Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Government is a branch of culture

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Scott Alexander proposes that we think of culture as a branch of government.

Each branch of government enforces rules in its own way. The legislature passes laws. The executive makes executive orders. The judiciary rules on cases. And the culture sets norms. In our hypothetical world, true libertarians are people who want less of all of these. There are people who want less of the first three branches but want to keep strong cultural norms about what is or isn’t acceptable . . .The real libertarians also believe that cultural norms enforced by shame and ostracism are impositions on freedom, and fight to make these as circumscribed as possible.

Sounding like one of Alexander’s “real libertarians,” one of my commenters complains about,

. . . A tiny subset of the population, media-ready and always on, always practicing PR, permanently in performance mode, not expressing themselves except in precisely those expressions that can be guaranteed to win the approval of the bigots and authoritarians who appointed themselves the police of society. Enforcers of conformity. Stamping out creativity. Stomping on self-expression.

I think it is best to take Scott Alexander’s view and turn it around: government is a branch of culture. I suggest defining culture as socially communicated practices and beliefs. We may think of government as the subset of practices and beliefs that are defined formally and enforced coercively.

Take property rights. We can think of them as culturally defined, even in the absence of government. But property rights take on more significance when the government establishes and enforces them. De Soto in The Mystery of Capital argues that without formal property rights an economy cannot develop properly.

Just as an economy has both a formal sector and an informal sector, culture has both a formal and an informal sector. The formal sector is where norms are enforced by government.

As a metaphor, think of footpaths. The paths where people walk are culture. Those paths that are not paved are the informal sector. Those paths that are paved are the formal sector.

Alexander argues that the proper libertarian position is to oppose enforcement of social norms, either formally or informally. But you cannot have a society without social norms, and you cannot have meaningful social norms without enforcement.

I think that a more viable libertarian position is that where social norms are contested, contests should be resolved peacefully. You don’t want the Protestants and Catholics burning heretics and fighting civil wars. But if Protestants want to engage in nonviolent attempts to set standards of behavior for Protestants and to convert Catholics to those standards, then that is ok.

A hard case for libertarians is when Google fires James Damore on religious grounds. Whose religious freedom should concern us most, Google’s or Damore’s? And once we choose sides, do we want the formal cultural institution, namely government, to enforce our point of view?

Libertarians often seek black-and-white answers, but I don’t think they are always easy to find.

A sense of Huemer

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Bryan Caplan mentioned that Michael Huemer is notw blogging. For example, Huemer writes,

I think ideology is based on outrage. We like to feel righteous outrage, and we pick our ideology according to the thing we most like to be outraged about. The ideology then tells us that that thing is everywhere.

That is a very TLP-ish statement, of course. Conservatives are outraged by threats to civilization, and they see them everywhere. Progressives are outraged by oppression, and they see it everywhere. etc.

He has this interesting corollary:

How to scam an ideologue: tell them a [false] story that fits their narrative about society and plays into their stereotypes.

Bryan points out that Huemer’s early posts offering tips for debate are pretty sensible–if you assume that people want fair debate. Unfortunately, the TLP-ist view is that is not the game they want to play. Instead, they prefer competing for status within your tribe by portraying the other side as evil.

Klassic: three libertarian priorities

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In January of 2007, I wrote,

The goals of the free-market agenda should be:

1. Increase the proportion of children who are schooled outside of the public school system.
2. Increase the proportion of health care spending that is paid for directly by consumers.
3. Limit the fraction of people’s lives where they collect Social Security.

. . .If I wanted to create an industry with poor performance characteristics, I would set it up like the public school system. I would create a monopoly and set up an institutional structure that entrenches producers while marginalizing consumers. I would locate decision-making power at an ever-increasing distance from those affected by the decisions.

If I were writing this essay today, I would emphasize the ideological damage inflicted by government schools, not just the inherent inefficiency. But I think that the main point of the essay holds up, namely that the Republicans have ducked the big three elements of statist economic policy.

Klassic: Masonomics

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In 2007, I wrote,

Masonomics says, “Markets fail. Use markets.”

. . .The argument between Chicago and MIT seems to be over whether perfect markets are a “good approximation” or a “bad approximation” to reality. Masonomics goes along with the MIT view that perfect markets are a bad approximation to reality. But we do not look to government as a “solution” to imperfect markets.

Two years later, I wrote,

Tyler argued that politics is about determining what sorts of groups have high status in a society. I think this can relate to the idea that people are motivated to feel good about themselves and to believe that others think highly of them. Think of political identity as like religious identity or musical identity. Tyler pointed out that it’s pretty easy to predict what music will be on the iPod of an upper middle class sophomore girl at Brown will like certain music, and it is pretty easy to predict the musical tastes of a 25-year-old male gas station mechanic in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and those are quite different. You might not get as high an R-square predicting political affiliations, but you could still do pretty well.

I am thinking that at the margin this blog may be better if I include more posts that point readers to older essays of mine. Hence the Klassic.

Mike Munger’s latest book

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I have written a review. The book, Tomorrow 3.0, speculates that we could become a society where individuals own few goods and instead rent. I conclude

Up until now, it seems to me that we have managed to become increasingly interdependent without a loss of liberty. That is, we have developed norms and institutions that facilitate interdependence while maintaining our ability to make individual choices freely. Many of the important institutions that provide this governance are in the private sector, and the norms that they develop evolve over time (think of the evolution of payment from cash to checks to credit cards to smart phone apps). Going forward, I would be optimistic that although a society of renters may require more governance and more rules, these will evolve primarily from competition and cooperation among private entities, and we need not see an increase in centralized coercion.

TLP watch

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1. Art Carden writes,

how do we understand the political rhetoric and division regarding the migrant caravan? I think Kling’s framework provides a very useful way to understand.

Indeed. The applications of oppressor/oppressed, civilization/barbarism, and liberty/coercion are obvious.

Another application of the three-axes model is that news stories that get “excess play” are ones that produce the sharpest divisions along the axes. I mean, considering the short-attention-span news cycle and the caravan story’s intrinsic (lack of) importance, its prominence and staying power is hard to explain, except that it provides outrage fodder for everybody’s axis.

2. When you have two hours, listen to Ezra Klein and Jonathan Haidt. Terrific throughout. They fight, but instead of a rude street brawl you get a gentleman’s boxing match. Some of Klein’s jabs are repetitious, but overall I would give them both a lot of points.

I also would note that at one hour, forty-six minutes or so Haidt insists he is not on the right, but then immediately he proceeds to say that human nature is tribal and violent and it’s amazing that we have escaped that thanks to institutions like the rule of law. Spoken like a true civilization-vs.-barbarism conservative. It contrasts so clearly with Klein’s repeated insistence that there is a lot more social injustice in society than we are willing to admit.

I usually try to be modest about the three-axes model and say that it describes rhetorical tools, not fundamental beliefs. But I am tempted in this case to make a stronger claim, which is that Haidt is really deeply attuned to civilization-barbarism and Klein is deeply attuned to oppressor-oppressed.

Maintaining political sanity

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Channeling anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Timothy Taylor offers this advice.

  • What effort do you make to see yourself as those from the other sides of the partisan divides see you?
  • Do you have the “merest decency” to see those with other political beliefs as sharing a nature with you?
  • Do you see yourself and your political beliefs “as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases”?
  • To what extent is your objectivity a matter of self-congratulation?
  • To what extent is your tolerance a sham?

In a similar spirit, I wrote,

I wish that people could treat their political beliefs the way that they treat their religious beliefs: as ideas and values that they find appealing, but which are by no means the one true way.

TLP watch: the “caravan”

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On Twitter, Russ Roberts writes,

The caravan is a perfect example of @KlingBlog’s great insight into politics and ideology, the three languages of politics

He refers to the caravan of migrants trying to cross from Central America to the United States. Indeed, from a progressive point of view, the main point is that the migrants are an oppressed class and those who want to stop them are oppressors. From a conservative point of view, the main point is that clear national borders are part of civilization and crossing those borders without permission is barbarism. And from a libertarian point of view, national borders are used to keep people from engaging in voluntary exchanges: between worker and employer; between landowner and tenant, or buyer. I am pretty certain I could find all three types of commentary on the caravan.

A more subtle point is that the three languages help explain what gets into the news and sticks there. If an event can arouse strong outrage on all three dimensions, it sticks, regardless of its long-term significance, or lack thereof. So the NFL football players kneeling during the national anthem was a major story, as is the caravan. For a story to gain prominence, it helps if it can be quickly and easily digested into outrage along the three axes.

I cringe that these melodramas are classified as “politics.” We need a different term. Perhaps “outrage theater.”

Buchanan’s theory of consent

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Two essays on the econlib web site.

1. Pierre Lemieux re-examines James Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty.

“My approach,” he writes at the beginning of the book, “is profoundly individualistic, in an ontological-methodological sense” (emphasis in original); “[e]ach man counts for one, and that is that.” It follows that individual liberty is a value and that the social system should be based on unanimous consent. Any limit to liberty must thus be consented to by each and every individual.

2. I review Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage.

Sugden proposes what he calls contractarianism, which he credits to James M. Buchanan. Instead of thinking in terms of social decisions made by benevolent autocrats, Sugden’s contractarian treats decisions as made by individuals acting voluntarily and in concert. The job of the welfare economist is to act as a mediator, making individuals aware of opportunities for mutually agreeable bargains as suggested by the economist’s research.