Are Property Rights Enough?

Katherine says:

It’s an interesting debate.

On Kerry Howley’s piece, I would say that unfettered individualism is not the only thing that qualifies as freedom. The world she envisions seems to me unmoored, anarchic, excluding the legitimacy not only of government but of faith or tradition or community. The underlying sense of it is that any ties to other people that limit the bounds of your actions are oppressive; the conclusion of that is that only in selfishness is there freedom.

I also have difficulties with Todd Seavey. He states that:

‘She mentions, for instance, that 5.5 percent of medical students, decades ago, “happened to have female bodies.” She concedes briefly that discrepancies in gender roles “may” result from psychological inclinations or voluntary behavior patterns rather than oppression, but she gives us no reason to believe that she has special skills enabling her to decide better than the rest of us when the sorting processes of society have yielded acceptably “free” results and when they have yielded unacceptably gendered ones…

Howley singles out a few hot-button, familiar issues such as race and gender, but the truth is that every time your fellow human beings decide, say, to be sports fans instead of talking about entomology with you, or to leave town en masse for the Bahamas (causing you to feel lonely), their actions have altered your life options. Tough luck. That’s called “other people exercising their freedom,” not “people oppressing you.”

That he is willing to compare very real discrimination on the basis of race and gender to other people having different hobbies that you suggests a complete lack of comprehension of the substantial impacts that it can have on people’s opportunity; moreover, it suggests an utter disinterest in trying to understand those impacts. I’m not quick to attribute gender differentials in jobs to discrimination, but “95% of the people in medical school are male” seems like a glaring enough disparity to at least suggest that we should consider if there’s an explanation besides women not wanting to be doctors. His tone suggests that any mention of discrimination is no more than whining, and it puts my hackles up.

McCarthy’s view comes closest to my own (on cultural issues; on most matters I don’t fit with any of them, as my economic views are decidedly un-libertarian; the freedoms to spew toxic waste into someone’s backyard or make people work 14-hour days in unsafe conditions aren’t my idea of liberty):

Paradoxically, the nonlibertarian qualities of the mutually antagonistic left and right sometimes entail unexpected benefits for freedom. Some of the most effective centers of resistance to state power over the centuries, after all, have been nonindividualistic institutions such as labor unions, churches, guilds, and extended families. Conversely, when libertarians attack these organs of civil society in the name of freedom, they may only succeed in empowering the state—not always, but sometimes.Report