A Letter to Constituents from Miss Nanny State

The last major item in Issue 18 is titled, “A Letter from the Governor of Connecticut.” This piece includes - you guessed it - a letter from the Governor of Connecticut. This letter begins with that most endearing of endearments - Dear Constituents.

Now, you're probably thinking that anytime a government official sends a letter addressed in this manner, it can’t be good.

And you're right.

In this letter, dated July 29, 1985, Governor William A. O’Neill is rationalizing his state’s recent seat belt legislation. His arguments generally focus on what he considers to be his responsibility: ensuring the safety of the state’s citizens.

I’ve always thought it was kind of odd when an official says they want to ensure someone’s safety, while at the same time pointing a government gun in their face.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against seat belts. I always wear seat belts. The point is whether or not government should create laws mandating such actions.

And in this piece a fellow by the name of David Solan replies in detail to the letter, giving his reasons why the Governor is misguided. The Governor rattles off various statistics in his letter and Mr. Solan responds back with some statistics and questions of his own.

While that may be useful and important, I have found this sort of response only leads to a "my statistics are better than your statistics" game and generally doesn’t get anywhere, which is why I always try to focus on principles. And Mr. Solan must have felt the same because his closing paragraph hits upon principled points:

I have a question for our good governor. By what moral right do you propose to treat people as if they were children, attempting to protect them from themselves? Liquor and cigarette smoking and crossing the street can also be shown to be dangerous, under certain conditions — would you ban these along with non-seatbelt wear¡ng? And if you wouldn't, dear governor, then pray tell us what principle you would use to determine where you would stop? Try to get a straight answer from O'Neill on that one. But don't hold your breath.

I think the part about cigarettes is interesting considering the changes that have taken place since with smoking laws. (Although I do understand the the justification that is used is the potential harm to others in second-hand smoke, it still seems relevant here, considering how the laws force the private business owner to not allow smoking rather than letting him make a decision for himself whether or not to allow smoking inside his business.) Solan writes this like he can’t imagine that happening and yet here we are with quite a lot of changes around smoking.

I guess once Miss Nanny State starts working, she just doesn't know when to stop.

************************************************************************************

A couple more notes on this issue:

1. “By Way of Explanation,” is merely a message from Carl explaining why it has been more than 6 months before this issue was published. For one thing he became engaged. So I guess his readers could excuse the tardiness.



2. Finally, Carl writes a follow up to the “Freedom as Self-Control” article. It’s short enough that I just decided to reprint it here:
   
   

   In my article in Issue #17, the point was made that there is a direct relationship between the fact that each individual is a self-controlling entity and the voluntaryist insight that all human organizations and institutions require the consent and cooperation of their participants to function. The purpose of this short note is to elaborate on this idea.
   
   In examining Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, her statement — that some people could be physically coerced into giving their consent did not alter the fact that submission to authority is always voluntary — was highlighted. At first glance this seems contradictory because if coercion has been used or threatened, how could the subsequent behavior be termed voluntary? This is what I wish to explain.
   
   Ms. Lane reasoned that submission to authority is voluntary because individuals control what they do (even when they are coerced). I accept her use of the word "voluntary" but it leads to the tautology that all human action is, by its very nature, voluntary. To distinguish between what a person does willingly (without the threat or use of violence) and what that same person does when confronted by the use or threat of violence, I think it is important to introduce the qualifiers "coerced" and "uncoerced" to differentiate between human action which is freely taken and human action which is only undertaken as a result of duress. When a kidnapper threatens to kill your wife, unless you ransom her for $10,000, you voluntarily turn over the money; but your consent has been coerced because of the kidnapper's threat to kill her. When you purchase a car for $10,000, the car dealer has obtained your uncoerced consent because there has been no use of, or threat of, violence. In both cases your tender of the $10,000 was a voluntary act, but in the first instance your consent has been coerced, while in the second instance your consent has been uncoerced.
   
   The parallel between these example arid our acceptance of the State should be obvious. Although our consent may have been coerced by State threats, ultimately our submission to the State is voluntary because we are self-directed and self-controlled individuals.
   I would like to extend my thanks to Pat and Kevin Cullinane for helping me clarify these ideas. •—Carl

   
   

Consistently Craving Consistency

What do you get when you mix a strong adherence to principle and worldly practicality? You get Mr. R. C. Hoiles.

We were first introduced to Mr. Hoiles in Issue 17 and I commented on a few ways I personally connected to this man, one being that I write a column for a local newspaper.

Now, after reading the feature article in Issue 18, “To Thine Own Self Be True – The Story of Raymond Cyrus Hoiles and his Freedom Newspapers,” I found another theme that makes me feel a connection to him: a strong desire for consistency.

We can see Hoiles' desire for consistency in his positions throughout this piece authored by Carl. Hoiles was always willing to stand by his principles, one example being that his newspapers spoke out against internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2, quite an unpopular opinion at the time.

Certainly this adherence to principle has the strong potential to annoy advertisers on occasion and there are a few examples of this in the article. But Hoiles apparently didn’t care and held fast to his principles even when it cost him money. And yet, his Freedom Newspaper Chain succeeded and grew.

Carl goes into more detail about Hoiles’ belief that he was handicapped by attending government schools. Hoiles realized he was never taught to think with consistency about basic principles:

“Of course, I never found any textbook or any teacher that believed taxation was a violation of justice and of moral law, as set forth in the Commandments "Thou shalt not steal" and "Thou shalt not covet." In other words, the government schools I attended made no attempt to be consistent and teach me to recognize contradictions.”

It appears that Hoiles spent the rest of his life working towards consistency and clarity in his thinking.

He believed that the purpose of the editorial page of his newspapers was to get people to think and all those on the editorial staff (which included Robert Lefevre) were constantly working and thinking about the freedom philosophy and how those principles defined the editorial stance of the papers.

I have always been drawn to consistency in thought. One thing that bothers me most is hypocrisy and I’m always bothered when I see it in myself most of all. My family tells me that sometimes I just think too much and analyze things too much when they hear me express concern about my own inconsistencies or about the inconsistencies in the world at large and maybe I do.

I wonder if R. C. Hoiles heard that a time or two in his life as well. If so, I am guessing he’d respond just as I do: I just can’t help it. I crave consistency.

The Greatest Benefit of Not Voting

In Issue 17, a short piece titled “Living Slavery and All That,” written by Alan P. Koontz discusses Murray Rothbard’s “slavery analogy” and whether or not this analogy is useful to determine the morality of voting.

Here is an excerpt from Rothbard’s book The Ethics of Liberty, Chapter 24, (The Moral Status of Relations to the State) which helps explain Rothbard’s view:

“Many anarchist libertarians claim it immoral to vote or to engage in political action–the argument being that by participating in this way in State activity, the libertarian places his moral imprimatur upon the State apparatus itself. But a moral decision must be a free decision, and the State has placed individuals in society in an unfree environment, in a general matrix of coercion. The State—unfortunately—exists, and people must necessarily begin with this matrix to try to remedy their condition. As Lysander Spooner pointed out, in an environment of State coercion, voting does not imply voluntary consent.3 Indeed, if the State allows us a periodic choice of rulers, limited though that choice may be, it surely cannot be considered immoral to make use of that limited choice to try to reduce or get rid of State power.4”

Koontz disagrees with Rothbard and gives several compelling reasons why this analogy is insufficient. One I find particularly interesting is the idea that voting does not just affect the individual voter, voting also affects others.

However, I’m not too concerned about convincing people of the morality of voting or not voting based on the idea of whether or not it is affecting (and thereby possibly harming) others, I’m more about non-voting as an individual act of defiance.

Not voting is the easiest way to start withdrawing your consent and removing yourself from state control. Oh sure, your individual refusal to vote will not do anything to change how the state treats you. They won’t suddenly leave you alone because you do not consent by voting.

But there is one major positive result when not voting is done as a conscious, principled act of defiance against the state: you begin to free your mind.

This is where all change begins. A free mind thinks more creatively. A free mind is open to investigating and critically examining ideas which can lead to fresh alternatives. A free mind is more at peace and naturally compassionate towards others.

So why continue to do what the master wants you to do? Free your mind. Don’t vote, and do it as a conscious, principled act of defiance to the state.

Voluntaryism is Simply a Free and Unhampered Market

Issue 17’s article “Unlimited Voluntary Exchanges” gives us a nice appetizer of the thoughts and philosophy of R. C. Hoiles. Hoiles is another person who is now deceased that I wish I could have met. He founded a chain of newspapers that continues to this day, although there has been some restructuring and changes like most newspapers in our electronic age.

Three items I discovered while investigating Hoiles’ Freedom Newspaper chain connected with me personally. The first is that one newspaper currently a part of this chain is in a city less than 50 miles from me in Seymour Indiana.

The second is that Hoiles thought the editorial and opinion page of a newspaper was its heart and soul. I found this quote on mises.org in a Jeff Riggenbach piece on Hoiles:

“What this country needs as much as anything else, are newspapers that believe in moral principles and have enough courage to express these principles and point out practices and beliefs that violate moral principles. A newspaper that only tries to run editorials and columnists and news items that are popular is of mighty little value to its readers.”

Yeah, what he said. I have been very fortunate to write for a daily paper that gives me a lot of freedom to speak my mind and so I can really relate to this.

The third item I discovered is that an online friend, Kent McManigal, writes for another paper in this chain, The Clovis News Journal. Interestingly, Kent has not been as fortunate as I have and has occasionally struggled with this paper’s publisher to get his opinions printed, which are always very hard-hitting and root-striking. I find this ironic, considering Kent seems to be exactly like the type of person Hoiles would have loved to see contributing on any of his editorial pages.

Besides his views on newspaper editorial pages, another reason I feel a close affinity to Hoiles revolves around his feelings about education. I learned he was a strong believer in the separation of school and state and also that he had a policy at his papers to refer to public schools by the more specific name, “government schools.” I made a personal decision to do that on my own several years ago. Maybe I was channeling Hoiles.

Hoiles also had a standing offer of $500 to any school official in the areas where his papers were published if he or she could explain how government schools were in harmony with the Golden Rule. According to Carl, he was never seriously taken up on this offer. I’m thinking this would be a fun thing to do in one of my newspaper columns someday.

But enough about my new love for Hoiles, let me give you a little explanation about this particular article which was originally published in 1959. It is basically Hoiles giving a report of sorts about a recent visit to The Exchange Club of Santa Ana where he spoke on voluntaryism.

Hoiles describes how simple voluntary exchange between individuals is all that’s really needed for a peaceful and prosperous society. He tells us that everyone benefits when two people exchange with each other because both of them are better off than they were before the exchange and the benefits will move towards other individuals in a wide variety of ways.

During this speech, Hoiles left time for questions and he also describes his responses. Here are some of the questions he reportedly received:

• How would you raise money to defend the nation?
• How would the Civil War have been handled?
• What about having to compete with the cheap labor in India and China? (Remember, this was written in 1959!)

You can go to the article and see how he answered these questions.

I know that there are more articles upcoming in The Voluntaryist that either refer to Hoiles or are reprints of Hoile’s writings and I for one am looking forward to reading them because anyone who thinks the same way I do about government schools and loves the editorial page of the newspaper is certainly my kind of guy.

Freedom for All is the Product of Self-Control

In the article in Issue 17 titled, “The Decision is Always Yours – Freedom as Self-Control,” Carl Watner discusses various aspects of self-control.

One point made in this article is that the government can’t force you to do anything; you are ultimately the only one who can control yourself.

This can be hard to understand at first. Many people hear this and think, “That’s not right! The government (or anyone else who uses violence or threats of violence) is forcing me to do x. I don’t want to do x, they are forcing me.”

But this is not true. You always have choices. It’s just that those who threaten violence against you can limit your choices. Severely. But only you can act on those choices and you make your choice by weighing the consequences. Many of us don’t want to go to jail or get killed of course and we accept another choice.

So in the end, if you do what the people with guns tell you to do you are still the one acting, the one making the choice, and yes, the one voluntarily consenting.

Carl discusses many implications to this insight but for me, this is important because of the problems that come when limiting choices. Limiting choices prevents people from developing the ability to make decisions and take responsibility for their actions.

And as mentioned in the article, limiting choices also limits the power of human creative energy. Energy that is needed to move society forward, to solve problems in a respectful and peaceful manner.

Another aspect of realizing you have control over your actions is that you begin to look inward and evaluate why you made certain choices and whether those choices added value to your life or not. You end up creating your own methods of self-government, self-discipline, and self-evaluation.

You focus on yourself rather than on others because it’s all about self-control, not ‘others-control.’ This is why self-control can lead to freedom for everyone.

Here is a nice ends-means comment at the end of this piece that I’ll close with here:

“…It is immoral in itself for the moral person to impose morality upon others. The moral person does not resort to force, does not compel others to accept his or her morality. The means would be inconsistent with the ends of morality. If the moral person gives due consideration to the means (the inculcation of character and self-control), the end (a group of people who are moral and respect property rights) will take care of itself. Thus another proof of "freedom is self-control." "One does not have to labor to compel others to accept freedom. One has, rather, to control himself, so that he does not interfere with the freedom of others. Freedom for all is the product of self-control. This means that we will be free when we stop preventing the freedom of others." (Bob LeFevre, G.7., September 13, 1959.)”

The Button-Pushing Dilemma

Issue 17 has two items on the topic of “button-pushing.” The discussion generally revolves around what you would do if given a chance to remove the state by pushing a button.

Carl’s article “Button Pushing or Abdication” discusses what Leonard Read, Robert Lefevre and Ludwig Von Mises said they would do. As you read the article you can see that Carl’s intent in bringing up the situation is to show that, from a Voluntaryist perspective, pushing the button makes little sense because you can’t force people to be free.

Simply pushing a button changes no one’s mind and is in essence trying only to force people to be free. So it’s contradictory to the Voluntaryist philosophy.

This issue also contains a response from Samuel Edward Konkin III (also known as SEK3), who sets up and imagines more parameters. In particular, he focuses on how the situation came to be in the first place and thereby gives an agorist perspective to the dilemma.

I’m not too big on these types of imaginary intellectual dilemmas and it’s mostly because of what Konkin points out, even if the situation could ever happen, there are far too many possibilities in how the situation comes to be in the first place.

So I find it hard to stay focused on the deeper philosophical issues involved and end up just thinking about it in a completely different way.

If I was in a situation to push a button, I might have to do it just because I’d be curious to see what happens if I pushed it. I think I’d be like Dennis the Menace, in the 1993 movie, I’d just have to push the button, because well, it’s there.

What would you do?

It's Your Body

Issue 16 of The Voluntaryist has an article titled “ ‘Health’ Freedoms in the Libertarian Tradition” where Carl Watner describes the development of freedom in the first half of the 1800s within the context of health.

Sylvester Graham is probably the most well-known “health advocate” during this time and Carl also mentions Samuel Thomson, who was deeply involved in herbal medicine.

There was an increasing skepticism mounting against drugs and the medical profession in general and these men were among those proposing more natural means of taking care of oneself, as well as simply taking responsibility for one’s own body.

Carl writes:

“His (Samuel Thomson’s) New Guide To Health encouraged people to take care of themselves and his ideas were patronized by a widespread clientele. It was estimated that he had some three to four million adherents out of a total population of seventeen million people at that time. His philosophy had a Jacksonian flavor, reflecting the widespread distrust of elites and the conviction that Americans "should in medicine, as in religion and politics, think and act" for themselves. "It was high time." declared Thomson, "for the common man to throw off the oppressive yoke of priests, lawyers, and physicians . . . " The Thomsonians believed that self medication was safer than being doctored to death. "Being your own physician would not only save your life.... but save you money as well."

Carl points out how the ideas of these men appealed to those seeking greater liberty in general. Many of the same people who had radical political views were also radical in terms of personal health issues. For example, Carl reports that Thoreau was vegetarian for at least a few years of his life.

It makes sense that people interested in freedom would be attracted to ideas on how to best take care of one’s health. After all, it’s a logical extension for anyone who understands the concept of self-ownership.

In this article Carl also discusses the history of vaccines, particularly the idea of compulsory vaccination. He points out that whether or not one agrees with the effectiveness of a particular vaccine, it’s still important to remain on the side of health freedom and use voluntary persuasion, rather than compulsion.

“Those who argued on practical grounds also claimed a right to be heard on the moral side of the question. Even if the anti-vaccinationists were wrong with regard to their assertion that vaccination was not medically effective, they desired to be heard out on their argument that "compulsion is a wrong." The burden of proof, in their opinion, was on those who wished to resort to coercion. For example. John Morley in 1888 maintained that "liberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion, whether direct or indirect." John Bright, writing in 1876. disapproved of compulsory vaccination. "To me it is doubtful if persuasion and example would not have been more effective than compulsion:... to inflict incessant penalties upon parents and to imprison them for refusing to subject their children to an operation which is not infrequently injurious and sometimes fatal, seems to be a needless and monstrous violation of the freedom of our homes and of the right of parents."

Bright's reference to the possibility of accomplishing the same end (the eradication of smallpox) by voluntary persuasion and example illustrates the underlying voluntaryist theme in this historical overview of the "health" freedoms. One need not have been opposed to vaccination at all to have been an opponent of
compulsory vaccination. One could have been opposed to the compulsion without being opposed to the practice of vaccination…”

We are still seeing controversies in many of the same areas written about here (proper diet, vaccination, licensing and monopoly in medicine, etc.) I have always maintained a skepticism when it comes to health advice, even from those within the licensed medical profession. I have watched society catch up to ideas I learned about 25 years ago, like the dangers of just handing out antibiotics like candy and that a fever is not necessarily something you need to "get rid of" by taking a pill. I try my best to educate myself as much as I can before embarking on any sort of medical intervention. Ultimately that's all we can do, educate ourselves, find people in the medical field we can trust and act based on the combined knowledge of benefits and risks. It’s your body. Take care of it.

Oh, and when it comes to personal health decisions, there's only one body part that matters when it come to government involvement:

Butt out.