Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

The UK political extinction event

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William Galston writes
(Link fixed),

Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned as the second coming not of Margaret Thatcher but of Benjamin Disraeli. His pledge of “one-nation Conservatism” means his government will lavish funds on long-neglected parts of central and northern England and on the National Health Service, which he terms a “beautiful idea that represents the best of our country.” In the short term, that means larger deficits; in the longer term, higher taxes. Proponents of limited government—a dwindling band—will be licking their wounds for years.

Note the last sentence in particular. Recently, when I have talked about The Three Languages of Politics, I have just talked about the Progressive oppressor-oppressed axis and the Conservative civilization-barbarism axis. I don’t mention libertarians.

I joke about 2016 being an “extinction event” that wiped out libertarians. Also fiscal conservatives and sane Democrats (like Galston). Libertarianism survives as a scapegoat–it turns out that we have been running the world all along, although we didn’t realize it. We caused the financial crisis, the opioid crisis, etc.

Europe in the 19th century

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Alberto Mingardi paints a rose-colored picture.

While no government adhered religiously to the principles of laissez faire, nineteenth-century Europe represents perhaps the best approximation of the ideal. Free trade, championed by England, swept away most protectionist measures; durable goods and people moved virtually freely. Passports were viewed as relics of an odious past—only states like Russia and the Ottoman Empire issued them. A Victorian idea prevailed: individuals should put checks on themselves, without state interference. John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer became household names among the educated class. Europe thrived in a period unshackled by government controls, with millions able to afford new and more sophisticated goods, including products created by an ongoing technological revolution.

Mingardi’s essay reviews Norman Stone’s analysis of the decline of liberalism starting in the 1870s and draws some parallels to the present environment.

Should libertarians heart state capacity?

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Tyler Cowen thinks they should.

State Capacity Libertarians are more likely to have positive views of infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power (requires state support!), and space programs than are mainstream libertarians or modern Democrats.

This is the most interesting post I have read this year. Note that I am composing this on January first.

What’s not to like about state capacity?

One strand of conservatism, represented nowadays by Yuval Levin, sees the state taking away functions from other institutions, weakening them. For some folks, that is a feature, but for these conservatives it is a serious bug.

One mainstream libertarian argument against a strong state stresses the lack of skin in the game. Wrong coat, wrong price, in Milton Friedman’s famous explanation. But that is a distributional problem, and Tyler doesn’t care much about distribution or static efficiency. Focus instead on growth.

Rent-seeking? Again, if it only affects static efficiency, it’s a second-order problem. Same with Hayek’s knowledge problem.

Perhaps minarchism was appropriate when wealth was embedded in tangible land and capital. Just have government protect private property.

But Tyler would argue that intangible sources of wealth require more complex rules and more concentrated expertise.

I don’t think that it follows that we need more state capacity. Private coalitions can put together rules. The Internet Engineering Task Forces are an example. If you respect technocrats, fine. Just don’t pretend that government does a great job of hiring and incenting them.

In a democracy, politicians specialize in instilling fear. I see the climate issue as an illustration of fear-installation rather than as an issue where our best hope is more state capacity.

It is true that state capacity and development are positively related. But I suspect that once you control for average cognitive ability the state-capacity variable drops out of the growth equation.

On wicked problems and public policy

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Following a trail from this comment, I got to a 1973 paper by Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber.

The problems that scientists and engineers have usually focused upon are mostly
“tame” or “benign” ones. . .the mission is clear. It is clear, in turn, whether or not the problems have been solved.

Wicked problems, in contrast, have neither of these clarifying traits; and they include nearly all public policy issues-whether the question concerns the location of a freeway, the adjustment of a tax rate, the modification of school curricula, or the confrontation of crime.

The paper is filled with insights, such as

In the sciences and in fields like mathematics, chess, puzzle-solving or mechanical engineering design, the problem-solver can try various runs without penalty. Whatever his outcome on these individual experimental runs, it doesn’t matter much to the subject-system or to the course of societal affairs. A lost chess game is seldom consequential for other chess games or for non-chess-players.

With wicked planning problems, however, every implemented solution is consequential. It leaves “traces” that cannot be undone. One cannot build a freeway to see how it works, and then easily correct it after unsatisfactory performance. Large public-works are effectively irreversible, and the consequences they generate have long half-lives.

The paper is also notable for the way in which it describes–in 1973–the fallibility of experts relative to technocratic expectations.