Goat Notes

Tired of reading liberals' lazy anti-libertarian caricatures on the Internet, I thought it was time I created a properly researched one of my own. All of the wisdoms below the cut have been encountered in speech, text, or action, up and including Number 30, from persons professing some sort of libertarian affiliation or other. Whilst I could certainly come up with a selection just as bad from other political stances, it is not my job to suggest to anybody how to be a piss-poor progressive or a crappy conservative, so I shall leave those tasks to others more closely concerned with them.

( Thirty-six ways to fox your freedom )

Because I'm in the preliminary stages of revising my fantasy novel, I've found myself dwelling on the ways in which its chief hero's methods do and don't work. This, not from the point of view of learning to be a better politician than she is - I almost certainly never shall be, either morally or pragmatically - but from the perspective that some of the things we each want to achieve aren't obviously compatible with some of the others.

Today's episode of Things People Inside My Head Told Me:

Good lordship is helping persons weaker than oneself, and acquiring a cut of power and status from every such deal. The good side of this path is that one becomes powerful in direct proportion to one's beneficence. The bad side of it is that after one has acquired a certain amount of power, one isn't so dependent upon the good opinion of the sort of people one is mostly helping, and has an obvious incentive to ...help... in ways which don't eliminate the need for one's lordship and assistance. This approach is also pretty much designed, by definition, to concentrate agency in oneself and leech it from humbler folk - indeed, to humble them further with every interaction. In a kindly way, to be sure, but not necessarily a less poisonous way for that.

There again, one thing a relatively good lord can be very good at, is the concentrated effort of fighting a worse one.

Good comradeship is also helping persons weaker than oneself, but sharing any net gain of power and status as far as possible. The good side of this path is that one deliberately diffuses power and agency amongst peers, eliminating the temptation to become a boss who can dole out good or ill with equal facility. The bad side of it is that strength won by good and frank action is thus diffused away from those most likely to repeat it, whereas well-meaning or downright malicious lords who do want to become bosses concentrate the power they win much more rapidly, and may therefore end up becoming the boss of the would-be good comrades in pretty short order. The personally egalitarian approach fosters independence and respect, but can't compel - and certainly may not receive - either.

One thing about a good comrade is that you don't necessarily notice one until you need them.

Another way to look at this is in terms of heroism.  A hero is a sort of good lord, at least in reputation; a villain is a sort of bad one.  A good comrade is just a mate, a good neighbour, the sort you want beside you in a pinch.  A bad comrade is, I suppose, a lowlife, a mook, a no-count bum.  They'll do you a bad turn as soon as look at you, but they haven't the mind to make any real gain from their dirty tricks in the long run.  That would mean taking on responsibility, if only to themselves, which they would enjoy about as much as a shit sundae.

Three Katherines of Allingdale is partly about the desperate need for, and desperate vulnerabilities of, the 'comradeship' mode of doing good stuff.  As a left-libertarian, that appeals to me both intellectually and by instinct - or perhaps I ought to say that this dual appeal is why my politics are like that in the first place.  But the lordly/heroic/villainous approach is strong in places where comradeship is weak, and sometimes it defends places where weakness can't be afforded.  Then the problem is how to get off the @$&!ing tiger afterwards!

I don't have much more of an answer to that, than I did before I thought of the story, or imagined this dichotomy explicitly.  Better questions, though.

Interested to know how far this makes sense to anybody else, or what other takes people have on it, and on how to handle it fictionally or in reality.  The heroic narrative is mighty dominant in fantastic literature especially, where its intuitive opposite seems to be not so much the comradely as the - well, anti-heroic! - mook-o-rama.  But an anti-hero doesn't look to me like the other positive pole from the Exceptional Levelling-Up Hero, at all, at all...

Charlie Stross, whose opinion of libertarianism is not famously high, has a good rant inspired by attempts to suppress the Occupy... movement, and solicits political responses from his readers.  Lively discussion follows in the comment section.  In the course of it, I finally got around to spelling out exactly why I no longer buy the idea that liberty and vast economic inequality can long live together:

>So what harm can it possibly do me that they're richer than I am?

None - in a society where rent-seeking has become a marginal dumb criminal activity, rather than the major basis of power and authority. First, catch your rabbit!

My extended argument here - the heading also links back to the full comment that elicited it. 

Shorter me: even in terms of purely negative liberty, relative poverty lacks the power to defend its rights, and freedoms that can't be defended are only aspirations at best.  Therefore, lovers of liberty must find ways to spread wealth too evenly for anybody to forge crowns from it, or else resign themselves to howling for the Moon through all the age-long night.

To recap once again on this month's challenge, it is:

Paying My Moral Debts
I'm going through the list of all the free stuff I, personally, am currently getting only because other people are enthusiastic and generous. Then I'm seeing how much I can commit by way of fair return, and how much of that should or can be financial. The coming month is for sorting out the financial side.

But this is where I ask: is the idea of financial moral debt a trap in itself?

On one level, clearly not. If I promise to give somebody some money, then even if there is no legal evidence of the debt, or the law allows me some way to weasel out of it, I'm obviously bound by my word. Moving out a bit, if somebody helps me out when I need a gift or a loan, and then further down the line they need some help from me, I think I owe them morally whether I've promised anything or not. And if Croesus helps me out and won't take anything back, even this confers on me a kind of soft obligation to pay the favour forward to somebody else at least once. All these kinds of moral debt, I'm quite happy with.

But taking the notion of 'debt' too literally, risks damaging the very gift economy I'm trying to do my part in.

There is nothing mean, and often something quite charming, about the ideal of always paying one's way and not owing nuttin' to nobody. That is a strong strain in the way I was brought up. Its danger, though - and hence the danger of projects like this - is that it may instil a kind of Janus-faced and flinty righteousness. On the one face, a pride in having paid all one owes (unlike, perhaps, some of those other people). On the other, a stubborn unwillingness to take stuff one can't pay for (ditto).

The proud face is almost certainly wrong. Here I've reckoned up a few moral debts that are too obvious to overlook. But were I to look harder, I should certainly find some more. And some of the best free stuff I'm probably benefiting from may be so transparent, and work so well, that I scarcely notice it, and have no hope of quantifying it. If I could quantify monetarily all the labour I benefit from without charge, it's not at all obvious that I could pay it. Nor would everybody even want me to pay it - assuming they were set up to receive payment in the first place. Payment in kind or in labour doesn't necessarily help either - same deal. The gift economy is not, on first blush, very much like the market economy at all.

The stubborn face may now incline to say, "Okay - I won't take any more free benefits than I can help." This is wrong in another sense. If Mr Stubborn refuses to take advantage of a benefit, it doesn't follow that the benefactor gets back any of what they spent to provide it. All that happens is that a little grace is lost from the world, and a little utility dropped into the entropy bin. It's surely wrong to be an ungrateful freeloader. But it's no better to be a surly curmudgeon. I've mentioned before that I believe mutual bounty to be an essential element of a working libertarian society, just as surely as legalistic gaming is a poison to it. But if there is to be bounty in giving, there must logically be no less grace in receiving. The temptation to maintain the moral 'credit' of a Lady Bountiful is ultimately as selfish and status-seeking, as the temptation to live the lush life on somebody else's tab is selfish and greedy.

So how much should I pay, and what should I take advantage of?

In the market economy, we know where we stand. A known value is offered by a particular person, and a known value is given in return by another. Plain dealing and precise reckoning are the market's breath and bones.

In the gift economy, value must still be given and returned. But even with the help of guide prices and suggested donations, the aims, rules, and consequences are very different. The same fundamental economic principles must apply, but in very distinct ways. I have a hazy idea of how to take some of the simplest issues forward, and shall attempt to do so in subsequent posts in this series. Taking the case where payment must be financial - this month's narrow target - I want to show how that quality I call gaiety, a sort of genial flexibility about various specifics of how good things are paid for and provided, can improve on either the legalistic market approach (take all you want, as cheaply or freely as you can get away with) or the moralistic market approach (don't take anything unless you can afford to pay the least you think it's worth) when dealing with goods freely offered. And I want, too, to examine its limits, and the places where market-like punctilio about specific obligations is required to keep the good shows on the road.

It's proving no simpler a project than I expected, and as always, I welcome any insights anybody has to offer.

Having set myself a not very demanding challenge for the next month:
 

Paying My Moral Debts
I'm going through the list of all the free stuff I, personally, am currently getting only because other people are enthusiastic and generous. Then I'm seeing how much I can commit by way of fair return, and how much of that should or can be financial. The coming month is for sorting out the financial side.

I've now ponied up for all the things I said I would. Somehow I expected this to involve a lot more time and hassle than it did. If this were just a question of settling moral accounts for the year, the matter would end there.  It would then have been needless for me to have posted about it at all, except possibly - as with my writing wordcount posts - to use the fact of public commitment as an encouragement to Get On With It. Which it probably has been. But that is not the main point of this extended challenge, at all.
 
Firstly, I want seriously to look at reasons for paying or not paying for goods, where one has the choice - and get to grips with the issues I haven't satisfactorily figured out.

Secondly, by the end of the month I should like to have started on regular habits in these matters that make better sense in terms of the code I believe in, and the budget I have to work with.

Thirdly, I want to see how far some of my fine-sounding ideas survive concentrated application to reality, and report on the results. This is one very low-stakes and easily controlled practice arena.
 
Fourthly, I want to look at structural and technical obstacles to useful voluntary payment practices, and swap actual and potential workarounds for them.

Fifthly, I want to make a case for the necessary link between libertarianism and liberality, which I think is systematically underestimated from both perspectives. It would be nice to convince some other people of it. It would be quite enough of a victory to convince myself, to my own practically expressed satisfaction. Worst of the acceptable possibilities is that events, or other people reading these sketches, defeat my argument because it is wrong. I question whether I could be persuaded that either free agency or free-handedness is overrated in itself. I am, though, open to being convinced that they are independent or even conflicting virtues, or that the same social institutions are unlikely to embody both. Either way, I wish to begin this argument via some simple bread-and-butter issues here.

My next post in this series will examine the boundaries and dangers of my starting notion of 'moral debt', and cast about for promising alternatives.

Back on Sunday from a big family gathering in Gosport, for the seventieth birthday of my eldest aunt - a witty fellow-scribbler who shares something of my penchant for fantasy.  Hampshire is nearly on my doorstep, but it isn't a county I know at all well. What I've seen makes me wish to amend that in the near future... It was a merry meeting, as they say. My mother and I stayed with a cousin who lives on what used to be a small farm, and has made a very fine place of it by the woody banks of a swift shallow river. High-tech comfort within, amiable shaggy wildness without, and dogs of the biggest and friendliest. My cousin, an ebulliently energetic businesswoman of many enthusiasms and a great affection for beasts and trees, is talking about bringing in a couple of pigs in the near future. That would be Hantsome of her!

Continuing with what is going to be a bigly piggy theme, I don't think I've eaten or - especially - drunk so lavishly since the cast-iron digestion of my first youth gave out on me - or had such a liking to do it. It was that sort of gathering. Possibly just because it was that sort of beano, I appear to have escaped any consequences, even a significant hangover. I've noticed such effects before. The eupeptic effects of good company and jolly mood are nearly as underrated as the dyspeptic effects of the reverse are notorious. In the mood for a quiet week now, though.

In that quiet week, my next job is to finish my festively-delayed chapter, with Kate's rallying of the Blancmange Army against the Bad Baron.  Whose much-despised token is... the blue boar.  The next chapter's events will be remembered in many folksongs, of which I wrote one of the more locally popular - The Hunting of the Boar - late last week.

Finally, with the turning of the year, it's time to begin a personal challenge that I've been working up of late.  I have a political and social theory that liberty can only increase in communities whose members are increasingly practising bounty rather than hoggishness.  In accordance with my related theories that advocates of freedom have less right to preach what they don't practise than advocates of authority, and that libertarians who don't willingly take on more responsibility than statists for general goods are witnesses against their own cause, I've been looking afresh at my own contributions to the common weal - and I am not satisfied with the tale.  I shall be blogging about the nontrivial parts of my solution, and no doubt exhibiting various pratfalls in the process, over the coming months.  More anon!