And Just Where Is The Constitutional Authority For FEMA, Congressman Paul?

My statement back during the time of Katrina, which was a rather risky political statement: why do the people of Arizona have to pay for me to take my risk... less people will be exposed to danger if you don't subsidize risky behavior... I think it's a very serious mistake to think that central economic planning and forcibly transferring wealth from people who don't take risks to people who take risks is a proper way to go. -- Ron Paul, The Charles Goyette Show, March 30, 2007

Herewith, a notice from Congressman Ron Paul's office assuring constituents in the Texas 14th Congressional District, which by the way includes Galveston, that "getting help to everyone affected [by Hurricane Ike] is his utmost priority."

The Congressman’s office is acting as a liaison between Federal agencies and constituents to ensure that available assistance is as accessible as possible, and that FEMA and other government agency activities are appropriate, efficient and helpful to Texans.

You can, of course, make an argument even as a libertarian -- I know this because I make it, myself, from time to time -- that standing on principle is sometimes simply foolish. I, for one, will gladly accept any federal largess that comes my way, too. I'm a libertarian, not an idiot.

Even so, it might be amusing to hear the good congressman explain the differences between federal aid following Katrina and federal aid following Ike.

Selfishness, Egoism and Altruistic Libertarianism

It is a cliché among many psychologists and economists that human beings behave self-interestedly. Moreover, since Adam Smith’s somewhat theological, somewhat anthropomorphic “invisible hand” metaphor, it has been almost an article of faith within the latter discipline that the collective, societal result of individual self-interested behavior is ironically salubrious.

It is a faith to which I also ascribe, although like all but the most zealous of religious fanatics I season that faith with the occasional heresy here and there. Crucially, however, it needs to be noted at the outset that not just any sort of self-interested behavior contributes to the common wealth and greater good. Specialization and trade, voluntary association, bargained-for exchanges, common rules and some sort of enforcement mechanism to address rule breaking are all necessary elements for human society to flourish economically, for the invisible hand to prove, as it were, optimally dexterous.

Most importantly, “self-interested” is not synonymous with “selfish.”

Discussions about selfishness elsewhere on this blog got me thinking about these things. I am no Ayn Rand scholar, nor do I purport to be an Objectivist. Undoubtedly, however, Rand’s followers constitute a significant and vocal segment of the libertarian community. (It’s a non-gated community, after all, noted for its lack of zoning regulations, restrictive covenants or entrance requirements.) Anyway, given that Rand published a collection of essays entitled The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, it should be clear just from the title’s use of the word “egoism” that she or Nathanial Brandon, as the case may be, intended to give the word “selfishness” a special, technical meaning in the overall context of Rand’s worldview.

But selfishness and egoism are two separate things, a fact I assume Rand understood perfectly well when she deliberately invoked the apparent contradiction of selfishness as a virtue for its rhetorical impact. Whatever Rand’s standing as an intellectual and participant in the history of political philosophy, she was also certainly a polemicist with a particular political agenda in opposition to what she correctly perceived as the 20th century’s greatest threat to humankind; namely, the threat of collectivism. You simply cannot read Rand fairly without bearing that in mind.

The important point is that selfishness is a common language concept, not a technical term. Anyone fluent in English knows what it means and knows, more importantly, that it entails a negative moral judgment. Selfishness is by definition a bad thing. It’s using up all the hot water in the shower when others are waiting, eating up all the cookies instead of sharing them with friends or family, and so forth. (Except, perhaps, at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, although Ms. Sinclair couldn’t have really been much of an Objectivist since the first thing she did was violate Maggie's pacifier property rights.)

Selfishness moreover logically entails and presupposes that there is some preexisting community to which the individual belongs and some moral commitment to that specific community. I, for example, live with my family in a household where there is a finite supply of hot water and cookies. If I stand in the shower for an hour shoving one increasingly soggy chocolate chip cookie after another into my mouth until both supplies are exhausted, I am acting selfishly relative to my family. It is less clear that I am being selfish when I buy the last package of cookies at the store, thus depriving the next cookie junkie from his or her fix, or when I purchase the big, heavy-duty water heater for my house. It is less clear, still, that it is properly called selfishness to eat any of those cookies or use any of that hot water knowing that many millions of people across the globe have neither cookies to eat nor any hot water to shower with.

To be sure, there are those who claim that the last is selfish, although the overwhelming majority don’t really believe it based on how they, themselves, actually live. The notion that we as individuals have moral obligations to humanity at large is, to put it mildly, very problematic. The point, in any case, is that we wouldn’t be inclined to call all sorts of behavior like eating a cookie selfish simply because every cookie eaten is, necessarily, a cookie no one else can eat. The morality of sharing does not require splitting my cookie into several billion pieces so everyone can have some.

Egoism, by contrast, is not an ordinary language word or concept. Mothers don’t scold their children for being egoists when they selfishly eat the last cookie. Indeed, if you peruse its Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry you will discover that there is not even a single technical sense of the term.

We pause now while I grind a philosophical axe for a moment. There is a critical difference between, on the one hand, the theory of psychological egoism, the theory that claims it is simply a fact that human beings always and under all circumstances behave self-interestedly and, on the other, ethical or rational egoism. These theories contend that morally right behavior or rational behavior, respectively, simply is self-interested behavior.

These latter may be right or wrong and are certainly subject to criticism, but at least they both admit of the possibility of unethical or irrational behavior. That is to say, the ethical egoist acknowledges that people are capable of behaving other than self-interestedly, she simply argues that they shouldn’t. So, too, the rational egoist doesn’t claim that we always act rationally, i.e., self-interestedly, but only that we should or that it is only when we do that our actions deserve the appellation “rational.”

Psychological egoism, by contrast, obliterates the normative force of self-interested behavior, whether for good or bad. Indeed, it obliterates normative considerations in the same way all strong forms of determinism do: if “ought” implies “can” but one cannot act differently than one does then it is absurd to claim that one ought to have acted differently. Moreover, if all behavior is, by definition, self-interested, then it is a fair question to ask of this non-falsifiable metaphysical theory what sort of substantive claim, if any, it really is making.

Axe grinding concluded, I’m reasonably confident that Rand was an egoist in both the ethical and rational egoism senses. In retrospect, however, it is perhaps unfortunate that she chose to use “selfishness” as a rhetorical device to describe her egoism because it opens both Objectivism in particular and libertarianism in general to the sort of prejudicial criticisms Mr. Hanley recently bemoaned.

In fact, Rand aside, there is nothing at all incompatible about libertarianism and altruism. Not, at least, if altruism is understood not as Rand technically used the term but simply as the opposite of mere selfishness. It is hardly altruistic, in the ordinary sense of the term, to coerce other people to behave in supposedly selfless ways in order to achieve your personal vision of the greater collective good even if that greater good is thereby realized. But it is unarguably immoral to coerce others using that rationale when, in fact, it becomes painfully obvious that the exact opposite results.

Indeed, if we’re looking for a single lesson from the history of the 20th century, we could do much worse than conclude that, no matter how noble their advocates’ intentions may have been, collectivist social and economic orders yield disastrous results. Obviously, therefore, noble intentions are no guarantee of success. Libertarianism has never claimed that in a libertarian world order everyone will win and "all must have prizes." In fact, as far as I know, only utopian collectivists and Lewis Carroll's Dodo have made that claim.

But then Carroll, of course, knew he was talking nonsense.

"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors ... and miss." *

There shouldn’t be a minimum legal drinking age, although I probably wouldn’t mind too much if it were set at, oh, say, six. If Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the rest of the Uber-Nannies out there want to keep pre-schoolers from bellying up to the bar, well, okay. After all, it’s for the children.

Syndicated columnist and (inexplicably) frequent reason contributor, Steve Chapman offers scraps of arguments against a proposal from an advocacy group called Choose Responsibility to lower the legal drinking age to 18. To date, the proposal has been signed by over 120 college presidents, predictably incurring the irrational wrath of MADD and other quasi-professional scolds.

Chapman’s arguments, such as they are, pretty much boil down to the assertion that many people under the age of 21 are too immature to drink and that more of them will drink and suffer problems as a result. As a corollary, if 18 year olds can buy alcohol, those under the age of 18 are more likely to have more ready access to booze because high school seniors will buy it for sophomores and freshmen, etc.

Here, however, is the money quote from Chapman’s lamentable column:

Why permit 18-year-olds to vote but not drink? Because they have not shown a disproportionate tendency to abuse the franchise, to the peril of innocent bystanders.

Mr. Chapman, if you don’t think 18 year olds who vote for Republican or Democratic candidates are imperiling innocent bystanders like me, you obviously haven’t been paying attention.

Seriously, though, there’s so much wrong with this mindset it’s hard to know where to begin in rebutting it. Here, however, is the principal objection:

The mere fact that something is dangerous or harmful to some members of a group is never sufficient justification to prohibit all members of a group from using or having access to it. The fact that some members of group X will abuse access such that members of the general population are harmed is equally insufficient to prohibit all members of that group from having access.

I accept the fact that institutional rights and privileges, e.g., voting, driving on public roads, necessarily involve some sometimes arbitrary regulation. Moreover, I certainly accept the fact that libertarianism is, for the most part, an NC-17 rated show. Children do require restrictions on their liberty for their own good. The question, however, is whether the default agent responsible to impose such restrictions should be the state or their parents. Admittedly, some parents sometimes fail in those responsibilities and the state must then intercede. See, however, the immediately prior paragraph as to why that fact alone does not justify depriving all parents of properly parental authority.

Serving your 16 year old daughter a half glass of wine at Thanksgiving or sharing a beer or two with your 17 year old son as you both watch the game or accepting the fact that your 19 year old college student may well get drunk on campus as opposed to driving off into the woods with friends specifically to go binge drinking, thus creating an even more dangerous situation isn’t an abrogation of parental responsibility. Imposing a universal prohibition to reduce abuse by a few and inadvertently but predictably creating such even more dangerous situations is.

Moreover, effectively arguing that it should be easier for the typical high school student to buy illegal drugs (never mind that they should be legal, too) than a six-pack of beer is, at best, a fairly odd case on utilitarian grounds as to why eighteen year olds shouldn't be permitted to drink. If Mr. Chapman doesn't understand these things, I trust the rest of the good folks over at reason do.

(* - Robert Heinlein)

Ezra Levant Update

Back in January, I urged readers to check out the blog of Canadian journalist Ezra Levant. Levant was subjected to a year-long investigation by the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission following a complaint by the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities over his publication in the Western Standard of the Danish Muhammad cartoons that had so many other publishers cringing in fear. I'm happy to report that the complaint has finally been dismissed and, as a friend at a forum site I frequent said, Canadians are at least tentatively embracing free speech.

As can never be noted too often, speech about which we already approve doesn't need legal protection.

More to the point, I would refer readers again to Mr. Levant's web site and specifically to his taping of the complaint hearing interview available here. I will repeat what I said originally: Levant’s responses to the bureaucrat seated across the table from him during the taped hearing is precisely how free people should deal with government officials under such circumstances.

Congratulations, Mr. Levant.

Forget “Taxation Without Representation” — New D.C. License Plates to Read “Money, Guns & Lawyers”

If you are an able bodied male resident of the U.S. between the ages of 17 and 45, are either a citizen or have declared an intention to become a citizen and are not already a member of the Armed Services (including the Reserves and the National Guard), Title 10 U.S.C. § 311 says you are, whether you know it or not, a member of the “unorganized militia.”

The unorganized militia doesn’t include any women nor does it exclude gay men unless Congress bought into the “gay men are sissies” (hence not "able bodied") stereotype back in 1903 when it passed the Dick Act. I know, I know!

I, by the way, served honorably in the unorganized militia without so much as a single blot on my escutcheon – and you have no idea how hard it was to keep my escutcheon blotless all those years – and yet I received nary so much as an Honorable Discharge – and you have no idea how boring an honorable discharge can be -- from those ingrates at the Department of Defense!

But to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, I didn’t come here to talk about the militia, I came to talk about the Second Amendment. As my co-blogger and famed radio personality Jim Babka has already noted today, the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller is a landmark ruling in the never-friggin’-ending struggle between individual liberties and state control.

At least one friend of mine who shall remain nameless but whose initials are RFC will probably be spending the rest of the day gloating to his many more "progressive" friends. And, indeed, notwithstanding the long, long litany of legitimate criticisms one can level at George W. Bush, lets not kid ourselves into thinking that the decision in Heller would have been the same if a Gore or Kerry nominee were sitting on the Supreme Court right now.

Of course, the reason I began with the business about the militia is because, for those of you who haven’t already memorized the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment reads:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

As you can readily see, the Founders seemed to think there was or should be some sort of connection between keeping and bearing arms and a well regulated militia. Then again, they also seemed to think a comma was required after “militia,” so maybe we shouldn’t always defer to what they thought.

Still, much of the palaver over gun rights since roughly 1791 has swirled around whatever the nexus between militias and individual rights is or should be, and now the Supremes have finally stepped up to the plate, or firing range as the case may be, and answered the mail. (If you like that mixed metaphor, I have many others, too!)

Here, however, is where I feel required to make a few turd in the punchbowl comments. First, as I tried valiantly but vainly to explain some years ago to an otherwise extremely bright and knowledgeable Michigan law professor who shall also remain nameless, the Critical Legal Studies boys and girls had it right, not in their actual politics (which almost universally sucks) but in their understanding that the language of the law is almost limitlessly flexible and that just about any legal result desired can be effected by those with the power to do so.

What this essentially means is that, even before Marbury v. Madison, there are no correct Supreme Court decisions, nor are there or have there ever been any wrong ones either, even including, for example, Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott. They simply are what they are and the wealth of 5 to 4 decisions over the years amply demonstrate that, over and over again, but for the opinion of one person the law of the land could and would have been vastly different. Argue about the morality or the desirability of this decision or that all you want, but save your breath when it comes to whether it was decided "correctly."

Second, never underestimate the power of the state and those who would use the state to do exactly what they want while telling you what to do and what not to do. Remember that when the largely pyrrhic victory against reverse discrimination in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was first announced, the same statists who had originally latched onto the phrase “affirmative action” to justify racial quotas now latched onto Justice Powell’s probably careless assertion that “diversity” was a legitimate state interest. Thanks to Justice O’Connor’s subsequent “reasoning” in Grutter v. Bollinger, equal rights advocates have only twenty years now to try again.

My point – and, yes, I do have one – is simply that the Supreme Court, just like the federal government taken as a whole, has been and continues to be as much a threat to individual liberties as a protector. If you really want to maximize freedom, minimize government.

Some Notes on the Social Institution of Marriage

Some of the more vociferous recent discussion over at Positive Liberty – by which I mean at the blog, not in my threads where I largely concern myself with talking pandas and such – surrounds what counts as marriage and what, therefore, counts as an argument for or against marriages of any sort and marriages of every sort. As always, I take a vaguely Wittgensteinian approach to these sorts of questions, which is to say several things.

First, like any other word that did not begin its linguistic life and remain that way as a technically defined term (like, say, “quark”), the way we use that word is going to vary over time and from place to place.

Second, the ways the uses of a word vary will more likely suggest that what these different uses nonetheless have in common is more a matter of ‘family resemblances’ than of some essential core definition. Generally, the more philosophically interesting an ordinary word like “marriage” is, the more likely it is to include within its ambit some ‘second and third cousins’ whose resemblance to each other is vague at best. Moreover, it is likely to be ambiguous (see, e.g., William Empson on ambiguity) in ways that cause a great deal of conceptual confusion.

Third, we have it in our power to give any word a new use. But, that said, we are foolish if we don’t expect that doing so will have consequences and we are prudent to try to think through what those consequences may be.

Moving from Wittgenstein to the more prosaic ways arguments get confused, let’s remember (or at least pretend) that there is a vast difference between the normative and the positive. What I mean is this. If the hypothetical State of Homotopia affords a legal status to some long term homosexual unions that it does not make available to heterosexual unions and it calls those unions marriages, then it is true that homosexual marriage exists in Homotopia but heterosexual marriages do not as a matter of law. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is an entirely different sort of question.

Moreover, what we might want to say about heterosexual unions in Homotopia that, but for the different legal status, act as though they were legally married is up for grabs, too. We can call them marriages-in-fact or quasi-marriages or nonlegal marriages or just plain marriages. But we need to be clear when we say that Henry and Frank and Betty have a family resemblance that Henry and Betty have similar ears, while Betty and Frank’s eyes look similar, etc. We owe it to ourselves and to those who disagree with us to try to be painstaking about that. Otherwise, we end up just spinning our wheels conceptually.

Now, let’s return to that prehistoric, stateless ‘state of nature’ that Rousseau so loved and Hobbes so loathed and movie makers like to stock with dinosaurs and towering black obelisks. Those dioramas at the Smithsonian and all those Indiana Jones movies, aside, we really don’t know how prehistoric people lived because – duh! – they’re prehistorical. Sure, we’ve got the archeological and paleoentological evidence and so forth, but all they add up to are grist for some likely stories.

And here is roughly the story we tell ourselves outside of Vacation Bible School where a different story might be told. Primitive men (and primitive women, too!) were probably hunters / gatherers at first, and the men probably did most of the hunting while the women did most of the gathering. This is because it is easier to care for small children while gathering than while hunting and, besides, testosterone poisoned males had to run off all that steroid induced energy somehow while estrogen enhanced females pondered such things as what sort of ‘treatment’ would dress up the cave opening.

There were, luckily for us, at least enough heterosexual primitive men and women in those early days to make a go of things, species-wise. (This is why heterosexuals enjoy the honorific among some in the gay community of “breeders.”) As the evolutionary biologists tell us, homo sapiens are just like every other species when it comes to being nothing more than a DNA replicating mechanism, so both males and females were hard-wired from even before they were a separate species (or from the very instant God’s intelligent design made them that way, it really doesn’t matter for this particular story) not only to desire sex but to want to see to it that their resulting progeny survived.

But this is a problem for human beings. We have a long gestation period as a species, at least the last part of which would make the independent survival of women doubtful. So would the years and years of care and attention human offspring require in order to survive. You can care for an infant or you can go hunt and gather, but you probably can’t do both at the same time very successfully. Besides, prehistoric women really were attracted to those big handsome lugs walking around yelling “Yabba Dabba Do” and bringing home today’s catch. But Fred, who, let’s face it, was probably doing Betty on the side when Barney wasn’t around, needed to know that Pebbles was really his daughter, so he needed to come to some kind of accommodation with Wilma a bit more permanent than the old clubbing / one night stand scene.

So men and women “naturally” pair-bonded and probably many of them discovered that there were all sorts of unexpected benefits (and detriments) to the arrangement. Did they call it marriage? No, probably not, if only because what we call marriage today is a far more complex and, having gathered millennia of historical baggage, ambiguous concept. But we can meaningfully call what they had marriages if we want to as long as we recognize that what we’re talking about is how our distant cousin Rufus still looks a bit like the rest of the family.

Were there homosexual prehistoric people who pair-bonded for some of those other benefits? Who knows? As Hobbes would have us believe, life was nasty, dull, brutish and short, so even heterosexual relationships probably fell rather short of the contemporary lip service given to concepts like “Till death do we part.” But it is certainly more likely than not that whatever prehistoric homosexual activity occurred did not contribute significantly to the way primitive notions of marriage and family developed into tribes and clans and so forth along the social ‘evolutionary’ ladder to the modern nation state.

Now, unless you ascribe to notions of historical inevitability, which I certainly do not, we can probably agree that the civil, social institution of marriage, its subsequent historical religious context aside, could have developed other than it did or, at the very least, that it could now be structured differently than it is without dire social consequences.

So, for example, I have harped fairly consistently that the notion of marriage as status, derived as so much of contemporary western culture does from feudal society, is a remnant of that feudalism and should be replaced with the notion of marriage as contract. (In a nutshell, a legal status differs from the private legal relationship arising by contract in that, typically, the parties involved cannot rescind or revise the legal relationship except, if at all, with state permission. Citizenship is a status. Unfortunately, so occasionally and for some purposes are what the Supreme Court has sometimes called the suspect classifications of race and, increasingly, gender. It’s a complicated topic better left for now to a more full discussion elsewhere.)

But replacing status marriage with contract marriage, regardless of its historical baggage, need not and should not change the legal status of parent and child as a general and sociologically normative rule. (By which I mean the rebuttable but strong presupposition should be that those who sire and bear children are responsible to raise them and should be accorded the requisite legal authority to do so. A legal authority, I hasten to add, to which there must be limits to protect the legitimate interests of children whose parents significantly neglect or abuse them. And, yes, what counts as significant neglect or abuse is open to debate. Yes, too, we can and do make categorical exceptions such as that sperm bank donors have neither rights nor responsibilities regarding their subsequent progeny.)

It should be noted that, as a practical matter in an age of heterosexual serial monogamy and “blended families,” we have already significantly divorced or uncoupled (puns intended) our notions of marriage from our notions of parenthood. Whether Heather has a mommy and a daddy, two mommies, one daddy or a Hillaresque village raising her really has nothing to do with the matrimonial status of any of Heather’s custodial care providers.

* * * * *

I close this with a few observations regarding Mr. Kuznicki’s concerns regarding what he took to be Jennifer Roback Morse’s argument on homosexual marriage. Note that I do not address or much care what her actual argument is but only his responses. As discussed above, I think that it is almost certainly true that marriage grew up “organically” around childbirth and parenting, “whether children are a part of any individual marriage or not.”

Mr. Kuznicki continues:

Others presumably are welcome to the institution, but there’s a clear element of risk to allowing just anyone in: The long history of allowing infertile heterosexual couples to form marriages is all the evidence we need to continue doing as we’ve always done, and letting them get married. The same can’t be said for same-sex couples.

Homosexual marriage, of course, does not grow up around having children. Children have to be grafted onto a same-sex pairing — by the state — and this in itself is an indication that the government is trying very hard to make equal two things that simply wouldn’t be equal in any other case.

And then there are the thought-police issues, which bother me even more. It’s far from clear to me that the state “must” protect homosexual unions if they are ever to work. But this is indeed how it’s turning out in practice. Much of this protection is just the usual PC nonsense that we’d all be better off without, as in the Canadian case. Yet this sort of protection is supposedly extraneous to any proper marriage contract itself — isn’t it?

First, what is that clear element of risk? That people will stop having or raising children? Put me in the skeptical column. As he mentions, there is a long history of marriage of infertile heterosexual couples with no significant if any adverse consequences. Moreover, among the some more than 90% heterosexual population – I’m not wedded to that percentage; plug in your own number if you wish. – we have quite a bit of evidence of children being “grafted” onto or into heterosexual families by virtue of adoption and blended marriages.

The quintessentially libertarian position, in any case, is that the burden must fall on the state not before it permits some exercise of individual freedom but before it prohibits it. It is, by contrast, the quintessentially conservative position (of the Burkean variety) that tampering with long established traditions and institutions is so inherently risky that we must apply the social equivalent of the precautionary principle before proceeding.

Nonsense. In fact, what history (and biology) teaches is that human society is remarkably resilient and adaptable. (Besides, as the standard objection to Burke and Wm. F Buckley. Jr. goes, wherever it is one decides to stand athwart the world yelling "Stop!" is ultimately entirely arbitrary.)

As to “the usual PC nonsense that we’d all be better off without,” however, I can only add “Hear, hear!”

I end with an admission and a question. The hardly surprising admission is that I am predisposed to intense skepticism regarding those nether regions of academia known as [Insert Your Demographic Grievance Here] Studies departments. I wonder, however, whether there has been much sharing between the Women’s Studies people and the Gay Studies people over the extent to which gay and lesbian sexual behavior (which I have been told is rather different as between gay men and lesbians), as it relates or compares to heterosexual sexual behavior, is better explained in terms of sex or sexual orientation. I think the very likely answer is sex, not sexual orientation, and that, if so, that fact is highly significant to these sorts of discussions.

Far From The Madding Crowd: A Libertarian Convention Non-Report

My preferred on-the-spot reporter would have been Triumph the Insult Comic or, failing that, Yakov Smirnoff (“In former Soviet Union, people actually give rat’s ass about Libertarian Party!”) Still, Reason’s David Weigel is doing a workmanlike job covering the 2008 Libertarian Convention, and you might want to check out Reason’s coverage if you, unlike me, care.

Picking the next Libertarian Party candidate is like being a battered wife fresh from the shelter walking into a pool room and flirting with the guy with the most prison tats and the fewest teeth. Forgive me if I don’t swoon at the prospect of Bob Barr, Mike Gravel or any of the other candidates carrying the tattered banner of libertarianism into the certain obscurity that yet again awaits it.

I will say, however, that if the ideological zealots who make up actual LP activists hand the nomination to a political careerist and opportunist like Barr because they think it will give the party added exposure, both sides to that bargain will have gotten exactly what they deserve. Barr will never again be taken as seriously as he once was (a good thing) and the LP will (correctly) be perceived as the political equivalent of a Star Trek convention. Not a good thing but not so bad, either. Hey, is that Penn Jillette over there? Oh, never mind, it's just Drew Carey again.

Nothing But Net (Gain)?

I'm still waiting to hear a valid negative (against) a kid accepting a scholarship, free education, at an early point in his life. – Howard Avery, whose 8th grade son Michael committed to the University of Kentucky’s basketball program this month.

The obvious “valid negative” here, Mr. Avery, is that neither you nor your son knows what the fair market price of his talents really are. You might, after all, be selling (out) way too low.

Child athletes, be they gymnasts, tennis players or whatever, pose a special problem for our culture, especially given how much we pretend that much of our interference in each other’s lives is “for the children.” Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. There have probably been few cultures that have hated children more than ours does, going out of its way to regulate and micromanage their every activity, forcing them to spend over a decade in penal-like rehabilitation institutions, prematurely sexualizing them, encouraging them to engage in sexual intercourse and then branding thousands of them sex offenders when we catch them on the wrong side of the statutory rape laws.

But I digress. So what if professional athletes and prostitutes both ruin their bodies for the amusement of total strangers? We do still outlaw child prostitution, quaintly enough, but child athletics are not only encouraged, they are actively promoted. What better way to get your kid into Princeton or Stanford on a free ride than to find some niche sport you can start them in at around three or four in hopes of having them recruited for the varsity team? And if the kid shows enough talent for a possible pro career? Hey, who wants to waste years grooming a kid to go to Johns Hopkins Med School when the NBA draft is right around the corner? And nobody ever sued a starting point guard for malpractice, either. (Point shaving, on the other hand, well, you know.)

Children pose a special problem for libertarians. Put a bit more amusingly, a friend of mine says that libertarianism is an adults-only activity. On the one hand, children are not and cannot be regarded as their parents’ property. On the other hand, the only viable recourse against child neglect and abuse is the state. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree as to what exactly should count as actionable abuse or neglect. So, for that matter, can unreasonable people, people who contend a mere spanking or letting kids eat junk food are sufficiently egregious to warrant state intervention. But surely even the most adamantly purist libertarian would admit that, for example, children are entitled to the same level of police protection against assault that adults are and that it shouldn’t matter in such cases that the assailant is a parent. (Anarcho-capitalists, on the other hand, might have a problem with child free-riders, here, but I digress again.)

I have little concern whether Michael Avery goes on to play for Kentucky someday though I do hope the kid manages to get some good advice from a sports attorney between now and then, too. I hope he doesn’t get injured along the way or that he manages to get someone to pay for some heavy insurance against such an accident keeping him from a lucrative pro career. I don’t even know if such insurance is possible, but if it is I hope he gets it. And maybe, just maybe all this is not only what the kid really wants but, far more unlikely, he is sufficiently mature to be making these sorts of decisions. In any case, I wish him well.

As for the Kentuckys and the sports fathers of the world, it would be nice if I could wave a magic wand and forever prohibit any of them from contending that what they were doing was really “for the children.”