Comments on: Cato Unbound in Unlikely Places

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By: TGGP

TGGP — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:36:07 +0000

Please, mtraven, it's a hell of a lot more than half the population! We're much more discriminating than you give us credit for.

By: Susan

Susan — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:06:52 +0000

it IS hard to find female libertarians, and when history occasionally provides a great one, they're rarely identified as such (i.e Margaret Thatcher). I think the biggest problem in recruiting women to The Cause is lack of mainstream marketing of libertarian ideas. Too many people–not just women–dont even know what libertarian principles ARE. Currently free market ideas are confined to think tank websites and message boards filled with commentary by…engineers. Not exactly the best places to reach chicks. If there was money to do outreach to, say, women small business owners who are being strangled by the permit process/gov regulations, I suspect more women would sign on.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:27:41 +0000

I think by “weird”, I meant “showing a failure of self-awareness” rather “rare or uncommon”.

And I _don't_ think one should expect proponents (effective ones, anyway) of new ideas to complain about this, because it is stupid and pointless to complain that people don't agree with you. If they don't agree with the ideas, it must be because the proponents _haven't convinced them yet_, and the burden is not by any means on them to recognize the alleged superiority of the proponents ideas…

By: John Thacker

John Thacker — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:55:17 +0000

Do you really think that women vote for wars less than men do? I'm not sure I understand people who are shocked and appalled at the suggestion that women seem to be less libertarian and demand reams of data about the assertion (reasonable to demand data, of course), yet blithely throw off the assumption that women must be less likely to vote for war.

Switzerland didn't give women the right to vote at the federal level until 1971, and some cantons not until 1990. Liechtenstein not until 1984. And yet these non- women's vote having countries were the least warlike in Europe.

Meanwhile Germany (1918), the UK, the US, Austria, Canada, etc. were a host of countries that gave women the vote between WWI and WWII. That didn't seem to stop WWII.

Has women's suffrage led to some decrease in the size of military spending? Not apparently. Has it led to the decrease in war? There has been a trend towards fewer global wars and a trend towards more women's suffrage judged from long time scales, but the connection seems tenuous at best.

By: djw

djw — Fri, 01 May 2009 05:24:20 +0000

Yes, but libertarians are a tiny fraction of the (male) population. The rest of them start ugly, liberty-destroying, state-growing wars with alarming regularity.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:50:19 +0000

I'm sure that Thiel disapproves of the views of politicians even more than he does those of women.

By: Thiel on giving women the vote « Libertarian News Network

Thiel on giving women the vote « Libertarian News Network — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:37:34 +0000

[...] right floats off to Neverland. No girls allowed!”), a defense from Jason Kuznicki at Cato and commentary from Will [...]

By: Liz

Liz — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:03:13 +0000

I don't want to discount the role of voters since I'm well aware political leaders need to take constituencies into account, but Thiel never really mentions that men still very much dominate political leadership. Shouldn't that matter a /little/?

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:10:40 +0000

The answer to that one is clear – the welfare state. After all, when has it ever shrunk?
OTOH, there have been periods where disarmament has followed wars – after WWI and WWII (in the late 40s, there was massive demobilization), after Vietnam, and, most recently under Clinton when troop levels were cut post the Gulf War.

I am not saying that war can't be the health of the state, but libertarians misread modern history when they claim that it's been the biggest driver of government growth.

By: mtraven

mtraven — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:10:51 +0000

Hm, yesterday the rage was at Byron York's comment that Obama isn't really popular because darky opinion doesn't really count. Now it's libertarians saying democracy would be just great except for the half the population that supports the wrong things. I detect a pattern, namely, that the only real people are white male nerds and the rest of the world is just getting in their way.

By: Rimfax

Rimfax — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:08:01 +0000

Read "Is There Anything Good About Men?" by Roy F. Baumeister. It is very relevant to this discussion of gender.

By: Paul_G_Brown

Paul_G_Brown — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:52:53 +0000

First, to elaborate Dan's point ...

Our moral sense, so to speak, is rooted in our emotions. Advocates for liberty (mostly) agree that, at the base, our interests in liberty is deeply attached to the emotional sense of self-worth and well being that comes from exercising our freedom, and the negative feelings that we experience when our liberties are infringed upon. 'Thou shalt not steal' is a rule that we've codified to try to make a subjective experience an objective principle. "Do unto others as you'd be done by" is a slightly more complex formulation, and "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." another, highly abstract though rationally formulated response.

We each come to structure our moral responses slightly differently, as a consequence of our many and varied individual histories.

Women as a class (to grossly over-generalize) experience and anticipate moments of complete physical vulnerability and individual powerlessness. From an evolutionary perspective, this means that women are biologically wired differently than men, and (again, to grossly over-generalize) prioritize moral principles somewhat differently (on the whole).

They're less interested in abstracted freedoms like 'lower state intrusion in my financial affairs' than they are with more concrete freedoms, like 'make sure there's a social support system for me when I or my child gets sick', or 'my economic liberty is best served by an enforced social contract not to discriminate against me on the basis of my gender'.

And second, Thiel is an exemplar of the principle that, while luck is the ultimate determinant of success in life, you can never convince the lucky of this. Paypal was one of four or five "credit card payments over the internet" companies started up at the same time. Thiel actually started a company called Confinity to build money financial exchange software for the Palm Pilot platform (there's an idea of genius). The major insight that pulled PayPal away from the pack was the idea to secure transactions with a challenge/response CAPTCHA, and what sealed the deal was EBay's genius move to close restrict Billpoint to just EBay auctions.

Had EBay not messed up Billpoint, had the product manager not read the Carnegie-Mellon paper, had IBM bothered to secure the CAPTCHA patent, had the VCs not forced Confirmity to merge with X.com when they ran out of money? Thiel would just be another undistinguished Bay Area bandit. In life, it is better to be lucky than good.

By: JoshuaHerring

JoshuaHerring — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:38:37 +0000

All of what you say is true – but I think it's obvious how Thiel came to single out women. He looked at history, thought about when the last time a Classical Liberal policy framework had a fighting chance at general acceptance, and came up with the 20s. Then he asked himself what the most salient changes since then have been. He came up with women's suffrage and the growth of the welfare state in the 30s. It's true that women's suffrage was passed before the 20s (1919, 1920, I can't remember exactly) – but Thiel makes the plausible assumption that culture lagged behind law and women didn't start voting in big numbers until later.

You may say his analysis is shallow. Indeed – it is. There are all kinds of statistical checks he could have done to make sure that his theory is minimally plausible. And, as you point out, there is the glaring omission of WWII (and wars in general), which, for my money, is the Day Classical Liberalism Died. But I don't think it's fair to say his choices are arbitrary. Quite the contrary – it's pretty easy to trace the reasoning.

By: uknowbetter

uknowbetter — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:29:55 +0000

Thanks for that link. I'm almost shocked it's that high. Where are these libertarian women?