A Voice Stentorian,

I appreciate the tone and thoughtfulness of your response. There are several points of disagreement that I find your response.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->1) <!--[endif]-->I resent the implication, however, that I do not understand the Libertarian position.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->a. <!--[endif]-->A similar objection I have here is this whole business about ‘libertarian democrats’ and the idea that progressives and left-wing politics are somehow in agreement on “99% of the time”.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->2) <!--[endif]-->I also resent your charge that I am making a ‘how dare you’ kind of argument.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->3) <!--[endif]-->You accuse LIVE, and me, of blurring an advocacy/arrogance line. If this is the case I would argue that you are no less ‘arrogant.’

For the sake of clarity and organization I will address 2, 3, and 1 last.

This whole business about ‘how dare you.’ First of all, I am not closing or ending a discussion by invoking the moral nature of our disagreement. Rather, I am inviting you to engage me in doing moral philosophy. You claim that I make a ‘similar mistake to those Republicans who support the war’ and seem to resent the invocation of ‘morality’ in the LIVE campaign and argument in its favor. Like it or not, it is a moral issue (like everything else political and social, I might add). Your entire philosophy rests on moral assumptions. For instance, the property rights you hold onto so dearly rest on moral claims as does your endorsement of capitalist markets above all else as a way of organizing society. If you endorse markets above all else for structuring society then you are in some way committed to answering for the consequences and results of organizing society in this way. You don’t get to say that the ultra-minimal state is the best and then turn away from the social ills, inequities and injustices of capitalism, in fact, the capitalist is morally responsible for them.

I’m not making a ‘how dare you’ argument, I am making the argument that your opposition to fighting for wage fairness for these workers is morally reprehensible. I could show why that is the case, and it doesn’t rest on some theological stuff that you cannot recognize as a legit reason (conservatives do this all the time). Your position says that living wage is not a moral necessity, right? Well, what ends up being a relevant moral issue or what ends up being a moral necessity on someone’s view is IN ITSELF a moral distinction. You invoke moral claims just as much as I do only I am more explicit in doing so. Don’t accuse me of throwing around ‘morality’ or ‘values’ as loosely as republicans, I don’t use either of those words pejoratively as you do. When I say that libertarian opposition to wage justice for workers at Vanderbilt is immoral, I am not cutting off argument. I am making this claim in an entirely logical and argumentatively cogent way. Your refusal to respond and engage me in moral philosophy is the only impediment to debate. There are is a long list of moral claims that underlie the living-wage issue, they aren’t amorphous rhetorical talking points that invoke a particular kind of persuasive language. They derive from convictions about how we ought to treat other human beings, justice, fairness, etc.

To continue, it is impossible to be morally or politically neutral on anything, such is our predicament as human beings in these circumstances. Political apathy is itself a political position, one which says that the status-quo is not so awful that it requires or (admits of possible) change. Moral skepticism or apathy is itself a moral position. Pro-choice is a moral position that assumes something about the practice of abortion (see Michael J. Sandel on this one, author of Public Philosophy.)

Now I would like to address your contention that I am somehow being arrogant for thinking that I’ve got it right with regard to the living wage issue. If I am arrogant for being pro-living wage, then your opposition to my position is no less arrogant. The problem here, is that we are faced with a moral dilemma. People find themselves in a system with unequal opportunities and starting points (inborn and circumstantial). The market system allows for businesses to pay their workers whatever they are “willing to work for”, even if the business could afford to pay more. This ‘whatever willing’ wage is taken on by low-wage earners because they desperately need to work to subsist. Geographical, social, economic obstacles notwithstanding, these people are not in a fair and equal bargaining position to enter into contract with the business. They business doesn’t rely on the work of these low-wage earners to SUBSIST. Because of existing inequalities and poverty, the business is assured that there will be plenty of poor people in need of money to employ, so they have no market-incentive to raise wages. In this way the business takes advantage of the poor bargaining position of poor people in need of work and pays them a wage that they cannot LIVE ON even though they are working FULL TIME. This is absurd and a moral travesty. Vanderbilt is exploiting low-wage workers at our school, because the market allows them to get away with it. This is a larger problem, but you have to start somewhere. Vanderbilt COULD pay their workers enough to subsist, but the fact of the matter is that the people running our university don’t care about these people and likely hold them ‘personally responsible’ for having such a lack of bargaining power. This is where student activists come in. We have the time, financial and social security to engage Vanderbilt and call them out on this issue in ways that low-wage workers do not. We are calling the university out on something that they would rather simply not address. There is no coercion here, this is a paradigmatic case of a social movement using non-violent methods to push for change. I don’t really see the libertarian argument against what we are asking for, except perhaps to argue that we ought to just leave the solution to ‘market forces.’ Market forces lead to exploitation of the working class and working poor.

Now, you could call me arrogant for calling Vanderbilt’s interaction with low-wage earners unjust or immoral. But it is no less arrogant than your contention that I am wrong to do that. Calling for the sort of ‘skepticism’ or ‘restraint’ you likely envision is to assume that the issue is not as pressing as it really is.

For example, take slavery. I assume that we both wholly agree that this practice is unjust and immoral. If slavery was still in effect, and you strongly condemned it on moral grounds, and I were to call you ‘arrogant’ for taking a strong position on the moral dilemma of ‘slavery’ I would be assuming something about the dilemma. Namely that it is up for debate or that its not certain whether or not slavery is a problem. I am not saying that institutional slavery is equivalent to capitalist exploitation of workers, however the argument you make about me being ‘arrogant’ for coming down firmly on the issue mirrors this dilemma.

And finally to address the first issue you raise. I believe I understand the libertarian position inside out. However, in having these ideologically confrontational discussions another belief I have is that if the opponent cannot state the other’s position in a way that the other can accept, then there is a problem. Because of this second belief, I will try to lay out what I take the libertarian position to be in a crude and painfully brief way.

The libertarian position I find most clearly articulated and philosophically sound is in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. In this well-argued and philosophically sturdy account Nozick makes an argument for an ultra-minimal liberal state in which the government exists for the sake of:

1. enforcing contract
2. protecting citizens from domestic and foreign interference, physical coercion and theft

The government secures a set of negative rights and is supposed to exist for the sake of allowing every individual in society to pursue their own conception of the good in their own way (so long as it doesn’t interfere w/ others similar pursuit.) Insofar as the state is minimal, it is also morally neutral, that is, it does not exist to ‘impose’ any particular view of morality on anyone. The only thing it exists to do is ‘maximize’ people’s liberty and freedom to do as they please. This, the libertarian believes, is carried out by a ‘freely’ operating capitalist market.

Justifications for this often hinge on intuitions about ‘private always being better than public’, ‘government can’t do anything efficiently’, etc. These intuitions are also motivated by a firm belief that capitalist markets will distribute burdens and wealth in a fair and just way (insofar as there is no government or private ‘coercion’ and everyone enters into all transactions ‘freely.’)

You might say, that Libertarians value above all a particular kind of negative liberty (free from coercion or interference). Its interesting to note at this juncture that “left-libertarianism” is a thriving political philosophy in academic literature that is a stark contrast to your capitalist, or right-wing libertarianism. In case you are interested, check out the work of Philippe Van Parijs who is at Harvard. You might also look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism. These left-libertarians are interested also in “freedom” to do whatever you want as the highest end of social/political institutions, they just don’t believe that capitalist markets secure this freedom for everyone.

To draw out some political implications of what I take the view to be, I will give some examples of things I take libertarians to be analytically (that is, by definition) opposed to (Correct me if I’m wrong)

1. Government mandated minimum wages
2. Universal public healthcare (or any tax-and-spend measure)
3. Public education (government-run and funded)
4. Consumer protection legislation
5. Federal grants to pay for college on a need basis

I don’t believe this is a mischaracterization of libertarianism. The view essentially consists of eliminating ‘government inteference’ in all spheres so that capitalist markets can work their magic. Correct me if this wrong.

Moving on, I do not believe we agree 99% of the time, and I find Kos ‘libertarian democrat’ position to be making one of the following serious mistakes:

<!--[if !supportLists]-->1) <!--[endif]-->misunderstanding what it is to be libertarian

<!--[if !supportLists]-->2) <!--[endif]-->misunderstanding what it is to be a progressive

The two views, if understood correctly, cannot be meaningfully reconciled. Civic-republican Leftists like myself and libertarians probably agree on a host of issues that aren’t related to economic justice. However, I believe we probably agree on them for different reasons. We certainly don’t agree 99% of the time, ESPECIALLY not on matters of policy. I mean, look at recent literature in political philosophy on matters of democratic deliberation and distributive justice and see where the libertarians, communitarians, liberals, rawlsians, Marxists, etc all fall down and you will see how different our ideologies are. Kos’ argument is a political one seeking to create a kind of alliance that has rhetorical appeal but little philosophical weight. My point here is that it is just about always politically-agreeable or rhetorically pleasing in our culture to hear someone make a ‘we actually all agree about X’ argument, but often they don’t hold water and are unfair to the purported ‘opponents.’ I take this to be the case with the ‘libertarian democrat’ business.

For instance, tell me that you agree on the following and I would seriously question the extent to which you are in fact a libertarian:

1. Public government-run guaranteed universal health care and college education for all funded through a progressive tax
2. The ‘idea’ of a progressive tax
3. National endowment for the arts and humanities, NPR, etc.
4. Raising the minimum wage

I respect that libertarians have reasons and justifications for their positions that are thoughtful and intellectually rigorous. However, I do not agree with their position, and I find it intellectually disingenuous to suggest that I somehow actually agree with them. This, I believe is unfair if you understood what I in fact believe. Perhaps I could be persuaded otherwise, but I cant see at this point how that argument would run.