Author Archive
Realizing Freedom
Last month, I talked with Reason senior editor Michael C. Moynihan on Reason.tv about my book Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice.
Victim in Egyptian Jail… Letters Will Help
From the FreeKareem.org website:
You can write to the Egyptian Ambassador to help his case. Please be polite and respectful.
More information available at www.FreeKareem.org. I wrote about the case in 2007 here and here.
G. A. Cohen
I was contacted by several people about the death of G. A. Cohen, to whose ideas I devoted a chapter of my book Realizing Freedom. (The chapter, originally published in Critical Review, is also available in a PDF form here.)
I’ll just make two points about Cohen here, as I believe it generally best (there are exceptions) not to speak ill of the dead. In a meeting in his office when he reviewed an early draft of the essay above, he admitted that I had found a serious flaw, but demanded to know (and “demanded” is the right word) what my point was: “Are you attacking the argument, or the conclusion?!” I said I did not understand the question. He answered, “Well, the conclusion does not follow from the argument, so which are you attacking?” I was rather flabbergasted, and replied that the conclusion of an argument is a part of the argument, not some separate thing. But that was not how he saw things, and it showed in his entire career.
There are arguments, and there are conclusions. You attach yourself to a conclusion, and then you look for arguments that lead to it. That’s why he was an “analytical Marxist,” i.e., someone who agreed with what he took to be Marx’s conclusions, but who thought that the arguments by which Marx reached them were erroneous or fallacious, so his job was to come up with new arguments. If those didn’t work, you kept the conclusion and looked for other arguments. (In this case, however, despite acknowledging to me that his argument failed to reach the conclusion, he never acknowledged it publicly, but took some pains to lobby journals not to publish my critique, as was confided to me by editors of those journals.)
To get a sense of what kind of man he was, think a bit on this defense of the Soviet Union:
The Soviet Union needed to be there as a defective model so that, with one eye on it, we could construct a better one. It created a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism.*
Millions had to die so that Cohen and his rich friends could enjoy “a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism.” Words almost fail me. But not entirely. He should have spent his life begging forgiveness from all of the people who suffered from his pro-Soviet (he spent a good bit of his youth as a Soviet propagandist, which was essentially a family enterprise) and pro-Communist activities. He was no different than any old National Socialist who might have regretted that National Socialism wasn’t nationally socialist enough, but who enjoyed the “mental space” it created to construct fantasies of an ideal life.
I will merely point out that his attacks on charity and assistance to others is consistent, not only with his political philosophy, but with his personality and life.
*From p. 250 of his 1995 book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), in which he strings together the “argument” that does not lead to the “conclusion” that property rights are unjustified.
Spinning…When a President who Seeks Dictatorial Powers in an Illegal Move Is Removed by the Congress and by the Supreme Court, Is it a “Military Coup”?
The media discussion of events in Honduras is remarkably confused. Here’s CNN:
The president of the U.N. General Assembly scheduled a noon session Monday to discuss the situation in Honduras, following a military-led coup that ousted the sitting president.
and
Micheletti, the head of Congress, became president after lawmakers voted by a show of hands to strip Zelaya of his powers, with a resolution stating that Zelaya “provoked confrontations and divisions” within the country.
….
The coup came on the same day that he had vowed to follow through with a nonbinding referendum that the Honduran Supreme Court had ruled illegal.
Imagine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or some other American president had decided to overturn the Constitution so that he could stay in power beyond the constitutionally limited time. To do that, he orders a nationwide referendum that is not constitutionally authorized and blatantly illegal. The Federal Election Commission rules that it is illegal. The Supreme Court rules that it is illegal. The Congress votes to strip the president of his powers and, as members of Congress are not that good at overcoming the president’s personally loyal and handpicked bodyguards, they send police and military to arrest the president. Now, which party is guilty of leading a coup?
This is another example of populist, dictatorial, anti-democratic thought parading as “democratic.” I discuss the issue in my recent lecture on enduring democracy in New Delhi.
How Protectionism Crashed the World Economy…and How to Stop It This Time Around
A coalition of more than 70 groups around the world, from Canada to Brazil to Kyrgyzstan to Germany to China to Japan to Kenya, has joined together to stop the dangerous stirrings of protectionism. The FreedomToTrade.org coalition (coordinated internationally by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the International Policy Network) has circulated a petition (signed by over 1,000 economists and thousands of others) and is now producing documentaries to alert the public to the dangers posed by protectionism. This one is on the role the Smoot-Hawley Tariff played in turning a serious recession into the Great Depression.
The mini-documentary is also being made available in 12 other languages. The Spanish version will be available on Cato’s Spanish-language project, ElCato.org. Others are available on YouTube.
This information is important and needs to be widely shared. Pass it on…
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
Food Crisis
AfricanLiberty.org has created a powerful short video on causes of the food crisis.
It’s also available in French from UnMondeLibre.org. A Portuguese version should be available Monday on OrdemLivre.org. Russian and other versions will be available soon.
Filed under: General; International Economics and Development
Milton Friedman Prize Selection Committee Member Arrested
The Ugandan government has arrested Andrew Mwenda, a member of the 2008 International Selection Committee for the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, along with his fellow journalists Odobo Bichachi and John Njoroge. Andrew Mwenda is a brave journalist who tells it like he sees it. He is well known for standing up for the rights of others; his involvement in the Milton Friedman Prize is only one element of his long commitment to human rights. It’s time that others stand up for his rights and those of Odobo Bichachi and Jhohn Njoroge. Cordial email letters to the Ugandan Embassy and the Ugandan government urging them to release the journalists and respect press freedom can make a difference:
His Excellency Professor Perezi K. Kamunanwire
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Fax: (202) 726 1727
pkamunanwire@ugandaembassyus.org
Mr. Charles Ssentongo
Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM)/ Minister Counselor
Fax: (202) 726 1727
Cssentongo@ugandaembassyus.org
Mr. Emmanuel Bwomono Olobo
First Secretary
Fax: (202) 726 1727
ebwomono-olobo@ugandaembassyus.org
Mr. Michael Karugaba
Second Secretary
Fax: (202) 726 1727
mkarugaba@ugandaembassyus.org
(In addition to being an outspoken advocate and practitioner of a free press, Andrew Mwenda is an outspoken proponent of development through the free market. Here is Andrew explaining the failures of “foreign aid.”)
Atilla Yayla Found Guilty
Atilla Yayla, the courageous leader of the Association for Liberal Thinking in Turkey, who has spoken at the Cato Institute and taken part in Cato conferences and programs, has been found guilty of allegedly insulting the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The 15 month prison sentence was suspended.
Background from my previous blog posts here and here.
The New York Times ran a piece on Friday on the likely direction for freedom of speech in Turkey, “Turkey to Alter Speech Law,” which focuses on Atilla’s case.
Atilla is a brave man and a friend of the liberty of everyone. Please write to the Turkish Ambassador in your country, respectfully (please) requesting that proceedings be undertaken to void the sentence. Here is the info for the Turkish Embassy in the USA.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; International Economics and Development; Law and Civil Liberties; Political Philosophy
Freedom for Kareem November 9
November 9 will mark 1 year in jail for an innocent young man, sentenced to four years in prison for expressing his opinions on his blog.
Raja Kamal of the University of Chicago and I told the story in “Freedom for an Egyptian Blogger and Freethinker” last February in the Washington Post. You can get more details, including how you can help take part in a dignified protest for human rights, write letters to Egyptian officials, and more, at www.freekareem.org.
Arabic Lamp of Liberty Re-Lit!
Arabs have had almost no access to the literature and the ideas of liberty….until now. The Misbah al Hurriyya (“Lamp of Liberty”) project of the Cato Institute is bringing Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and many more thinkers to the Arab public. The team behind the Lamp of Liberty, notably Editor Fadi Haddadin and Business and Promotions Manager Ghaleb Hijazi, have outdone themselves with a newly redesigned website for the project: www.misbahalhurriyya.org.
It’s got more than a new look, though. Now you can see the incredible success of Ghaleb’s syndication of hundreds of articles to the Arab press, find information on Misbah al Hurriyya books, including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Policy, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Johan Norberg’s In Defense of Global Capitalism, and the Economic Freedom of the World Report, and browse through hundreds of studies, articles, and essays. The site also features Mudawwanat al Hurriyya (“Blog of Liberty”), an interactive map of economic freedom (in the bottom left corner), policy debates, video streaming of interviews, online books, and much, much more.
Even those who can’t read Arabic will appreciate the ingenuity and brilliant design of the site. And when you know that it’s presenting a positive alternative to the violence, oppression, and poverty that have plagued so much of the Middle East and North Africa, you will know that the positive attractions of what Adam Smith called “the simple system of natural liberty” – rather than more violence and military force – are a powerful response to the ideas of statism and intolerance. Ideas aren’t generally defeated with mere force; ultimately, it takes another idea.
The re-designed Arabic Lamp of Liberty will be joined soon by its Kurdish [www.chiraiazadi.org] and Persian [www.cheragehazadi.org] sister projects. They’re all part of Cato’s Center for Promotion of Human Rights family of projects, including the existing Spanish [www.elcato.org] and Russian [www.cato.ru] projects (each with books, podcasts, websites, and more) and forthcoming Portuguese, Azeri, French, and African (in English, French, and Portuguese) initiatives. Ten team members of the African initiative will meet in Tanzania at the African Resource Bank meeting in a few weeks. Anyone who’s interested in supporting the promotion of libertarian ideas and policies around the world should contact the Institute. (Any funds specified for a particular language or region will be spent only on works in that language or region.)
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; International Economics and Development; Political Philosophy
A Jailed Blogger and What You Can Do
I’ve got a detailed piece on National Review Online on the case of Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman, sentenced to four years in prison in Egypt for the crime of … blogging.
Filed under: General; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Free Kareem Rallies February 15
Friends of freedom will be at dignified rallies in cities around the world on behalf of Abdelkareem, who is awaiting sentencing in Egypt for expressing his opinions on his blog. Rallies will be held in New York, London, Ottawa, Chicago, Bucharest, Washington, Rome, and Paris, and we are hoping for other cities.
In Washington, friends of freedom will gather at noon on February 15 at the Egyptian Cultural and Educational Bureau: 1303 New Hampshire Ave, NW; Washington, DC, near Dupont Circle.
Visit http://www.freekareem.org/ for more details. If you can spare an hour on February 15, please join those who are standing for freedom of speech….and for the freedom of a young man who — agree with him or not — merely spoke his mind.
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If You’re in New York and Can Spare a Little Time, You Could Spare a Life
Former Cato Institute interns and New York residents Constantino Diaz-Duran and Chris Kilmer are organizing an effort on behalf of an Egyptian student they’ve never met who faces a terrible penalty for writing his opinions on his personal blog. The event will take place Wednesday, January 31 starting at 3:30 pm at the Egyptian Consulate in New York at 1110 2nd Avenue, between E. 58th and E. 59th.
Kareem is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday. A respectful message to the Egyptian government — whether in front of the Consulate or by email, fax, or phone — encouraging them to do the right thing and let him go could save a young man’s life.
Please Help This Young Man
This case is extremely important. The fates of a young man and of freedom of speech are at stake. Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman will be sentenced on Thursday for alleged crimes in Egypt, including insulting the president. Please read about his case at http://www.freekareem.org/.
Please send a respectful letter by fax or email to the Egyptian Embassy requesting that the Egyptian government correct the error of arresting him and allow him his freedom.
Filed under: General; International Economics and Development; Law and Civil Liberties
Attention, Legal and Political Thinkers: A New Scholarly Resource
There’s a new resource from Italy’s Instituto Bruno Leoni: a scholarly web resource on the ideas and work of the great legal scholar for whom the Institute is named, “Rediscovering Bruno Leoni.” It has both Italian and English versions and includes mp3 files of some of Leoni’s lectures.
Leoni showed a deep understanding of law and its relationship to voluntary social order. His work on the evolution of law greatly influenced F. A. Hayek and other writers who outlived him. In contrast to prevailing views, he argued that law is not simply an assertion of power, as the legal positivists insist, i.e., a set of “commands of a sovereign,” but traces back to the claims made by individuals and adjudicated through a complex process of interaction. As Leoni argued in “Law as Claim of the Individual,”
The legal process always traces back in the end to individual claim. Individuals make the law, insofar as they make successful claims. They not only make previsions and predictions, but try to have these predictions succeed by their own intervention in the process. Judges, juris-consults, and, above all, legislators are just individuals who find themselves in a particular position to influence the whole process through their own intervention.
The cases we bring to court and the cases we don’t all are part of the law-making process. The role played by elected legislators is important in the creation of a legal order, but it is almost always overrated. Most of the law that governs our everyday lives resulted from relatively decentralized common law (or Roman law) processes, and not from the “commands” of sovereigns.
Additional resources on Bruno Leoni (and on many hundreds of other deep thinkers) can be found at the extensive and brilliantly organized “Online Library of Liberty.”
Other writers with a similar appreciation of law as an evolved body of rules of just conduct include Lon Fuller of Harvard Law School (especially in his classic work The Morality of Law), F. A. Hayek (notably in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. I: Rules and Order; his classic 1945 American Economic Review essay on “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is must reading for understanding complex social processes, including the evolution of law), and Randy Barnett of Georgetown University, a Cato Institute senior fellow and author of Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty and The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law.
So, budding law students and political scientists. Have at it!
Filed under: General; Law and Civil Liberties; Political Philosophy
Jailed for a Blog
Please Help This Young Man
Yesterday’s International Herald Tribune ran this article by my admired friends Dalia Ziada and Jesse Sage:
CAIRO: In a cramped jail cell in Alexandria, Egypt, sits a soft-spoken 22- year-old student. Kareem Amer was sent to prison for over a month for allegedly “defaming the president of Egypt” and “highlighting inappropriate aspects that harm the reputation of Egypt.” Where did Amer commit these supposed felonies? On his weblog.
If the Alexandria prosecutors’ standards of censorship were applied in the United States or Europe, thousands upon thousands of bloggers would be behind bars. The basic right of individual free expression is sadly not respected in today’s Egypt. Yet the authorities’ decision to jail an obscure student for his writing reveals a larger struggle for free speech playing out between dissident bloggers and state prosecutors across the Middle East.
That gives the basics of the case. The entire article is available here.
Thousands have already signed the online petition (but more are needed for it to be effective). Others are writing respectful letters (the only kind that work) to the Egyptian authorities. Resources, including banner ads for blogs and websites, information, press coverage, and more, are available at www.FreeKareem.org.
Enlightenment Thinking on the Move: Economic Freedom of the World Report Now in Arabic
Thanks to the hard work of my colleagues Fadi Haddadin and Ghaleb Hijazi, who run Cato’s Arabic website Misbahalhurriyya.org, an elegant Arabic edition of the 2006 Economic Freedom of the World Report has now been released. The Arabic version was unveiled at a recent meeting in Beirut organized by the Fraser Institute of Canada and the Friedrich-Naumann Stiftung of Germany that we attended with our colleague Andrei Illarionov.
The printing of the Arabic edition was gorgeous, as were the cool brochures and other materials that Fadi and Ghaleb had produced in Jordan. The entire report in Arabic is available online now for downloading in PDF format. The availability of such thorough-going comparisons should, I hope, introduce a greater degree of cause-and-effect thinking into discussions of policy, which would be a great advance over the conspiracy theorizing that is unfortunately so common in the Middle East. (Besides all the data, it includes William Easterly’s hard-hitting critique of “foreign aid,” “Freedom vs. Collectivism in Foreign Aid.”)
The printed edition of the report was also delivered to the economics and politics editors at An Nahar, Al Hayat, and other papers (many more are in the mail) and will be distributed at the upcoming meeting of Arab economists in Kuwait this weekend. Congratulations to Fadi and Ghaleb and their team for such a success.
Our colleague Andrei Illarionov gave a remarkable presentation, based on statistical data, on the roots of economic stagnation in the Arab Middle East. A condensed version will appear in the Arabic press, and — if I can cajole him — in English, Spanish, Russian, and other languages.
Filed under: Cato Publications; International Economics and Development
Turkish Classical Liberal Defends Himself and Free Speech
I blogged earlier about the unpleasant experiences of a Turkish friend, Professor Atilla Yayla, whose remarks got him in hot water in Turkey, including suspension from his post as a professor at Gazi University and public denunciations as a traitor. He has now written a vigorous defense of freedom of speech in Turkey for the International Herald Tribune, “Freedom of Expression in Turkey.” As Atilla explains,
After my fear and panic in the first few days, I think I now understand why this is happening.
I am a well-known classical liberal. I openly defend human rights for everybody. That naturally includes the rights of Kurds and conservative Muslims.
The Kemalists hate my attitude, but they are not able to challenge and refute my ideas. Their opportunity came with this event and they turned my criticism of Kemalism into an insult against Ataturk.
But Turkish journalists, cartoonists, writers and academics face more than just state ideology and trial by media. Law 5816 prohibits publicly “insulting Ataturk’s memory.” Just to be sure, Article 301 of the penal code stipulates prison for “public denigration of Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey” or “the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial institutions of the State, the military or security structures.”
Yayla is a well known classical liberal in Turkey. He has devoted his life to defending the rights of everyone, regardless of religion, language, nationality, ethnicity, gender, or other characteristics. Now it’s time for others to defend his rights.
Free Markets, Limited Government, and the Arab World
Today is the second day of the Economic Freedom of the World network meeting in Beirut, at which Cato has an international presence. (The conference is organized by our good friends at the Fraser Institute of Canada and the Jordan office of Germany’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation.)
My colleagues Ghaleb Hijazi and Fadi Haddadin brought from Jordan the beautifully printed and bound full Arabic edition of the Economic Freedom of the World report. The Arabic edition (which will soon be available online) is beautiful and really impressive. They also distributed for the first time the new brochures for Misbahalhurriyya.org, Cato’s Arabic libertarian website and publishing service, as well as other products for Arabic readers. We got a preview yesterday of a series that they helped to produce with Al Jazeera on examples of successful free-market entrepreneurship in the Arab world. They’ll be run on television over the next month.
One of my colleagues gave a really interesting presentation that looked at the roots of Arab economic stagnation, during which he used data to show that it’s not religion, it’s not ethnicity, and it’s not even oil — it’s state-owned oil monopolies that have been responsible since the 1970s for lagging economic performance in the Arab world. (In particular, his data on the difference between Arab OPEC members and Arab non-OPEC members were quite interesting.)
A number of foreign participants, as well as a lot of the Lebanese participants — notably the government ministers — had to cancel their participation in the conference due to security concerns, but for those who did come, it all seems rather peaceful. (On the other hand, given the recent attempts to bring down the government through extra-electoral means, if I were a Lebanese minister, I might not go to a lot of public events, either.) Today’s sessions are focused on auditing the performance of Arab governments and identifying and reducing or eliminating barriers to trade, obstacles to entrepreneurship, and so on.
I walked with some of the other participants (from Turkey, Poland, Russia, Georgia, Jordan, and Canada) to visit the Hezbollah camp in front of the prime minister’s office last night. It was quite an interesting experience. (I posted some photos on my personal website of posters with Hugo Chavez and Hezbollah’s Nasrallah, which seemed popular there.)
This afternoon and over the next few days my colleagues and I will be meeting with newspapers and publishing houses.
The Results of Defending Freedom of Religion and Referring to “This Man” in Turkey?
A respected political scientist, Dr. Atilla Yayla of the Gazi University of Ankara, Turkey, has been dismissed from his teaching position and pilloried in the press in Turkey for daring publicly to make critical remarks about the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose version of “secularism” has meant state control of and suppression of religion.
Kemalist secularism is not well understood by Americans and Europeans. As Dr. Yayla put it some years ago (about 10, I think) at a seminar on Islam and civil society I organized for him at the Cato Institute, “People say that you have separation of church and state in America and we have separation of mosque-and-church and state in Turkey. In America, that means freedom of religion. In Turkey, it means freedom from religion. There is a great difference between the two.” Private property, contract, and limited government, he argued, should create the framework for people to decide on their own, through voluntary cooperation, whether and how to build a mosque, a church, a synagogue, or anything else. Such decisions should not be made by state officials.
Atilla was calm during the hot discussion that followed and offered a voice of reason and true liberalism, as passionate secularists and Islamists around the seminar table argued against each other, the former for suppressing and controlling religion by force and the latter for imposing it by force. One secularist even showed a calculation of how many square meters a Muslim needs to pray, multiplied it by the Muslim population of Turkey, calculated the number of square meters of Mosque space in Turkey, and concluded that Turkey had a 50 percent surplus capacity of Mosque space, and therefore that no more should be allowed to be built. Dr. Yayla suggested that that decision should be left to the religious devotion of the faithful, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or otherwise, and calmly appealed for peace by promoting freedom of religion: religion should be neither suppressed nor supported by the state.
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