Elf Sternberg

This morning, I had a conversation with a Londoner who commented on a news article about a toddler finding a gun in her mother car and shooting her mother in the back. The gun, it turned out belonged to the mother's boyfriend. "Hell of a thing, a gun permit," he said. I pointed out that in the US, one doesn't need a gun permit to buy a gun, only carry it on your person in public, and in some states it's perfectly legal to carry one in your car without any regulation at all.

"That's nuts!" he said.

"That's the United States," I said with a shrug. "We're not a psychologically healthy country. The boyfriend will now be prosecuted, but as the Onion says, there was no way to prevent this, in the only country where this happens routinely."

It occurred to me even as I said it that the NRA is the distilled essence of libertarian morals. Libertarians will tell you that absent regulation, syndicates and "private rights-enforcement organizations" will emerge that will pressure corporations to treat their customers well.

We all realize this is bullshit. Corporations, by their very nature, will have more money than the syndicates and investigators; they'll be able to hire their own "private security-enforcement organizations" (and they already do), they'll be able to corrupt the internal workings of their competition and stay within the letter of the "night watchman's" idea of the law.

But the NRA's behavior is completely consistent with libertarian ideals. In our world, food companies will cut corners, and people will die. The company might get sued out of existence, or it might have the resources to maintain itself in the face of lawsuits. For example, the infamous case Grimshaw v Ford revealed that Ford Motors had run the numbers and figured it was making so much money that buying off the families of those killed by its poorly-made cars was cheaper than retooling the factory line. The NRA would like a world where misuse of a gun is never regulated before the fact; the libertarians would like a world where misuse of the market is never regulated before the fact.

If people die, well, eh: caveat emptor, motherfucker, even if you personally have no economically viable way checking the quality and suitability of a car, a processed food product, or a medical procedure.

There are two kinds of governments— one is an military force which worries about the education and well-being of its citizens only insofar as it can feed its military powerhouse, the other is an insurance company that ensures the education and well-being of its citizens so that they can be its economic powerhouse. The United States has always wanted to be both. The impulse to be both has kept it vacillating between these two extremes, and every time it does the powerful find a way to wedge themselves further into control.

The freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers .. The founders of libertarianism ... failed to extend the principle [of liberty] to covertly violent, semi-violent, or nonviolent forms of coercion.

Noah, The liberty of local bullies