I’m feeling very pleased with these two days and I thought it went extremely well and the local organisation was superb and Nicolai (Barczentewicz) and You and all the people who worked for the organisation did a great job, so… Everybody I’ve talked to think it was one of the most successful conferences we’ve had, so it’s very good, I’m very pleased.

Thank You. This is Your first time in Poland?

No, no, I’ve been to Poland many times. In the early days after the… the post-Soviet era – ’92-’93, and again more recently, not to Warsaw but to Krakow – so I can see, certainly in Warsaw, how the city has changed between 1992-1993 and today. It’s very spectacular. At the time it was grey, it was drab, it was really… it had the feeling of a very boring place. Today, and today’s not sunny and so on, but it’s certainly a vibrant place full of colour, full of young people in the street, advertising, you know, shops, things like that. No, it’s great, absolutely great. And the old buildings have been redone and the appear in all their glory, it’s wonderful.

So You’ve been to Warsaw and Krakow?

Yes. These are the only two places I’ve been to. I’ve been to Katowice and I think maybe one or two other cities; but I’ve never been to the North. I would like to go to the Lake Mazur; I’ve never been there and I’m told the nature is absolutely beautiful; and Gdańsk, which, again, I’m told is a beautiful city, full of history and so on.

Okay. So apart from this feeling that Warsaw has become more vibrant and so on, how are You enjoying Poland, its people, its culture? How do You see it?

Well, I see it as a young and; one of the great cultures of Europe. It’s a language I do not speak, so I have problems identifying with the culture. For instance I was desperately trying to find, either in English or in French, a translation of Reymont’s book which Wajda turned into a film: The Land of the Great Promise – I don’t know how it is in Polish, so I couldn’t find a translation; the only Reymont book I could find in translation was The Peasants, which is probably not his best book, but I’m reading it right now. It’s just an example of how difficult it has been for Polish writers and playwrights and so on to get their work known internationally. Musicians are doing very well. Górecki is a celebrity in the rest of the world, as is Lutosławski and so on. But you don’t have the same thing with literature. And it is a problem of the languages that are losing more and more of their international status – I’m talking of the Frenchmen.

I’ve got a few questions about Your life. I’ve heard You’ve made quite a fortune. Is that true?

Well, I wouldn’t – You know, how big a fortune is before it can be called quite a lot. No, no. I never went to university and I was a dunce at school, so I started working very young, but I was lucky enough at one point to join a financial company in Paris, an American one, as a telex operator and this got me interested in things financial and so on, so I worked my way up the ladder and then one of our clients asked me to work for them in Switzerland and I acquired their business when there was a sort of merger or buyout. So I acquired a very small business we had, which they spun off and it grew nicely – partly luck, partly hard work, partly the work of others who joined the organisation. I sold it, not entirely, in 2000, and the bit that I kept started losing a lot of money; so the money I’d made in the sale of a major business I lost in keeping the bit that the other people didn’t want. So it’s from rags to riches and back to rags in one generation.

What kind of advice would You give to people who’d want to follow in Your footsteps, at least the rags to riches part?

Well, the rags to riches part is the most difficult one to achieve. But I really think there is no recipe. If there was one, everybody would be rich. What is more important rather than wanting to be rich is wanting to do the sort of thing you enjoy. And if what you enjoy can be of service to a lot of people, then a lot of people will buy your product. But if what you do is trying to service a lot of people, but you are very bored at doing it, you’re not going to be successful, because there would be something of your lack of passion and so on that will transpire and your staff will not be motivated, your clients will not be motivated, so at the end of the day, however rich you want to be, you will not succeed. But if you passionately believe in a mission, in a product or something like this, hopefully, not sure, but hopefully, that passion will communicate to other people and they will say: yes, we want to deal with you, you know, we like what you are doing. And, you will be so attentive to what your clients want to do and so on, that you will anticipate their wishes or You’ll be the first one to see that the market is changing and you will accompany the market.

And what about the libertarian mission, the libertarian passion? When did You hear the call of freedom? How did You find out about these ideas?

Virtually when I was born, and I think – as far as I can, sort of, recall – I was always a kind of libertarian. My father was a shopkeeper. He had no formal education, and my mother didn’t have any formal education either. But they were both very well read and they had a big library at home and they encouraged us to read; but I was always hearing my father complaining about taxes, control, bureaucracy, which, you know, shopkeepers complain about. So I was never too enthusiastic about the State. It was always presented to me as being something that was rather a nuisance than a solution. So I think I simply ingested this and then I was not interested in politics; I had friends who were. I managed to escape the brainwashing of Marxist professors and so on precisely because I didn’t go to university. But I was a kind of a classical liberal without any political fashion and so on.

It’s in 1981 when the Communist-Socialist coalition managed to win the election in France that suddenly it came as a sort of warning shot; I said, well something is happening here that I should take notice. I asked friends, who recommended Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom,” things like this and knowing nothing about the subject I wrote a book about it. You know, when you don’t know about a subject the best thing is either to teach it or to write a book about it, because it forces you to learn – so that’s what I did. In order to write this book, which was published by the Paris Economic Institute, in order to write this book I had to read a lot of literature. Suddenly I realised that minarchists crystallised all the unformulated ideas, aspirations that I had in mind.

A bit later on, I realised that my book was not the solution, because it still believed in the State and so on. As I said at the conference, at the time I was a utopian. I believed that you could constrain the State, but since I’ve become a realist –I’m an anarchist. So if there is a little bit of a State, it will grow. So the only realist position is the anarchist one.

And what about Libertarian International? Were You one of the founders?

No. Not at all. Libertarian International was founded a long time ago. I announced at the opening of the conference this morning that Vince Miller, the president of ISIL, died last night. Libertarian International started as a kind of spin-off of ISIL back in, can’t remember exactly, ’92 or something like this. And I got involved in ISIL, I think the first time in ’87-’88. I went to the ISIL conference in Paris in ’89, which was the first conference I attended, but then Europeans at ISIL left under the Chairmanship of Hubert Jongen. 2 years ago, when Hubert Jongen decided he wanted to retire, he asked me to take over and this is what I’ve done.

What is it exactly that the organisation does?

It’s main activity is to organise these conferences twice a year. Once in London in the Fall and once somewhere in Europe, in Spring or Summer. Its membership – it doesn’t really have a membership, it is a movement. The reason we don’t have a formal membership is because we’re so international – with people, friends in Iceland, in Norway, in Turkey, in East Europe and of course France, England and so on. So far, it was been very difficult to collect membership dues, to keep people informed of what we were doing and so on. Recently, now everybody being on the internet it’s easy to spread information, it’s still very difficult to collect membership dues. So what’s the point of having a list of people if their commitment is simply in giving you their e-mail address? Even with PayPal it’s very difficult to make international transfers. So we prefer to be viewed simply as a movement of people who believe in certain ideals and we get together at these events and maybe one day we’ll be able to be more structured. But you know, libertarians don’t believe in, sort of very-

They believe in structure, only voluntary one.

Yes, exactly that’s right, so maybe we’ll have a voluntary structure, with a bit of a budget that would help organising more events.

Sure. Are you active outside of Europe? Have you organised events on other continents?

Not really, because it was not in the remit of Libertarian International, because actually, it should be called Libertarian European, but it doesn’t sound to good – Libertarian European – so we called it Libertarian International. But we didn’t want to compete with ISIL, and because ISIL is worldwide, we left it to ISIL to recruit in South America, in Africa, in Asia; we limit ourselves to Europe.

You’ve had the opportunity to travel to different countries and so on. What is You impression of how different cultures are related to liberty? What kind of mindset is the most conducive for the growth of libertarian ideas?

It’s a very good question. I think that, ultimately, every human being is interested in right – and especially in these very basic rights: do not kill, do not steal, to not assault and keep your promises. If you go to Patagonia or if you go to Mongolia, you are unlikely to find somebody who’d say “I don’t mind being killed, I don’t mind being raped, I don’t mind being robbed.” These are the fundamental prohibitions that libertarians see as being the fundamental human rights. Do not kill and so on. These prohibitions are human.

Then cultures come on top of this and cultures will have different attitudes towards the family, different attitudes toward business, different attitudes toward culture, in the sense of the arts and thing like that. And that is fine. That is fine, provided that there is no coercion, provided there is no violation of these very fundamental rights.

I think it is important that we do not develop worldwide either a kind of MacDonald American culture, which will be rejected by a lot of people, or a kind of Chinese culture – which may one day flourish, simply because of sheer numbers of people over there. I think it is important that we all remain living with a heritage that we received, but so far part of this heritage was in direct violation of our rights and this is what libertarians reject.

And from the countries You visited, which would You say has the most vibrant libertarian movement or has the most potential for the growth of such a movement? Apart from America.

Yeah, apart from America. But even in America- I think it is a bit of an illusion that Americans are more libertarian than people elsewhere. It’s simply that libertarians in America have more access to the media and therefore can express their view publicly. In my country for instance, in France – where there is a very important and very powerful intellectual movement, libertarian movement – these libertarians never get access to the media, their books are never reviewed, they never give interviews in newspapers and so on. So, they are invisible. We know each other through this wonderful mean which is the internet, because we have forums and things like that. But we are libertarians talking to libertarians.

I think where the movement is probably gaining most is in the UK, because there is a long tradition of rights there, and the attitude of the BBC and other media toward libertarians is very different from the attitude in France. In the media they love inviting a libertarian, who will stare at the camera and who will say “we think that all drugs should be legalised.” And then the BBC switchboard is jammed with calls, the producer thinks it’s a wonderful show – you know, they love it! Whereas in France, again to call an example I know, journalists view their function as educating the public. And educating the public in the right sort of ideas and these ideas range from the left of the centre to the centre of the left, so that is the spectrum that they cover.

So there isn’t much we can do in France. In Eastern Europe, I think, in Poland, in Slovakia, where I was last week, certainly in the Czech Republic, in the Baltic states, there is an important libertarian movement, it is growing and it attracts a lot of intellectuals – and it gets more press coverage than we have in Belgium, France, Spain and so on.

Why is it, that in France, which produced thinkers like, ranging from Proudhon to Molinari, Turgot, Bastiat and people like that- How has France slipped towards this statist mindset that it seems unable to free itself from?

I think there are two reasons. One is that France is a country where traditionally intellectuals have more influence than in other countries. And intellectuals, for sociological reasons, were more in favour of the State, more in favour of socialism, more contaminated by Marxism. After all, most intellectuals live off the State – I mean, they are professors, they get subsidies because they are artists, because they work for the State-owned radios and television. So the intellectual movement that produced the ideology was more statist and generally to the left and generally Marxist, until recently.

The second reason is that the state has always had a huge prestige in France, which dates back to Louis XIV and maybe earlier. So the best brains in France don’t go into business; they work for the State. And the prestige, elite education institutions, and, you know, Polytechnique and so on, churn out civil servants.

So the conjunction of these two factors meant that being in business was not really something that was valued – it was vulgar, it was crass, it was sometimes considered to be Jewish and there was always a bit of anti-Semitism floating there. It is now changing. It is now changing and more and more young people, the ones I talked to, do not aspire to become civil servants. And therefore the statist ideology is probably on the way out. But it has dominated the scene for the last 80 years, and more.

Generally, what do You predict for libertarianism in the future? What do You think – whether it will grow, where will it grow if so and so on?

I think it will grow. I cannot say where it will grow, but I think it will grow and – a point I made in my talk earlier is very much inspired by Marxism – I think Marx was right on this count – I think that the political structures are dictated by the factors of production and the factors of production are dictated by technology. And the technology today is no longer one that will foster the State. Actually it is turning against the State. It is transborder, and it’s now becoming more and more difficult for a nation state to regulate its economy – because business moves – it’s more and more difficult to make claims about reducing unemployment, about giving more benefits to people and so on.

So more and more the ideology that has been dominant since, say, the late Enlightenment, or the French Revolution, until probably the 1980s – that ideology is on the way out. And I think that libertarianism is going to be the ideology that people will turn to simply because every day I look around and I don’t see any other competing ideology. People from the left – I mean, socialists and so on – no longer want to identify themselves as- they don’t know what they are for. You know, they say “we are anti-globalisation, we are anti-capitalist” and so on. They don’t tell us what they are for. They have no program except maintaining the status quo, which can’t be maintained. So libertarians have the ideology, but can give account of the world that is emerging in front of us – I mean, they have created the narrative that explains the world and I think more and more people will start buying this narrative.

What form it will take – again, in my talk I said, probably the stations on the road are going to be transnational organisations, maybe created by states, but very rapidly becoming independent from states and having a life of their own. And then maybe entering into competition with other organisations that would not be created by states but would offer the same sort of services. And it would be easier for people to accept these services after they have seen that institutions like the ones I mentioned, Interpol, the European Central Bank and so on, are doing this sort of job that the public expects.

Great. Last question. What should the individual person do to further the idea of freedom in their life.

I think that what we need is simply to be there. Ideally, I mean You know, we can preach and convert, like the Apostles did, or evangelicals do today. But in reality, I don’t think you convince people. You do not tell them “This is the way to think.” They discover it by themselves. But in order to discover it, our books, our publications, our websites, our blogs must be there. Then people will stumble upon them and they say “this is what I was looking for. This is what I sort of had in my mind, I could not put it into words. But now I realise this is what I was thinking.” So I think the more we publish, the more we become visible in bookshops, on the internet and so on, the more chance we have to attract people, who will accept 98-95-96% of what we say. And it’s good that they won’t accept 100% of what we say.

Okay, great. Thank You.

____________________________
Interview by: Jędrzej Kuskowski

The trial of the most important leaders of Hitler’s regime in Germany began on November 20th, 1945, in Nuremberg. On the bench of defendant’s at the Palace of Justice – one of the few buildings in the center of Nuremburg, which survived the English and American bombings during the war – served 21 individuals.

After the ten-month long proceedings, the International Military Tribunal rendered the verdict: twelve of the indicted (one of them by default) were sentenced to death by hanging, seven to jail – from ten years to life, three were acquitted. The death sentences were carried out on the night of October 16th, 1946 (Herman Göring escaped the hangman, as, shortly before the execution, he ingested potassium cyanide).

From among the tried and sentenced in Nuremberg high – ranking officers of the Nazi regime, most were accused of crimes such as involvement in the planning of war, the initiation and waging of a war of aggression, but, most of all, the dispensation of criminal orders, the murdering of prisoners of war and of the civilian population, mass deportations, the plunder of property, etc.

Two of the charged appeared before the tribunal not because of what they did, meaning, for example, the dispensation of criminal orders, but for what they said and wrote. They were Hans Fritzsche and Julius Streicher. This note is dedicated to their trials.

The propagandist

Hans Fritzsche, accused of the commitment of crimes encompassed in the Indictment Charter by Articles I (conspiracy, or collective plan), III (war crimes) and IV (crimes against humanity), was a deputy to the Home Press Division at the beginning period of the war, and, from 1942, the deputy chief of the Radio Division, headed by Josef Goebbels, in the Ministry of Propaganda. As the deputy to the Home Press Division, he supervised the entire, covering 2,300 titles, German daily press. In his job, he worked under the director of the German press, Dietrich, and, every day, he broadcast the “daily parole of the Reich Press Chief”.

Fritzsche earned huge popularity through his radio broadcasts “Hans Fritzsche Speaks”. His speeches, dedicated to the international military – political situation, were filled with the spirit of fanatical loyalty to Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. The ever present element in these was anti-Semitism. Among his other ideas, Fritzsche maintained that “the war was started by the Jews… and their fate has turned out as unpleasant as the fuehrer predicted”.

Although Fritzsche did much to persuade the German nation to support Adolf Hitler and the German war effort, and, moreover, proliferated the sometimes false information, he never, in his broadcasts, directly called for the murder or persecution of Jews, or the commitment of any crimes.

Jew-baiter No. 1

Julius Streicher was the publisher and the editor of the anti-Semitic weekly publication “Der Stürmer”. It was a magazine saturated with the most fanatical anti-Semitism that one can imagine, on top of it so obscene and vulgar, that even many hard-core Nazis could not read it.

In his published articles, Streicher did not limit himself to general insults or invectives against the Jews. He demanded, as claimed by the tribunal, “total and thorough annihilation of Jews”. A good example of what Streicher wrote in “Der Stürmer” can be an excerpt from his article dated May 1939:

“There must be a punitive expedition against the Jews in Russia, a punitive expedition which will expect: death sentence and execution. The Jews in Russia must be utterly eradicated”.

Whereas in an issue from February of 1944, Streicher stated:

“Whoever acts as a Jew acts is a rogue and a criminal; whoever repeats his act or wants to imitate him, deserves the same fate: annihilation and death”.

Streicher knew much about the extermination and death of the millions of Jews – he was kept up to date about the progress of the “Final Solution”. From that progress, it is worthy to say, he took extreme pleasure. In one of the issues of the magazine that he published, he wrote, among other things, that “it is wonderful to know that Hitler is freeing the world from his Jewish oppressors”.

However Streicher attended to his function as the gauleiter of Franconia (he was removed from it for moral scandals and gigantic corruption), his activity at this position did little against him at his trial. The whole indictment against him was based on what he printed as the publisher and editor of the weekly magazine “Der Stürmer”, specifically on 26 articles (12 of them written by Streicher himself), which were published between August 1941 and September 1944. In these articles, he categorically demanded the annihilation of all Jews.

Guilty of the crimes?

In the opinion of the prosecutors of the Nuremberg tribunal, the activities of Streicher as well as of Fritzsche constituted crimes against humanity, described in Article IV of the Indictment Charter. Although neither Streicher nor Fritzsche personally murdered, oppressed or ordered murders, deportations, etc., without their publishing activities (in the case of Fritzsche also administrative activities as the deputy director of press and radio), all of these crimes may not have happened. Brutal acts of violence would not have occurred if certain beliefs would not have been instilled in the human minds, such as the one that the Jews were the ones responsible for the start of the war, as maintained by Fritzsche. Moreover, they would not take place without encouragement of propaganda, as was conducted by Streicher via “Der Stürmer”.

It is not enough!

The Tribunal agreed only partially with this briefly described argumentation,. As far as Fritzsche was concerned, the judges found that although his radio broadcasts were unrelentingly anti-Semitic, they did not contain calls for extermination or oppression of Jews. Moreover, it was not ascertained that he knew about the matter of Jewish eradication in the East. Finally, although his speeches sometimes contained false information, there was no evidence that he knew that the information he provided was false.

The undisputed fact that Fritzsche proliferated and reinforced anti-Semitism and encouraged the nation to support Hitler and the war efforts did not, according to the tribunal, constitute substantial grounds to declare him guilty of participation in conspiracy (Article I of the Indictment Charter), of war crimes (Article III) or finally of crimes against humanity (Article IV).

The instigator

In a different light, according to the tribunal, appeared the case of Julius Streicher. Most of all, contrary to Hans Fritzsche, he instigated the commitment of crimes in a direct and unambiguous way. Furthermore, his instigation took place at a time when “Jews in the East were murdered in the most terrifying manner”, and he himself knew about the crimes perpetrated against the Jewish population – and yet continued his “death propaganda”.

All of this was sufficient to find him guilty of crimes against humanity (the Tribunal acquitted him from the charge of commitment of crime from Article I of the Indictment Charter, as well as from participation in conspiracy, as there was no adequate evidence that confirmed that Streicher participated in the preparation or planning of the war).

The Sentence

Hans Fritzsche was acquitted of all charges brought against him. Julius Streicher – in accordance with the tribunal’s sentence of October 1, 1945 – was hung at the gallows.

Nuremberg and the freedom of speech

The trials of Fritzsche and Streicher are especially worthy of recollection in the context of the discussion over the boundaries of the freedom of speech.

The proponents of the legal repression of people, who publicly propagate, for instance, anti-Semitic or generally racist matters, often recall the sentence of the Tribunal in the case of Julius Streicher. The propaganda of hatred was recognized at Nuremberg as a crime against humanity – proclaim some, who support the placing of racists and anti-Semitics behind bars. They often forget, however, that the second of the propagandists – anti-Semitics was not only not sentenced by the Nuremberg Tribunal, even for a short punishment, but completely acquitted.

The majority of the anti-Semitic and racist propaganda, which can be found today either in some radical magazines or on certain Internet websites, has a lot more, without comparison, in common with what Fritzsche did than with what Julius Streicher presented in his activities.

Today words, tomorrow bombs?

The Nuremberg Court, as seen, was not too keen to stretch responsibility for “conspiracy”, “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity” on someone, whose only fault was the spread and publication of certain words, rather than the fulfillment (or the ordering of their fulfillment) of certain acts.

From the perspective of the freedom of speech, it was a legitimate position. Often enough, one can persuasively argue that certain acts would not take place without the effect of certain statements. “The Holocaust would not happen without the anti-Semitic propaganda”. “Today fall words, another day it will be stones (or arrows)” – sometimes argue the supporters of repression in the face of the so-called “hate speech”.

Such arguments are not, in a simple way, false. Thinking logically, the Holocaust would not have occurred if the minds of the pre-war Germans were not instilled with certain notions about Jews. Similarly, the crimes that occur these days in many European countries (thankfully seldom in Poland) of a racist character would not take place if the minds of their perpetrators would not be instilled with certain ideas on the subject of national, ethnic or religious groups, whose members become the victims of such attacks.

Where will we finish?

But these kinds of arguments about the limitation of the freedom of speech may be applied to several other statements, not only to racist or neo-Nazi propaganda. Let’s take a couple of examples. It seems, for instance, apparent that impetuous uproars, which often result in enormous material losses, and regularly accompany the meetings of such organizations as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum or the International Monetary Fund, would not take place if the minds of some (but really of many) people would not be instilled the belief, propagated by the intellectual critics of globalization, that these institutions are responsible for wars, economic crises, unemployment, destitution, the devastation of the environment, and the entire evil that prevails in the countries of the third world.

The crimes of the radical animal rights activists, such as the arson of stores with furs or the demolition of labs, which conduct experiments on animals, would most likely not happen if their perpetrators, under the influence of certain publications, films, speeches or Internet websites, would not care about the fate of the animals killed for their fur or used in experimental labs.

The arson of laboratories that conduct genetic experiments or damage the plantation of genetically modified food would not happen if not for the spread of the view that experiments in the area of genetics carry with them threats against human health and life and the natural environment.

Such acts of violence, such as arson and the destroying of abortion clinics, or the murder of abortion doctors (a wave of such crimes went through the United States in the 90s) would not take place, logically speaking, if the propaganda of the pro-life supporters did not instill the belief that the termination of a pregnancy is a grave crime.

Each intensive spread of determined beliefs carries with it, indefinite in the near future, risk of indirect contribution to aggressive behaviors…

As the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued when he ruled in “Gitlow vs. People of State of New York”, thus protecting the freedom of speech of a man, who published and proliferated a manifest, which called for a Communist revolution and a forceful abolition of the government, “every idea is an incitement”, and the only difference between the expression of an opinion and instigation is more specifically shown by the speaker’s (or the publisher’s) enthusiasm for the possible result of his opinion.

Streicher vs. Fritzsche

Streicher evidently demonstrated such enthusiasm, while Fritzsche did not display it. Does that mean that the former was hung justly, while the latter was justly acquitted?

A controversial decision

Let’s suppose that, in the light of the raised charges, the Tribunal justly acquitted Hans Fritzsche.

However, according to the competent experts of the Nuremberg trial, the case of Streicher was treated superficially by the International Military Tribunal. As shown by one of the secondary participants of the trial, Telford Taylor, in his book, “The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: a Personal Memoir”, the entire trial against Streicher lasted all of two and a half days (one day for the reading of the charges, the remaining one and a half for the deposition of the accused and the presentation of the defense’s arguments). At court, no concrete proofs were presented that proved that the propaganda that he spread directly or even indirectly contributed to the crimes of the Holocaust. The examination of the witnesses did not establish that the reading of “Der Stürmer” encouraged anyone to commit any concrete crimes.

Crimes against humanity?

Doubts of purely legal nature can also be pointed out. Streicher was sentenced according to Article IV of the Indictment Charter, in other words, for “crimes against humanity”. The definition of those crimes, as contained in the International Military Tribunal Charter, was as follows:

“Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”

Instigation to such crimes (where there should be a distinction between the issuing of orders and instigation in press, as practiced by Streicher) was not mentioned.

Why?

Why then did the Nuremberg Tribunal send Streicher to the gallows? Without doubt, the anti-Jewish propaganda practiced in “Der Stürmer” was unacceptable to a normal man. From a moral point of view, Streicher’s activities clearly deserved the highest condemnation.

However, moral condemnation and a sentence in a trial (especially a death sentence) are two different things.

The hearing before the Nuremberg Tribunal did not prove that the publication “Der Stürmer” was the cause of any of the crimes perpetrated during World War II. The connection of the publishing activity of Streicher with those crimes was a result of logical thinking – not concrete evidence. It did not mean, of course, that no such connection existed. But in a criminal trial, one rule should stand true: In dubio, pro reo (When in doubt, in favor of the accused). In the case of Streicher, there is doubt if such a rule was applied.

Perpetrator or swine?

It is not out of the question that the decision to hang Streicher was affected by elements, which should not have been examined in the first place. Most of all, Julius Streicher was, as far as his appearance, way of speech and manners were concerned, an exceptionally repulsive figure. Observers of the Nuremburg process depicted him as: “brutal, coarse, vulgar, swinish” – just to name a couple names. It is also probable that the Court’s decision in Streicher’s trial was affected by the prospect that the public opinion would revolt if Streicher was not punished equally with the worst of the offenders.

Hung for such a reason?

Streicher was sentenced for crimes against humanity, the definition of which did not clearly cover behaviors such as instigation. From the perspective of the rule “In dubio, pro reo”, the case against him would look completely different if he was tried for crimes, which by definition encompass certain statements, such as, for example, inciting to commit crimes or calling for racist hatred. Evidence for his commitment of such crimes would be more than substantial.

The sentence of Streicher’s trial was not the only decision of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which for these or other reasons can raise serious doubts. As Joseph E. Persico writes in his book, “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial”, “the trial of Streicher was the first example that the fundamentality of individual verdicts could be debated into infinity”.

As the evoked author states: “Today we always debate whether the violence presented in films and television programs contributes to the exertion of violence of the recipients, and we still do not have an answer”. Was there a simple way, leading from the raging anti-Semitism of “Stürmer” to the gas chambers of Auschwitz? Streicher and his activities were despicable. It may be worth to note, however, the example of Francis Biddle (the American judge of the Nuremberg Tribunal) and postulate the question: is despicability a crime, which is punishable by death?

* The mentioned opinion by Justice Holmes in the case of Gitlow versus People of State of New York, in which, calling on an earlier – actually formulated by him – opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Schenk versus United States (1919), he defended the thesis that statements, which propagate the forceful abolition of the government, may be punishable only if they take place in such circumstances that they result in direct and clear danger of commitment of criminal activities, was a dissenting opinion. The seven-person majority of justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (the sentence of Justice Holmes was supported by the equally liberal in the matter of the freedom of speech Justice Louis Brandeis) decided then that although the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states, among other things, that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”, protects (thanks to the 14th Amendment) the freedom of speech from restriction by state authorities, and not only, as the authorities of the state of New York, appearing on one side of this trial, tried to contend and how often was claimed at that time by the federal authorities in the legal literature, nevertheless guaranteed by it freedom is not absolute and does not prohibit state authorities from punishing for statements “inimical to the public welfare, tending to corrupt public morals, incite to crime, or disturb the public peace” – and more so does not prohibit the establishment of injunctions of such statements, which, as the court maintained, “endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means”. The accepted in Gitlow’s case position that authorities may see as crime any propagation of activities against the law – even when the propagation of such activities has a purely abstract and general character, without calling for concrete criminal acts, and the possibility of effective revolutionary propaganda being completely minuscule, was in a final way abolished in the case of Brandenburg versus Ohio (1969), in which the U.S. Supreme Court uniformly stated that the guarantees of freedom of speech and press, as provided by the 1st and the 14th Amendments of the Constitution, “do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”. This last position holds true in American law at this time.

Bartłomiej Kozłowski

***

The article was initially published (under a different title) in the section “Kartka z kalendarza” on the website Polska.pl.

Translated by: Karolina Kuczyc
January 13, 2008

This solution to making a libertarian world happen has a couple of advantages:

1. It is moral.
2. It is bloodless.
3. It is simple.

I find it puzzling that some libertarians (among them prominent scholars) are still on government payroll. While advocating free societies, founded on the non-aggression axiom (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle), they still choose to be rather part of the problem, not the solution.

It could be argued that by holding a post at a prestigious state university you can get the libertarian message to more people – but how true is the message if the messenger denies it by his actions?

Some libertarian scholars seem to think they possess a kind of moral superiority: it lets them advise others to try to bring down the state – simultaneously they themselves avoid the first and simplest step to make it happen: cut their own connections with the state.

In “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Guilt and Punishment for the Crime of Statism” (www.walterblock.com/publications/block_theory-guilt-punishment-crime-statism.pdf) Walter Block (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Block) laments the fact that in the case of government-employed scholars “no cognizance is taken of the distinction between a Marxist or leftist professor who supports totalitarianism, and those who oppose it.”

In Block’s opinion the unnoticed difference is that an opponent of totalitarianism is in some way “less guilty” of “the crime of statism”. I would say otherwise.

There is a distinction. A supporter of totalitarianism simply follows what he preaches. An opponent, who lambastes government taxation but works for the state and takes money collected in taxes, is a hypocrite.

Block admits that “even the libertarian professor or politician who accepts a salary from government is still guilty of what, by his lights, can only be considered stolen (e.g., taxed) property. And this cannot be denied. However, there are several replies open to the libertarian professor employed by a state school. First, there is the claim that he is only getting some of his own money back from the government, and not that of other people. Second, it is not exactly theft to take from a thief; rather, such an act is best characterized as relieving a criminal of his ill gotten gains. So, even if a post office worker takes a salary from the government, this does not mean he is guilty of a libertarian legal code violation; far better that he, a non thief, now has this money than that the government, which stole it in the first place, gets to keep it.”

One question is left unexplained: if a thief steals your property should you have to do him a favour (work for him as a professor, for example) to get back what’s yours?

Andrey Yefimitch, the hero of Anton Chekhov’s (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Chekhov) Ward Number Six (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13409), says: “I serve in a pernicious institution and receive a salary from people whom I am deceiving. I am not honest, but then, I of myself am nothing, I am only part of an inevitable social evil: all local officials are pernicious and receive their salary for doing nothing. . . . And so for my dishonesty it is not I who am to blame, but the times…. If I had been born two hundred years later I should have been different. . .”

Libertarians who still work at tax-funded positions tend to argue their involvement with the state in a similar way. There are lots of variants of the explanation but it typically finishes with something like this: “I work for a pernicious institution and rob the taxpayers – but at least I know that it’s evil and dishonest. I don’t hide it. In the long run this state system is unable to function. It will collapse. It is wrong both morally and economically. But look, man, right now I need the money. And, what’s more, I tell other people straight in the eye that we don’t need the government”. The libertarian scholar who works for a state institution can go even further: “I teach my students the evils of taxation and state regulations. I work for the government but I’m the enemy within. And, hey, these weirdos even pay me for it”.

There is something fundamentally wrong with this. Imagine a worker at a private company telling someone: “I hate my company. Our products are faulty. My boss is a dunce. But, well, this dunce pays me two grand a week”.

The state acts so absurdly and inefficiently that it really pays the man who fervently attacks it. That is very comfortable – but doesn’t seem to be moral.

What do government-funded libertarian scholars count on? That all people will follow their advice, cut their connections with the state, eventually make it disappear and only then – at the very end – those professors living off people’s money will follow suit?

If not – what other options are there left to overthrow the government? What solutions do we have at our disposal?

Suppose we decide against being engaged in military-like conflicts, shedding blood or seizing the government and trying to impose freedom using its powers (if such a thing was possible). How can we make a free society happen?

Libertarianism implies the absence of the state. It means no state institutions. That means no people willing to work for the government.

Resign your tax-funded position if you hold one. We are one step closer to making a free society reality.

Start changing the world with changing yourself. So simple yet so difficult.

Should virtual child pornography be banned?

A defense of the United States Supreme Court decision

Probably no kind of expression is so much hated, as so called “child pornography”. So, it is not strange, that many people were displeased with the U.S. Supreme Court decision holding, that “virtual child pornography” cannot be prohibited. But pejorative term “child pornography” – and emotions connected with this term – should not make us unable to understand decision of the Court, and to quiet consideration of arguments used to support of criminalization of so called “virtual child pornography” in light of free speech and free press clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

To understand the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition we must first to understand difference between the “real” child pornography, which since long ago is prohibited in whole United States (and in virtually all civilized countries in the world) and so called the “virtual” child pornography, which was question of controversy in this case. Although real and virtual child pornography can, at least in some instances, to look very like, they are in fact very different things. This difference lies not in what particular movie or photograph visually represent, but in question, how these materials are produced. The real child pornography is produced by filming or photographing sexual activity with a child. In case of virtual child pornography no real child is used. Sometime, an adult person which look like a legal child can be used for pornographic purpose. Sometime, it can be product of pure imagination, without use of any real human being at all.

In 1982 case New York v. Ferber the United States Supreme Court held, that pornography in production of which children are used can be prohibited even if resulting products are not obscene. A reason behind such ruling was that use of a child in production of pornography is harmful to physiological, emotional and mental health of the child used for such a purpose. But in case of virtual child pornography no child is used – let alone abused – for purpose of making pornography. So, reasons on basis of which the U.S. Supreme Court said that child pornography is unprotected by the First Amendment are, in case of “virtual child pornography”, simply void.

If no actual person is harmed by production and distribution of virtual child pornography what arguments can be made for prohibition of such materials too? Of course, some arguments have been made for prohibition of virtual child pornography. But are these arguments compatible with philosophy, upon which free speech and free press clauses of the First Amendment are based? And is prohibition of “virtual child pornography” a good way to making children more safe from pedophiles?

So look on these arguments. It is often said, that virtual child pornography should be prohibited as real child pornography, because it can encourage some people to molest children. As the U.S. Congress said when it enacted statute which Supreme Court held unconstitutional, virtual child pornography “whets appetites of pedophiles” and contribute in this way to sexual crimes against children. But is it good reason for its prohibition?

Of course, very important question in this case is problem of causal relationship between virtual child pornography and subsequent abuse of children in result of its influence. Is possible – even likely – that viewing of virtual child pornography can sometime encourage a pedophile to commit crime against a child. Is possible that it can support and even strength convictions and emotions that ultimately form the basis for his (and perhaps, but rarely, her) harmful behavior. But equally well, it might contribute to relieving of instincts which can lead to crime by inciting pedophile not to molest the child, but to masturbation. I think, that more likely is the second. But I cannot to said that the former is unprobable.

But here is an important question. Should an expression be prohibited because it might in some way contribute to something wrong? When such prohibition is justifiable?

Of course, sometimes it is. Everyone is probably familiar with famous statement which the U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1919 year case Schenk v. United States: “The most stringed protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in theatre and causing a panic“. And in the case Brandenburg v. Ohio (decided in 1969) the U.S. Supreme Court held that the First Amendment do not protect speech, which is designed “to producing or inciting imminent lawless action” and, in given circumstances “is likely to produce or incite such action”.

But these are examples of speech which connection with violence or another harmful action is very clear and direct. Yet no such argument can be made in case of “virtual child pornography”. Even most ardent anti – porn fanatics do not claim that viewing pornography* lead to abuse of children (or women) in such way, as inciting frenzied mob (classical example of speech, that would be unprotected on basis of precedent Brandenburg v. Ohio) can lead to lynching or rioting. As Justice Kennedy wrote in his opinion in the case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, although same link between virtual child pornography and actual instances of child abuse may exist, such causal link is contingent and indirect. As he wrote “The Government shown no more than a remote connection between speech that might encourage thoughts or impulses and any resulting child abuse“.

Therefore, question is whether such indirect and contingent relationship between expression and harmful behavior can be just reason for prohibiting of a speech in question?

The U.S. Supreme Court clearly said, that no. Virtual child pornography cannot be prohibited without violation of the First Amendment because “the mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts is not a sufficient reason for banning it“. As Justice Kennedy wrote (citing the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the case Stanley v. Georgia which held, that possession of obscenity in private home cannot be prohibited for such reason, that viewing obscenity can lead to crime) “government cannot constitutionally premise legislation on the desirability of controlling a person’s private thoughts. ( ) First amendment freedoms are most in danger when government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from government, because speech is beginning of thought“.
But in Canada, the Canadian Supreme Court in very analogical case, question in which was constitutionality of the Canadian Criminal Code provision banning possession of child pornography – equally real, as fictional (Canadian statute in time of decision defined as child pornography also some purely written materials, that is writings which “advocate or counsel sexual activity with a person under the age of eighteen years that would be an offence under Criminal Code of Canada” – the present definition is yet more broad) – held, that even purely fictional “child pornography” can be prohibited for just such a reason. As Canadian Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in her opinion in the case Her Majesty the Queen v. John Robin Sharpe, although proof of cause and effect relationship between possession of fictional child pornography and sexual abuse of children is uncertain, such concrete, scientific proof of link between possession of child pornography and sexual crimes against children is not necessary to uphold, as constitutional, the criminal code provision of child pornography. A sufficient reason, on basis on which Canadian Parliament was warranted to prohibit not only production and distribution (which were not direct question in that case) but also purely private possession of child pornography – even, if it has nothing to do with use of actual children in its production – was, in the Canadian Supreme Court opinion “reasoned apprehension of harm” which may flow from exposing some people to such a materials.

As we can see, an American approach to question which is subject of controversy here described is not common. Even the U.S. Supreme Court was partially divided upon the question, whether “virtual child pornography” should be constitutionally protected.

But I think that the Canadian approach to this question is potentially very dangerous. If one kind of expression (a fictional child pornography) can be prohibited because it might be “reasoned apprehension” that it can contribute in some way to something wrong, why others kind of speech should be free from censorship when similar arguments can be made against them too? Many people, for example think, that violent scenes in movies, television programs and computer games are one of the contributing factors to real crimes. In Poland, for example, few years ago was on basis of such a reasoning proposed unusually broad and vague law against media violence. If enacted, it would be prohibiting, under penalty up to 1 year in prison production and distribution of all media products – such as movies, computer games, books and periodicals – which are directed to persons younger then eighteen years of life, if such products contain “violence” (defined as “depicting or describing of brutal, repulsive, terrific, or cruel scenes, which might endanger physical or psychological development of children or youths”), “vulgar presentation” (defined as “scenes, words, phrases or gestures which are commonly regarded as un censurable or offensive or such that are showing in malicious or contemptuous way a man, peoples or religious symbols and because of it might harmfully influence a moral attitude, or understanding of social phenomena by children or youths”) or, finally, an “obscenity” (which term is very rarely used in polish, defined as “scenes, words, phrases or gestures describing or depicting sexuality of men or of a peoples in such a way, that it can endanger physical or psychological development of children or youths”). Such a law would be clearly unconstitutional in the United States. But if “reasoned apprehension of harm” is sufficient reason to banning some kind of expression, it can be difficult to say, for what reason such a law, if democratically enacted should be struck down as impermissible infringement of freedom of speech? (About this proposition see my article Nowy Totalitaryzm? O projekcie „Ustawy o Zakazie Promowania w Środkach Masowego Przekazu” krytycznie (A New Totalitarianism? About project of „Prohibition on Propagation of Violence in Mass Media act” critically).
Not only pornography and media violence could be banned under such an approach. Similar arguments can be used against radical political propaganda – like for example an anti-abortion rhetoric. It seems to me, that link between preaching that abortion is cruel murder of most innocent human being and such act of violence as – for example – bombing of abortion clinics and shooting to doctors is far more clear, than link between virtual child pornography and sexual abuse of children – above all, abuse of a child can occur without influence of any kind of expression, while such acts of violence, that have been committed by some militant antiabortionists in obvious way has its basis in some particular ideas – ideas, which are, of course, transmitted by speech. This do not mean, of course, that there is a clear and direct connection between claiming that abortion is heinous crime and acts of violence (vast number of abortion opponents are not, I think, criminals) but it is obvious, that persons influenced by such a viewpoint are – at least statistically – more prone to commit such crimes, than people upon which such ideas do not have any influence (can we imagine a person shooting to an abortionist, if that person never heard about abortion?). If speech can be made a crime “because it increases the chance that unlawful act will be committed at some indefinite future time” (what is, of course, exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited – but what the Canadian Supreme Court surely allowed) prohibition of antiabortion rhetoric would be at least as justifiable, as prohibition of virtual child pornography. Equally well, under such an approach such political ideology like Marxism could be prohibited. Number of victims of violence, which have been done under influence of this philosophy is absolutely uncomparable with eventual number of victims of pornography. And although communism as political system of the state in most countries have failed, extremist groups inspired by this philosophy still exist in western countries, plotting violent revolution and sometimes using or inciting violence on the streets. Of course, exactly this same can be said about, for example, propaganda against globalization, genetic experiments, or for animal rights. Would riots, which accompany conferences of such organizations as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum and the World Bank occur if in minds of some people were not impaled opinion, that politics of these bodies leads to hunger, unemployment, poverty, economic depression, devastation of environment and even wars in some parts of the world? Would such crimes, as setting fire to fur stores or laboratories, when genetic experiments and experiments on animals are made occur, if some people were not convinced to opinion, that all genetic manipulations are deadly danger to natural environment and human health and life – or under influence of some speeches, movies, articles and other forms of expression has not become exalted over the fate of animals used in laboratory experiments or killed for fur or food? Ultimately, under such reasoning convincing arguments could be made for prohibition of the Bible – above all, no other work of literature has been more often cited by perverts and criminals as source of inspiration or justification for many terrible crimes – ranging form religious wars, inquisitions, witch burnings, and pogroms of earlier eras to child abuses and ritual murders committed in contemporary times. And, if such deeds, like – for example – the antiabortion violence, are – in some part – the result of convictions which influence of the Scripture can engender in minds of some of its readers would not be the Bible a good candidate for prohibition, if sufficient ground for banning speech would be that it might increase the probability of harmful acts? Of course, this same argument in even greater degree could be made against, for example, the Islamic Koran. Nobody can convince me, that thoughts expressed in this book, and terrorist acts – such as 11 09 2001 attack – have nothing in common.

Of course it is probably not very likely that, for example, the Bible could be made illegal under the reasoning showed above (above all, it is not sufficiently unpopular). But above examples of kinds of speech, that could be censored on basis of reasoning very similar to that, on which prohibition of virtual child pornography could eventually be supported clearly show, that such approach constitute deadly danger to freedom of expression. The ACLU president Nadine Strossen put this point very well in her article about “hate speech”. “Allowing speech to be curtailed on the speculative basis that it might indirectly lead to some possible harm in the future would inevitably unravel free speech protection. All speech might lead to some potential danger at some future point. As Justice Holmes put it “every idea is an incitement”. Therefore, under such a watered – down approach, scarcely any idea would be safe, and surely no idea challenged status quo would be” – she wrote. And as we read further in her article “Until the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court did apply this relaxed, so called “bad tendency” approach to free speech. Over dissent by such respected Justices as Holmes and Brandeis, the Court allowed government to suppress any speech that might have a tendency to lead to some future harm. This approach endangered all critics of government policy and advocates of political reform. For example, during World War I era, thousands of Americans were imprisoned for peacefully criticizing United States participation in the war and other government policies. Likewise, at the height – or depth – of the Cold War, members of left – wing political groups were imprisoned for criticizing capitalism or advocating socialism“. Prohibition of the “virtual child” pornography on basis, that it can lead to abuse of children would be in essence a return to such a discredited approach – exactly like censoring “hate speech*” against which Nadine Strossen argued in the article cited above.

Beyond this, there is an important question: would be children safer from pedophiles, if all sexually explicit pictures of children would be eliminated? The one of problems with such kind of regulations, as law banning virtual child pornography is, that the “child porn” can, for pedophiles be lesser sexual stimulator than some kinds of expression commonly viewed as innocent. As New York University School of Law professor Amy Adler wrote in her article “The Perverse Law of Child Pornography” “The problem for legal regulation (of child pornography) is that pedophiles often find stimulation from the very some pictures that non pedophiles consider innocuous, that we extol and value: consider the pedophilic magazine Paidika, a self – described online “Journal of Pedophilia”. Its website depicts not grotesque sex acts with children, but pictures of kids that I could only call “cute”. (…) “In fact certain pedophiles may prefer “innocent” pictures. According to some theorist, the stimulation of the picture may be inversely proportional to its overtly sexualized nature: it may be the very innocence – the sexual naiveté of the child subject that is sexually stimulating. Thus, the peculiar nature of pedophilic desire itself may make governance of child pornography an impossible task. One writer reports, that members of the North American Man Boy Assotiation (NAMBLA – an organization for pedophiles, many of whom are in prison) find erotic stimulation by watching children on network television, the Disney channel, and mainstream films. As the writer put it: “I have found NAMBLA’s “porn” and it was Hollywood”. And if reason for prohibition of “virtual child pornography” is that it might encourages thoughts or impulses which can lead to child abuse, reason for banning such an expression, as mentioned above would be convincing as well. But is there a sane person which would be for such a prohibition? Where would we go under such an approach?

Similar case we have with an argument, that “virtual child pornography” should be banned because pedophiles are using it for purpose of convincing children that sex if “fun” for them, and to enticing them in this way into sexual activity. Although this premise might, in itself, be true, proposition that “virtual child pornography” should be banned for such a reason would be leading to equally absurd results, as proposition that “virtual child pornography” should be prohibited because it might incite pedophiles to crimes against children. As Justice Kennedy wrote in decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in “virtual child pornography” case “There are many things innocent in themselves, however, such as cartoons, video games, and candy, that might be used for immoral purposes, yet we would not expect those to be prohibited because they can be misused“. And, if I know, when pedophiles are using pornography for purpose of enticing children into sexual activity, they are most often using an “adult” pornography, in most instances even no close to being obscene. Yet “adult” pornography, if not obscene, is protected by the First Amendment. Should it be prohibited because it sometimes might be used for criminal purpose? If yes – why candies should not?

Finally, it was argued, that danger, which “virtual child pornography” cause to children is such, that – if it is legal – it might impede prosecutions of real child pornography. According to such an reasoning, a defendant in (real, not virtual) child pornography case can argue, that picture in question is not a picture of real person – and, in such kind of situation, because of general rule of criminal law, that doubts, which are not resolved must be decided for benefit of an accused (in Latin this rule is called “In dubio, pro reo“) — such a person, although really guilty of a crime, must be let to go free. But this reasoning, although, theoretically it have some appeal, has a very weak basis in real life. It was, as I know, only one child pornography case in the United States defendant in which attempted to convince the jury that the child pornography in question was merely virtual pornography – but the jury remained not convinced. And I think that the contrary argument can be made: legalization of virtual child pornography, which is visually indistinguishable from the real child pornography may diminish production of the real child pornography – and sexual abuse of children, which production of such a pornography undoubtedly involves. If a market for sexually explicit pictures of children really exist, and there are some people, which make money because of existence of such a market, who of them will use a real child for production of pornography – risking many years in prison – if exactly this same product can be obtained in totally safe and legal way?

In the end, I will come to an argument, that pictures, which 1996 amendment to federal child pornography statutes made criminal cannot have any positive value for society. Such an argument is very dubious for me – not because I think that virtual child pornography is a good thing – but because such an argument is in war with First Amendment. Firstly – who – and in which way can decide for legal purposes, which pictures, speeches and like have – and which have not – positive societal value? Deciding such a question necessarily must be based (at least in part) on purely personal tastes and prejudices of deciding person. Beyond this, a particular feature of contemporary First Amendment law is that it protect very bad speech – like, for example, so called “hate speech” or advocacy of crime (unless such advocacy has purpose and capacity of inciting or producing imminent lawless action) – that is, speech about which an argument, that it have not positive values for society would be far more easy to present, that argument, that it have such a value. It is true, that there is in the First Amendment law (extremely dubious, for me – and, should we remember, non supported by substantial minority of the Supreme Court justices) an “obscenity” exception, which is based – at least in part – upon the argument, that such an expression is lacked of any values. According to U.S. Supreme Court, an “obscenity” can be suppressed because “it is not essential part of exposition of any ideas“. But an obscenity exception to the First Amendment do not give any arguments for prohibition of non obscene virtual child pornography (real child pornography is prohibited for reasons totally different from reasons, upon which prohibition of “obscenity” is based.) If this part of federal child pornography statutes, which the U.S. Supreme Court find unconstitutional would be in force, argument, that, for example, incriminated work has serious artistic, literally, political or scientific value would not be – unlike in an obscenity cases – a defense against prosecution. And, as Justice Kennedy wrote in the Court opinion, works of unquestionable artistic value would be endangered by this law. Beyond this, work – unlike in an obscenity case – had not to be appreciated as whole. Single explicit scene could be reason for putting author, producer and even possessor of incriminated movie or photograph behind bars for many years. Finally – unlike in an “obscenity” case – it would not be matter, whether work in question “appeal to prurient interest of its audience”, and whether it is “patently offensive” according to contemporary societal standards. Although kind of expression, which the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 attempted to criminalize is commonly called “virtual child pornography”, a movie about horror of sexual abuse of a child could be recognized a crime under the Child Pornography Prevention Act as well. Would it be in real interest of children? Would be it good way of fighting sexual abuse of children by adults? Above all, it is rather difficult to fight what some one perceive as evil, if is not possible to speak freely about it.

So, it might be a case for position exactly contrary to one taken by critics of the Supreme Court decision in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition: allowing pictures of fictional sexual exploitation of fictional children do not only not endanger the real children but, it might be, in some degree, helpful in fighting abuse against them. It is because role, which art can play in convincing people about and, therefore, combating a social ill.

Such was an argumentation of Findlaw commentator Marci Hamilton, in her defense of Supreme Court ruling. As she wrote: “The problem for critics of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition” is that total suppression the government sought in CPPA of non – obscene images of child sexuality will not make our social ills – such as incest or abuse of children by trusted adults – go away. Indeed, a total bad like CPPA makes it more difficult to constrictively work out these demons.

Art – in movies or online – is the safest means by which we can address underbelly of our culture. We need movies and books and paintings, so what we can think trough the most difficult issues intellectually, and grapple whit them emotionally as well. In a culture that encourages and recognizes the right to hold any belief one desires, art’s hard work of testing and challenging ideas is an invaluable element of the process by which individuals choose the beliefs to which they will adhere, and those that they will reject.

For example, we are barely at the beginning of dealing whit monstrous action taken by trusted and revered Catholic priest. How will we come to with the abuse revealed in the recent scandal?

First, of course, there must be concrete steps taken to secure the safety of children – specifically, legal and church reform centered on protecting children from any future abuse. But assuming that that the new structures are indeed put in place, what happens next? Do we blithely return to path of contentment and relegate the topic of child abuse to the headlines of 2002?

No. It’s to late for that. We must face those demons in order to vanquish them, and the motion pictures that inevitably will depict these tragedies offer us a low -cost, free – risk means of doing so. If an artist cannot depict the child being abused, she cannot accurately depict the monster who would abuse him. We need desperately need the opportunity art provides in order to more fully understand and, frankly, to fully condemn such actions.

Those criticizing the Court have the indisputably right moral instinct: to protect children from all harm. However, they do not serve children’s interest well if they expect society simple to forgive and forget the harm that is inflicted on children on a regular basis in this society (and certainly not only by the Catholic Church).

So long as real children are not used in creation of works depicting child sexual acts, and real children are not exposed to these works once they are completed, the harm to children will be minimal – especially as compared to the harm to the adults’ marketplace of ideas by censoring such images. In their rush to shield children, critics if Court’s recent decision forget that some depictions of children engaged in sex will be employed by artists whose viewpoint is sympathetic to child and unsympathetic to the abuser, and these depictions will make the children advocates point far more forcefully and viscerally than a hundred dry brochures would have. I this case, a picture may be worth a thousand appeals for funds.

It has taken this culture a long time to begin to protect children from predators – in part because topic was so taboo. We should not repeat the mistakes of the past and assume that because child sexual abuse is rightly anathema. Instead, let the topic be brought into the sunshine – where its ugly parameters can be accurately assessed, examined, and dealt with.

I hate the abuse of children, as do the member of the Court. But I welcome the artist who will help us to come to terms with our living nightmares, and I believe in their First Amendment right to include such materials in their artworks. Let the market – not the government – determine that which is valuable in art and healing” (see the whole article).

So, making criminal the pictures of fictional child sex would be step in wrong direction. The United States Supreme Court, deciding, that such materials cannot be prohibited, made very right thing.

*On question, whether pornography should be prohibited, if an argument, that its influence on some persons can lead them to commission of crimes could be convincingly made, see my article “Pornografia i gwałty – usprawiedliwienie dla cenzury?” (“Pornography and rapes – a justification for censorship?”).

*I touched the question of “hate speech” in several articles which I put on my internet site, most extensively in article “Faszyści do pierdla?” (“Fascists to prison?”), and also in my recent (September 2007) article “Jeszcze raz o wolności słowa i hate speech” (Yet again about freedom of speech and hate speech).

The situation is similar with persuading people to believe in individual liberty, which also constitutes the pointing out to people of evil, unfairness, theft. And in this case, we have to convince people not only of these facts, but also to act against organized state coercion – to catch the candy thief.

Who is it best to entice? Preferably everyone, who is available, but there exist groups, which, in their own specific way, are most susceptible to the liberty idea. These usually include the young, the high-schoolers, students, young academic professionals. They should be treated as the future libertarian elite, future teachers, who will educate the less educated and the politically unaware groups of people. Individuals, who, from the depth of their hearts, love freedom, but who would also like to have something to put in their pots.

Thus, if we would like to convince the multitude of people, who are only waiting for the alternative, to believe in free market and free society, we would have to show them the most pro-social face of libertarianism. Show them that, on the free market, the real one and not the monetary counterfeit, it is the hardworking, poor and exploited man that profits the most. And this does not come at the cost of the middle class, because laissez – faire promotes equality, it is its “desired indirect effect”.

Sometimes it appears that people, who view themselves as libertarians, do not try to notice that, sentencing themselves to an agitated defeat in the pre-race. Instead of talking to and informing people, who had less luck in life, they offend them; call them failures who only poison the atmosphere of success and business. Thanks to this intellectual manner, the victories of the most authoritarian parties should come as no surprise.

I know how much work it takes to change something, especially within a mentality, but I deeply believe in improvement. I also believe that this change in the approach will result in many others, most of all the broadening of the circles of potential advocates and the cooperation between the various factions of the libertarian ideas, which is so necessary. Then, when so many will believe, we will finally catch the candy thief.

Jeremi Libera
September 30th, 2007

Translated by Karolina Kuczyc

The basis of existence of the ancient Rome was fairness and force. The popular at that time anagram IVS VIS symbolizes this unity. In the Roman law, much was written about what we would today see as natural, how, for instance, “no one can benefit from crime”, that property was separated from ownership, that equality of the opposing sides in a trial was introduced, but behind it all stood legions unified by steel discipline. The initial law of the twelve tables, written by the commission, was an expression of the binding customary law.

It was a significant culture shock for the Romans to become acquainted with (first through trade, then obviously through conquest) Greece, particularly with its diversity and philosophy. It is worthwhile to look from their perspective at Athens and Sparta or at Platonists (Neo-Platonists by that time) and Stoicists. The culture of the ancient Rome was characterized by such immense practicism, that no one is able to indicate any noteworthy Roman mathematicians. Greece enhanced the ability to conduct theoretical deliberations. Aside from the question “how?”, the question “why?” started being asked. The fusion of these two cultures occurred in entirety already in the antiquity, so much so that the archeologists refer to it as the Greek – Roman era.

Christianity, founded as a Judaist sect on the periphery of the Empire, completely clashed at the beginning with the obligatory culture; it forbid the creation of effigies, scorned force and did not value wisdom. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible – wrote Tertullian, adding that The unity of heretics is schism. Blending with the Greek-Roman world, Christianity provided the Latin culture with generality, meaning that it addressed it to each person individually, notwithstanding their position in the world, sex, class or language. The extent of the fusion can be seen in the IV century, when the highest Christian priest accepted the title of Pontifex Maximus, previously reserved for the leader of the council of Flamines and Vestals.

The barbarians (as in ones who wear beards) flooded the borders of the Empire, bringing with them their own laws, their own understanding of force and tribal principles, which, in order to differentiate from the Roman virtue (virtus), should be called honor. They let the Christianized world measure up to their own diversity and most of all… they themselves greatly wanted to become Romans, but not completely. They were the victors, had a strong sense of their own distinctness and value. Theodoric the Great, the first medieval king of Italy, ordered to be buried in a stone mausoleum in the shape of a yurt, the traditional home of the nomad people.

The Middle Ages constituted an era of the blending of the barbarians into the mainstream of the Latin civilization. It was at that time that the currently present paradigms were shaped:

- the acceptance of opposites with the simultaneous elimination of logical inconsistencies,

- readiness to accept innovation,

- communication.

I will not insist that other civilizations do not try to eliminate logical inconsistencies or that they are not ready to accept innovation, but the West developed these abilities in a unique manner. The sentence, “Tao, which can be described by words, is not a true Tao”, must have emerged from different cultural surroundings. Each civilization, which would come in touch, even indirectly, with the West, could enrich it with new ideas. Gunpowder, through the Arabs, came from the Chinese, but it was only after the experimental works and the theoretical analysis of “the black monk” Berthold from Freiburg that the stechiometric proportions were discovered, and gunpowder became useful for barrel weapons. A great majority of the innovations of the Latin civilization contributed and still contributes to communication, starting with the network of the Roman roads (where many are still in use today) and ending with the Internet.

It was only the Latin civilization, among the many different post-Enlightment ideas, that produced liberalism, which recognizes individual rights to stand above responsibilities towards a community and freedom as an overriding value. On the other hand, conservatism and socialism, which order the society to accept the forced hierarchy, constitute ideas comprehensible to everyone. This is why I perceive the Latin civilization as an environment favorable to freedom (understood variously). Looking at its history, I try to understand why that is the case.

Radoslaw Tryc

December 27, 2007
Translated by: Karolina Kuczyc

A: The movement is growing beyond belief, in all sectors of society and in nearly all countries, so far as I can tell. The web has been important, obviously. Libertarians have always believed that getting the ideas out there is the most important step we can take. Any media that get our message out are thrilling, especially the media that are not highly controlled by government. The government made a mistake with the internet, from its own point of view. It controlled radio, television, and much of the print media by default. But the web took off before the government got its hooks in it.

Q: Now that so many great leaders of the movement, like Hess and Rothbard are gone, what can we, as a movement do to compensate for that loss? Do you see any leaders of such a caliber emerging on the horizon? Or maybe we don’t really need a unifying figure?

A: More often than not, leaders emerge in retrospect. They aren’t something you seek out but rather emerge out of the fabric of a movement. In many ways, I think we are surrounded by them. But it will take time to know what thinkers are the most influential for the long run. Another point to consider is that the leaders of the past are not dead because the most important part of their lives, namely their ideas, thrive now as never before.

Q: Do you think that it is the poor or the rich who benefit from State regulations the most? Seeing how libertarianism is often accused of being a “rich man’s philosophy,” what can we offer those less fortunate and how to convince them of the promise of libertarianism?

A: Government is always and everywhere a rich man’s business. The poor have never played a role in the administration of the State, except insofar as they are used by elites as a cover. In fact, the emergence of the State itself grows out the successful cartelization of one sector of elites against all its competitors. So of course these same elites rule on behalf of themselves. In the whole history of humanity, there is only one means by which the class of the poor have successfully converted their lot into something higher, and that is capitalism.

Q:. Do you think Ron Paul has any chance of getting the GOP’s presidential nomination? How could his candidacy affect the US political scene?

A: Political parties are quasi-official agencies within the fabric of the State. They exist to create the appearance of free entry into the sector of power. No outsider has been able to crash them unless the outsider agreed to play along. Ron Paul—perhaps the most libertarian political figure in American history–is not someone who plays along. However, the internet is a new factor, and I suspect he will surprise a lot of us. Certainly he will bring more attention to libertarian ideas, so that is all to the good.

Q: How much, in your opinion, is the Libertarian Party worth to the libertarian movement? Should we engage ourselves in political action as a movement, or is it better to concentrate just on agitation and education?

A: Many good people have run for office, and many activists have performed heroically. The problems for the LP come about when the people running the party begin to think of themselves as vying for power as versus being an educational organization that uses the structure of elections as a venue.

Q: You are sometimes accused in right-wing circles of collaborating with the left, and vice-versa. What do you see cooperation with those more left- or right-oriented can bring us and what is your general view on the type of alliances that libertarians should engage in from a strategic point of view?

A: Libertarians can draw from the right and the left but we finally must chart our own course, though there is nothing wrong with praising a non-libertarian thinker for being correct on a certain issue. In 1929, Mises said that the reason Old Liberals are so misunderstood is that we stand for the general interest instead of a particular interest. This remains true today. It is for this reason that people are always accusing us of being rightists or leftists or whatever. Liberals have always been misunderstood for the reasons that Mises explains.

Q: What is Your opinion on leftist or agorist libertarian mavericks, like Roderick Long or Samuel Konkin? Do you think they’re on to something, for instance in criticising corporations or are they just a harmless faction?

A: I’ve noticed a general tendency here. When the right is in control, the left looks better to libertarians. When the left is in control, the right looks better. We are all generally drawn to the merits of the people who are not in power! So it is hardly surprising to see a rise of “left libertarians” in a time when the chief threat to liberty comes from the right, that is, from the red-state fascists who celebrate militarism and see no downside to every form of human-rights violation. Right now, it seems as if most of the intelligent non-libertarians are on the left. I would only caution that the left is beset with as many problems as the right. They want freedom without markets, peace without free trade, civil liberties without property rights. This can’t work.

Q: What do you think about the mainstream more-or-less libertarian groups, like neolibertarians, neoliberals, “Beltway libertarians,” or “vulgar libertarians”? Is it better to treat them as part of the movement, or should we remain neutral, or maybe denounce and criticise them?

A: This phenomenon proves that libertarians are not immune to seduction by power. Indeed, there is a special premium that the State pays to libertarians who sell out. The State wants nothing more than to be seen as promoting liberty, so when libertarians assist in providing that cover, the State is pleased to oblige. It is, however, easy to tell the difference between the phony and real libertarians by observing their proximity to the centers of power.

Q: The recent passing away of Milton Friedman presents an opportunity to assess his contribution to the cause of liberty. What is your opinion of him? Can libertarianism be based in neoclassical economics? What do you think about the attempts to create such a hybrid by people like David Friedman and Bryan Caplan?

A: He obviously did great work on many economic questions. But it is a mistake to see him as a libertarian. He was a wage and price controller in wartime. He was an advocate of the withholding tax and the guaranteed national income. His idea of tax-funded subsidies for private schools is a very bad one. His plan for stabilizing money was refuted 100 years ago by Benjamin Anderson. He was pro-war. I could go on, but it’s probably best to focus on his contributions, of which there are many.

Q: Now, a tricky question. If, all of a sudden, George Bush read Mises or Hayek and decided that he wanted to strip the United States down to a minarchist State – but only so far – and invited you to do the job, would you accept? If you would, then laying aside Congress and the Supreme Court, what would be your first acts in office?

A: Would I push the button? Yes. I wouldn’t want to stay in office, given the corruptions of power. So I would cut anything and everything, with a focus on abolition. Abolish the executive branch, then the judicial branch, then the legislative branch. These would be good first steps.

Q: Libertarians are divided on the immigration question, with both sides having seemingly good libertarian arguments for their position. The Mises Institute is reputed for its anti-immigration stance. Do you share that position?

A: Free movement of people, like free movement of property, is the ideal. The problem is the universal franchise and welfare, which permit the State to use mass immigration to its own advantage. Absent those, the US has plenty of room for many millions more. Certainly the calls to spy on and jail employers for hiring immigrants is wrong and dangerous.

Q: What is your opinion on the anti-globalisation movement? Do you think libertarians have a common cause with them in opposing, say, Nafta, or are the differences too pronounced?

A: Nafta didn’t end up creating more liberty. The key problem is that we have to distinguish between real and false free trade. Real free trade requires no treaties. The problem with collaboration with either the pro- or anti- side on this issue is that both are wrong and both are right. We need to keep focused on the true goal and not get distracted. What poses the greater danger: the treaties or the protectionists who oppose them? It depends on the time and place.

Q: How will the American economy fare in the coming years? Are we in for a depression, or will a boom be sustained and recession contained?

A: I wouldn’t know, but it is a mistake to become sanguine and relaxed. The US could sink into an inflationary depression. The dollar could lose its status. The US could grow economically far less than emerging economies. There is nothing in the central planning apparatus to prevent this.

Q: Do you think that the number of problems that the State faces today, like enormous deficits, will ultimately lead to its downfall or will those be used to justify even stricter control and more emergency powers?

A: The State is tightening control in some areas while it loses control in other areas. The reality of economic law is one of the greatest limiting devices. The State cannot accomplish what it sets out to accomplish, but the attempt leads to a great loss of liberty. So while I can imagine that an economic crisis will lead to more control, I don’t think this can succeed over the long term.

Q: Do you sometimes follow events in Poland? If so, what direction do you think our county is headed in? What are the chances for libertarianism to flourish in post-socialist countries?

A: I only visited Poland once, at the end of the Soviet era, so I am thrilled at the progress and freedom. On the other hand, the post-socialist economies are largely in the same boat as the US. We are all beset by fascistic planning structures, monopolistic regulations, socialized health care and education, even as new sectors of freedom pop up every day. So given this, it is long past time that libertarians of the world unite in common cause. The State is vulnerable.

Q: Are there certain strategic errors made in the beginnings of the libertarian movement that continue to haunt it? If so, what could we do to evade them in Poland?

A: The biggest strategic error is collaborating with the powers that be, as if the people in charge—those consumed by what St Augustine called “the lust to rule others”–can be convinced by libertarian arguments. This isn’t going to work. We need to come to terms with the fact that we are ultimately a revolutionary movement.

It Is.

So how’s it been as of yet?

Oh, it’s been great. I’ve been walking around Poland, we went up to the castle today. Yesterday I had my session at the conference. I’ve been just walking around on the streets. It’s really beautiful.

And about the paper. It was on Spooner, right?

Yes, Lysander Spooner, on his theory of natural law and legal interpretation.

You’re known as one of the major exponents of left-libertarianism around the world. So, could You give me a brief description of what left-libertarianism is and how it relates to other tenets of libertarian thought.

Okay, well I guess it represents an integration, or I’d argue, a reintegration of libertarianism with concerns that are traditionally thought of as being concerns of the left. That includes concerns for worker empowerment, worry about plutocracy, concerns about feminism and various kinds of social equality – that kind of thing. And it goes back to – in the nineteenth century, a lot of people like Benjamin Tucker and so on – the individualist anarchists were very much a part of things like the feminist movement, the labour movement, the anti-racist movement – but approached these from a pure free market position and not advocating any kind of State control as a solution – in fact they saw State control as a problem, as something that helped to reinforce these other forms of oppression or was justified by the same kind of (mistakes?) as the other forms of oppression.

So what are the dominant strands of left-libertarianism?

Well, there’ve been a lot of different things that have been called that. Some would use the term left-libertarian to mean something equivalent to socialist anarchist. Then there are other people who used the term to mean a certain group of sort of semi-Georgist thinkers who favour some kind of material equality or equality of land or something like that – and those aren’t really the strands that I’m interested in. In the 1970s a guy named Samuel Konkin created something he called the Movement of the Libertarian Left – and though what I’m talking about is broader than that, a lot of what I’m talking about comes out of that movement. He was someone who was concerned with continuing the Rothbard strategy of alliance with the Left after Rothbard had given up on it. He was also an anti-political thinker – meaning he was against electoral politics – and in favour of a passive revolution from below, that is building alternate institutions and education and so forth – (…) for things that way rather than electoral politics. And although I’m not as severely against electoral politics as he is – You know, I don’t think I’d be destroying my soul by voting, nevertheless I agree that electoral politics is not gonna be the primary strategy – if it turns out to be part of the strategy, fine – but not any more. So that’s one of the strands that goes on. And then there are the mutualists, of whom Kevin Carson is one of the best known exponents today. They’re followers of Benjamin Tucker and they argue that free markets would reduce the interest rate to nearly zero and would replace the present-day capitalist firm structure with workers’ coops and independent contractors They also think that there is no such thing as legitimate absentee ownership of land – you can only own such land as you can personally occupy – and that’s not a view that I share, but certainly I would agree with people like Kevin Carson that the existing distribution of land in society is the result of heavy government intrusion into society on behalf of various kinds of corporate interests and that in a free society things would look pretty different, even though I disagree with them on some of the details.

What would You say is the reception of left-libertarian ideas among people on the left and people in the libertarian movement?

Well, mixed as You’d expect. Both libertarians and leftists – some of them are going to be suspicious of it and regard it as an attempt to merge what they love with what they hate – it’s like, you know, pouring (…) oil all over your ice cream – but on the other hand, we’ve gotten a lot of sympathetic reception too – a lot of leftists have told me that they were always very suspicious of libertarianism until they came across the writings of people like Kevin Carson and Charles Johnson and myself. They came to see that libertarianism didn’t have to be all about looking (out for #1), benefit to the rich and so forth, a certain kind of stereotype they had. And I know some libertarians also, who have moven to the left in this respect. And I was asked to be on the board of the corporate aspect of MDS, which is connected to the old SDS, the old 1960s leftist student movement that Rothbard was allied with for a while. So they were willing to elect me to the board – because I’m not sure how many of them knew about my background; some of them did and the ones I talked to were happy with it – they want to get a broad coalition of people going against imperialism and plutocracy.

You mentioned that mutualists argue that state intervention benefits certain people at the expense of other people and that You agree with that. What do You have in mind exactly?

Well, the way things are set up in terms of– Or let’s just start with the simplest things to begin with. You have things like taxes and regulations and licencing fees and zoning regulations and various things that make it easy– the richer you are, the easier it is for you to start up a business because you can afford the lawyers to pay and the fees to jump through all these hoops and so forth. I mean, for example, there are a lot of places where a licence to operate a taxi cab costs $100′000, which the average poor person doesn’t have lying around. I mean, a taxi service would be an excellent service for someone to start out with if they don’t have a lot of money because it doesn’t require a lot of capital up front. All you need is a car and a cell phone to start off with if you want a small taxi company – things like that. So that’s an example. Then of course there are massive subsidies, ways in which taxes are redistributing resources from the less affluent to the more affluent – though corporate welfare and so forth. You have things like — one thing that Kevin Carson has pointed out is that a lot of things like transportation subsidies and funds for roads and highways help enable big corporations to externalise the costs of transportation – and a lot of the goods that they transport; and also things like eminent domain, where a company starts up and the government just sort of seizes private property and gives it to them on the grounds that having them have the property would be more economically beneficial. So these are just some of the examples of the ways in which they do this.

I happen to know that Kevin Carson also advocates workers’ coops and argues that government intervention in the market causes, sort of, centralisation of capital in a limited number of hands and causes hierarchy in firms and businesses to arise. What could we do to counterbalance this effect?

Well, in a way this goes back to an argument that Rothbard made when Rothbard pointed out an implication of Mises’ calculation argument, which is that given that — it becomes impossible to rationally allocate resources — it becomes increasingly impossible the more insulated you are from the price signals of the market. And so this is true not just for a centralised government, but also, insofar as a firm becomes bigger and more centralised – there’s some benefits obviously to the forming of a firm – the reasons to do it – but there are costs to do it, too. And people talk about economies of scale – which there are – but there are also diseconomies of scale. But as firms get larger, it’s harder and harder for them to know how to allocate their resources within the firm and make decisions about things within the firm because they’re insulated from market signals. But, various ways in which the government helps to subsidise and prop up these big corporations means they’ve been able to externalise a lot of these costs, so they’re able to reap the benefits for themselves of the economies of scale, but he costs involved with the diseconomies of scale they get to stick on to the rest of the world. And so that’s why we get these centralised, hierarchical things which are in many ways bad for the market and bad for the workers in them. So, obviously one thing we need to do is get rid of these government — ways in which government props up this system. And also, encourage workers to organise – it’s an old line, and of course a lot of the ways in which workers have organised themselves have been pushing for various kinds of government favours and so forth which ends up actually making the system worse because the labour unions and so forth just get coopted into the whole system – and so the people who run the labour unions benefit a lot more than the average people do. But, having independent unions on the one hand and scaling back the power of government on the other – that’s the way in which you can really empower workers.

Could You expand on the “independent union” thing? ‘Cause You know – libertarianism and unions – it’s not exactly a very loving relationship and many libertarians are very sceptical of unions, so what would You say to them, basically?

Okay, well for a long time, libertarians and union supporters have been at odds and have seen each other as the Enemy. The unions in the early XXth century made their peace with Big Government and government in effect decided – I know more about the history of this in the US than in other countries but I imagine at lot of this applies to other countries as well – the alliance of Big Government and Big Business in effect decided to buy off the unions rather than fighting them decided to incorporate them into the system and so, as a result, unions receive various kinds of special government privileges but also various kinds of restrictions – restrictions on when you can strike and for what reason and the government can order people back to work and various kinds of things. And so, certainly unions as we know them have not been a very pro-liberty force. In the XIXth century it was different – there was more of a cooperation – you know, there were problems then too – but there was more of a cooperation between the labour movement and libertarians and the idea is that if you think of unions simply something for collective bargaining, a way in which – just as there are reasons to form firms, so there are reasons to form unions – it’s simply a way of, you avoid transaction costs, as you do in forming a firm, you organise together and you can see unions as simply one form of many kinds of associations for mutual aid, which were common in the XIXth and early XXth centuries. For example, the way that most of the working poor got their health insurance in the early XXth century was through mutual aid societies, fraternal societies, friendly societies and they basically got either regulated out or crowded out or both by the rise of the welfare state. So various kinds of mutual aid systems are — they’re alternative — when people think about how can the poor be helped they usually think either the poor help themselves, get a job – or you help them through private charity or you help them though government charity. But there is such a thing as mutual organisation for mutual self-help, which the government has made harder and harder to do – but that really is a promising way of going about it.

Earlier You mentioned that left-libertarianism shares certain concerns with the movements on the left. That includes feminism. So again, feminism and libertariansim haven’t been exactly buddies in history, so can this marriage be saved?

(laughs) Where have I heard that line before? Yeah, that’s a reference to an article that Charles Johnson and I wrote called: Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved? In the XIXth century, libertarianism and feminism were much more closely allied. The major libertarian thinkers like Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, Herbert Spencer, Voltairine de Cleyre and so forth were very much — they tended to see patriarchy and government as part of an interlocking system, each one helping to support the other and each one deriving from similar kind of mistaken attitudes. Nowadays, by and large, many feminists – not all – but many feminists have looked to the state and state control as a means of achieving their goals but this often turns out to be frustrating for them because the state continues to be run mostly by men and often they find that the way laws get written or applied are not exactly what they wanted but they still keep going to “Daddy State” because they don’t see any alternative – they think that — they’ve come to think of the market as something that will produce systematic discrimination and that they have to intervene. Many libertarians think that the market penalises discrimination and therefore — or at least penalises discrimination when it’s irrational because if you deliberately hire the less qualified man over the more qualified woman because you’re a sexist then your bottom line will suffer and so forth. So if the market penalises irrational discrimination, any discrimination that survives on the market must be rational and therefore if women are being discriminated against it must be for some good reason, they must really be less efficient and so forth and therefore a lot of libertarians think that there can’t really be a problem here. But I think there are two mistakes there. First, I think it is a mistake to think that there couldn’t be any discrimination on a free market, because pervasive social and cultural attitudes can — you know, they don’t automatically go away. Markets give you economic incentives – there are costs to these things – but people assume there’s no one willing to pay those costs, and if enough people pay them, systems like that can survive, so in addition — that’s not an argument for using non-market means like government to solve the problem, especially since if you’ve got pervasive discrimination, probably people in government are going to have the problem too. But it’s an argument for various kinds of organised associations – voluntary – but organised associations to fight against this sort of thing. But, second, it’s worth remembering that we don’t have a free market and everything that cuts down competition makes it easier for companies to engage in discrimination, because it socialises the costs. Also, by encouraging the large-scale growth of these corporations, making them internally less rational but preventing them from being punished by the market for that, it means that it’s harder for people to tell whether they’re making rational decisions with their employees – and so it’s harder for the costs of discrimination to actually be felt. So, the way to fight discrimination is first, to have freer markets, and second, to do sort of education and consciousness raising and organisation for women’s interests.

This sort of ties in to another point. I think it’s Charles Johnson that promoted the concept of “thick” and “thin” libertarianism. So what is thick and thin libertarianism exactly?

Okay, thick libertarianism is the idea that libertarian goals should be integrated with other sorts of goals or that libertarianism should regard itself as being part of movement for more that just negative liberty, whereas thin libertarianism is the idea that libertarianism should just be focused all on libertarian rights per se and nothing broader. But exactly what thick libertarianism means — there are different ways of talking about thick libertarianism. For example, you could say that there are — you might think there are certain cultural values such that a libertarian society is unlikely to survive unless those values are widespread. If most people in society have become acculturated to Nazi values – you could spread Nazi values though purely non-coercive means, you know, spreading your Nazi pamphlets around in a free society – but if enough people become convinced of it, it’s not going to remain a libertarian society for long. So, one way in which libertarianism is bound up with other values is that the promotion of those other values may be part of promoting the free conditions for the survival of a free society. Another example would be — there are ways in which some of the reasons for being a libertarian are also reasons for supporting these other values – so that although there is no necessary connection between the two. It would be odd, for example, to think that people matter so much that we shouldn’t be allowed to violate their rights, but they don’t matter at all beyond that so it doesn’t matter whether they’re starving in the gutter in front of you and you just step over them. Again, there’s no logical inconsistency, it’s just that the reasons for being a libertarian are also reasons for concern with wider values like independence and autonomy and mutual aid. And — well, those are two, there are more ways to pick – those are the two ones that we talked most about. So the idea is that libertarianism — reasons for being a libertarian are also reasons for supporting these other values and that libertarianism would work better if you had people broadly committed to things like mutual aid and so on. Think of it just that way – if people don’t have values of mutual aid then there’s gonna be a lot of suffering in a free society and people are going to say: oh, it’s a problem with libertarianism and then we’d all go back to statism. I mean, it’s a simplified answer, but an example.

Who’d You point out as a thin libertarian, because as I see this, there’s mostly thick libertarians around, I mean left-libertarians are thick libertarians, Rothbard was thickish, Ayn Rand was thick as a brick and don’t even get me started on Hoppe. So, who’s thin?

Well, Walter Block may be the paradigm case of a thin libertarian. Not that he doesn’t have other values but he’s always insisting that as long as it meets the criterion of libertarian rights then, from a libertarian standpoint, nothing else about it matters. In fact, he has an article that will be forthcoming in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, but I think there’s a version of it on the mises website already, where he criticises both me and Hoppe for running off in our various directions – mine leftward and Hoppe’s rightward. It’s on the grounds that this will weaken the libertarian movement because we’ll start fighting each other – you know, like libertarians aren’t fighting each other already – we’ll start fighting each other instead of fighting the Romans, as it were. But just in terms of that strategic worry, it doesn’t seem to be the case – I don’t just work with left-libertarians, I work with libertarians of many different flavours. Soon they’re all attacking each other but I’ve managed to get along with most of them most of the time. I guess thin and thick are a matter of degree, not everyone is as purely, ideally thin as Walter – I’m sure he’ll appreciate that compliment.

So, what about, for instance, neolibertarians. Randy Barnett recently came out of the closet with his pro-war views. Are they a valid strain of libertarianism?

Well, it depends on what you mean by a valid strain of libertarianism. In one sense, the only valid strain of libertarianism is whatever agrees entirely with me – you know, there is only one true libertarian and I am he. But if you mean – am I going to purge Randy Barnett out of the movement, well A: I don’t have the power and B: no – Randy has done a lot of good stuff. If you look on his website you have great articles about anarchy and about legal theory and so on. I think that he’s deeply, totally wrong about the war. People sometimes say: well look, either you have to regard this as a minor deviation, something that’s not too important or else you have to say that it’s really major and therefore he doesn’t count as a libertarian any more. But I don’t think these are the only two options. I think someone can have a really, really major deviation and still count as libertarian – an inconsistent libertarian. But people like Randy Barnett have contributed so much to the libertarian movement that I’m not going to rule them out and say they’re not libertarians – it’s just they’ve gone sadly astray on the war issue. Well, you know, Benjamin Tucker supported World War I, supported the Allies. Everyone’s allowed one deviation, Rothbard used to say. (laughs)

Did Rothbard have a deviation?

Oh, he had many. (laughs) Walter would say – I don’t know if Walter would say this but I can imagine Walter saying that Rothbard’s one deviation was saying that you’re allowed one deviation. (laughs)

Okay, so – the vanilla question. Ron Paul. Chance or no chance? Vote? Don’t vote? What do You think?

I don’t think his chances are very good. I think that – you know, it’s interesting to see how much he’s managed to stand out from the pack. He’s done better than I expected. But in the end, I don’t think that the Republicans are gong to go for him. He might end up with higher percentage points than anyone expected, but I would be shocked and awed if we won the nomination. In terms of: should you vote for him? For people, who are US citizens – well, that’s up to you. I’m pleased to see him doing well, I’m not really a supporter of him in the sense that I disagree with him on a number of issues that I regard as pretty important – immigration, abortion, equality for gays, that kind of thing. But I’m pleased to see him doing well. As for whether I’d vote for him – given how little a vote matters, I’m not sure it matters. I doubt I’ll have an opportunity to vote for him. I’m not going to switch my registration to Republican and vote for him in the primary – it’s just too icky. And he’s not gonna win the nomination so the issue of whether to vote for him in the presidential election is not probably going to come up. But I wish him well. I have various problems with him but I certainly wish him well. So, there’s my icky, wishy-washy vanilla answer.

You mentioned abortion. I take it, You are pro-choice, right? So, are You pro-choice on the grounds that Murray Rothbard was pro-choice or something else?

Yeah, it’s sort of broadly Rothbardian. I mean, there are two questions: one is when does the foetus become a person and the other is does its being a person mean that it’s wrong to abort it. So I would say: first of all, although I can’t pinpoint the precise point I would say that it needs to have some kind of minimal mental capacities to be a person. So I would say it’s not a person at conception. I think it is a person before birth – but I’m not prepared to say when – given the rest of my view, it doesn’t matter that much, because I do think that the right to life does not include the right to live in someone else’s body and so the mother has the right to eject it by any means necessary, if she decides she doesn’t want it there. So, I guess it’s broadly along Rothbard’s lines.

What’s the best strategy for achieving libertarianism? You mentioned that You don’t like electoral politics and You probably agree with the, sort of, Koninite-agorist/agorist –

I say agorist ’cause when you say Anarchy! Agora! Action! the accent is the same place each time.

So You agree with the agorist position?

Yes, broadly, as I said before, I’m not dead set against electoral politics. I don’t think electoral politics inherently sanctions the State, although that moral concern is something more than the volutaryists said and that the agorists said – the agorists have more of a strategic worry, which is they think that we should be trying to win people away from the State and encourage withdrawal from participation in it and therefore it’s counterproductive to engage in electoral politics. I mean I’m broadly in agreement with that but I think that You have to use marginal value analysis here as anywhere else and decide whether there may be some cases — especially with referenda, perhaps less with voting for people, but with referenda there are occasions where you may be able to prevent something awful from happening by voting against it. And I also think that, come the Revolution, it will be nice to have some of our people on the inside to make the State not react too violently as it starts to wither away, and so it would be good to have some people in there. But on the whole, I think that the way to view this is not to — you know, it’s not primarily about seizing political power, it’s primarily about creating alternative institutions and educating people such that at some point people just ignore the State. Because the wonderful thing with the State is, unlike other evils in the world, like tornadoes and hurricanes and so forth, if you ignore the State, it will go away. Now if just one person ignores it it won’t go away, but if enough of us ignore it, it will go away – ’cause it’s just a bunch of guys giving orders. It’s only if people start obeying those orders that they really are a State. Otherwise they’re just a bunch of guys in suits. So what we really need to do is to create the kind of culture and alternative institutions and so forth that people just no longer take the State seriously, just like — there used to be a guy in XIXth century America who called himself Emperor Norton – Charles Johnson likes to use his example – he went around and called himself the Emperor of America and wore fancy robes and people either played along or not as they liked. I would have no trouble with a government that were like that – you could go and it’d be like going to Disneyland and they could call themselves President or Prime Minister or whatever they were and you could play along or you could say ‘oh, this is boring’ and you could leave.

What is Your opinion on cooperating with more pro-freedom conservative types, right-wingers, Birchers, people like that?

I’m pretty open to who I’ll cooperate with. I think that different libertarians with different talents and inclinations probably will do better at cooperating with some people than with others. I probably would get into arguments too often with Birchers and so forth for me to be the ideal person to cooperate with them, but I’m certainly not against cooperating with them, I think that as you cooperate with them you actually try to seduce them towards your position as well and so I I’m pretty open to cooperation but I’m specialising more in the particular alliances I’m interested in building because those are the ones where I have the best feel of how to communicate with the people and what the shared issues are and (…)

Lew Rockwell has this theory that left-libertarianism is gaining popularity right now, but only because it’s right-wingers and Bushites and people like that who are in power and when the roles switch and when the Democrats will get in it will be back to the old days of paleolibertarianism and more right-wing oriented libertarianism. What do You think about that?

Well, I think it’s certainly true for some libertarians. Some libertarians have moved left because Bush has been a great recruiter for left-libertarianism. But, I certainly don’t think it can be true of everyone. I certainly know a lot of people, including myself, who were left-libertarians under Clinton – not that we didn’t hate Clinton too, we were good libertarians and hated Clinton, there was plenty to dislike – but, the Summer Soldier and the Sunshine Patriot will leave us once the Democrats get in power – which I think they’re pretty likely to do – but there’s a core of left-libertarians for whom neither the Republicans nor the Democrats will ever be palatable again.

Okay, so let’s shift emphasis from the right to the left. Have You in the past cooperated with any person on the left? Some kind of Noam Chomsky person or something like that?

Well, as I’ve said I’m part of this outfit — right now it’scalled Foundation for a Democratic Society, before that it was called Movement for a Democratic Society Incorporated. It’s a long, ugly story about various name changes and too crazy to get into it. One thing that libertarians and leftists have in common is that we’re just crazy in terms of our infighting. But anyway, so I was involved with that, I was at the meeting in New York City in January or February and I’m on the listserv so I’ve been involved with that. Back in the 90s I was involved with some leftis in anti-war activities in North Carolina at that time.

What do You think libertarians could learn from leftists, and vice-versa?

Well, libertarians can learn from leftists about – well I think that when libertarians and leftists sort of split up in the XIXth century, libertarians began specialising in understanding the benefits of market-oriented, for-profit solutions, while leftists specialised in understanding the benefits of non-profit, cooperative ways of associating. And likewise, libertarians specialised in understanding the evils of State-based forms of oppression, and leftists specialised in understanding the evils of non-State-based, private forms of oppression. So I think what each has to learn from the other is – the leftists have to learn from libertarians good things about the market that the Left doesn’t understand and bad things about the State that the Left doesn’t understand. What libertarians need to understand is bad things about forms of private power, that libertarians tend to think ‘well, if it’s not directly supported by the State then it doesn’t matter from a libertarian point of view’ and also, some of the benefits of forms of voluntary association that aren’t for-profit. So i think those are probably the two main things each side can learn from the other.

What are Your thoughts on the future of left-libertarianism in general and about the cooperation between leftists and libertarians?

Oh, well, I’m optimistic about it. Of course, if you’re a political radical of any kind you have to be optimistic because the alternative is complete despair, but I am optimistic about it, I see more interest growing for the coalition and various people on each side that always looked with suspicion on the other begin to come together. The Internet is a wonderful way in which people can find each other and find out about these perspectives and ideas. So, yeah, I’m pretty hopeful.

So what are You up to? Any new projects? Hideous Dark Secrets Hiding Under the Ground or something?

I can’t tell You my hideous dark secrets, but there’s a book that Tibor Machan and I have edited together, which is an anthology about anarchy and minarchy. He got together a team of minarchists and I got together a team of anarchists and we have each side arguing its position and it’ll be coming out from Ashgate in February, so on my side I have Charles Johnson, John Hasnas, Aeon Skoble and John Narveson. Then I’ve got my book on Wittgenstein and Austrian Economics that is supposed to be coming out from Routledge some day – I look forward to whenever that’s going to appear. I’ve got — what else have I got coming up — I’ve got some articles forthcoming in the Cato Institute’s Encyclopedia of Libertarianism – something on the Stoics and the Epicureans, something on the history of liberty in the Ancient World, something on John Brown and something on Ralph Waldo Emerson – I think those are the things I’m doing. That project has been waiting for many, many years – looks like they might finally be going ahead with it and the thing finally will be coming out.

What are those two books going to be called?

My book on Austrian methodology is called “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics and the Logic of Action” and the anarchy/minarchy book is called — it’s an odd title, we didn’t pick the title, the publisher did, it’s something like — “Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?” As I said, we didn’y pick that subtitle. And the Cato Encyclopedia of Libertarianism is just the Cato Encyclopedia of Libertarianism.

OK, so that basically it. Thanks!

Well, OK, thanks very much.

____________________________
Interview by: Jędrzej Kuskowski