Supper Clubs, Supper Clubs

April 1999

Here are brief reports from our last 4 supper clubs. We have been lucky to have such high calibre forums for the libertarian perspective here in Vancouver. If you are travelling through, call us up to see if we have scheduled a get together when you're in town. The cost is low, and the discussions are always stimulating.

August 15, 1998 Walter Block on Radical Libertarianism - Prof. Block resides here when he isn't teaching at the University of Central Arkansas. He is also one of the leading lights in the modern libertarian movement. Walter's style is to test ideas by taking them to the extreme and he likes to try out his new thoughts on us. He started by asking what might happen when the welfare state's Berlin Wall falls and we gain our liberty. Will the current victims of the welfare state (i.e. honest taxpayers, etc.) be justified in seeking restitution from the perpetrators of the current regime and if so who is guilty? Is it ethical to receive benefits (i.e. welfare, sidewalks) from the state? Walter argues that only top politicians and bureaucrats are responsible for the current theft and that accepting welfare is justified for the same reason that it is OK to dispossess thieves of their stolen property. This brought much discussion as some argued that you mustn't keep the property rescued from thieves but are obligated to return it to the original justified owners. (Block uses the same argument in his 1976 classic Defending the Undefendable, in his chapter defending private counterfeiters.)

November 5, 1998
Jan Narveson on Democracy - Prof. Narveson was visiting Vancouver to present a paper at UBC and was kind enough to honour us with an evening of his time. He is most noted for his attempts to provide a foundation for libertarian beliefs (i.e. why should we have private property rights and not interfere with other people's lives?) David Ramsay Steele argues in the May 1999 issue of Liberty that the current state of libertarianism is much improved compared to the Rothbard-Rand natural rights ideas thanks to the work of "the two Jans (Narveson and Lester)". Prof. Narveson spoke to us about the democratic urge to give every person their say but shows that if we are to treat this idea seriously, majority rule and other forms of group rule lead to totalitarianism. Only by putting constraints on democracy (i.e. 'rights' that aren't subject to democracy) can we get what people think democracy promises. In other words, political thinkers concerned about people should spend more time stressing liberties rather than the false god of democracy.

February 27, 1999
Officer Gil Puder of the Vancouver Police Department on ending the war on drugs - Officer Puder caused quite a stir in Vancouver when he published an op ed in the local paper condemning the war on drugs. (His writing is available at http://www.mapinc.org/.) He was reprimanded by his police chief when he reiterated these views at a Fraser Institute conference last summer. The chief was forced to back down and Puder's social calendar has been busy ever since with groups interested in his views. Puder believes addicts are sick and need treatment instead of incarceration. Libertarians may agree that de-criminalization will reduce the harm of the drug war, but we don't want a "therapeutic" state either. We believe everyone should be allowed to live their lives the way they want so long as they don't injure others. But it was interesting to hear that an "insider" also feels that crime statistics are being manipulated and that politicians are just recycling failed ideas. It was disturbing to hear, that even with the lessons he learned from the failed drug war, Officer Puder still wants to increase government control of firearms. Even more scary was Officer Puder's admission of the importance of "discretion" in a police officer's work. Essentially, with all our laws and regulations the police officer has to decide whether an offence is important enough to enforce. If you are polite and submissive, you needn't worry too much about minor infractions of the law. But if you in any way challenge an officer's authority over you, you can be taught a lesson. How corrosive is this power both to the police and to our society?

March 27, 1999
Our speaker, UBC Prof. Paul Tenant came down with the flu so Walter Block and Paul Geddes stepped in to talk about native land claims. We agreed that natives have a claim to some parts of BC by fact of their being descendants from first users not because of documents issued by some distant king. Although the principle of first use (or homesteading) makes sense, we still don't have the facts to apply this principle to BC. The devil is in the details. How extensive must first use be in order for ownership to occur? We don't grant ownership of the moon to the first person who saw it. And how extensively were the natives using the lands that their descendants now claim? Block believes that legitimate claims probably amount to less than 5% of BC (Which should be easy to accommodate since the percentage of land that is currently privately owned in BC is only 5%.) We regret not having Prof. Tenant there for this discussion because as the leading expert on these historical matters, he could have informed us of the extent of native first use. A second problem is who the ownership should reside with. Libertarians believe in individual ownership and are leery of the government created native collectives that the new treaties are recognizing. We don't want to condemn natives to live in the equivalent of a communist society where all resources are controlled by politics. We also agreed that a major problem with BC is that so much of the resources in BC are crown-owned and we want these resources to be privatized quickly.