Should the French Boycott Be Boycotted?

To the Editor:

I am enjoying my first issue of your publication and glad to be a new FEE supporter. I confess to having stumbled at the threshold, however; I’m dubious, that is, about [Sheldon Richman's case for] boycotting the boycott (July/August).

The state/people distinction is sometimes useful in political discourse, as during the Cold War and concerning, most recently, Iraq, but that doesn’t appear to be the case in the matter at issue. It may be that 50 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong, but polls clearly show that an overwhelming majority supported Chirac’s errant (from our standpoint) behavior. It is not an argument against a voluntary boycott, just as it is not an argument against free trade, that a small majority may be adversely affected if a larger, overall benefit is reasonably to be expected.

The recent French diplomacy gave rise to a tremor of discomfort in a lot of Americans, the expression of which as a practical matter could only take the form of abstention from buying French products. These voluntary actions gave rise to a spontaneous reordering of the market sure to be detected by French politicians, ever reflexively mercantilist, both directly and from the lamentations of their export and tourist industries. This may even affect their behavior. But whether it does or not, it seems to be that this is how the global political economy is meant to work and convey information.

There is also an element of individual liberty in the balance here.

So I would like to suggest that the libertarian maxim in cases such as this ought to be laissez faire et laissez boycotter.

—John L. Stavert

Loudon, Tennessee

Nature Conservancy Is Different

To the Editor:

I agree with everything Walter Williams says in his insightful article “Average Americans versus Environmentalists” (July/August). I am anxious to read Rothman and Lichter’s Environmental Cancer: A Political Disease. However, I do object to their lumping the Nature Conservancy (NC) in with environmental groups, as Professor Williams says that they do. I hope that NC’s responses to Rothman and Lichter’s survey were markedly different from those of the environmentalist groups, but if they were not, it is surely because, as Williams quotes Rothman and Lichter, “most Americans are willing to describe themselves as environmentalists” even if they are far from them politically.

The Nature Conservancy puts my donations toward the purchase of remote lands, which it preserves in largely pristine states, although it does permit some profitable enterprise such as cattle breeding and oil drilling. NC does not work against land development through legislation, and confiscation of private property is certainly not on its agenda. William Thomas, editor of the Objectivist Studies Monograph Series and author of “Radical for Capitalism: An Introduction to the Political Thought of Ayn Rand” (an essay available from the Objectivist Center), writes, “The Nature Conservancy’s general method of purchasing areas and setting them aside for protection is a model of the kind of wilderness protection methods that might exist under Rand’s system” (p. 13). Such a statement by a prominent Objectivist should convince readers of Ideas on Liberty that NC is not environmentalist; its methods of land conservation are consistent with capitalism.

Because libertarians and Objectivists are both radically capitalist groups, we are ourselves, unfortunately, still removed from the majority of Americans. For our movement to grow, we must distinguish those who are of our own persuasion from those who are not.

—Arthur Williams

Denver, Colorado