Corporate Libertarians

One of the paradoxes of Robert Heinlein was that he wrote one of the two sacred texts of libertarianism (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), believed firmly in individualism, and also held the belief that military service was an essential part of that individualism.

To be sure, Heinlein explicitly stated that a healthy society was essential to the individual, so he believed that individualists must also include the social good as part of their own. It’s a sophisticated position, and I only disagree on practically all the details, especially when it leads to things like the belief that Napoleon was some sort of triumphant individualist (a position sometimes attributed to Nietzsche, or that Cesare Borgia was a paragon of enlightened self-interest (Machiavelli).

Current libertarians are less keen on their own personal membership in the military, but they do often identify with collective behavior and groups. However, for a good many libertarians, group identification seems to be with the modern corporation, sometimes called “private enterprise.” I’ll also note that “value” is often assumed to be monetary, and nothing more. For commercial enterprises, of which the public corporation is a good example, that is pretty easy to understand. It’s not quite as clear-cut for individuals, but that mistake is obviously not limited to libertarians.

This “corporate libertarian” critique does not hold for all libertarians. There is, after all, no secret libertarian handshake, no membership card, etc. Anyone can call themselves a libertarian. Still, the most annoying ones are those who fail to understand that the limited liability corporation is a profoundly privileged beast, one whose existence weakens such things as the individual right-to-contract, and individual property rights in general. I will stipulate at the outset that I think the corporation is a very powerful and useful invention, but it does require certain sorts of regulation if it isn’t to seriously harm individual rights, and often corporate libertarians seem more interested in eliminating those essential regulations than upholding the underlying individual rights.

Let’s consider how this can work with an extreme case: contract murder. I’m sure pretty much everyone would recognize that a contract to perform an illegal act is itself an illegal contract, and totally unenforceable. Furthermore, it’s pretty easy to see that both parties in a contract hit (the killer and the one who pays for the killing) are guilty of criminal conspiracy.

What would be the effect of making such contracts legal, and absolving the one who takes out the contract from penalty? Obviously this would weaken criminal law, but less obviously, it would also weaken contract law, since it would set civil law against criminal law. In a similar way, the institution of slavery weakens the institution of property, by putting property rights into opposition to human rights. Property rights in the South during the Civil War were often pretty shaky, what with the armies marching through and all.

The limited liability corporation puts many decisions behind a financial “firewall.” Stockholders and their agents (corporate boards and management) can undertake actions that, potentially, have far greater adverse consequences than they would deem acceptable if their whole net worth was at risk, as it would be in a proprietorship. This means that when individuals enter into contracts with corporations, the exchange is even more one-sided than if it were a matter of an individual contracting against someone with greater resources.

The anti-environmentalism exhibited by many corporate libertarians is another symptom of psychological projection and identification. If, for example, individuals do not have a property right on the air they breathe, then property rights (and individual rights generally) are pretty much meaningless. Similarly, if I own real property that has a stream running through it, I possess certain rights that preclude those upstream from having absolute authority over that stream as it passes through their property. In common law, this would be an easement; Federal and State laws are usually even more explicit and restrictive—to the fury of anti-environmentalists.

Similar easement rights surely exist for such things as migratory animals, flood control, protection of ground water, ecological integrity and so forth. I have an interest in all of these that is best expressed (in my view) as a property right. However, since such things are difficult to monetize, they do not show up in corporate thinking. Generally, only individuals value such things, and since corporate “rights” trump individual rights, then the corporate libertarian inevitably leans toward anti-environmentalism. For that matter, so does anyone who cannot imagine any value except insofar as it can be measured in monetary terms.

Minimum Wage

There's a concept in economics called "elasticity," more specifically, the “price elasticity of demand.” This is a concept in microeconomics, though experience tells me that it is often mistaken for macroeconomics. I have several theories about why that is, but simple ignorance is probably the real reason.

Most commodities have a relatively inelastic demand response to price changes, which is one of the reasons why firms try so hard to remove themselves from the task of supplying mere commodities by branding, or otherwise differentiating what they sell from the products of other firms, with copyright or patent protections, or some sort of barrier-to-entry strategy. One can also take advantage of commodity pricing on the upside, when there are supply crunches. The money Exxon makes from a supply scarcity of oil and gasoline (oil production or oil refining) is one such upside; oil firms literally make more money by supplying less gasoline. The electricity shortages in California a while back are another example.

But economics is a social science, and in social sciences, the “science” is often subverted by the “social.” That was the main sermon that the late John Kenneth Galbraith preached during his lifetime, and it took me longer to get it than it should have, partly (I will alibi) because he often used arguments that weren’t particularly strong. He argued, for example, that advertising does nothing but create artificial demand, and worse, that it made firms immune to consumer choices. I’d have loved to see his analysis of the “New Coke” but I don’t think he ever made one.

Still, agendas matter, and that is nowhere more obvious than in economics, and especially economists and their fellow travelers. There is a political philosophy afoot that holds “the market” (or “the free market”) to be some sort of moral fairy dust that can be sprinkled onto any policy to turn it into a just and moral action. This does, however, require some interesting mental gyrations on the part of the true believers.

Consider this analysis of the Minimum Wage, a tried and true policy of the advocates of labor. The basic argument in favor of the minimum wage should not be controversial: demand for the lowest economic value labor (sometimes called “unskilled” by those having never worked a minimum wage job) is inelastic, as befits a commodity. This means that a minimum wage above the “market clearing price” will result in some marginally lesser employment rate, but the margin will be proportionally less than the marginal increase in wages mandated by the minimum wage. In other words, the winners get more money than the losers have lost. This additional money must come from somewhere, of course, and traditional theory suggests that it comes from the business owners (and possibly managers) that have to pony up the additional wages.

Now there is a debate within the economic community as to whether or not there is any loss of employment in the minimum wage class (or in the overall labor force), at least for small enough increases. This might simply mean that the loss is too small to measure, given the other noise in the system, or it might actually mean that the increase in demand caused by a higher minimum wage (more money in the pockets of those who spend it), has a stimulative effect on the macroeconomics of the situation. In effect, minimum wage workers have more money to spend at Walmart, so Walmart has to hire more minimum wage employees. This is sometimes called the “Ford effect” because Henry Ford supposedly paid high wages to his workers so they could afford to buy automobiles.

But there isn’t really any way to make the case that the minimum wage hurts workers in general, because it simply isn’t true, and there is no intellectually honest way to make the economic argument that it does.

Nevertheless, I have seen quite a few articles, by economists, saying exactly that, in so many words. I remember one in particular, from an economist at Pepperdine University (the economics department at PU being essentially another right wing think tank, as is the one at George Mason University), that decried the terrible result that raising the minimum wage would have on the unemployment rate of black teenaged males. What are the odds that said economist has ever been concerned about the employment prospects of black teenagers in anything other than a context of arguing against policies that would actually result in monetary loss to large corporations?

But here’s where this all goes very meta. I once wrote more or less the same thing as the above in a posting to a Compuserve Forum. The result was that several other participants (who would all, I suspect, classify themselves as libertarians), simply refused to even acknowledge the argument, and castigated me for being so callous toward the unemployment that would surely result from a minimum wage hike. They were prepared to argue the does-it-or-doesn’t-it-cause-unemployment question, but the more general case of quo bono simply did not register.

Yet every one of them believed that he understood economics.

What is John Galt?

Atlas Shrugged is a hard case. It's not clear how to even start writing about it, given the aura of political weirdness that surrounds it. By almost any standard, it's science fiction. As McGuffins, it includes an engine that runs on extracting static electricity from the air, a variant of ten-point steel (Reardon metal), a cheap process for extracting unlimited oil from oil shale, and a sonic death ray. And if those weren't enough, the book culminates in a 100+ page speech given to the nation on high-jacked airways by a spooky character who has waged an underground movement against the status quo, a character who is named in the first sentence ("Who is John Galt?"), but doesn't actually appear until Part Three of a three part book.

Then there's stuff like this:

The clouds and the shafts of the skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire still holding the glow of sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one, which it is too late to stop.

That could easily come from one of the better noir novels of the period. Its roots are clearly in Black Mask pulpitry, the offspring of Chandler and Hammet. Mickey Spillane, whom Rand admired, wrote like that on occasion, and seldom was given due acknowledgment for the craft of it.

Moreover, there was a novelistic purpose to the prose; the mood was deliberately evocative of decay, and a sense of loss. Within the context of the novel and its time, it called forth images of more heroic times, of a lost age of adventure that so appeals to those nostalgic for times from before their own births. In other words, Atlas Shrugged appealed to the dreamer children, and that is also where science fiction finds its grip.

Atlas Shrugged (as well as The Fountainhead) shows up on "The book that changed my life" polls with such regularity that it's a bit embarrassing, though I'm not sure to whom, maybe just me. Still, I'd like to get some sort of handle on it, and I think the pulp/science fiction aspect of it is a major feature of its appeal.

But, just as evolutionary theory is tested by examples where adaptation is imperfect, the appeal of philosophies are best tested by the internal contradictions that its adherents swallow. The internal contradictions of Libertarian/Randian/Objectivism have been remarked upon ad nauseum, but I'm looking to see what sort of novelistic contradictions there exist in the original text. I'm not going to waste time on the obvious gap between reality-as-portrayed and reality-as-it-is. That's too easy and beside the point. Yes, it is, in fact, very rare for the heads of businesses to be the engineering, scientific, and technical brains behind the operation. That's part of the Edison mythology, and ignores the importance of Charlie Steinmetz (even if Edison himself did not). It's also pretty clear from the boardroom scenes in Atlas Shrugged that Rand had never actually been in a boardroom (if I were a certain sort of catty person—which I am not—I would make a similar remark about bedrooms, but all evidence is that Rand knew her way around a bedroom, and furthermore, knew just how important fantasy was in that setting). Still, it's worth noting that, in Atlas Shrugged, when businesspeople make remarks about "helping the underprivileged," they seem to actually mean doing something that might have an adverse impact on their own bottom line, and that is somewhat less believable to this reader than the sonic death ray.

But this is beating around the bush, as it were, and I wish to draw attention to a very important feature of Atlas Shrugged, and that is the failure of its primary sexual narrative.

The point of view character and protagonist of the novel is female, Dagney Taggart, who is, at novel's beginning, the Vice-President in Charge of Operations of Taggart Transcontinental. Dagney is the granddaughter of the founder of the company (more-or-less modeled on Cornelius Vanderbuilt), while her brother, James is the incompetent President, whom she must always work around to make the railroad a success. James is supposedly a good "Washington man," able to get government concessions and favors from the Federal government, and, remember, I'm not going to discuss the unrealistic political economics of the book.

The first section of Atlas Shrugged, from one viewpoint at least, consists of getting Dagney into bed with the first male protagonist, Henry (Hank) Rearden, the head of Rearden Steel, who has just created ten-point steel…I mean, Reardon Metal, an unlikely (from a metallurgical standpoint) alloy of iron and copper. It's a superstrong alloy, and, naturally, everyone in the business and scientific community is against it, apparently because it's so good, and doesn't conform to theory and stuff like that. Dagney and Hank are first business partners, trying to get a railroad line to the previously mentioned shale oil fields, and to do this they have to reinforce a bridge, which is done with Rearden Metal, so there's this fantastic high-speed train ride through Denver, over the bridge, etc., into the Valley of the Oil Shale, or whatever it's called, and at the end of it, Taggart and Rearden have frenzied sex, because, well, come on now, this is Ayn Rand writing here, and both of them are rich, good-looking, talented, and very highly sexed.

Afterwards, Rearden, who is already married, has an attack of conscience and gets all moralistic and self-loathing, but Dagney laughs it off and convinces him that sex is good, which, frankly, isn't that difficult a bit of persuasion, is it? Still, it would never have been necessary with Howard Roark, the previous Randian protagonist with initials HR.

Later, Reardon's wife goes absolutely ballistic when she learns that he's having an affair with Taggart, and not, as she first thought some chorus girl or other cheap tart. Rand gets this bit of psychology almost perfectly correct, including the fact that Rearden is so clueless that he thinks that his wife would be more ready to accept his affair with Taggart, because it's high romance rather than low and tawdry, i.e. when it actually threatens his marriage, rather than being a cheap bit on the side.

Okay, we'll now fast forward over the second part of the book, Either-Or, which has its points, especially the ongoing romance/sexual frenzy between Dagney and Hank, plus the slow deterioration of the country (and our heroes' fortunes) as the evil altruistic philosophies roaming the land devour the wealth of the country's creators, and as those creative sorts slowly disappear, one by one, into some mysterious Void. Even the dull reader will, by the end of Either-Or (probably even earlier) guess that this John Galt fellow has something to do with it, and the brighter readers will have figured out that all the cool people are leaving their posts because John Galt or one of his minions has talked them into it.

Okay, let's leave that odd little point for a bit, though it is odd isn't it, that all these rich and talented folks are walking away from their fortunes and place in society? And it's a lot of them, with nary a one of them blowing the whistle, or blabbing to somebody who might take note of it.

But Part Three, A is A (for all you comic book fans, that's where Ditko's "Mr. A" comes from), finds Dagney Taggart, after crashing her plane in a small Colorado valley at the end of Part Two, waking up in "Galt's Gulch." And who should be her rescuer but the fabled John Galt?

All right, blah, blah, blah, Dagney can't yet bring herself to retire from the world and join the strikers. Yes, that's what they are, strikers. It's "the mind on strike," because, you know, businessmen are such intellectuals. Okay, there's also artists, composers, scientists, engineers, etc. Yeah, yeah, every artist I've even known knew his Schopenhauer. And read Aristotle in the original Greek. Crap, I said I wasn't going to do that.

Anyway, Galt pretty much effortlessly, I mean effortlessly, takes over Taggart's affections. Another of her former lovers, Francisco d'Anconia, is also in Galt's Gulch, but although he is damned dashing and all, he doesn't measure up to Galt. No one does, not really. Not even Hank Rearden, who later in the book, gives up the rights to Rearden Metal to save Taggart the public humiliation (!) of the exposure of their affair. Taggart then exposes the affair herself, on national radio, but Rearden figures out that she's fallen for someone else because she only uses the past tense.

Then, blah, blah, blah, hundred page speech from Galt explaining how the world really works, everyone who isn't a total asshole joins the strike, cut, fade to black and well, who knows what happens afterwards, the dictatorship of the intelligentsia? Some sort of Objectivist paradise perhaps.

Or maybe not.

Consider. You've got these two folks, Taggert and Rearden. They are as individualistic as they come. They come together (so to speak) over shared interests and passions, share triumphs and some defeats. They are star-crossed lovers.

Then this guy Galt waltzes in, Taggert swoons and Rearden lets it happen. And none of these folks, not the industrialists, the heirs of great fortune, the artists, composers, writers, the damn pirate even, none of them go against the class. All these rugged individualists join in a collective action, a strike, for God's sake.

How is this possible? I can come up with only one, plausible within the context of science fiction, answer.

John Galt is a Slan. Maybe he doesn't have tendrils, but slans don't have to have tendrils. But he's super-smart, capable of inventing a fantastic new energy device all by his lonesome. He's super-attractive, because, well, slans are like that. And he obviously has some sort of mind control power, just like Jommy Cross developed in Slan. Galt may not be an exact van Vogtian slan, but he's obviously some sort of telepathic mind-controlling mutant. It's the only reading of Atlas Shrugged that makes any sort of sense.

Because otherwise, all these rugged individualists would have had to have taken up exactly the same political ideology and exactly the same course of collective action in support of that ideology. And that's too implausible to believe. It's just ridiculous.

The Guy on the Bike

There was a bar in Berkeley where I used to hang out. I mentioned it in the acknowledgements in SunSmoke, because I often did some writing there. It was also a place I often went to have a beer after an Aikido practice. The first beer after Aikido doesn’t count, is the way I sometimes put it. Sometimes you’ve sweated so much that they first beer is like pouring water onto dry sand.

Neither the post-Aikido beer, nor the writing explain why I was often there at closing time, though, nor could massive alcohol consumption, since I tended to nurse each beer for at least an hour and rarely had more than three in an evening. I did like the ambiance of the place, though. A friend of a friend nicknamed the place “The Fellini Bar,” because of the weird décor—stuffed animals, manikins, that sort of thing.

One evening near closing, one of the waitresses asked my help in dealing with a guy who was “off.” You get pretty fond of the waitresses when you spend a lot of time in a bar, so I went over to the guy and offered to walk him home. He lived only a few blocks away, and he sensed that it was a good idea to take me up on the offer. He wasn’t too far gone to realize that he’d been scaring someone.

The guy had serious brain damage. He was living in a halfway house hotel on Shattuck Avenue, and I sat a while with him in his room, chatting. He’d done his best to decorate the room with magazine cut-out photos on the wall, a knick-knack here and there. He was trying his best. One of the things I learned was that after so bad a head trauma accident, one of the most important things that all the medical professionals tried to indoctrinate him with was that it was not okay to simply finish the job and kill himself. His speech would periodically return to what were obviously slogans that they’d fed him, e.g. “Now is not my time.”

He told me that it was from a motorcycle accident over ten years before. As I say, he was obviously trying to make the best of it, but there wasn’t much “best” to be had, especially because he remembered what it had once been like to be able to think and speak clearly.

There was much food for thought in our little encounter, much of it not relevant here, but there is one thing that came to me with considerable force: the guy who stepped onto the bike was not the guy that I was dealing with. People can yammer all they want about how it’s “their business” if they want to risk their lives, etc. etc. and I might be tempted to agree on principle. But it isn’t just “their business.” It’s also the business of whoever comes out the other side, the guy who isn’t them any longer, but who has a vague memory of having been them, once upon a time. And it’s the business of every waitress they’ll ever scare, and every guy who’ll ever have to walk them home.

Further Black Swan Bashing

I previously vented some annoyance on The Black Swan (The Impact of the Highly Improbable), by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but that was primarily an excuse to engage in a little pedantry on the Central Limit Theorem and statistical distributions in general. This one’s going to be a little more directly critical of Taleb and his status as a self-described “maverick” and “empiricist.” Actually, I think I’m going to have some fun.

Consider this passage:

If you want to see what I mean by the arbitrariness of categories, check the situation in polarized politics. The next time a Martian visits earth, try to explain to him why those who favor allowing the elimination of a fetus in the mother’s womb also oppose capital punishment. Or try to explain to him why those who accept abortion are supposd to be favorable to high taxation but against a strong military. Why do those who prefer sexual freedom need to be against individual economic liberty?

The first thing that leaps out, of course, is that the viewpoint taken is that sort of Movement Conservative Libertarianism that so pisses me off. Is there any doubt, for example, that Taleb is anti-abortion, anti-income tax, pro-military, and a “free marketeer?” I mean, could someone who wasn’t these things make such ridiculous arguments?

Take the first one, about how explaining a Pro-Choice, Anti-Death Penalty stance to a Martian. Is there any sentient creature, imaginary or otherwise, who could not tell that there are some pretty serious differences between a fetus and an adult human being? I mean, this isn’t a matter of ideology even; it’s a matter of basic perception. Adult human: quite large. Fetus: very small, at times even microscopic.

Moreover, it’s actually very hard to find even an anti-abortion proponent who behaves as if fetuses are equivalent to even newborn infants (to say nothing of adult humans). No one who believes the fetus=infant equation can possibly be in favor of rape/incest exemptions, given that no one claims that it’s okay to kill an infant who was the product of either. And of the people who are against such exemptions, the overlap with being against all forms of birth control is very large—again not supporting the fetus=infant argument very well, but doing a good job of supporting the keeping-women-in-their-place argument.

Part of what Taleb is doing here is “inverting” a liberal argument about the hypocrisy of being “Pro-Life” and in favor of the Death Penalty. But that’s always been a pretty weak pro-Choice argument. The real issue at stake is whether or not the state, through its agent of government, should have the power of life and death. The classic Liberal position is “No,” and holds that the state should not demand that a woman give birth against her wishes (making the granting of life a matter of state power), nor should it have the power to execute (putting death on the state’s control panel as well).

So although Taleb’s first example is both weird and silly, at least his logical inversion, can, with a lot of effort, be justified (although I seriously doubt that any anti-choice crusader would admit that they were actually after the Power of Life and Death, by projection, onto religion and subsequent devolution of religious authority to the state). But the next inversion is just stupid.

Even begging the question of whether liberals are for “high taxes” or, rather, for highly progressive taxes (Taleb, being wealthy, may have some difficulty understanding the difference), to believe that there is some contradiction or even “arbitrariness” between advocating high taxes and a weak military is to believe that you can think of nothing to spend taxes on except the military. Would Taleb’s hypothetical Martian have trouble comprehending say, Sweden? Not a very bright Martian, I think.

Again, this is an inversion problem. While one can, without logical contradiction, be in favor of high taxation without a strong military, one cannot really be in favor of a strong military without advocating high taxation. (I’m ignoring the case where the military is self-financing via tribute, since, first, the tribute is still a form of taxation, and second, no one has been able to make that work since the British Empire, as nearly as I can tell, and I’ve heard arguments against that one).

True, there are some people now who do, in fact, advocate a strong military and low income tax rates, but they are advocates of Supply-Side Economics. You know, morons.

But the last one is the real tell. Isn’t “individual economic liberty” a great phrase? I wonder what Taleb thinks it means.

I’d be willing to guess that he doesn’t mean the liberty to can your own produce, spin your own thread, make your own clothing, or even grow your own marijuana for personal use. Just a guess there. But usually, “economics” carries this notion of “trade” along with it, and it takes two to tango, as it were. And it takes a lot more than two to create a market. So why this “individual” modifier?

One possibility is that Taleb put the word “individual” in the phrase, because if he’d left it at “economic liberty” then it would have occurred to someone (maybe Taleb) that he was actually talking about the “liberty” of large organizations to exert massive economic advantages over individuals.

Of course it’s also possible, even likely, that by “individual economic liberty” he was talking about the “liberty” of single individuals to go into the Big Casino and place their bets. Come to think of it though, that’s rather the same thing, isn’t it? The gamblers always think of themselves as individualists, when actually they’re just appendages of The Game.

Taleb seems to have made a nice chunk of change in the trading of derivatives in the 1980s, and one might consider the possibility that his views reflect both his experiences and the general mind-set of those around him at the time, the trader as “rugged individual.” Taleb also says that he hates narratives (though his book is primarily a string of anecdotes) and dislikes being stereotyped. He seems to believe that he has escaped from his upbringing and the narratives of his own experience to achieve clear insight and a contrarian and skeptical worldview.

To quote Karl Hess: Spare me.

Color Blind Spot

On January 2, 2003, Allen Newsome, 17, attempted to rob what he thought was a pizza delivery man who had come to his apartment building in Harlem, New York City. He used what has been described in various reports as a “pellet gun,” a “BB gun,” or a “toy gun.” It looked, however, like a “real gun,” just as an undercover police officer apparently looked like a “real pizza delivery man.” Newsome was shot and killed.

The news reports on Newsome’s death were used by Brooklyn councilman Albert Vann, and Queens councilman David Weprin to garner support for a bill they had introduced to the NYC City Council to ban toy guns from the city. Obviously they weren’t prescient; they were basing their advocacy on previous cases, such as the August 1998 case of a 16-year-old New York boy bearing a submachine gun water pistol who was shot six times in the legs by polic or the 1994 case of another boy, this one 13, who was shot and killed by a police officer who mistook his toy gun for the real thing.

The Libertarian Party sprung into action. Sensing a threat to our constitutional rights to keep and bear toy guns, Jim Lesczynski, spokesman for the Manhattan Libertarian Party announced a “Guns for Tots” program, to collect and distribute toy guns to the kids of P.S. 72 in Harlem before the ban could take hold.

The Daily Show had a good chuckle. The “Guns for Tots” program itself was not very successful, given that the Principal of P.S. 72 told the students to keep away from those strange white men, and some parents came and denounced the Libertarians as racists.

I bought up the “Guns for Tots” matter to my Libertarian college buddy Jeff, as part of a conversation about the extent to which racism plays a part in Libertarian politics, and in the politics of “self-identified” libertarians. The latter group, to my certain knowledge and from direct observation, includes some outright bigots, and White Supremacists.

Jeff told me, “But I know Jim Lesczynski, and he’s not a racist. He was just making fun of some politicians that he thought were pushing a stupid idea.”

Let’s consider that proposition for a bit. Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that somehow Jim Lesczynski has managed to grow up in America without a shred of racism in his entire being, a true example of what another Comedy Central guru, Stephen Colbert says: “I don’t see race. People tell me that I’m white.” Let’s, for the purposes of analysis, grant the hypothetical.

Even granting that extreme unlikelihood, how clueless do you have to be to not understand that, in the context of a discussion about how the police are mistaking toy guns for real guns and killing the holders thereof, that handing out toy guns to young children in Harlem is going to result in the perception that you are in favor of having the police kill young children in Harlem? And Harlem children are the very emblem of “not white.” They may not be all “black” any more, given immigration and such, but there aren’t very many of them who are going to be put in the same racial group as Stephen Colbert.

Moreover, this was a PR stunt. There are about a million issues that are more important to the cause of liberty, however you want to define that term, than whether or not children in a particular city get to have super-soakers. This entire thing was a media event attracting media moths, and the Libertarians went for the flame. And if you are going to go after publicity, if you are trying to make points for your cause, whatever that cause might be, it is up to you to make sure that the right message gets across. Whining about how people “misunderstood” just means that you’ve screwed up.

When I was researching this, my favorite argument against the toy gun ban was that “there aren’t many cases” where children had been killed by police who thought the gun was real. Not “none,” you understand. Just “not many.”

There is absolutely no cannibalism in this navy, and when I say absolutely none I mean there is a certain amount. - Monty Python

Enough hypotheticals. Do I think that Jim Lesczynski and the Manhattan Libertarian Party was being racist? Damn right I do. They could have made their point by handing out toy guns to white kids (and maybe made the point that white kids aren’t so much at risk of being shot by the police for holding a toy gun). They could have kept their mouths shut on this one and kept issuing press releases about medical marijuana and other issues where they’re on the side of the angels. But instead, I’ll bet anything that some of them chuckled and grinned at how “daring” and “politically incorrect” they were being, and how they could really make “liberals” fume, and how cool that made them.

I am also absolutely sure that the idea that they were being racist never entered their minds, because, like so many people, they think that you have to be a Nazi or a segregationist, or some other sort of obvious bigot to be a racist. The idea that there can be unconscious racism, that it can affect the way you perceive others or even yourself and your own actions, never enters their minds.

Libertarians, I think, and I’m thinking here of the real-deal Libertarians, the ones who believe in reason, and individual action and responsibility, and the entire philosophical hook, line, and sinker, are particularly vulnerable to this failing. The problem with a blind spot is not just that you can’t see what’s in it, but also because you can’t see the blind spot either.