Democrats support sex discrimination

Groping for a running mate? (Imagine the Democrat reaction if Trump did this.)

One nice thing about philosophy is how it exposes bad ideas for what they are, irrespective of their popularity or trendiness.

At last night's Democratic debate, front-runner Joe Biden made explicit that he will only consider a woman for a running mate.  His opponent, Bernie Sanders, wouldn't commit outright to that position, but he's leaning heavily in that direction.

Proposition: The person most qualified for the job is the one who should get that job.

Democrats, the people who supposedly represent the progressive and enlightened mindset in America, now deny this Proposition.  (Or at least some trendily large majority now denies it.  How much stink are they raising about Biden denying the VP opportunity to any men?)

Now, common sense and justice say that to deny the Proposition, one should come up with a really compelling overriding reason, because otherwise the Proposition is eminently plausible, so much so that it should serve as a basis for social policy - the reason being that common sense and justice find (in application to employment policies) discrimination against people on the basis of characteristics other than their qualifications for the job, to be repugnant, the sort of thing that a country such as ours (the United States) is supposed to have gotten away from.  Only reactionaries or some such deplorables would favor non-merit-based employment discrimination.  Right?

Well, apparently, it is now the reactionary position (if you listen to Joe Biden and his supporters and enablers and fellow-travelers) to oppose the kind of sex discrimination that Biden & co. now explicitly support!  Apparently the default view is that opposing sex discrimination is now a sexist position itself, and that perhaps intellectual resources need to be marshaled to use misrepresentation and shaming tactics against such opposition.  I wish I weren't exaggerating the nature of the moral absurdity going on here.

You don't have to ask what I think about this.  Just ask what an established, high-reputation sage like Socrates or Aristotle would say about this.  At the very least they would (I think) say that there had damn well be really good reasons why employment discrimination on the basis of sex should be reintroduced after supposedly having been widely repudiated in the USA and other nations.

So what would those really compelling reasons be?

I can't think of a single one.

I can think of reasons that would weigh in the consideration of candidates for employment - the standard 'diversity'-based reasons pertaining to what can be gained from differences in perspectives and background or life experience.  But I can't think of any reason whatsoever that should be categorically overriding.  Biden has said that being a woman is, in itself, a categorically overriding reason.

He has categorically ruled out considering a man as a running mate.  This is equivalent to an employer saying "men need not apply."  (I was going to say, it's the equivalent of an employer tossing the applications from men into the trash bin immediately, but by the principle of interpretive charity we cannot assume that Biden is being that dishonest, deceptive, and dastardly.  He's openly advertising his sex discrimination so that no men need waste their time presenting their credentials to him for consideration.)  Does that seem reasonable, something possibly endorsed by justice and common sense?

Why on earth should anyone even have to spend their time asking these questions?  Philosopher's question: how much more of a departure from common sense and justice does this stuff have to be, before Democrats & co. raise a stink?  (As Dennett would say, better pump those intuitions, turn the intuition knobs up to 11 if you have to.  The Democrats/Biden are at a 10, it looks like.)

But again, don't consider what this here blogger has to say, because what the hell do I know.  Just imagine instead an Aristotle bringing all his analytical weight to bear on this kind of question, and/or use your conscience (which should come to the same thing).  I don't know what language an Aristotle would use, but I think it's fucking ridiculous, what the Demo-rats have become after decades of intellectual atrophy and hubris.  'Philosophers' in the academy should be all over this kind of thing, but I'm not expecting that to happen because they're mostly 'politically correct' Democrats and politics tends to compromise intellectual integrity (hence the boldfaced hypocrisy of the 'academic freedom' rationale for tenure).

[Addendum 3/17/20: Turley appears to be among the few within the commentariat with the integrity/honesty to call out Biden's blatantly discriminatory pledge for what it is.  Has the pandemic news been distracting the rest of them, or something?  Not likely.  Biden's moral offense here is red-flag obvious to anyone who pays attention to politics.  If this isn't a no-brainer, then what is?  How is this possibly anything other than Biden being caught dead to rights?  (Note that the most upvoted anti-Turley comments below his article offer nothing of substance.  So much for the credibility of "likes"/upvotes as a gauge of quality or honesty.)  I think intellectual dishonesty can take various forms.  I don't think it's rampant, but I don't think it's rare, either.  In politics especially, lots of people quite lazily (i.e., dishonestly) if not recklessly caricature and smear adversaries' positions (contrary to Mill's advice about knowing the opinions of adversaries in their most plausible and persuasive form), and they give their own side a pass for bad things, quite a lot.  (So, well, yeah, in politics, dishonesty is kinda rampant.)  And I think those who are readily in a position to call out Biden for his pledge, and yet fail to do so, are being dishonest.]

Better living through Big Government?

From ourworldindata.org

U.S. federal debt as percentage of GDP; from wikipedia

Now, I'm not going to say that GDP equates to better living, but it does contribute to higher living standards which, other things being equal, makes for greater opportunities for better living (more leisure time to study/think about philosophy, for example, or improved pharmaceutical technology under 'better living through chemistry' assumptions, for another).  But let's say we look at this from the standpoint of purely economic outcomes (i.e., GDP per capita, perhaps adjusted for levels of inequality assuming that's particularly important to do...).  And look at the two graphs above in combination, covering roughly the same period of United States history.  Assume standard data/knowledge that any informed citizen should know about, concerning the size of government in the USA (spending, regulatory burden) both before and after the mid-20th century.  (The first graph, GDP per capita, is on a logarithmic scale so that we don't get the J-curve effect from exponential growth, i.e., would show a straight line over time for a constant rate of growth.)

Do the graphs show that big government has produced better economic outcomes, without undue or deadweight cost?

I mean, I might understand how the debt incurred by World War II may have been necessary, and relative to the economy was being paid down in the subsequent decades, but since that time the welfare state has ballooned.  Non-military spending since the beginning of the Great Society programs in the 1960s has increased from roughly 19 percent to roughly 28 percent of GDP.  What are the benefits that have come about from these additional costs?  From the GDP-per-capita graph, it appears hardly any benefit has happened compared to what came before.  Meanwhile, the national debt relative to GDP has increased considerably and is projected to go yet higher.  (I can only assume, based on my inquiries over the years into this matter, that this is due to the actuarial deficits in the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds" that those in the know have heard and talked about - the figures running in the tens of trillions of dollars (present value terms) if not over $100 trillion - are beginning to materialize; turning Keynes on his head, as it were, the long run is now arriving.

What the data show, to me, is that Big Government has brought the USA a large cost, without an added economic benefit.  Am I missing something crucial here?  Is it that economic growth rates tend to slow as economies mature, and that Big Government and its associated deficits/debt have kept the growth rate roughly the same, and that perhaps the added costs of Big Government are worth this?    Is there a particularly compelling reason to believe this?  Is it that per capita GDP could manage to keep up its growth rate under the strains of Big Government (greater government spending and regulation as a share of GDP) only if the federal government went into structurally higher levels of debt (as a share of GDP)?  How do we tell?  And how does the dynamic of accelerated globalization in the past half-century affect this analysis?

Is the American layperson in a good epistemic position to decide whether trading off liberty for Big Government (and you'd have to bastardize the meaning of "liberty" to think it's anything other than this) is worth both the economic outcomes as well as the effects on the national ethos and character?  Do the decline and fall of empires throughout history have anything to warn us about here?  Better get that philosophical education going, or risk an intensified shitshow, huh?

A libertarian social safety net

For reasons the merits of which are not altogether clear to me, a great many people have been habituated into the thought that a social-welfare safety net has to be administered, coercively (at the point of a gun), by the state.  We're not even talking here about emergency measures that perhaps only a state-scale entity could take during a deep recession or depression, or during a deadly virus outbreak (there's one I have readily in mind at this very moment), but rather an ongoing, cradle-to-grave, offensive-to-liberty, welfare state.

Consider: the United States had, by today's standards, a very small federal government, outside of wartime, for the first century-plus of its existence.  Somehow the people managed to get by without all of today's largesse; somehow it managed to develop into a world power with a per-capita GDP growth rate not unlike what came after.  As for what has come since, non-military spending at all levels of government (federal, state, local) has steadily increased to over 30 percent of GDP today, even as GDP has expanded many-fold during that time.

On its face, this indicates that it's not some pressing, life-or-death need that feeds the welfare-state mentality, but rather a mentality reflecting a contempt for principles of liberty (to adopt a phrase used in the title of a Walter Williams book).

(As for pressing, life-or-death needs, there will be, for the foreseeable future given foreseeable technological and production frontiers, such pressing needs at the margins.  Even the "successful" (using a specifically statism-inflected moral standard) Nordic-style welfare states still have nonzero poverty rates, e.g., around 5% in "Denmawk!"  And the economically-advanced nations continue to hoard wealth out of the reach of the desperately needy peoples of Africa and elsewhere; part of the prevailing welfare-state mentality is that "universal healthcare as a matter of human rights" doesn't extend to such geographically less lucky peoples.  That is, the pressing-needs-at-the-margins argument that is the wedge in the door welfare-statists use to get us to the 30-percent-of-GDP level we have today, is selectively not expanded to cover the entire world.  The expenses would then supposedly be too unreasonably demanding of the wealth-producers' talents, energies, time, and lives, see - that is, the global top x% selfishly lives high while letting others die.  As for a sustainable, i.e., capital-intensive route to economic development for the geographically unlucky people, transfers of already-produced wealth from altruistic first-worlders, to thereby be consumed by the unlucky ones, won't cut it, however warm and fuzzy it makes the altruistic ones feel.  Only in the era of globalized capitalism has the global poverty rate been declining (dramatically).)

Human beings flourish as members of communities.  That's a point well-recognized by sages like Aristotle.  But it's a category error to lump "community" in with "state" or government.  A sine qua non of state institutions is physical force, i.e., compulsion or threat at the point of a gun.  Under the classic libertarian analysis, physical force must not be initiated or introduced into human affairs; its only proper use is to repel or redress initiated force.  ("But what about x, y, z, this that and the other thing, be it public goods, public health emergencies, depressions, etc.?"  Is it really that such pressing needs and concerns can't be addressed by non-state means, or is there a failure of imagination involved?  And is even a hardcore libertarian analysis not amenable in any way to libertarian interpretations of the invasiveness to human autonomy that is a public health threat?  Are we even really sure that economic depressions come from the operations of a fully free market under fair legal constraints?  Are the likes of David Friedman just out to lunch?)

Now, my vision for an ideal social order is something like this: Aristotelian-eudaimonist-perfectionist ethical norms, under some wide or universal recognition of the idea of better living through philosophy (including philosophy for children), combined with libertarian social-political norms.  (Are there such things as incorporated cities even in an 'anarcho-capitalist' framework envisioned by Friedman et al?  There are incorporated other things, so I don't see why not.  So there may be cities, but perhaps not city-states - presumably the form of polity of primary focus for an ancient Greek philosopher - cities being localized and more under direct control of the territorial participants.  So, would such cities have the (delegated) rights to regulate the size of soft drink you can purchase within the city limits?  More on that in just a moment.)  Under such a social framework, based on eudaimonist or flourishing norms alone, there would be a large private-sector-based social safety net, probably operating under the virtue-based norm of aid that Rand/Galt promulgated in Atlas Shrugged (and which Rand-bashers refuse to acknowledge, having lazily/recklessly caricatured her egoism in base, non-virtue-based terms).

So let's say I am posed the question, "If you could eliminate the ongoing cradle-to-grave welfare state right now, given all its offenses to human liberty, would you advocate for that?"  But under scrutiny, the terms of the question are a moot point.  Hypotheticals or counterfactuals should be treated with all the seriousness they deserve, which is to say, they need to consider not merely the consequent but the preconditions for the antecedent.  (That is to say, hypotheticals or counterfactuals are open to abuse in the absence of proper context-keeping.)  That is to say, there is no conceivable scenario, under proper constraints for conceiving things, in which the welfare state is going to be eliminated right now.  (Properly constrained conceiving - as distinct from, say, imagining - doesn't permit conceiving of pigs who can fly unaided, hence the saying.  No proper concept of "pig" allows for it; it would drop the context of how we came to form and maintain the concept.)  The prevailing norms of American society won't allow for it.  The people would have to be converted to the Aristotelian-etc. principles I note and link to above, or be moved considerably in such a direction, or some such widespread values-alteration.

Would cities or other territorial communities make laws or regulations about soft drink sizes, or sexual practices, or other matters of virtue?  Or is there something about the libertarian norm that reflects and informs how people ought to treat one another generally speaking?  Or more exactly, is it something about what explains, grounds, or informs the libertarian norm (linking again) that involves a perhaps-judgmental yet laissez-faire attitude toward how people conduct their lives?  I mean, let's say that rather than paternistically regulating soft drink purchases, people apply Rand/Galt's virtue-based approach and condition social aid on either past virtuous behavior or on education for future virtuous behavior?  I think that this eudaimonist-libertarian way of thinking, actually present but largely implicit or inchoate in a great number of American people, helps explain what they find so offensive about Mayor Bloomberg's paternalism (which flows over into the mentality behind his highly intrusive "stop-and-frisk" policies, a mentality I don't see being extricated from his worldview all that soon, the same as with the elitist hubris behind his comments about farming skills).  Anyway, eudaimonist-libertarian social norms would emphasize education toward people exercising their best judgment, and then leaving it up to them to exercise their judgment given their own context of knowledge and hierarchy of values.  Like, duh?

To sum up: Like perhaps quite a lot of libertarians, I'm all for a robust social-welfare safety net and other virtues of sociality and community, just not at the point of a gun.  And with enough imagination (fueled by an intellectual perfectionism and/or the kind or quality of thinking behind Nozick's appallingly neglected framework for utopia) as well as ample benevolence, wouldn't it be a better safety net than the one currently existing?

[Addendum: Under a broadly prevailing culture of Aristotelian intellectual perfectionism, would there be even nearly as much need for social safety net institutions, or would people be a lot more self-sufficient in that regard?  I urge much properly-constrained imaginative conceiving in this regard.  Much like Rand, and contrary to the usual lazy caricatures of her, I have a very high view of human potentialities even as regards the less talented; while I don't envision a repeal of the bell curve, I envision a marked 'rightward' shifting of it under culturally Aristotelian conditions.]

What does Putin want for the USA?

If I had to guess, Putin wants to sow internal division, discord, and distrust.  If I had to say, Putin is a grandmaster of misinformation and misdirection.  See his non-answer answers to Chris Wallace's probing interview questions.  So, he sees how Trump's presidency sows discord, and Trump's opposition plays right along, probably much to his delight.  (This includes their obsessing for years about Trump/Putin-collusion conspiracy theories.)  He most likely seeded the claims made in the so-called Steele dossier (actually the Clinton/PerkinsCoie/FusionGPS/Simpson/Steele dossier), and the anti-Trump-biased intelligence (sic) community played right along, further sowing distrust of its honor and capabilities.

Now we hear that he might also like to see Sanders be president (consider the ring to that phrase - "President Sanders" - and in light of this) if he can't have Trump; for that, too, would sow much division for obvious reasons.  He sees Sanders' quasi-rabid supporters, and parallels to Trump's True Believers, and figures they'll be adequate to the division-sowing job.  Then again, maybe it's just another piece of misinformation from him that he wants Sanders elected, maybe just to see how Americans react to that notion.

We just don't really know for sure what's a trial balloon from him, and what's for real.  'Reality' for Vladimir Putin seems like a rather fluid notion, in a political context anyway, since the norms of rationality touted (and practiced to varying degrees of imperfection) by philosophers and scientists are not the norms (if they can even be called that) of political discourse (warring by less violent means).  His state-TV apparatus is self-serving propaganda/lies, after all.  He learned it at the KGB, ffs.

Knowing all this, why on earth should anyone pay serious attention to who Putin supposedly wants to win in the USA, or whether he even thinks discord and distrust in the USA serves his own political interests or not, and focus instead on the merits of each candidacy?  It's just a distraction, which for all we know is what he wants.  I mean, does he want more attention/scrutiny focused on him and his fundamentally dishonest and gangsterish nature, or not?

But what should really humble Trump's opponents is the thought that they may very well be willing if not eager dupes of Putin's puppet-mastery.  But I don't expect such a level of thoughtfulness from them, at this point, they are that pathetic and dishonest themselves.  Also, Trump as a matter of basic honesty and accountability/transparency should make clear to Putin that he wants him to stay away from election-meddling efforts.  But Trump likes to troll his domestic opponents too much (and they're pathetic enough to go right along with that, as well), so I don't expect that from him, either.

Did I mention there's an antidote to this shitshow?

Impeachment and philosophy: addenda

Following up the earlier post.

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

A 79-year-old, heart-attack-having socialist...

...is apparently who the Demo-rats would most prefer as the candidate to end up in the White House come 2021, based on betting markets.  (He's about 18 or 19 percentage points ahead of the next candidate as of today.)  That's: (1) 79 years old; (2) an avowed socialist; (3) who recently had a heart attack.  This combination should tell you something about just how off-the-rails this party has become.  They don't appear interested much these days in listening to reason.

He and the party don't seem all that interested in a serious discussion about how globalization - the greater spreading out of capital flows from the first-world to the poorer world - is a key driver of greater economic inequality in the USA (the capital goes, the returns come to those still in residence); instead, increasingly, they (e.g., AOC) prefer to attribute this trend to some inherent dynamic in capitalism toward greater inequality (universally or globally, full-stop).

He says that no one really knows how much his bigger-govt schemes might cost, so he won't even bother to provide projections.  He recently tweeted, "Abortion is healthcare."  Anyone who listened carefully to the last 2020 Demo-ratic debate could notice that his proposals and style are pie-in-the-sky; how do he and his supporters expect his pretty-transformative proposals to get past a GOP-majority Senate, for one thing?

As a piece yesterday in the WSJ points out, Sanders was in favor of nationalization of industry in the 1970s, and defended Ortega and Cuba in the 1980s.  He's now more of a staunchly "progressive" 'New Dealer' and/or Scandinavian welfarist type with an agenda of generous economic 'rights' (education, housing, healthcare, etc.) and lessening the influence of money in politics.  But if the one not-bullshitty piece of evidence of racism on Trump's part - his company's housing policies from nearly 50 years ago (for which it/he didn't admit wrongdoing, etc.) - can be held against him today, so can Bernie's hardcore-socialist politics from 40 years ago.  If.  Right?

But even take out the socialism part, however one defines 'socialism,' as though that's not troubling enough.  There's still the heart-attack-having 79-year-old part.  What are these people thinking?  They want to get rid of the "corrupt, racist, trillion-dollar-deficit-making, etc." president so badly that they can't accept any other outcome with a semblance of equanimity or proportion, and yet this is the alternative they most prefer to present to the swing voters of PA, MI, and WI?

And why can't they come up with a seriously viable candidate who isn't over 70 or under 40?  (I think Plato might have something to say about putting people under 40 in charge of things political; do these politically-oriented lightweights care?)

[Addendum: to get some idea of how clueless these people can be, lefty Robert Reich asks why America is so divided now, and then proceeds to explain: "Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos...".  Can it be that part of the division is attributable to people like Reich insisting on dubiously, one-sidedly framing things this way, without any sense of irony, and that those on the right are sick and tired of it?]

[Addendum 2/21: I'm somewhat amazed that, all my attention-paying so far notwithstanding, I've not seen Bernie being called to explain his supposed ideological transition from hardcore communist to 'Denmawk'-style social democracy.  How lazy/incompetent do his debate opponents and the media have to be for this not to have happened yet?  You'd think we'd all like to have an explanation, lest we possibly end up handing over the nuclear codes to a crypto-commie or something?  Am I the crazy one here?]

[Addendum 2/22: It should be noted that from polling averages the definitely-leftist Sanders + Warren numbers come to about 40%, while the more moderate Biden + Pete + Klobuchar + Bloomberg numbers come to about 50%.  This raises the good question as to why on earth a not-very-convincing plurality of support should vault someone into a nomination - not altogether dissimilar from how Trump managed to get the '16 GOP nomination in the face of quality competition from at least 5 other candidates.  IIRC he didn't poll much above 35% until all but a few other candidates dropped out.  Still, he did win the general election by appealing to enough swing voters, and there is much talk of a contested '20 Demo-rat convention.  The betting markets (now putting Sanders at nearly 50% and about 30 points above the next candidate) don't seem too deterred.]

Impeachment and philosophy

I'll begin this post with a timeless quote from Plato's Republic, Book V:

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,-- nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing.

(In other words, why can't political rulers be more like this guy?)

The reason that the nation is in this mess is because the advice contained in the above has been flouted so thoroughly.  As I've pointed out many times already, all the major American framers were philosophical-enough people to be founders and/or members of the American Philosophical Society.  We don't have anything like that in the politician class right now.  As few as four years ago, Sen. Rubio declared in a presidential candidate debate that "we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers," apparently to the approval of the audience (while philosophy-major Carly Fiorina, also on the stage, didn't even rebut).  (To Rubio's credit, he later acknowledged value in philosophy.)

I think the American people are well aware that partisan hypocrisy is front and center - perhaps the issue - of this whole impeachment thing.  What the American people aren't agreed upon, is which of the two sides is the worse offender in the partisan-hypocrisy department.  (It's the other side, of course.)  But I think they're all quite aware that were the party roles reversed, the parties would be singing quite a different tune.

All the Senators signed an oath of impartiality.  This oath is belied what I believe to be a statistically impossible scenario: that 100 seriously impartial people would somehow almost all vote along party lines.  So let's dispense with any notion that impartiality is a serious factor in all this.  [Edit: an alternative explanation is that the political Left and Right have differing information-processing protocols, a different can of worms....]

Just about the only person prominently involved in this process who has an air of credibility and impartiality is Prof. Dershowitz, who has made arguments that certainly raise some serious questions and concerns, and are of historic import.  Dershowitz has said (on Cuomo Primetime, twitter, and elsewhere) that his argument has been twisted by critics into one he didn't make, and when he says something like that, it should tell the critics that they need to be more careful - or, as I like to put it, to bend over backwards in the name of fairness and context-keeping.  (As in: Dennett/Rapoport Rules.  For instance: Rand-bashers invariably encounter pushback from Rand-fans that the bashers are misrepresenting Rand's position.  That should be a red flag for any fair-minded person that the bashers need to get more careful and (even better) backwards-bending, but the bashers invariably don't do this - they disregard the pushback - a further and more serious red flag about their intellectual character.)

With that background, let's consider numerous facts:

By all appearances - and no one seems to contest this in good faith - Trump conditioned Congressionally-appropriated military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine's president announcing investigations, notably into '20 Dem aspirant Joe Biden and his relation to the energy company on the board of which his son sat.

It also appears that Trump got various ideas about Biden's apparent conflict of interests - something his son was warned about by people connected to Secretary of State Kerry among others who wanted no such involvement, BTW,  - from Sean Hannity's show.  Hannity's show is a cauldron of (partisan) theories about Democratic corruption (in addition to endless Trumpian talking points).  As the previous hyperlink indicates, Trump/Hannity's enemies regard these theories as kooky conspiracy theories, but Hannity was essentially proven right about the Obama/Comey FBI's partisan FISA abuse (about which Hannity/Trump's enemies were most incurious until it became too obvious to ignore any longer).  And given the partisan nature of all this, it's not like Trump/Hannity's enemies weren't involved in conspiracy-theorizing themselves about Trump/Putin collusion, debunked by the Mueller Report.  (See Greenwald for how bad this makes these conspiracy theorists/allies/enablers look.)

So it's not like Hannity doesn't have some credibility and that his/Trump's enemies don't lack a good deal of credibility themselves.  And by appearances Trump accorded Hannity's (crucial-context-omitting) claims about Biden/Burisma more credibility than it deserved.  It speaks (poorly) to Trump's flaky political-belief-formation processes which rear their ugly head elsewhere.  According to Trump's July 25 phone call with President Zelensky, the Biden/Burisma situation sounded "terrible" to him.  Now, unless there is good evidence that Trump had good evidence available to him that the Biden/Burisma situation was probably not as corrupt as he expressed in the July 25 call that it could be, then he has some legitimate pretext (in his mind, supposedly or presumably) on national security and corruption grounds for wanting investigations initiated.  The House's impeachment managers have presented a case to the contrary, i.e., that Trump did or should have known better.  And a faulty-belief-formation-process "out" here doesn't exactly work in his favor, fitness-for-office-wise.

But even granting this "out," the manner and method by which Trump conditioned this aid on investigations is the most disturbing aspect of all this.  He apparently kept it as much under wraps and related to as few people as possible, and he involved his private attorney Rudy Guiliani in it.  Rudy's involvement in this appears not to have been along policy or national-security-related lines, but along personal and partisan-political lines.  Legitimate interests in Ukraine-related corruption could have involved more fully and transparently people in his agencies and in Congress.  But it appears that he tried to hide this aid-conditioning as much as he could, which points to a culpable knowledge that this quid pro quo (and that's what it is) is dirty and accordingly wouldn't pass policy muster.  Bolton referred to it as a "drug deal" to suggest how sleazy and corrupt it is.  From plausible and fair-minded arguments I've seen, it constitutes (to this or that extent) an abuse of power.

That's where the Dershowitz Argument comes in: does an abuse of power as such constitute an impeachable/removable offense?  Here's where non-partisans should balk, as Dershowitz has vigorously been suggesting.  Dershowitz holds that there needs to be something more to the action, namely the committing of crimes (hence his support for Nixon's impeachment), else the abuse-of-power criterion is too vague and malleable, and too exploitable (i.e., abuse-able in its own right) by partisans of the opposing party.  (Note: he seems to leave open the possibility - which would be consistent with the 'consensus' of other legal scholars - that purely self-dealing motives in a non-criminal but abusive act is enough to impeach/remove.)  Dershowitz raises historical examples - notably President Lincoln's partisan-election-related actions releasing Union soldiers from the battlefield to vote for his party in an Indiana election.  (Is there any serious doubt that had Trump done likewise, today's Demo-rats would call for his impeachment?  I recommend carefully chewing over this question.  Further, given the tenacity with which Dershowitz argues his case, it's pretty much inevitable, given the opportunity, that he will bring the Lincoln example up for consideration by the legal scholars ganging up on him.  (He brings it up here on CNN [shorter youtube version here] and it's not addressed.  How friggin' hard can it be to address, I wonder?))  Republicans like to point to Obama's hot-mic moment where he offers a quid-pro-quo to Russia about missile defense - "I'll have more flexibility after the election."  (Having heard about this back then, I found it cynical and typical of the D.C. Swamp, and a cause for political embarrassment, but I don't recall the prospect of impeachment entering my mind.  As I said, it seemed all too typical.  [Edit: And what's more, Trump was supposed to be an antidote to the Swamp; so much for that hope.])

I don't know whether this warrants Trump's removal from office.  At the moment I assign it about a 50/50 probability.  For me to think that measure is warranted, the probability should be at least 2/3.  I do think it shows that Trump is ethically and/or epistemically unfit to be president.  Up until this Ukraine episode, I was almost enthusiastic about his beating the obviously-bad Demo-rats/leftists in 2020.  (Indeed, I even boldly predicted his '20 victory given the alternative which the American mainstream would have ample reason to find odious and ridiculous.)  My hope is that they nominate a candidate who is not so loathsome and idiotic that we're left with Trump as the default option.

And Demo-rats have to be on the hook for so much of the intellectual bankruptcy and corruption in all this.  Relevant points:

(1) This is the same party that bent over backwards to be unfair to, i.e., to blatantly dishonestly smear, Brett Kavanaugh.  You want to talk abuse of power, extreme bad faith?  What business did Demo-rats have agitating and demanding that his accuser be given a nationally televised Senate judiciary committee platform, once they had in hand and knew about Leland Keyser's debunking testimony?  ("Believe women" doesn't extend to Keyser, a woman....)  Or their extensive efforts to gaslight the public with their "we believe Ford" or question-begging "believe survivors [i.e., accusers]" stuff both before and after the assault-allegation hearing?  Appropriate retribution for this effort at personal and career destruction is loss of another SCOTUS seat, if not a presidential acquittal.

(2) This is the party that bent over backwards not to know what was wrong with Crooked Hillary's unauthorized server setup and the consequent mishandling of 110 classified documents.  The legal authorities have declined to bring charges, but no one that I know of has contested the point that anyone who engages in such behavior should not have a security clearance - something that should be a major consideration in whether she is objectively disqualified from holding the office of the presidency.

(3) Certain arguments made by the House impeachment managers can be thrown right back at them - namely, about pulling levers of power where so much as even a scintilla of corrupt partisan political intent is involved.  (That was their pushback against Dershowitz's argument about mixed motives, i.e., in between pure national-interest motives on one end and pure self-dealing motives on the other.)  In making the House case on the Senate floor, Schiff claimed that Trump is "scared to death" of facing Biden in 2020.  Well, Demo-rats are scared to death of having to face Trump in 2020.  Using selective presentations of evidence, Schiff peddled the Trump/Russia collusion narrative ever since early 2017.  (BTW, his many references to the June '16 Trump Tower meeting, between Trump aides and the Russian lawyer promising dirt on HRC, don't establish collusion claims but they do establish the extent to which Trump and his son are willing to deceptively/dishonestly spin.)

As for manager Nadler, he's been caught dead-to-rights on video from back during the Clinton impeachment saying on the House floor that impeachment should be bipartisan; this is obvious prima facie evidence that Nadler's motivations this time around are partisan-political and not purely in the nation's interests.

As for manager Jeffries, he's referred to Trump as the "Grand Wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," itself a claim beyond the pale of honest discourse and clearly indicating an animus and prejudice that would distort his motives for impeachment.

And let's face it, if the Demo-rats are too fucking lazy or dishonest to mount a clear non-strawman counter-argument against the eminently non-partisan Dershowitz, enough to get his recalcitrant mind to relent rather than be coerced into agreement (through dubious 'consensus'-mongering or whatever), then have they really cleared the hurdle that they ought to clear in order to convince 2/3 of the American people of their case?

And that's another thing - both parties but Demo-rats in particular (there isn't much of a case for a moral equivalence here, however odious the Republicans get at times) have so squandered trust and credibility that I can't treat the House managers' case as having been presented in full good faith ("with all due respect..." etc.).  They've cried wolf too many times about how bad Trump and his supporters are, their treatment of Kavanaugh belies any professions to concern for justice and fairness, they look the other way when Crooked Hillary mishandled classified info, etc.  If Trump were to be removed, consider that this empowers these intellectually and morally corrupt people, and that is the wider context in which impeachment- and removal-related arguments should be considered.  (As for those sometimes-odious Republicans, are they even going to censure Trump for his underhanded and dirty aid-withholding?  Do they deserve to lose control of the Senate where the 2-per-state format heavily benefits them already?)  The notion that he would need to be removed from office in order to restore some sense of honor and decency to our politics . . . I think that ship had already sailed some time ago.  The American people are getting the politics they deserve, commensurate with an intellectually bankrupt culture.  Plato is right.  (See the "philosophy ffs," "philosophy for children," and "p4e" tags, and this blog's masthead hyperlink, for leads to the solution.)

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

The latest AOC idiocy (idAOC?)

Something something the recent remarkable stock market gains are inequality in a nutshell, foolish words to that effect.  Some left-leaning "news" outlet cited the 2.9% year over year gain in "wages" (vs. the exorbitant 22% or so gain in the Dow) as evidence for her thesis.  Except that the latest interpretation from the basically commonsense (and therefore far superior intellectually and morally) biggest "conservative" media outlet that the latest gains were seeing the fastest growth on the low end (which economic theorists would explain in terms of the upward pressure on wages from a ever-tightening labor market, with 3.5% unemployment as ample evidence of that - along with, not coincidentally, the conceptual truism that those on the lower end of the bargaining-strength scale are the ones most likely to become the first people unemployed come the next recession (which anti-Trumpers all over the place were all but guaranteeing would happen under the unknown, unproven President Trump's leadership, and this includes New York Slimes columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman - the part-time partisan hack, etc.).

Anyway, pretty much everything from AOC involves some obvious economic fallacy or other, or culpable ignorance of readily available data (e.g. everything at ourworldindata.org), or some obvious unseriousness of thought and mannerism ("it is fascisuuuuuuuum . . . uh, uh. uh. uh, that we're headed toward..."), but what really is so objectively anger-warranting about it is that this person wielding real legislative power could not only be so fucking intellectually lazy and reckless, but also so fucking full of hubris (which goes hand in hand with the fucking intellectually lazy part).  The economy does better (than it otherwise would - ceteris paribus, as any serious student of economics knows about) when the Dow is doing better, and vice versa.  Nobody ever asserted a 1:1 correlation between the two (a fucking strawman, since everyone concedes one is about expectations and the other is about measured output), but the Dow isn't going south when investors of capital (people whom AOC obviously knows jack shit about) are bullish on outcomes in the not so distant future, and when they're bullish people get more available and better paying jobs.

(And since of course the Dow is a measure of expectations it is part of the index of leading economic indicators (LEI); the unemployment rate is, of course, the biggest coincident indicator.  Also, not coincidentally to AOC's studied ignorance, a 2.9% growth rate in wages, with inflation as low as it is, sounds like perhaps upwards of, I'm just pulling a reasonably-well-educated guess out of my ass here, a 50% to 100% faster growth rate in real wages than what was happening under the last Demo-rat presidency.  And as I pointed out some months back, given the slow-as-ever population growth rate these days, a 3% rate of GDP growth translates into double the per-capita GPD growth rate obtained with 2% reported GDP growth, not 50% more.  If people would stop lying with statistics and go through the comprehensive data set and mentally integrate it properly, they'd not give any time, attention or credence, or the power of lawmaking/physical force, to the likes of the fundamentally character-deficient AOC.  [Note from the digression below the context-oriented treatment of "if-then" hypotheticals and consider what such a hypothetical would have to presuppose about those currently  lying with statistics and giving AOC the time of day and whether all that in presupposition and implication would wipe out the need for the very hypothetical itself, heh heh.]  Also, it's not intellectually honest to do as your typical leftist does and that is to attribute a dynamic going on within America - a widening of income/wealth as measured by the Gini coefficient or whatever - to a dynamic inherent to capitalism itself.  The widening gap in America can be explained in great part by the effects of globalization, and with the increased globalization of capitalism - that big driver of CO2 measures which leftist losers use simultaneously to condemn capitalism for its evils while refusing to acknowledge the human benefits - there has been not just a dramatic fall in global poverty rates (whatever threshold you use) but little change in either direction in Gini-inequality globally in the last few decades).  Anyway, it's hard to maintain an anti-capitalism narrative in the face of all the data at ourworldindata.org in conjunction with an understanding of basic economic principles including the role and (win-win) effects of talent differentials - and the data include a huge rise in global population in the era of capitalism . . . which, if the left wants to maintain is a bad thing, it should say so outright (it might help explain their shittily selective attention about the population-reducing crimes of left-wing regimes; the name of that deliberate starvation of millions by the brainwashed-in-Marxism regime is known as Holodomor, kids; the reckless starvation of scores of millions within a few years by that other brainwashed-in-Marxism and hence also totalitarian regime is known as the Great Chinese Famine, ffs - give Mises the relevant data and he would have predicted millions would die and correctly explain exactly why, just as he correctly explained why socialism proper would eventually fail wherever it was tried (something something once all the seed corn was consumed). Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy Che Guevara t-shirt, while the usual leftist-loser suspects just continue on saying how capitalism killed many more all the while global population exploded (just as it did in Industrial England during the Worst Period in Human History according to Marx & Co., ca. 1800-1850)  All of this failure and death enabled by the Academic Left [see tag] with a few honorable exceptions that prove the rule, mind you....)

This is low-hanging fruit at this point; all told, AOC is a fucking moron who happened to be in a far-left congressional district and has some charisma (and more clever than wise, etc.).  Also it appears that a degree in "International Relations and Economics" from Boston U. is empty paper nowadays; if you want to present to the American taxpayer Exhibit A of the academy's intellectual . . . credibility deficit . . . look no further than AOC.  (Philosopher's question: If it isn't outright intellectual bankruptcy, how much further along the deficit spectrum does one have to go before it is reached?  And do we really want to find out?  How good can the standards be there, as things are now, when for instance a Scumbag Lisa Duggan at a top-10-ish university (NYU) dishonestly smears Ayn Rand in a public-university-published book, and then evades and insults those calling her "scholarship" into question - i.e., did she seek out contrary input, e.g., philosophy professors who are favorable toward Rand, or did she run it by the editors of the Journal of Ayn Rand studies for QC purposes, or did she make any effort to so much as know about the Peikoff courses, that sort of thing, all of which she made every effort not to do, basically - all without accountability or consequence?)  She (AOC) actually seems otherwise natively smart/bright but crippled by the education (sic) establishment's selective-worldview-cultivating procedures.  That should be enough to piss anyone off.  Rand's "The Comprachicos" presages what has become of the whipped-by-the-left university and its most loyal, necessarily hubristic spawn (AOC, e.g.).

But next up I think I'll take to task philosophy blogger (already in the intellectual stratosphere by today's lamestream media standards[*]) Michael Huemer's attack on doing the history of philosophy, and in particular his dictum, "don't be Aristotelian."

[*] [* for reasons I won't polemicize about in this here post, the author of the "world's most popular philosophy blog" serves as a complicated case seeing as there is little in the way of non-destructive "philosophy" that ever actually goes on there]
[Digression that should be transferred to the next post & multiple-paragraphed.]
(Obviously he's not aware, for instance, of state of the art interpretations from the likes of David Charles and Allen Gotthelf that a final cause or telos is irreducible to the other causes and associated with this idea is that the final cause achieves a good (so we're in normative/value-theory territory, not the realm of mechanics, physics, chemistry, or 'unevaluative' biology).  And more generally, from the standpoint of a perfectionistic methodology: if we learn nothing else from the history of philosophy, and if we're good learners, we glean from the study of the past greats just what about their thinking styles made them first-rate thinkers with such lasting influence (such as Aristotle has in ethics, specifically with the recently-revived virtue-ethical tradition - duh).  And if we're really perfectionistic we should be able to devise methods by which to reliably and accurately rank-order the great thinkers on a scale of greatness (be it in cardinal or ordinal terms).  By any good measurement system Aristotle comes out pretty much well ahead of the competition in virtue of a monumental body of writings (and lost dialogues likened by some of the ancient wisdom-lovers to rivers of gold to Plato's silver).  (By virtue of her identification of the principle of ordinal rankings in terms of teleological measurement, as well as the identifications made throughout the rest of the Ayn Rand Lexicon, does(n't) Rand rank pretty high on the scale of overall philosophical greatness?  By parity of reasoning, if indeed Rand along with the other giants of the history of philosophy - all by repute and nearly all in fact first-rate minds - each had their own well-edited and cross-referenced Lexicon demonstrating with great effectiveness what first-rate minds they pretty much all are, wouldn't that increase people's interest in doing philosophy?  Huemer seems to short-change this possibility or something, in which case I suggest he get more dialectical/thorough in reasoning through what value things like history of philosophy provide.  Also, I've explained in my book (namely in the most-important second chapter, 'Aristotelianism') that I'm an Aristotelian in terms of a tradition of thought defined by certain fundamentals but not beholden to all of Aristotle's arguments (as he himself would have wanted it, duh).  And fundamental to his very-impressive-results-getting intellectual enterprise was his philosophic method, which the scholar writing about Aristotle in the Oxford Handbook identifies with dialectic.  But the dialectical method should be treated most fundamentally, not merely as a matter of consulting, giving a fair hearing to, etc., the varied learned and reasoned-sounding opinions, weighing them and deciding on a best explanation; it is most fundamentally the art of context-keeping, for which Huemer can consult Sciabarra's Total Freedom, where Aristotle is treated as the fountainhead of this methodological tradition while its being formulated in terms of Sciabarra's art-of-context-keeping fundamentals (and in terms of the proper application of "both-and" reasoning to competing and partial claims to the truth, in addition to the proper "either-or" reasoning involved).  So far as I know, no one's presented any good reason to doubt Sciabarra's thesis, not even the ultra-wisdom-loving Prof. Huemer.  Also not widely known: for Rand, her concept of mental integration is, well, integral to her concept of context(-keeping).  And that is integral to her concept of hierarchy of thought.  (A proper approach to hierarchy would help inform us on if-then style hypotheticals that philosophers to pose; what are not just the implications of the if-clause but the presuppositions?  Like, "if the Aristotelian end of history as defined in UP's book were to eventuate, then...".  Like, for instance, would UP's book have to have been written first?  Is it a realistic hypothetical in the first place?  That kinda shit you should get stoned and think through very carefully and thoroughly.)

Darn it, I lost a certain train of thought here, for which I blame the weed.  Oh wait, now I remember: I supersede 'Aristotelian' and 'dialectic' in the sense that I identify my methods in terms of a principle of intellectual perfectionism, which means (among other things) doing the activity of philosophy as close to perfectly as one feasibly can, but also learning a bunch of shit (for which don't ever trust AOCs under 30) and also possibly fanatical attention to (hopefully the most crucially relevant, philosophically essential) detail.  Like Aristotle, Aquinas and/or Rand, for instance?  (Also, I think with a probability approaching 100% that a Hegel Dictionary of the sort built by, who was it, Solomon in the 1980s perhaps or Houlgate ca. 2000?), might be part of a whole revived "understanding Hegel" effort that may actually pay off for once, but idk.  Just call it the Hegel Lexicon and voila, we've got a volume 2 in a much-anticipated-by-me series.  I just get a bit of a kick out of inductively identifying tantalizing principles like that one there.)

[Background music/soundtrack to the foregoing: Pink Floyd favorites, a listing of which is available]

The core libertarian principle explained

I'm using the term 'libertarian' in its specifically political sense, not the (indeterminist) free-will sense, as per the following image:

The basic libertarian principle is often phrased in terms of 'self-ownership' - the principle that one is the rightful owner and therefore has exclusive rights of disposal or control over one's own physical person (body-mind; faculties; abilities; energies; time; life-activities) - and, by further reasoning, exclusive rights of disposal or control over the productive fruits of applying one's personal resources in action (property rights, including the right to start and own/control a business of one's own, or pool capital with others, whatever one freely chooses).

Now, in the header I put the word "explained", and in so doing I'm both giving an essential description of the core libertarian principle as well as a why-account, as in why do people possess an exclusive right of 'self-ownership' and classic, essentially Lockean property rights.

The core libertarian 'self-ownership' principle reformulated is provided in the image above: one person's life is not another's (or others', as in a majority/mob) to dispose of.

I take the libertarian principle to be some kind of undeniable moral truism although its precise specification is a matter of controversy.  Is it consistent with any form of welfare or subsistence rights that Rand explicitly denies?  (And for reasons I will get into shortly I regard Rand as preeminent exponent of the libertarian idea.)  If it is undeniable, then it means that whatever other ethical/moral principles we can all reasonably agree upon after due deliberation, they all must occur within the constraints of libertarian 'self-ownership'.

Now, as to the reformulated wording.  The most directly comparable formulation of "one person's life is not another's to dispose of" or "my life is not yours to dispose of" in the literature is Prof. Hospers' "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of," in his early-1970s article, "What Libertarianism Is."  But it's a safe bet that his primary influence in this regard was his series of conversations and correspondence with Ayn Rand in the early '60s.  And the evidence that it originated with Rand is a passage in Atlas Shrugged (1957) where the hero, John Galt, asks the Head of State (heh heh) Mr. Thompson (heh heh), what he has to offer him, and the panicked (heh heh) and account-overdawn (heh heh) Mr. Thompson says, "I'm offering you your life" or words to that effect, and Galt replies, "It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson."  (Of course, anyone who has followed these things knows, Hospers, a widely respected figure in his profession, is recognized in particular for his expertise in aesthetic theory, and he's a big fan of Atlas Shrugged.)

Now, the core libertarian self-plus-property ownership principle is often taken by many scholars and interpreters to imply a rejection of any extensive measures of taxation and governance (a really big, powerful armed forces might be required for a period of time to defeat a mortal foreign enemy?), and especially measures that take property/income/wealth from one citizen and give it to another, or, what's usually called redistributive taxation/spending.  (Self-styled anarchist libertarians or 'anarcho-capitalists' say that you don't need any form of government/taxation to have a stable rule of (libertarian) law, national defense, or other 'public goods' functions usually attributed to a 'minimal state' framework.)

Now, the basic libertarian 'self-ownership' is, I believe, best formulated by Rand and (subsequently) Hospers, but Rand gives an explanatory why-account that Hospers doesn't in his article, although the intuitive appeal of the principle is there aplenty even in his telling.  But it's Rand who really gets to the meat of the why-account, which is the whole theoretical & thematic core of Atlas Shrugged and her entire philosophy: the role of the mind in man's (human) existence and all this entails.

Rand boils down the basic principle in dramatic fashion in the Galt-Thompson scene as much as she does throughout pretty much the whole novel.  The basic opposition comes down to this: Is John Galt's mind properly at Mr. Thompson's disposal rather than (exclusively) his own?  By "mind" Rand means a specifically human, conceptual or intellectual faculty which depends on the volitional  (thereby requiring free or uninhibited thought/action) act of focus, and the ultimate measure of the service to one's life, i.e., ethical or moral perfection, is the degree of one's focusing one's mind as opposed to evading or being otherwise frustrated or negated from within or without (by other actors).  
Put another way: A human is, by nature, a volitional/free conceptual-intellectual being who must make judgments about how to act, and this requires a focused process of thinking and this requires an effort (the basic phenomenon that involves active, free, volitional movement as opposed to a relatively or fully passive or restive state), and it means that one must be able to duly consider the reasons for taking a course of action.  So is it Galt's life to determine by how own free judgment how it is disposed of, or does it belong in part or full to Mr. Thompson/the State?  It's an irreconcilable opposition of basic principles.  Miss Rand is often bashed for putting things like this in such starkly "unrealistically black-and-white" terms, but I don't see any way around it.  It's the basic crux of Nozick's rejection of Rawls' theory (and arguably on grounds Rawls concedes as true when he defends the seperateness of persons against utilitarian appropriation-of-persons-for-collective-benefits).

But the fundamentality or primacy or basic-principle-ness of Rand's role-of-the-mind theme is the why of the libertarian principle.  To state again: the human mind (intellect) must operate freely to act/be what it is, and to be appropriated from outside against the action-directives issued by the exercise of its own free judgments weighing the for/against reasons (etc etc?) is to be treated as a mere instrument or means which falls afoul not just of the libertarian principle as presented here but also a 'Kantian' principle widely considered eminently plausible (the Randian version being stated as: "man is an end in himself and not a means to the ends of others" - which I take to be another alterative formulation of the libertarian principle).

So if Mr. Thompson is to get Galt to willingly cooperate, bother to put forth the effort to act (causally enact an effect, which in human terms is means-ends reasoning), he needs to be shown a reason to do so, and not the muzzle of a gun.  (Oh no, that unbearably black-and-white illustration of the principle, stated for the umpteenth time already in the novel (heh heh - if only the Rand-bashers would just fucking listen for a change, man, they might learn something; Rand's got information, man; not-exactly new shit has come to light (these past 63 years and counting ffs etc. for the umpteenth time)).)

What exactly is a reason for engaging in the effort of an action?  Well, there's a vast literature on that but a lot of it has to do with reconciling the "rational" and the "reasonable," or put another way, between appeals to one's personal preference- or value-set, a so-called egoistic reason-giving or justification for action on the one hand, and what, in arriving at the best principles for governing interpersonal behaviors meet the highest standards of fairness?  (Much of the influence of John Rawls in recent moral-political theory has to do with his understanding of political justice in terms of fairness or what I'm here calling reasonabless.  The idea I'm advancing/advocating here is that the libertarian principle must be able to - and does - satisfy standards of fairness, principles all communicating-in-moral-terms actors can freely and cooperatively agree upon.  Rawls brings in the concept of overlapping consensus to help describe/explain this ideal deliberative-communicative framework.)  The reasonableness-standpoint also suggests something or other about taking a stance of impartiality so that the perspective of all moral deliberators-actors are respected (taken into account).  (Political jab: this is why I loathe today's leftists who constantly caricature their opponents.)  Some sort of principle of human-equality is operative throughout all this ideal, something about equal consideration of all perspectives which means techniques of free, rational, logical persuasion and dialectic.  (Rawls' famous Original Position is a thought-experimenty device for taking the impartial standpoint so that particular circumstances don't affect one's judgments of fairness.)

So, Galt and Rand are saying - or might or ought to say - perhaps not to a slimeball like Mr. Thompson but rather to even an honest interlocutor whom I take Rawls and Nagel (whose 'altruism' or other-person-directed motivation comes from taking an impartial stance) to be, something like the following: "Look, give it your best shot at convincing me to take your so-called impartial stance but it's going to me my own free judgment and not yours that decides, okay?  This constrains you from applying your difference principle and all that stuff in anything other than a voluntary sense, i.e., even then it's not the role of the political to employ physical force in any capacity other than protection from the initiation of force (the introduction of force into human relationships)."

Rand has a lot of very negative things to say about the initiation of physical force.  "Force and mind are opposites" as she would say aplenty.  Then there's the translation of "armed might (of, e.g., the electoral majority)" into "guns and physical force."  Rand ain't fucking around here when she brings up the gun thing, because that's what it comes down to, a tool to threaten you to do things contrary to your own judgment and substitute for that the judgment of others (over how to lead your own life, etc.).  If Rand gets nothing else about her political principles across, it's that all human relationships should be premised on rational persuasion.

Now, there's the introduction of force, and there's the use of force in self-defense in the event that its use is initiated.  So that gives us some idea of when the use of force is ever appropriate.  If one is ever to use force, one should be able to give a damn good reason for doing so.  In the case of self-defense, a life is at stake (we're taking the case of defense against attempted murder here).  Or, we can speak of a portion of one's life (which is one's own to exclusively dispose of, etc.) being defended against less deadly forms of violent assault.  Now, there's also the matter of what are usually termed 'emergency exceptions,' e.g., the shipwreck scenario and breaking into an absent owner's house to obtain food rather than starve - provided compensation is paid to the owner, say.

Some philosophers - James P. Sterba comes to mind - have argued that a combination of reasonableness and libertarianism (or the moral principles that give libertarianism its appeal) leads to subsistence or welfare rights on roughly the 'emergency exception' grounds, although that can probably (surely?) be reformulated in the terms of reasonableness and fairness outlined above.  But there is reasonable disagreement over really (I mean, really, c'mon) how much leeway this gives the government/state to use forcible mechanisms to move resources around on a greater-needs basis.  (Keep in mind that the primary/basic/fundamental/essential productive resource is the human mind/intellect.)  For one thing there is a really large body of economic and political-philosophical literature that speaks of the wisdom of free markets in minimizing human want or suffering across a vast range of goods and services, in raising living standards wherever they're instituted, in making for the development of capital which leads to fewer out-of-resources scenarios, etc.  (Rand famously yet widely-misunderstoodly explains all this in terms of the darn-near-explosive power of the human mind unleashed especially as that has happened in the modern period from the scientific and political Enlightenment and onward, with (in her polemical mode) statist parasites trying to divert all the fruits of that progress to their big-government programs for little or no reason (sic) other than that "the resources are there for the taking [and Rawls tells us that we should go by maximin principles as a justice-as-fairness criterion, so the proper, non-libertarian role for government/force here is to maximally improve the lives of the least advantaged, and that requires about 50% of GDP be government/force-based.]")

(Note, BTW, the implausibility of the Warren/Obama argument that billionaires are created through massive state-created infrastructure - the famously caricatured but still relevant-point-making "You didn't build that" stuff.  So, how do they explain the existence of a billionaire like John D. Rockefeller or an industrialist on the level of a Henry Ford, prior to the rise of post-New Deal big government infrastructure?  Is it the idea that more government-provided infrastructure adds to the per-capta GDP growth rate?  I rather doubt that the data available at ourworldindata.org support such a thesis.  It actually shows a fairly consistent cross-era (pre- and post-New Deal) average growth rate - so doesn't that suggest that all that extra government is just a deadweight-loss superfluity in GDP growth rate terms, thereby recommending a return to a libertarian-ish default government size?

I guess one basic question here, though, is whether the libertarian is conceding as a matter of principle that in the event that misfortune should ever exhaust a person's resources, they have a government/taxpayer-provided safety net, which is in effect conceding that there are welfare or subsistence rights.  Do we get at least this concession on behalf of a "right to well-being" when Gewirth formulates his semi-famous principle of generic consistency (PCG) in terms of rights to freedom and well-being (inasmuch as he's formulating his 'dialectical' moral framework in rights-terms...).  Put differently: is this a principle that even a John Galt could rationally-and-reasonably concede in terms of the value-hierarchy he could rationally endorse, which necesarily includes taking an appropriate stance of impartiality?  What if he's in the shoes of the unfortunate who has exhausted all resource-avenues (somehow)?

I think I'll leave that as an open question for now.  While it is an interesting question whether the kind of subsistence-rights-claim I'm talking about can still be called libertarian in some sense, the more interesting question is whether it's the right position to take.  I happen to think it is, as long as it's properly qualified and constrained.  There is an emergency-exception kind of rationale on the one hand, and then there's the reality of government taxing and spending upwards of 40% of GDP in many advanced economies today on the other hand.  Is there some kind of slippery slope from an emergency-style safety net (what else is "safety net" supposed to connote? it's not supposed to mean a hammock, as many conservatives like to point out) to government taking up half a country's (it's citizens' lives) in GDP?

Okay, to wrap this up: There's a lot of reason to believe that the libertarian principle, widely adopted in all its implications and grounding principles, would be a route to optimal human problem-solving across a vast range of cases (particularly in regard to what I take to be its Randian grounding principles about the free exercise of the human intellect - which adopted/applied universally would meet by definition for an end of history, i.e., a universally or perhaps only near-universally adopted principles of a perfectionistic or 'Aristotelian' approach to human rationality or problem-solving.  I've found the tendency for the most accomplished libertarian theorists (the Aristotelians and Randians) to be barking up that tree quite a bit more than I've been seeing the other libertarians or the non-libertarians doing so.  Communicative rationality, justice-as-fairness, or even the basic libertarian principle itself describe roughly the "form" that human reasoning ought to take on ethical (more specifically, moral or universalistic) grounds - ideas that fall more or less into the Kantian tradition of theorizing.  But the Randian-Aristotelian ground of the libertarian principle is a principle of intellectual perfectionism that applies not only to thinking in terms of mutual deliberative rationality and that cluster of Kantian-ish theories (with reasonabless front and center), but at least as importantly to the issues about how to live one's life and fulfill one's wisely-formed goals, expressed in terms of rationality (preference-satisfaction) and well-being (objective flourishing/actualizing of potentials).  (This is often associated with 'Aristotelian,' teleological, eudaemonist or happiness-oriented, self-actualization (like in David L. Norton's magisterial if not monumental Personal Destinies), perfectionism (the Dougs Den Uyl & Rasmussen; Thomas Hurka), virtue-ethics (a huge field of authors such as Anscombe, Foot, Rand, Veatch, MacIntyre, John M. Cooper, Nussbaum, Annas, and basically a lot of the moral philosophy faculty at places like Arizona and UNC-Chapel Hill.) That is to say, the intellectual perfectionism applies to the content of one's ends over and above applying the proper form of reasoning.  The very interesting question from this point on, explored in places like Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, is how mutually reinforcing these reasoning-stances are or might be.  We can have Kantian-ish constraints informing us about the reasonableness of ends to adopt as examined from the flourishing-angle - to both reasonably and rationally incorporate such contraints into one's (wisely-formed) preference-set, as it were.  And it seems to me that whatever else intellectual perfectionists ought to be, they ought to be libertarians who also recognize the problem-solving power of human intellect with all this entails.  (And it's hard to see how Rand doesn't earn high philosophical marks on this count, although I would like also to single out Gewirth - a good man, and thorough.)