Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!
Wednesday, April 01, 2015
David Boaz rewrites his Libertarian Primer from the 1990s
Author: David Boaz
Title: “The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom”
Publication: New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015 (1997), 418
pages, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4767-5284-6, Preface, twelve chapters, appendix
with personal political quiz, heavily indexed.
The author is an executive vice-president of the Cato
Institute in Washington DC. The title
page calls the book a “Revised and Updated Edition of ‘Libertarianism: A Primer’”,
first published by The Free Press in 1997, accompanied by a collection of
essays dating back to ancient history, called “The Libertarian Reader”, edited
by Boaz. (In fact, see the mini-review of those here March 28, 2006)/
The book argues its points in simple and straightforward
language. In a practical world, we start
running into some questions, but at a certain point these questions are no
longer simply about polity or political theory about government, but more like “how
to live free in an unfree world”, as Harry Browne used to say.
For example, Boaz argues that health care costs have gotten
out of control because “someone else pays” for health care in most cases. True.
In fact, in the past, a lot of people used the health care system very
little and lived long life spans, actively, on sheer momentum, before passing
away suddenly when time was up. Today,
we expect every possible treatment attempt for every disease. But, of course, this brings up the question of
personal luck. If we don’t want “Obamacare”
logic says we have to take some kind of position on pre-existing
conditions. Either the public takes
care of this, or “family or friends” do, or unlucky people go without. You have to take some kind of position. Ted Cruz, for example, doesn’t seem to answer
that point. On the other hand, Obamacare
has disrupted plans that already works, and saddled people with requirements
for unnecessary coverage in some cases.
On Social Security, it is true that the Social Security
Trust Fund is getting into trouble sooner that we had expected. Well-off people do not have as many children,
and people are living longer. But it is
not correct to call Social Security just a “welfare” plan that would otherwise
be covered by adult children being obligated to provide for their parents – an idea
that gets into the issue of filial piety and filial responsibility law (although
libertarians wouldn’t want these to be laws).
In my own case, my FICA contributions more or less comport with the Social
Security benefits I get, but that won’t be as true for people working
today. I do like the idea of migrating
to privately owned accounts that could not be raided by future opportunistic
politicians (with the next debt ceiling crisis). But there is cost – and some sacrifice –
involved in transitioning to a private system.
Boaz offers an interesting interpretation of the idea of "the tragedy of the commons", to deflect away from the idea of its being part of a zero-sum game.
Boaz dedicates ample space to the dignity of the individual,
and maintains that there are only individuals, not groups, that actually have
moral agency. But it’s when he talks
about “Civil Society” that he risks running into moral or philosophical
contradictions. In a real world, extended families, religious bodies and nations do take on purposes of their own.
At this point, I want to mention that I wrote my first “Do
Ask, Do Tell” book about the same time that Boaz wrote his 1997 Primer, and I
wrote DADT III about the same time he wrote this update. (My DADT-I book was sometimes called "The Manifesto".) I knew David in the 1990s through GLIL, and
it seems that my work and his are like opposite faces of a coin. What’s different is that my books are
developed from personal narratives, which have lots of ironic and morally
problematic situations. That’s because I’m
writing from a “personal space” rather than from a position of employment in a
think tank or any policy-debating group.
You could say, how does a person “like me” find “freedom in an unfree
world” – the Browne Question. You could
ask, how should I behave, or be expected to behave? This question has contexts in both coercive environments (like the military draft, in my own case) and in situations where you need to have others want to work with you or do business with you.
That’s mainly the concern in my writing. I may be a mixture
of “Divergent” and “Factionless” (the boundary can be narrower than we want to
admit), but there are a number of intertwined themes in my narrative, some of
it concerning the model for my “second career” in journalism, and, in earlier
times, my sexual orientation. Generally,
I have the impression that others sometimes see me as like a kibitzer of a
chess game, an alien observer whose stares can actually affect the subjects of
his attention (an idea of relativity, after all). I have the capability to influence policy beyond
what numbers show, and probably influence how people more heavily socialized
than I am feel about themselves, and whether they feel following the deeper
mores of society is “worth it” if I have the freedom to live in my own
alternate space so visibly. Yet, I steadfastly refuse to become someone else’s
tool (like teenager Bob in the movie "The Zero Theorem"). Having taken the course that I
did, in writing the books, there is no going back, no joining someone else’s
cause and being their spokesperson.
There can be no pimping, no hucksterism, no glorification of
victimization. Boaz would be correct in
maintaining that some of my dilemmas were created by government: the demands for gender conformity had a lot
to do with militarization and war (as I dealt with all the ironies of the
Vietnam era draft).
Still, libertarians are learning that social capital
matters. This was most clearly
articulated in Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” (March 14, 2012). There is something to be said to social
solidarity, for people working together for goals “beyond themselves.” What happens when these goals are wrong? That could leave us with appealing to
religious faith. Social competence is a virtue
in its own right, a fact with an ironic reflection in the attitudes I expressed
toward others about the time I confronted others that I am homosexual. There was a curious puritanism in my own
world, an insistence that some sort of relationship with another was valueless
to me (emotionally) unless the person was “worthy” (and even “perfect”). Psychologists call that “upward affiliation”.
Boaz talks about the value of fraternal organizations in
getting people to help each other with volunteer efforts rather than depend on
government. (And, note above, “filial
piety” would have major implication for the mean of “marriage” vis-à-vis “personal
responsibility” – although that probably helps the cause of “marriage equality”.) Good social networking in the real world (not
just Facebook) and competence at it probably helps stable marriage in a
reciprocal fashion. But fraternal
organizations (unless just spiritual, like Rosicrucianism) need to reach out to
others besides “one’s own”. (And his
idea about fraternal groupings led to a strange moral crisis for me in the 90s
when I worked for a company that specialized in life insurance for the
military.) Boaz points out that the LDS
church was very good at this, being one of the most helpful religious groups
for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
As for the moral obligation to “give back”, as in
volunteerism (as to “living free”, above) Boaz writes that most economic
hardship results from people having children before they are capable of
supporting them in two-parent (which could now be same-sex) families. But (beside the population demographics
issue) luck and fortune do have a lot with poverty, starting with the kids “unlucky”
enough to be born to irresponsible parents, as well as everything else in life
that can go wrong (crime, disaster, disease, genetics, etc). When people “give back” and others (the less
lucky) know that societal structure encourages charity, society does tend to
become more stable than it would if it took such a narrow view of “personal
responsibility” as I took myself in the past. But that social structure can infringe on
personal goals, especially of the “divergent”. Freedom, after all, is a pre-requisite for
innovation, for raising the living standards of everyone in the first
place. Boaz points this out repeatedly.
See also comments about Matthew Rognile's Brookings paper at MIT, on Piketty's review July 22, related to what Boaz argues.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
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