Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Tyler Cowen interviews Russ Roberts

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You’ve probably already checked it out. I’ll toss in a few comments.

COWEN: If government spending had to be increased by, say, 20 percent, what would you spend the money on?

My first thought would have been “helicopter drop.” As I see it, government corrupts everything it spends on, so just drop the money from a helicopter (the Universal Basic Income comes close to that).

But on the UBI itself, Roberts says

what really make our hearts sing: pride, dignity, respect. They’re cliches, but they’re not in our model. So we say, “Well, yeah, they’re working in the background.” Or “We’re just holding them constant.” Or “They’re not important for the question I’m looking at.” Then we get to something like universal basic income, where we say, “Okay, we’re worried — because of, say, autonomous vehicles or artificial intelligence — that people aren’t going to be able to find work, but that’s okay. We’ll just give them a check.”

Who would say, “Oh, that’s a good idea. That’s a good substitute for a feeling of pride and agency and responsibility and dignity that a job well done provides”? We’d say, “Well, that’s absurd.” Yet, people on the left and the right have adopted the economist’s view that says there’s a function that translates stuff into well-being. I think that’s just grotesque. Where we’re talking about things I’ve changed on, that’d be a big one.

Here is Russ being profound:

I would say that’s true of marriage and religion. Any one day, you might sometimes think it’s a hard deal. Most days, it’s good or great, and then, more importantly, over a longer period of time, it’s deeply satisfying. I think in today’s world, those two institutions are struggling because for whatever reason, people are more interested in today.

I would say that I found high school teaching like that. On any one day, I might hate it. But over a longer period of time, it was satisfying.

The whole interview was fun to read through.

Claremontism

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Thomas D. Klingenstein writes,

we are engaged in a contest between two understandings of justice, one built on the principle that all human beings are equal—the other on the principle that all “marginalized” identity groups are equal, and all are oppressed by white males.

This is from the Claremont Review of Books, and it may be behind a subscription wall. I am out of alignment with the Claremont folks, but this publication is still very fulfilling.

They are solidly behind President Trump. As Klingenstein puts it,

Nourished in our colleges and universities, multiculturalism is an insane exercise in self-flagellation. It sees America’s past as a series of crimes against humanity: genocide, racism, and all its co-morbidities. Multiculturalism’s worldview is enforced by a ruthless speech code (political correctness) which makes it virtually impossible for anyone in the mainstream of American life to challenge it. Trump, however, is the exception. He has shown that it is possible to stand up to multiculturalism.

My own thoughts.

1. I agree that the leftist intellectual outlook on elite campuses is poisonous. The poison then spreads to less-elite campuses, to schools of education, and to schools of journalism.

2. I disagree that the antidote is Donald Trump.

3. Think of the problem this way: Harvard and the New York Times are infected with bad ideas, such as hostility to capitalism. These bad ideas then spread. Our challenge is to ensure that better ideas have a chance to reach young people.

4. One approach is Samizdat. Soviet dissidents, excluded from mainstream media under Communism, resorted to secret copying to in order to disseminate their ideas. The IDW is our Samizdat.

5. A second approach is internal reform. Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy is an example.

6. A third approach is to try to disrupt higher education. Somehow make it possible for people to bypass the indoctrination centers and still have the same life opportunities.

Feser on Hayek

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Edward Feser (Claremont Review, paywall) argues that Hayek has been widely misinterpreted. Feser says that Hayek thought that only comprehensive socialist central planning was the road to serfdom.

the planner has to dictate, rather than learn, what individual economic actors need and how they will behave. For the only sure way to know what they want and what they will do is to decide for them what they should want and what they should do. And the more closely the economic planner wants outcomes to conform to his plan, the more thorough this dictatorial control will have to be. This is the sense in which Hayek thought socialism entails “serfdom.” He was saying that centrally planning large-scale economic outcomes requires large-scale control of economic behavior. Planners will have to increase control, if they are intent on realizing the plan.

But of course, they could instead just give up large-scale central planning. That is exactly what happened in Western regulatory welfare states. They never ended up becoming dictatorships, precisely because they pulled back from going whole hog for socialism. Hayek was hardly surprised by this. On the contrary, it was exactly what he was trying to convince them to do. He wouldn’t have wasted time writing The Road to Serfdom if he thought the economic regulation that already existed made socialist dictatorship inevitable. Nor was he opposed in the first place to all regulatory and welfare measures. For example, in The Road to Serfdom itself he explicitly allows for regulations to ensure safe working conditions, and for a safety net for those unable to provide adequate food, shelter, and health care for themselves. The Hayek who thought that the smallest tax increase is but the first step toward the Gulag exists only in the imaginations of uncharitable critics and simpleminded admirers.

TLP watch

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Cass Sunstein writes,

We live in an era in which groups of people—on the Left, on the Right, in university departments, in religious institutions—often end up in a pitch of rage, seeing fellow members of the human species not as wrong but as enemies. Such groups may even embark on something like George Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. When that happens, or when people go to extremes, there are many explanations. But group polarization unifies seemingly diverse phenomena. Extremism and mobbing are not so mysterious. On the contrary, they are predicable products of social interactions.

The essay goes into some of the social psychology involved. As my thinking evolves, I am putting more emphasis on what the three-axes model says about political psychology and less emphasis on what it says about ideology per se.

Social media and content regulation

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John Samples writes,

American law and culture strongly circumscribe government power to regulate speech on the internet and elsewhere. Regulations of social media companies might either indirectly restrict individual speech or directly limit a right to curate an internet platform. The First Amendment offers strong protections against such restrictions. Congress has offered additional protections to tech companies by freeing them from most intermediary liability for speech that appears on their platforms. The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that private companies in general are not bound by the First Amendment.

However, some activists support new efforts by the government to regulate social media. Although some platforms are large and dominant, their market power can disintegrate, and alternatives are available for speakers excluded from a platform. The history of broadcast regulation shows that government regulation tends to support rather than mitigate monopolies.

I think that this gets it mostly right.

My worry is that American culture no longer supports free speech. We can make exceptions for speech that causes direct harm, such as shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater where there is no fire. But hurting someone’s feelings should not count as direct harm. Racist remarks or Holocaust denial may be uncouth, but in a culture of free speech they should be permitted.

Zoning and liberty

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John Cochrane writes,

I received a few comments from fellow libertarians last time I wrote about these issues. Shouldn’t communities have the right to pass whatever restrictions they want? If they want to preserve a $5 million per house replica of 1950s suburbia, and wall out the unwashed masses, hypocrisy aside, why should the state stop them? I counter, this is not libertarianism, the defense of private rights, this is untrammeled majoritarianism, by which your neighbors via the city strip you of your right to sell your house to the highest bidder, do what you want with it, and strip the ambitious kid from Fresno who wants to move here of his right to be supplied by a competitive marketplace.

But there are externalities in neighborhoods. If my neighbor’s house gets sold to someone who puts up a ten-story apartment building, my porch will no longer get any sun. I may have to put up a fence to keep my lawn from being trampled. The increased traffic on our street could mean that every time I want to pull out of my driveway I have to wait ten minutes for someone to let me in. The noise level may be much higher.

In theory, you can handle all of these issues with well-specified property rights and Coasian bargaining. In reality, this is a difficult problem.

I am not saying that government solves the problem well. I am not saying that existing zoning practices make sense. But a simple rule that says that you are allowed to sell your property to the highest bidder, with no restrictions, probably does not make sense either.

My review of Raghuram Rajan’s latest book

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My review of The Crumbling Pillar says,

One can think of each of the three pillars as having an ideological base. The strongest support for the market comes from libertarian ideology. The strongest support for the state comes from progressive ideology. And I would argue that the strongest support for community comes from (socially) conservative ideology.

My overall criticism of the book is that he supports an idea of subsidiarity which I identify strongly with conservatism but without doing anything to raise the status of conservatives or lower the status of progressives. Either this is what Tyler Cowen would call a Straussian attempt to appeal to progressives or it shows how conservative thought is completely ignored by academics these days. In my review, I opted for the latter interpretation.

Please read the whole essay.

Country size and quality of government

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A commenter asks,

Is there a nation with a population of say, 30 million people or more that has an appreciably smaller government than the US and could be held up as an example that smaller government works for a modern country with a large population?

There is a low likelihood that any nation with a large population (I might use a figure closer to 75 million as the cut-off) will be well governed, whether the government is large or small. My essay on recipe for good government pointed out that two variables can help explain the level of economic freedom in a country: ethnic composition and size (with size being a negative factor). If you are trying to explain some other desirable characteristic, such as the Human Development Index, those same two variables will matter. In the essay, I wrote,

Relative to this peer group of high-population countries, the United States is still the best governed, if we use the index of economic freedom. Perhaps we should be grateful that our government is not worse than it is.

If you want the best government, move to a small country (5 to 10 million people) with an ethnic composition that according to Lynn and Vanhanen will have a national average IQ in the mid-90s or higher. Even if you are looking for economic freedom, some of the Scandinavian “socialist” countries fit that model. So do Hong Kong and Singapore, of course.

The piety display

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M. “Lorenzo” Warby writes,

If a cognitive identity is based on adherence to a set of opinions (that is, publicly expressed or endorsed beliefs) that are felt to generate prestige, to justify a collective and internalized sense of approval and admiration towards their adherents, then opinions which contradict those prestige opinions cannot also generate prestige. They must generate negative prestige. If X generates prestige, then Contrary-X must generate negative prestige and so be subject to the opposite of public admiration (within that cognitive milieu), which is stigmatization. Indeed, avoiding such stigmatization can become a powerful reason to engage in affirming the prestige opinions (or, at least, not openly contradicting them).

Pointer from Lorenzo himself, who did me the honor of leaving a comment on yesterday’s post. In the first part of the essay, he argues that the term “piety display” is more accurate than “virtue signaling.” Read the essay to see why.

The three-axes model would say that conservatives and libertarians also engage in piety displays. When conservatives speak of the fragility of civilization and describe it as threatened by barbarism, that can be thought of as a piety display. When libertarians highlight the encroachment of the state on liberty, that can be thought of as a piety display.

Lorenzo argues that in a time of rapid change, conservatives are at a disadvantage.

visions of the imagined future naturally gain increased power. In particular, politics based on a moralized vision of the future have an inherent advantage that was greatly magnified. For the problem of the past was not only that it now looked so different, but that the past (being sequences of human striving) is inevitably morally messy. Conversely, the imagined future can be as pure as one wants. So, if one wants opinions that provide some guarantee of cognitive status, those based on the politics of the imagined future have a near unbeatable cachet. Especially as it is easy to confuse moral intensity with moral superiority, and even use the former as a marker of the latter.

The perennial appeal of socialism feeds on the information-economizing purity advantage of the imagined future. Rarely precisely defined, socialism becomes a righteous catch-all for the aspiration to attain some profoundly better society, without grappling with practical difficulties or past failures along the path.

The essay concludes,

Given that the underlying drivers of the demand for prestige opinions that generate and protect status-asserting cognitive identity are not likely to go away soon, the prognosis for the health of freedom of thought, science, public debate and democracy in Western societies, or for the competent functioning of institutions, is not good.

I think that the symmetry among libertarians, progressives, and conservatives breaks down when it comes to what I call intimidation. Conservatives and libertarians do not seek to de-platform people with different ideas. They do not seek to get CEOs fired for having the “wrong” opinions. They do not seek to stamp out intellectual diversity in higher education or journalism.

There has been a fascist left for a long time. We saw it in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba, and in Venezuela. But until recently, the Anglosphere has rebelled strongly against it. When I was young, Newsweek Magazine alternated columns by Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. College faculty voted Democrat more than Republican, but conservatives did exist in academia, and no professor was driven off campus for teaching while white.

When I was growing up, the people who might be de-platformed or intimidated were on the left, if they could be connected in some way to the Communist Party. My mother was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957 for her Communist associations in the 1930s.

Back then, the term for abusive personal attacks was “McCarthyism,” referring to a Republican. Back then, the left was against McCarthyism. Now it practices it. Back then, the left read George Orwell’s 1984 as a warning. The SJWs read it as a how-to manual.