JS: Oh, I see what you mean. I think for that segment of what I have to say the Libertarians would largely be in accord, in agreement. That is the whole point of a certain Libertarian view is that the order that's created by human cooperation and so on is preferable to an order that's created by states. Where I differ from the Libertarians is that the Libertarians" their model of order without hierarchy is the market. My problem with the Libertarians is that they simply don't understand, or refuse to understand, the fact that market outcomes can result in disparities of income and power that create inequalities and oppression that are intolerable. Most Libertarians are perfectly comfortable with the one percent taking everything. They are completely blind to inequalities in life chances. A Libertarian" I'm taking an extreme example, but it's illustrative. So a Libertarian would say that if I want to sell my child, I'm at liberty to do so. That's an act of free will and it's a free exchange.
In fact, in interwar China there were lots of women who did sell their children, but they sold their children because they had nothing to eat. Anyone in their right mind would recognize this sale as a kind of outcome of coercion and oppression. The trick is to change the conditions that force people to choose between keeping their children and dying, or having a meal. It seems to be the Libertarians are kind of blind to those differences and the way in which life chances are mal-distributed.
Rob: Speaking of selling one's children. It makes me think of Jonathan Swift's article, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick," which was a suggestion that they be sold as food.
JS: Right, right, right
Rob: I wonder if Libertarians might go for this.
JS: Well you know, it's funny you should mention Swift, because Swift understood somehow implicitly that often the best critique of a particular ideology is to take it to its logical conclusion and show how it would work and A Modest Proposal was a perfect example of that. I wish there was more in that way of critique in American political discourse than there is.
We're going to have to end pretty soon by the way.
Rob: Yes, I was going to say, you've given me more time than I asked and I do appreciate it. I have so many more questions and I hope we can do this again and hopefully soon, but we'll wrap for now. Any last things you want to say?
JS: No, it was fun and I'm a South Jersey boy. I grew up in a town called, Beverly, halfway between Camden and Trenton along the Delaware. Spent a lot of my time swimming in the polluted Delaware River and fishing for eels and went to a little Quaker school, Moorestown Friends School, to which I just went back to the reunion. There was probably not a weekend, there was probably not a single weekend during the basketball season in my teenage years when I didn't go to Philadelphia to see Villanova, La Salle, Penn, St. Joe's, whatever, to see a basketball game.
Rob: Okay, I have one more question. I took it from your interview two years ago in the New York Times when your book first came out. It said you were working on a new book on the deep history of plant and animal domestication. How's that going and what's that about?
JS: So I'm interested in why"as you know, I'm interested in states and so I'm interested now in" when I say deep history, I really mean deep history. That goes to say, we've been around as a species, Homo sapiens, for about two hundred thousand years and only the last five thousand years have we lived in things that we call states. So I'm interested in understanding how we came originally to live in these great heaps of grain and domesticated animals and concentrated human beings originally. And so I'm interested in the origin of the state and since these states, the first ones in Mesopotamia and so on, were very small. Most people were not in states for quite a long time and I'm interested in the relationship with the people outside of states and the people in states. The book that prepared me for this in some sense is a more recent book called, The Art of Not Being Governed, which is about hill peoples in Southeast Asia having, over the last two thousand years, run away from states and concentrated in the hills and practicing a form of agriculture that makes it impossible for them to be taxed or controlled.
Rob: Okay, I have feeling we're going to have to take this to the next interview, which I'd like to set up with you soon. I'm going to wrap now.
JS: Okay.
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