Monthly Archives: January 2006

David Friedman on education

David Friedman has contributed some thoughtful comments on my post about political socialization and libertarianism. I had written that libertarians need most people to prize freedom; otherwise, liberty itself will weaken. However, parents want their children to gain marketable skills above all else. They therefore do not demand that schools impart public goods, of which the love of liberty is an important example. If parents do not put pressure on schools to teach freedom, then libertarians must consider other ways to educate all children for liberty. The vehicle that comes first to my mind is universal, taxpayer funded k-12 schooling with a “civics” mandate; but there may be alternatives. In arguing for civic education that emphasizes liberty, libertarians should invoke their own philosophical ideals, but they should be willing to swallow the restriction on individual freedom that will come from universal education.

Friedman replies:

I think parents are mostly interested in educating their children to have successful lives. One way of doing that is by learning what the world is like. If libertarians are correct in believing that more freedom results in a more attractive society, a more accurate picture of the world will tend to result in more support for liberty. So shifting control over schooling in the direction of parents rather than school officials and politicians is likely to result in some shift in favor of liberty.

I’m struck by the idealism of this paragraph–or, to put it another way, by the avoidance of a rational-choice framework. If individual parents want their own children to “lead successful lives” in our society, then they should hope that their kids are not too eccentric or unruly. They should try to give their children skills that are valued in the economy, along with a healthy respect for authority. That’s what pays. One representative “New Jersey mother” in a focus group told Public Agenda: “There are key points–hard work, discipline, respect. If those are taught in the home, that’s more than 50 percent of what you need to succeed. Even a below average kid will do well if his parents teach him that.”

Libertarians believe that a better society would be more free than ours is. Even granting that libertarians are right, parents who want their own kids to be successful in today’s society will hope that other parents’ children fight for liberty. That fight is likely to be lonely, under-paid, frustrating, and only enjoyable if one truly prizes intellectual debate.

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an exercise for Martin Luther King Day

I find it useful to teach WALKER v. CITY OF BIRMINGHAM, 388 U.S. 307 (1967) as an example of legal and moral reasoning. This is the case that originated with the arrest of Martin Luther King and 52 others in Birmingham, AL, at Easter, 1962. It is a rich example for exploring the rule of law, civil disobedience, religion versus secular law, procedures versus justice, and even the way that our moral conclusions follow from how we choose to tell stories.

By way of background:

In 1962, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) hoped to generate massive protests in Birmingham before the end of the term of Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, the violently racist Commissioner of Public Safety. As the protests began, Connor obtained a state-court injunction against the marchers. When the SCLC leaders received the injunction on April 11, they stated, "we cannot in good conscience obey" it. King called it a "pseudo" law which promotes "raw tyranny under the guise of maintaining law and order."

At this point, the Direct Action campaign is in crisis: there have been only 150 arrests so far, and no more bail credit is available. On April 12 (Good Friday), Norman Amaker, an NAACP lawyer, says that the injunction is unconstitutional, but breaking it will result in jail time. King disappears from a tense conference, reappears in jeans. "I don’t know what will happen … But I have to make a faith act. … If we obey this injunction, we are out of business." Leads 1,000 marchers; he and 52 are arrested. He is sent to solitary confinement. In NYC, Harry Belafonte raises $50,000 for bail. The New York Times and President Kennedy condemn marches as ill-timed.

April 15 (Easter Sunday): MLK is released from solitary confinement, still in jail. Writes "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

April 26: King is sentenced to five days with a warning not to protest. Sentence is held in abeyance.

May 2: Children’s march. King: “We subpoena the conscience of the nation to the judgment seat of morality."

May 20: Supreme Court strikes down Birmingham’s segregation ordinances. A deal is worked out.

September: bomb kills four little girls at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

SCLC appeals King’s conviction for two reasons: to overturn the Birmingham parade ordinance, and to prevent future uses of injunctions against civil rights marchers. The case is [Wyatt Tee] Walker v. City of Birmingham. It is not decided until 1967 by the Supreme Court, which upholds King’s arrest and imprisonment on basically procedural grounds:

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concluding thoughts about public media

Today is the last day of a great meeting on public media, a rich discussion enlivened by presentations of excellent projects (for instance, the National Black Programming Consortium, OneWorld, Global Voices Online, Location One, Public Radio Exchange, and PRI’s Open Source.)

“Public media” comprises all forms of communication that help a democratic public to do its work. The public’s work includes deliberating and debating issues of common concern, mobilizing people to participate in formal politics, and creating cultural products that represent and preserve a people’s heterogeneous values.

Three sectors can serve these roles; each has advantages and disavantages:

1. Corporations (broadcast networks, cable-TV providers, big software companies, newspapers, and publishers) can help the public to do its work. They sometimes meet public demand for news, debate, and information. They apply expertise, talent, and discipline; and they have access to mass markets. However, they generally make more money by providing and advertising commercial goods, rather than encouraging civic and political participation. They can attract the largest audiences by presenting politics in ways that amuse or arouse viewers but make them less likely to participate themselves. Corporate consolidation and market fragmentation make these problems worse.

2. “Citizen media” means material created and disseminated by individuals or small, voluntary groups: blogs, personal websites, photo galleries on Flickr, podcasts. These “many-to-many” media are far more diverse, open, and innovative than corporate programming. However, there are questions about the citizen media: Can unfunded individuals and networks create products that are more ambitious than short snippets of text, snapshots, and video–for instance, lengthy narrative movies and original news reporting? Even if a few very talented people can create these ambitious products, how can we help those with average skills to participate and find audiences for their work, which will not look professional? And how can we prevent all these individual producers from forming small, insular groups–how can we create a public dialogue?

3. The traditional “public media” are broadcast stations and producers funded (at least in part) by tax dollars. They have a strong tradition of commitment to the public’s interests, although they can certainly be criticized for attracting and serving a narrow slice of the population. In the United States, the organizations in the orbit of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have some strengths: reputation and public trust, a national network of local institutions, archives of excellent programming, talented employees, and some broadcast spectrum. They have the power to put individuals “on the air,” which attracts participation. However, their advantages are diminishing as more competitors arise (including citizen media producers), and as viewers shift from radio and TV to the Internet, where they have far more choice. People are increasingly alienated by the traditional model of station membership, in which you pay dues, receive some goodies, but have no direct impact on programming–and the fundraising drive just drones on. Public broadcasting stations must learn to use their spectrum and other assets to enhance public discussions and cultural collaborations. Their job is to help form publics that demand genuinely public media from all three sectors.

[Rebecca MacKinnon’s summary is on her blog.]

Alito and strict constructionism

GRAHAM: Are you a strict constructionist?

ALITO: I think it depends on what you mean by that phrase. And if you…

GRAHAM: Well, let’s forget that. We’ll never get to the end of that.(LAUGHTER) Have you heard the term used?

ALITO: I have heard the term used.

GRAHAM: Is it fair to say that, when it’s used by politicians, people like me, that we’re trying to tell the public we want a judge who looks at things very narrowly, that doesn’t make a bunch of stuff up?

Is that a fair understanding of what a strict constructionist may be in the political world?

ALITO: Well, if a strict constructionist is a judge who doesn’t make things up, than I’m a strict constructionist. (LAUGHTER) …

ALITO: I think that a strict constructionist as you understand it would engage in a certain process in evaluating that question. And a strict constructionist, a person who interprets the law — that’s how I would put it — a person who interprets the law would look at the language of the authorization for the use of military force and legislative history that was informative, maybe past practices. Were there prior enactments that are analogous to that? What was the understanding of those? And a host of other considerations that might go into the interpretive process.

If a “strict constructionist” looks at precedent, legislative intent, “past practices,” and a “host of other considerations,” then strict constructionism means nothing at all. Judge Alito clearly doesn’t like the phrase–perhaps because it’s too controversial, or perhaps because it’s vacuous. But could it be a meaningful theory? I suppose it could mean:

1. A judge should deliberately refuse to consider all the matters that Alito listed above, except the text of the relevant statute or constitutional provision. It is improbable that anyone can understand a text without some recourse to context, but trying to do so would be the judge’s intent.

2. A judge should apply the law regardless of its consequences. In moral philosophy, “consequentialists” are those who would assess actions or policies by their results. “Deontologists” instead apply principles or rules, without directly considering consequences. It was a consequentialist Supreme Court that ruled that public schools could not be segregated by race because segregation had bad effects on minority children. A deontological court might have said that barring any child from any public school on the basis of color, even if it has benign effects, always violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Strict constructionism would be a form of deontology in which existing laws (not morality) provide the principles to guide a court’s decisions.

Judge Alito sounds like something of a legal deontologist some of the time. For instance, in defending his decisions regarding searches, he says that these police actions were harmful but allowed by the law. Note, however, that a legal-deontological approach would not always push in conservative directions. A strict constructionist (in this sense) could not argue that courts ought to enhance economic efficiency, nor could he defer to the president in order to promote national security. That would be paying attention to predicted consequences. The motto of the strict constructionist would rather be “Fiat justitia et pereat mundus”: let justice be done even if the world should perish. (This is not a smart thing to say in confirmation hearings, however.)

promise of public media

At a meeting tomorrow, I’m supposed to reflect briefly on this question:

Citizen Media: Enthusiasts claim that new media, with their anti-top-down structure, tend to more democratic. Critics claim that they just make for finer niches of communication and more opportunities for marketing and consumerism. Not enough attention has been paid to how these new ventures can create more public space and invigorate public media. In what ways can these media be used to create a more robust public?

Since four others are also slated to speak and will probably cover the main points, I think I will focus on kids. I’ll say:

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