TGIF: Thomas Szasz - Unappreciated Libertarian

I maintain that mental illness is a metaphorical disease: that bodily illness stands in the same relation to mental illness as a defective television set stands to a bad television program.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

--Thomas Szasz (1920-2012)

Monday, April 15, was the 104th birthday of Thomas Szasz, the late great debunker of the system of social control perpetrated, in cahoots with the state, by institutional psychiatry, the mental-health establishment. That system has included among its methods lobotomy, electroshock, involuntary "hospitalization" (a "crime against humanity"), outpatient commitment, forced "medication," and other means. For Szasz, who excelled at exposing how scientific language is often used to subjugate, forced hospitalization, treatment, and medication were in fact imprisonment, torture, and poisoning.

Szasz's soft accented voice was powerful because he had credentials: he was a medical doctor, psychiatrist, practicing psychotherapist (for consenting clients only), and professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. He knew from the inside what he was talking about.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, he came to America in 1938 at age 18. He adored America's founding principles, which proclaimed the natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He was a libertarian, favoring private property and free enterprise. He loved autonomy and self-responsibility. As a result, he fought tirelessly against the government-medical complex and its persecution of people who, though perhaps disturbing to others and even themselves, had violated no one's rights.

I knew Tom Szasz. He wrote a column for The Freeman (Foundation for Economic Education) during my 15 years as the editor. Working with him was a great honor, not to mention a great pleasure. He was unique. He was wise.

Szasz (pronounced like the first syllable in Saskatchewan) wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles and kept writing practically to the end of his long life. He made his first big splash with a radical book, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), which people should read regardless of their interest in psychiatry. This book and the work that followed got him routinely denounced by the government-medical establishment. Ironically, "experts" said he was crazy and called for his firing from his university. Call it an early attempt at cancellation. Why? Because Szasz disturbed the peace. Later, people acknowledged his contributions, perhaps because he had exposed the worst psychiatric abuses, such as the warehousing called hospitalization. He even won awards. But his view of human behavior has not yet won the day.

By "myth" Szasz meant that mental illness is a metaphor that is unfortunately taken literally. He wrote, "Typhoid fever is a disease. Spring fever is not a disease; it is a figure of speech, a metaphoric disease. All mental diseases are metaphoric diseases...." He did not deny that people can behave oddly, annoyingly, disturbingly, and even threateningly. But he denied that behavior was disease: "In asserting that there is no such thing as mental illness, I do not deny that people have problems coping with life and each other." They may need many things, but physicians and psychiatrists are not among them.

Nor did he deny that people can suffer from brain disease or that currently unknown brain diseases could be discovered in the future. Again, he meant that disapproved or immoral behavior is human action not illness: it has reasons, motives, purposes, and stories -- not causes, as we observe in nature. "There is no psychology," Szasz aphorized. "There is only biography and autobiography." What's more, if all mental illnesses were brain diseases, Szasz asked, why would we need psychiatrists? We have neurologists already.  Moreover, people with real brain diseases, like other physical diseases, are free to reject treatment. Ergo...

He was fond of philosopher Gilbert Ryle's insight about myths in The Concept of Mind: "A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms belonging to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them." That's Tom's approach.

Thus when people asked Szasz if he was saying that no one was crazy, he'd say something like, "I didn't say no one was crazy. I said no one was mentally ill." Of course, if there is no mental illness, then there is no mental health either. Health and illness have historically referred to the body, he said. The "mind," however, is not a literal organ; it's a metaphorical organ. How can it be ill? Pathologists find no mental illnesses when they do autopsies.

By the way, his book The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience is a gem. Spoiler: "Mind is a verb." In other words, mind is not something we have, but something we do. We aren't robots, as some neuroscientists think; we are minders -- conscious and self-conscious beings who mind. We say, "Mind your own business" and "Mind your manners." Szasz taught us to mind our metaphors.

The connection to freedom and libertarianism, if not already obvious, becomes clear when we see that instead of being about controlling disease, psychiatry is about controlling behavior that someone else finds objectionable, for good or bad reasons. Aggression, he said, is properly handled by the criminal justice system. As he wrote in concluding The Myth:

Psychiatrists ... [in] actual practice ... deal with personal, social, and ethical problems in living.... [Emphasis added.]

Human behavior is fundamentally moral behavior. Attempts to describe and alter such behavior without, at the same time, coming to grips with the issue of ethical values are therefore doomed to failure.

Szasz viewed many issues through this lens. He wrote two books defending the freedom to take recreational drugs and to self-medicate without a doctor's permission (prescription): Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers and Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market. Addiction -- although perhaps a bad habit that takes great effort to break -- is not a disease. Nor were any of the other "addictions": gambling, shopping, sex, you name it.  He also published two books on the right to commit suicide.

From the start Szasz opposed psychiatry's regarding homosexuality as a mental illness properly subject to forcible "treatment" and called for full recognition of the individual rights of gay men and lesbians. In the 1970s the American Psychiatric Association board finally voted to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. In real medicine, Szasz pointed out, physicians do not vote on what is and is not an illness. That tells you something.

He also spoke out against the insanity defense in criminal trials. Criminals are human beings, he said, who should be judged morally and held accountable for their actions. 

His life's mission was to battle for liberty and self-responsibility by discrediting what he called the "therapeutic state." He thus fought courageously against the "medicalization of everyday life," that is, the recasting of human freedom, choice, and action as medical, not moral, concerns and in the case of disapproved choices and actions, as diseases. F. A. Hayek, whom Szasz admired, called the misapplication of science to areas outside its province scientism. As Szasz put it, "Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations."

I thought about Szasz often during the pandemic and the government's "science-based" restrictions on liberty. What exactly would he have been saying? I am certain of two things.

First, he would have insisted that physicians and scientists are not qualified to tell us what trade-offs we should make between liberty and health. That's not a medical or scientific issue, but a moral one that should be left to each individual. Advice, if requested, is one thing. Colluding with the state to violate liberty is something else.

Second, he would have condemned all government and scientific attempts to quash public debate about what COVID-19 was, where it came from,  and what to do about it. He loved John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and its plea for freedom of speech.

His magnum opus is Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, which I recommend. Highly readable and entertaining, it covers much of what he had to say over the years and responds to critics. He also published several collections of wise aphorisms, a form in which he was brilliant. Samples: "The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself." And: "A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong." You will learn from his aphorism alone.

I especially want to draw attention to Szasz's 2004 book, Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices, in which he argued that the freedom philosophy is incompatible with psychiatry as we know it. Besides chapters on that theme, he also has chapters on particular libertarians and civil libertarians: Ludwig von Mises, F. A Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, Julian Simon, Deirdre McCloskey, Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, and the American Civil Liberties Union. His analysis is at times critical because libertarians have too often failed to apply the nonaggression principle (obligation) to those whom state-deputized psychiatrists have declared mentally ill. The chapter "Economics and Psychiatry: Twin Scientisms" is pathbreaking. In the Preface, he wrote:

I believe that involuntary psychiatry [like chattel slavery] is -- regardless of any good in it, real or attributed -- immoral and illegitimate. The proper response to the outrage of psychiatric slavery is abolition, not reform.

I contend that this position is not merely consistent with the basic philosophy of libertarianism but inherent in it. Unfortunately, liberty is something for which everyone regards himself as fit, but most people regard certain other persons or the members of certain groups as unfit. In the past, among the unfit were blacks, women, Jews, and "perverts" such as homosexuals. Today the persons most often considered unfit for liberty are the mentally ill.

Thomas Szasz is definitely someone whom libertarians ought to check out.

In the meantime, see my article "Szasz in One Lesson" and my 2005 video interview with Tom on YouTube. And visit Jeffrey Schaler's Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility for many articles by and about him.

More on Immigration and Public Property

Inspired by scholar Simon Guenzl, it occurred to me that regarding "state-claimed" so-called public property, people have been wronged not primarily as taxpayers but as potential homesteaders. (See Guenzl's "Public Property and the Libertarian Immigration Debate," Libertarian Papers, 2016 vol. 8, no. 1, and listen to his conversation with Bob Murphy's Human Action Podcast.)

Guenzl properly distinguishes between state-claimed land and state-seized land, such as that acquired through eminent domain. In the latter case, government personnel took land from identifiable owners, but state-claimed land never had owners. The state foreclosed homesteading.

Among the people prevented from homesteading are would-be immigrants, people from other parts of the world. In times past, many came to America to stake out parcels on the frontier to make better lives for themselves and their families. They demarcated, cleared, plowed, planted, and harvested it. They built homes with it. They "mixed their labor" with it, Lockean-style, and made it their own.

By foreclosing homesteading to this day of a vast portion of America, the government harms their modern-day counterparts as much as it harms those politically defined as citizens. Libertarians (and others) who would treat citizens from foreigners differently in this matter are obliged to justify that seemingly arbitrary distinction. So far they have failed to do so.

Thomas Szasz: Champion of Freedom

Today is the 104th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), the great if unappreciated libertarian and defender of individual autonomy and dignity. A psychiatrist by profession, for over 50 years, Szasz was the foremost critic of the social-control system we call institutional psychiatry, or what we could call the government-medical complex. He called it the Therapeutic State. He opposed involuntary mental hospitalization, forced medication, the insanity defense, prescription laws, drug prohibition, laws against suicide, and the psychiatric position (until the 1970s) that homosexuality was a mental illness requiring forced intervention. I am proud to have had him as a friend and also a columnist when I edited The Freeman. He was a delightful man. His books include The Myth of Mental Illness, Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, Our Right to Drugs, The Manufacture of Madness, and Faith in Freedom. He also published several collections of wonderful aphorisms.

I wrote the following about 20 years ago to summarize a good deal of what Thomas Szasz said in his dozens of books and hundreds of articles. I call it "Szasz in One Lesson":

If neuroscientists discovered that mass murderers and people who claim to be Jesus had different brain chemistries from other people, most everyone would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a mental illness/brain disorder (MI/BD).

If neuroscientists discovered that homosexuals had different brain chemistries from heterosexuals, far fewer people would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

If neuroscientists discovered that nuns had different brain chemistries from everyone else, very few people would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

If neuroscientists discovered that married men had different brain chemistries from bachelors, no one would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

Clearly, a difference in brain chemistry per se is not enough to make people believe that someone has a MI/BD. It takes more. Why, then, would a difference in one case be taken as evidence of MI/BD, while a difference in another case would not be? The obvious answer is that people, including psychiatrists, are willing to attribute behavior to mental illness/brain disorder to the extent that they disapprove of that behavior, and are unwilling to do so to the extent they approve of, or at least are willing to tolerate, that behavior. (Psychiatry once held that homosexuality was a mental illness. That position was changed, but not on the basis of scientific findings. Science had nothing to do with the initial position either.)

In other words, the psychiatric worldview rests, not on science or medicine, as its practitioners would have us believe, but on ethics, politics, and religion. That would be objectionable only intellectually if that were as far as it went. Unfortunately, it goes further, since the practitioners and the legal system they helped shape are empowered:

•  first, to involuntarily “hospitalize” and drug people “diagnosed” as mentally ill and thought possibly to be dangerous to themselves or others, and

•  second, to excuse certain people of responsibility for their actions (for example, via the insanity defense).

Postscript: I'm often asked which one of Thomas Szasz's two dozen books I'd recommend to someone unfamiliar with his work. I suggest Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences. This highly readable book covers most of his views on psychiatry, mental illness, and the Therapeutic State, with responses to his critics along the way. Of course, after that, you'll want to read the rest.

Post postscript: More on Thomas Szasz to come. Meanwhile, see my 2005 interview with Szasz.

TGIF: Why Isn't Antifa Marching for Apple?

I was all ready to don a black mask for the Antifa demonstration when I realized that the self-styled antifascists hadn't planned a demonstration. What are they waiting for?

After all, the national government has just started a new fascistic crusade. You'd expect the guardians against fascism to be out of the gate with great dispatch. But they aren't.

You haven't heard about the latest fascistic crusade? It's the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Apple for "monopolizing" the smartphone market, or maybe it's the "luxury" smartphone market. The government is keeping its options open on this.

The government says Apple's iPhone accounts for 65 percent of the American market, depending on how you define "the market." (Worldwide the iPhone is only 20-30 percent.) That doesn't sound like a monopoly because 40 percent for the competition ain't chopped liver. But let's not be bothered with facts. Apple says its U.S. share is under 50 percent.

Isn't calling the government's action fascistic a stretch? Well, maybe, but it's not a big stretch to say it's another step down the road to serfdom. (Okay, that's not my term. It's Hayek's.) Remember: the word fascist once meant something more than "I hate you."

If you read what the founders of fascism wrote, you'll see that this political philosophy is not at its core racist or anti-Semitic, though it is nationalistic. It is the view that the nation is essentially a single organism with the state as the head. Liberal individualism was declared feeble and inadequate for the 20th century. In contrast to class conflict, fascism preached internal harmony among the big blocs, labor, business, and other corporate entities. This was the touted cooperation of all significant groups -- corporatism ( which didn't mean business corporations ran everything).

In light of that orientation, a free economy, like liberal individualism, could not be tolerated. In its place was dirigisme, which comes from the French for to direct. It's the view that the state, on behalf of the nation, should direct economic activity for the nation's good. Business can remain in private hands and even make a (state-defined) reasonable profit -- but only so long as it serves the people's (state-defined) interest. In other words, "owners" hold their property provisionally, at the pleasure of the wise leader. Otherwise, they're out. That's right: ownership, business, and profit may not serve -- ugh! -- selfish ends. They must serve only (state-defined) public ends. (See my entry on fascism in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.)

That explains other key features of fascism, such as the one-party-rule brutality. As Hayek showed, our wise leaders could not make a plan to harmonize the whole society if anyone were free to make his or her own plans, either alone or in concert with others, as a consumer or producer. How can we have a proper planned society if any individual can disrupt it just by living as he or she wishes?

So where the hell is Antifa? Forget the black masks, and forgo the smashing of windows or harassing of people at outdoor cafes. But make your position clear: you do not want this step toward fascism in America. Justice for Apple and all victims of antitrust oppression!

Specifically, the Justice [!] Department

alleges that Apple illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers. Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability, and lower costs for consumers and developers. Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others.

Translation: consumers who choose the iPhone over an Android phone because they like its distinctive features don't realize they are being exploited. (Full disclosure: I'm an Android guy.)

The complaint has a lot to do with Apple's app store. Apple exercises closer control over apps than Google does with its competing Android app store. Apple's rebuttal of the government charges is reported here. As Professor Thomas B. Nachbar of the University of Virginia Law School says, "The basic theory of the lawsuit is that Apple is squelching the development of apps – such as so-called 'super apps' that are essentially a gateway to a variety of services or apps – cloud streaming game apps, messaging apps, services (especially financial services, such as digital wallets) and accessories (such as smartwatches) – in order to insulate the iPhone from the rise of potential competitors."

He goes on: "Much of the conduct the government is complaining of in this case are things that Apple says it does to either protect its users or provide them a distinctive customer experience." Apple also says its approach is intended to protect its customers' privacy and let parents limit what their kids can do with their iPhones.

Apple's and Google's different app policies have advantages and disadvantages regarding variety, security, privacy, and user experience. Different users will want different things. Do the antitrust bureaucrats not get that? It's all about trade-offs. Who should decide? Which approach is "best"? That depends on who you are and what you want. That's the great thing about markets and competition, even our less-than-fully-free system laden with patents, copyrights, trade restrictions, etc. Companies can create different bundles of features and then let consumers choose which bundle they like best. All that's necessary is to dismantle legal barriers to market entry.

The antitrust bureaucrats don't like that system. It's too, well, free. (They'd say, Orwell-style, "restricted.")  Besides, they need to earn their high salaries. So they pretend to know how the ideal phone market should look, and they have the power to do something about it. But they'll have to get through the courts, which may yet save consumers from the conformity-imposing bureaucrats. Time might be on our side. As Axios says, "The case is likely to take years to resolve. By the time it's settled, we might be using our smartphones in very different ways."

I don't like fascism, so I don't like antitrust bureaucrats. We should have sent those mini Mussolinis packing long ago. What about it, Antifa? Show you're antifascism after all.

Israel, Zionism, Jews, and Anti-Semitism

"In some quarters anger at Israel's brutal occupation has undoubtedly spilled over to an animus toward Jews generally. But however lamentable, it's hardly cause for wonder... Should it really surprise us if the cruel occupation by a self-declared Jewish state engenders a generalized antipathy to Jews?... [I]f many Jews themselves repudiate any distinction between Israel and world Jewry, indeed, if they denounce such a distinction as itself anti-Semitic; if mainstream Jewish organizations lend uncritical support to every Israeli policy, however, criminal, indeed, abetting the most virulent tendencies inside Israel and muzzling principled dissent outside Israel; if Israel defines itself juridically as the sovereign state of the Jewish people, and Jews abroad label any criticism of Israel anti-Jewish -- the real wonder is that the spillover from antipathy toward Israel to Jews generally hasn't been greater."

--Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: 

On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, 2008

TGIF: Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate

Opponents of people's freedom to cross national borders to where the best jobs are, aka open borders, make a rookie error: they engage in static analysis and overlook the dynamism of social processes that freedom produces.

I was recently asked on Facebook: "Are you enjoying Biden open borders?" There's the mistake right there. People who ask that question look at a bad situation, say, the mess at the southern border; imagine one policy change, namely, the removal of restrictions on movement; and stop there. It's as if that policy shift would prompt no changes in how people, including Americans, behave. Because of their static analysis, the opponents of the freedom to move foresee disaster.

But hold on. That's like assuming that a significant change in the tax laws -- in either direction -- wouldn't prompt significant changes in people's tax-related behavior. It assumes that at least some people are not purposeful beings and do not respond to incentives and disincentives. But we know otherwise. For example, since World War II, federal taxes collected have been a fairly consistent percentage of GDP regardless of the changes in the tax rates. Why would that be? You know why. People respond to incentives and disincentives. Elementary to the economic way of thinking.

Pointing out this error is one of the first things a market advocate would tell an interlocutor who committed it. Frédédric Bastiat's wonderful "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" taught the lesson in reverse: he showed that an obstacle, a broken window, prevented a shopkeeper from acting as he would have acted but for the need to overcome the obstacle, that is, the need to buy a new window. He couldn't use the money to buy books, shoes, or something else. Those who focus on how societies full of actual people work understand this. You can't leave human action out of the picture.

In the real world, decriminalizing foreign workers' freedom to move would represent profit opportunities not only for aspiring immigrants but also for entrepreneurial Americans. Yet the opponents only consider what foreigners would do. How could they have forgotten the Americans? What, they don't like profit?

The southern border is indeed a mess. Many people are assembling there, many of whom are evading the government officers (yay!) and sneaking in or are entering with provisional approval or helpless acquiescence. The government seems overwhelmed. Some governors have cynically shipped the newcomers to other states without their consent, using them cynically as pawns. Shame! Everyone can agree that something has to change.

Freedom-of-movement advocates say the solution is to remove all the restrictions -- not just restrictions on entry but all the restrictions on what people can do once they cross the border. Here's the point: that requires eliminating all the rules on how Americans may deal with the newcomers. Right now, it's illegal to hire and rent to border crossers who lack the "right" government papers. As Chandran Kukathas eloquently reminds us, the government cannot limit the freedom of "outsiders" without also limiting the freedom of "insiders." How easily that is overlooked!

So "open borders" means more than the mere literal dropping of entry restrictions. Laws against American conduct would also necessarily be repealed. Commercial relations between Americans and newcomers would be decriminalized.

Immigrants come here to work (to make better lives and to send money home to their families); they need jobs, housing, medical insurance, and other goods and services. Decriminalization on both sides of the ledger would replace the hazardous black market, with all its dangers of exploitation and worse, with a transparent legal market for labor, tenants, and customers.

Decriminalization, in other words, would invite entrepreneurs to form businesses designed to match newcomers with employers, landlords, etc. Job and housing brokers, or exchanges, would set up shop near the border to offer their services. Other firms might offer transportation to private employment and housing centers. The possibilities are nearly endless. (They'd be even better if the myriad destructive housing restrictions were repealed.) No one can say how exactly it all would look because entrepreneurship consists of discovery. That's its genius.

This open market, by the way, would function as an invitation to workers who want to multiply their incomes 2 to 15 times through increased productivity. That's what happens when people are free to move from poor low-productivity to rich high-productivity countries. It's win-win, as free exchange always is.

There's no excuse for static analysis when it comes to immigration. Dynamic market analysis is not some new thing. It's one of the first points that free-market advocates draw attention to. Unfortunately, even some smart pro-market people overlook dynamism and say dumb things. For example, Thomas Sowell once said, "You can't let everyone come to America because if everyone came to America, it wouldn't be America anymore."

Why I Pick on Israel

People close to me ask why I criticize Israel while ignoring the other bad governments in the world. (I guess they don't count the U.S. government as bad.) I have many reasons, but here's a big one: no other government (besides the U.S. government) claims to act in my name. I object to that. (For the record, years ago I declared my exit from the disparate worldwide collection of people that Israel presumptuously claims to speak for.)