The Dissident Frogman's Epistle to the Libertarians, and Political Culture
The Dissident Frogman has broken a long silence to comment on the results of our election, and this article, "The Frogman's Prophecies," should be read in full. Because of the strong logic and utter beauty of its last few paragraphs, and its relevance to many I know who want to be purist libertarians (or even anarcho-capitalists) I think the ( Read more... )
Additionally, though the laws were better-chosen than ours (you were theoretically much freer), law enforcement in the Early Republic was very spotty. This had the most obvious effect of increasing the power of the competently-violent over those less violent or less competent at it (consider the social role of duelling in early 19th-century America, or in the South all the way through the Civil War, or of rough-and-tumble fighting and eventually gun-fighting in the Old West all through this period).
It also very much increased the power of the rich over the poor, to a degree barely conceivable today. To begin with, the notion that an employer or landlord was also one's "master" or "lord" in the pre-Industrial sense of the word (and hence had the right to forcibly-discipline employees or tenants) was a long time fading away (this was even a more severe problem in Europe, which was one reason why poor people immigrated from Europe to America rather than the other way round). A rich person had the diet and leisure to become a very good fighter, if he was so inclined; he also had enough wealth that any wound he survived was economically a minor inconvenience rather than something likely to cause his starvation. Finally, the rich man -- if he desired this -- could easily amass comptently-violent followers (this is one of the few things that Western-genre movies get right) and thus if necessary simply outnumber his poorer enemy.
The law -- such as it was -- might not interfere with this, because the rich man -- if he at all outwardly conformed to the social norms of his time and place -- was probably friendly with the local authorities. He and his family hob-nobbed with the local sheriffs and judges and state legislators: some of his family might be these personages. He could also afford lawyers, both to harass his enemies and to protect himself against any legal consequences of his actions.
Conformity to social custom was very important. In a world without very effective law enforcement, what could really doom a person was the disapproval of his or her neighbors. (I switched to the gender-neutral construction on purpose here, because such custom was one of the major ways of holding down uppity women). It greatly limited the power of the rich but also the rights of the poor. A rich man whose business manager or foreman dealt with labor organizers by beating them bloody would be tolerated; one who had his minions drag pretty young girls off the streets to be raped at his house would not. By the same token, a poor man who sued to recover a debt would be listened to with some respect in the courts; a labor organizer who tried to get the law on a rich man whose minions had beaten him bloody would be laughed out of court, and probably beaten up again (or killed) afterward. Consider the sad history of Abolition in the South, or of the Mormons in the Midwest, as examples of how this worked against non-conformists.
In other words: people in the Early Republic were so much more constrained by custom than we are now, and very large classes of people (a total well over 50% of the population) were also more contrained by law than we are now, so they were not as free as we would be now if we had racial and sexual equality plus a rule of libertarian law.
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