Criticism of Evidently Not book
Political, Media ·Sunday January 10, 2010 @ 22:27 EST (link)
I find some inconsistencies in the arguments in the viewable excerpts of the book Evidently Not that I feel obliged to point out.
In Why Government?, "Men are not angels" is not an argument and is entirely insufficient to declare a stateless society ("anarchy") impossible (e.g., see Stefan Molyneux's arguments on Freedomain Radio). If government has no rights except those delegated, then how is it funded? It must be funded entirely through donations if the author is to remain true to the rights claimed.
Why a Republic? - Mob rule is still entirely possible (and common) with representative democracy. It may filter out a few hotheaded votes, but replaces them with the backroom deals and pork of a congress. They are not held accountable now, because they can pay everyone off with other people's money and people overlook the other special interest groups as long as theirs is funded. There is almost no degree of anger due to bad law or regulation that cannot be bought off by throwing money at special interest groups: this is the biggest problem of representative government.
It is no more or less possible to vote a minority into slavery in pure democracy than a republic (it already happened here), and a constitution that protected individual rights would restrain both equally.
Typo: "they are more interested in remaining in power, THAT governing rightly" (than?).
Why Conservatism? The writer has now accepted taxation as necessary despite the earlier clamor about rights—that government only possesses those rights delegated to it by individuals. After that, how much taxation is conservative is skipped entirely. Both major parties claim they're trying to spend less; yet they both consistently fail. In many ways they are indistinguishable, and work together to infringe and circumvent individual rights.
All of the above excerpts are from chapter one; excerpts from the rest of the book are much sparser (the rest is unavailable online) and they continue with some unfortunately rather poor arguments and criticisms of local and recent politics which will not stand the test of time well. Local events are used well to illustrate principles, but poorly as a target of ad-hoc rants. Conservatives must establish clear principles, such as the non-aggression principle, and evaluate events in light of those principles, objectively, not emotionally.
