Category: Liberalism

Is a micro-party the best way to promote libertarianism?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 90 Comments

Liberty and Democracy Party activists seem happy enough with with their 0.13% national vote share in the House of Representatives and 0.15% in the Senate. I’m still not convinced that the micro-party strategy is the way to go in promoting classical liberal/libertarian ideas.

While LDP members did get publicity they would not otherwise have received, much of it was not favourable. Lisa Milat is hardly responsible for the actions of her brother-in-law, but pre-selecting her just about ensured that media coverage was not going to be on-message for the LDP. And Bede Ireland perhaps could have picked a better issue to promote than decriminalising incest.

As the LDP is not seen as a serious electoral contender, the mainstream media will only be interested to the extent that the LDP can offer some colour to alleviate the boredom of the stage-managed major party campaigns. But ‘colour’ in the media context means things that the public will think ridiculous, eccentric or outrageous. That isn’t the way to make people take libertarian ideas seriously.
Continue reading “Is a micro-party the best way to promote libertarianism?” →

Laissez Faire Books, RIP

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

It’s not yet mentioned on their website, but an e-mail over the weekend announced that libertarian bookseller Laissez Faire Books is closing down. As they explain it:

The book market has changed tremendously over the past 30+ years, and it has gotten harder and harder for a small niche bookseller to cover expenses. I suppose the market has spoken.

And those who advocate the market must accept its verdict. But I am sorry to see Laissez Faire books go. In my twenties (and maybe earlier, I can’t remember now) I was an enthusiastic Laissez Faire customer. I wasn’t ideologically (or perhaps nearly as importantly, temperamentally) inclined to sign up to all their enthusiasms, especially for Ayn Rand, but better Friedman, Hayek, Sowell et al. than the swooning over the state of much of the Australian intelligentsia.

Though I am sorry to see Laissez Faire close, I am one of the reasons they are going. Even when a Laissez Faire email alerted me to a new book I wanted, I would usually end up buying it from Amazon. Once, Laissez Faire was the only place I could locate many libertarian books, but Amazon caters to just about every niche market. After taking into account the cheaper postage when buying several books at once, Amazon was usually the less expensive option too.

So Laissez Faire have been caught up in the creative destruction of their ideology. Amazon does a great job of making libertarian books accessible, but it is has helped wipe out a specialist libertarian bookseller in the process.

Tolerance vs rights

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

In my yet-to-be published debate with Alan Soble about The Peel’s pro-gay door policy for The Philosophers’ Magazine, I argue for The Peel being allowed to decide who it allows in, and he argues for a door policy that does not discriminate on sex or sexual preference.

I think there is a confusion in Soble’s position. On the one hand, he thinks that people should not be disadvantaged because they are gay or straight, or male or female. He supports anti-discrimination law to neutralise so far as possible any negative repercussions of these characteristics (though I am unclear how being straight can be a significant disadvantage, unless you count kids). On the other hand, using anti-discrimination law to prevent gay-only bars entrenches disadvantages of being gay, such as the difficulties involved in identifying and meeting other gay people. You can be gay, but you can’t have institutions that support that characteristic.

A similar confusion is found in VicHealth’s More than tolerance report. It chastises respondents to its survey who would be concerned about a close relative marrying someone from a Christian, Jewish or Muslim background – especially Muslim:
Continue reading “Tolerance vs rights” →

Friendship and Facebook

~ Andrew Norton ~ 86 Comments

I’ve read a bit about the philosophy of friendship over the years, but none of it is much use when encountering Facebook for the first time. Thinking myself too middle-aged for what I thought to be a youth site I hadn’t even looked at it until last week, when Jacques Chester asked me to link to a Liberty and Society group and I decided (in my middle-aged caution) to check before I linked. But I had to join first, and every day since I have received emails from Facebook telling me that person X, Y or Z has added me as a ‘friend’ and wanting to confirm that we are in fact ‘friends’.

In most cases, it’s been pretty easy to ‘confirm’ these people as friends. But can I be a ‘friend’ of someone whose name and face I don’t recognise? (from the friends we have in common I presume we must have met, but I don’t remember it). Or someone whose name and face I do recognise but I haven’t seen them, been in touch with them, or even thought of them for years? On the other hand, not confirming someone as a ‘friend’ could be seen as rude. Just because I am not a friend doesn’t mean I want to make an enemy.
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Liberty and Society seminar

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Younger readers of this blog (Sukrit and Leon I know of, and maybe some lurkers?) might be interested in the CIS Liberty and Society programme, a weekend live-in seminar on classical liberal ideas. The next one is in Sydney over the weekend of 14-16 September, with 6 August the deadline for applications. It’s free, and the CIS will also pay most of your travel expenses if you live outside of Sydney.

For people who have been in the past (it’s been going since 1996) we are planning drinks in Melbourne on 23 August. I’ve emailed everyone we have records of living in Melbourne, but there were a few bouncebacks and there are probably some people who have moved here since they attended L&S. If you are interested in coming email me anorton AT cis.org.au

And for other people who have been in the past, there are a couple of Facebook groups:

This one set up by Jacques Chester, now in Perth.

And this one set up by Robert Wiblin, who is at the ANU.

Where do I belong on the Crikey blogging bias-o-meter?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 38 Comments

This week Crikey has been rating various forms of media outlets by their political bias, from 0 in the middle stretching to 10 in each ideological direction, right and left. Today they turn to blogging (subscribers only).

My bias is quite open (‘Carlton’s lone classical liberal’), and I received the most votes in the best solo libertarian blog competition, but it seems that Crikey only rates me as a 1 on the right side of their bias-o-meter. My friends at Catallaxy, by contrast, score a 6.

How can this be?
Continue reading “Where do I belong on the Crikey blogging bias-o-meter?” →

Equal respect versus tolerance

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

One of the central ideas of modern leftism is that all human beings are entitled to equal concern and respect. This is why most leftists oppose racism, sexism, ethnocentrism and homophobia.

…leftists don’t automatically see difference as a matter of status. Some groups of people recognise one set of virtues while others recognise another. Leftists want to see a society where everyone can pursue their own ideals of excellence without being judged or looked down on. This is a vision they share with many libertarians.(emphasis added)

– Don Arthur at Club Troppo.

The sentence I bolded is not, in my view, 100% right. It is an area in which leftists and libertarians will often have shared social practices, but important if sometimes subtle differences in their underlying philosophy.

Libertarianism (or classical liberalism) does not require equal respect, or even any respect, of other people’s ‘ideals of excellence’. What it requires is tolerance, the virtue of putting up with the things that you don’t like. It isn’t so much equal respect as equal indifference.

For a liberal, equal respect demands too much and more than is necessary. For passionate religious believers (and liberal ideas of toleration began with the problems they cause) it is very hard to hold other faiths in ‘equal respect’ without calling into question their own beliefs. But all it requires to tolerate them is to hold off from intimidation and violence.

Indeed, the shift from liberal tolerance to leftist acceptance, the logical result of equal concern and respect, takes us back to where we started before the idea of tolerance took hold. Tolerance challenged the idea that everyone must fit in with a common set of norms, and replaced it with the idea that everyone must abstain from certain behaviours.

The practical differences between these two views came out in the reaction to the decision to allow The Peel hotel to exclude women and straight men. Continue reading “Equal respect versus tolerance” →

Are ‘left’ and ‘right’ useful political labels?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

As long-time readers would know, I think the labels left and right are not very useful nor descriptive as each covers such a huge range of ideas that it’s hardly useful.

That’s blogger Sacha Blumen in his comment on my post on left and right attitudes to status.

Sacha’s quite correct that the political labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ can cover a lot of territory.

According to Wikipedia, ‘left’ can cover:

social (as opposed to classical) liberalism, populism, social democracy, socialism, communism, syndicalism, communalism, communitarianism, some forms of green politics, some forms of progressivism, and some forms of anarchism.

While ‘right’ can cover:

conservatism, monarchism, fascism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, reactionism, some forms of populism, the religious right, nationalism, militarism, producerism, Nativism, realism or simply the opposite of left-wing politics.

Adding further to the complexity, political parties thought to be of the ‘left’ or ‘right’ don’t always act according to stereotypes. As Paul Keating has been reminding us this week, Labor led the way with market reforms of the Australian economy, while the ‘right-wing’ Howard government has increased spending on welfare more quickly than Keating did.

Though more precise ideological descriptions are often useful, that doesn’t mean that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have no value. Continue reading “Are ‘left’ and ‘right’ useful political labels?” →

Status, left and right

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

Though leftism is diverse, a common thread is a concern with equality. This makes it in part an ideology of status, with political programmes that seek to eliminate status differences or moderate their impact. This is one reason leftists remain concerned with income inequality long after absolute poverty has been eliminated, try to obstruct institutions that reproduce status differences (eg private schools), and favour anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws for groups that have historically had low status.

Almost everyone is status-conscious to some extent, but levels of concern with it vary a lot. Politically, I suspect that people with relatively high levels of status concerns are disproportionately attracted to leftism and to hierarchical conservatism (in Australia, conservatism tends to be populist, but in countries with more aristocratic traditions status-oriented individuals could go left or right). On this theory, those with relatively low levels of status concern would be disproportionately on the liberal/libertarian right, in which individual freedom is prized – who cares what other people think, I am going to do what I want, either alone or with like-minded people.
Continue reading “Status, left and right” →

Carlton’s best classical liberal blogger

~ Andrew Norton ~ 58 Comments

Some of my Liberal friends may feel envious that I can win a vote with just 13% support, to claim the title of ‘best solo libertarian blog in Australia’. As I do not use the label ‘libertarian’ I did not vote for myself. And as I only read a couple of the other fourteen contestants regularly enough to form an opinion on their relative merits, I did not vote for anyone else either.

But 161 readers of the Australian Libertarian Society blog did back me – though I do not know whether this is because they like my blog, or because at one point Graeme Bird was in front, and I was the most realistic chance of preventing him from winning (Graeme is the only person on moderation at this blog, but even if he wasn’t most of his comments would still be rejected for containing obscenities).

Whether I am Australia’s best solo libertarian blogger or not, I am confident that I am Carlton’s best classical liberal blogger….