I believe that the fundamental issue in social epistemology is the process by which people climb the status hierarchy. If the process is meritocratic, as in a chess tournament, it is a good idea to trust the people at the top. If the process is corrupted, by rules that are unfair or easily gamed. then the high-status people are not so worthy of our trust. But the solution to corruption is to improve the process, not (just) to belittle high-status people.
Category Archives: Libertarian Thought
Have property rights gotten complicated?
Russ Roberts talks with Michael Heller and James Salzman, co-authors of a book on issues with property rights. Roberts says,
I think most human beings think about the historical nature of property rights: something’s either mine or it’s not. And, that’s like my house, as long as I don’t have a mortgage. But, we tend to think of property rights is on or off: one, zero. And, what your book does beautifully is explore the rich nuance and subtlety of property rights, currently and in history.
For a number of reasons, I think that property rights are much more complicated now than they were two hundred years ago.
1. Because we are more likely to live in dense urban settings, what you do with your land affects me in many more ways than if we lived on separate farms or in a small village.
2. A lot of wealth now is intangible. That makes patents and trademarks and business rules more important. My claim to own a machine or a piece of land is pretty easy to verify. Intellectual property creates a lot more ambiguity.
You have to use force to take tangible property from me. But you may not have to use force to take intellectual property. Indeed, I may have to initiate the use of force (perhaps with the government on my side) to stop you from using my ideas. So libertarians do not necessarily support intellectual property. As David S. D’Amato put it,
Libertarians are seldom indecisive or wishy‐washy on the question of intellectual property. We tend either to favor or oppose it strongly, depending on whether we see it as a necessary and proper guardian of legitimate individual rights, or a precarious and inherently unjust form of coercive monopolism. In an era when so much of what is even considered free competition depends on our answer to the intellectual property question, it is important to grapple with the theoretical work that was handed down to us, regardless of our ultimate stances.
My personal view is that information wants to be free, but creators need to get paid. As I see it, not all types of creations should be compensated in the same way. So I don’t take a simple, binary view of intellectual property.
3. There is much more specialization and trade than there was two hundred years ago. That means we depend on many more strangers than was the case back then. As a consumer, when I buy something, I believe–correctly or not–that various rights have been conferred to me. When I rent a bicycle, if the chain breaks when I am ten miles down the trail, do I have the right to be rescued by someone from the bike rental shop? If a drug causes a harmful side effect, do I have a right to compensation from the drug company? from my doctor? from the doctor’s malpractice insurance company? from my own health insurance?
4. Studying the “terms and conditions” for all of the software and web site subscriptions I have purchased probably would take me more than a lifetime. Like most people, I don’t do it. But that means I probably don’t really know what my property rights are.
Overall, if you were a New England farmer in 1800, you could go for months, perhaps your entire lifetime, without encountering a situation in which you were unsure about who owned what. Everything on your land you could sell or give away at will. Today, every time you use your smart phone you probably are encountering a situation in which property rights are unclear. Who owns your email archive? Your location data? Is an app that you “own” something you can sell of give away at will?
Think about all this. Clear, straightforward property rights are probably a necessary condition for a libertarian utopia of minimal government and maximum voluntary exchange. 21st century society requires a lot more governance (not all of which needs to come from government. Social media can censor politicians as well as the other way around).
And if you believe that blockchain by itself can settle all of these property rights issues, you have some work to do to persuade me of that.
Liberty and monopoly
the federal government should license any firm that functions in whole or in part as a search engine or general sales platform—but only in return for the firm’s agreement to obey a single set of industrywide rules and standards set by Congress or an executive agency under congressional, presidential, and judicial oversight.
Lind is arguing that we should deal with private monopoly power by using government power. I think that is a bad trade. A basic libertarian instinct that I have is that we should always be skeptical of the idea of using government power as a “solution” to the problem of power exercised in the private sector.
The moral weakness of an eviction moratorium
If you understand that rental contracts are socially desirable in normal times, then you should be wary of the idea of having government break them during a pandemic. To put it clearly: anyone who advocates an eviction moratorium is being deeply immoral.
Speaking of recent essays, I also wrote on baseball, race and economics.
in 1965, in a sense only the National League was integrated. Only one American League team, the Minnesota Twins, had more than one black contributor. The Twins’ black cadre included catcher Earl Battey, shortstop Zoilo Versalles, right fielder Tony Oliva, and pitcher Jim “Mudcat” Grant. Not coincidentally, that team waltzed to a pennant.
Wesley Yang’s take
Wesley Yang started with this.
Among Biden’s first acts in office was to issue an executive order that has been taken as a warrant by those keen to extend this mandate further—into the provision of medical services by race and other areas to equalize outcomes wherever statistical disparities in outcome persist. Those disparities were henceforth to be understood as the product of a foundational, pervasive, trans-historical, and unyielding racism that can only be dislodged through the overt distribution of opportunity and reward by race in pursuit of “equity”, which has displaced mere equality as the aim of racial activism.
the federal government and other private entities have already crossed a Rubicon and signaled a willingness to defy legal precedent and public opinion in accordance with the ruling consensus of the new regime that they have thereby inaugurated.
I call this regime the Successor Regime. 2021 is its Year Zero.
Have a nice regime.
Cryptopia?
In a comment, Michael Strong writes,
As the crypto-libertarian generation increasingly is of age to raise children, nearly 100% of their children will be raised outside of establishment institutions. Many of these people are expats or digital nomads. The movement is increasingly international, with the brightest, tech savvy, and increasingly wealthy people from around the world simply leaving legacy institutions behind. Competitive governance is here.
The grievance study majors reigning over the rotting corpse of government institutions in the 21st century will find those institutions bankrupt within a decade or so. This world will not be glamorous or fashionable. Young people won’t be attracted to a life in this world. Already no one really wants to teach in government schools.
Speaking of the process of demoralizing teachers, Gregory Hansen writes,
I am no longer in the classroom. I won’t see the next generation of ideologues sweep through campuses. However, as the political Left endlessly moves the goalposts after each Pyrrhic victory, I hope the moment will come when a critical mass of faculty and students refuse to play the game. It is difficult to convey the toll taken—semester after semester, year after year, decade after decade—by a teaching environment in which a single criticism or correction or incautious remark can produce an explosion and formal or informal disciplinary proceedings. For almost 50 years, I’ve had to be on the alert, recognizing that conflict with any student other than a heterosexual white male could cost me. Most students wanted to learn. I developed radar for those who didn’t—for those searching after grievance. This sounds exaggerated. It is not. Many students with preferential status now work the system in multiple ways, sometimes with little awareness of the special treatment they receive.
I skimmed his essay. Reading the whole thing would be too depressing.
Strong paints a much more optimistic scenario. Call it cryptopia. It goes like this. Suppose the price of Bitcoin goes up by a factor of five. Then some Bitcoin owners will be billionaires, who can start their own utopian libertarian cities. Once bright, ambitious people can leave legacy governments behind, they will never go back.
This is the ultimate use of exit instead of voice. So far, exit strategies this ambitious have not worked, but we will see. I think it will be hard to really make an alternative financial system safe and effective. And I can imagine that if enough talent exits legacy governments, those governments will change from being stationary bandits to roving bandits, and then the cryptopias will have to worry about how to defend their people’s wealth.
All about progressivism
Michael Lind thoroughly dissects the progressive movement.
whenever you read the phrase “public interest group” or “social justice organization,” you should substitute it with “billionaire-or-corporate-funded social engineering bureaucracy.”
That is one tiny slice. Read the whole thing.
On somewhat similar lines, Musa Al-Gharbi writes,
Since the publication of Anand Giridharadas’ best-selling Winners Take All (Knopf 2018), there has been a good deal of attention of how the super-rich use philanthropy as a means of shaping society in accordance with their own tastes and interests under the auspices of helping others – often exacerbating the very problems they claim to be trying to solve. However, millionaires and billionaires are not capable of creating, enforcing, managing and perpetuating society and culture all on their own.
More realistically, to understand whose interests are being served by a social order – to see how it is formed, reproduced and sustained – we should look at the upper quintile of society, the top 20%.
This is from the introduction to his own forthcoming book. One more excerpt:
Symbolic analysts’ dominance over knowledge production, culture, institutional bureaucracies, etc. often affords us even more clout than our (relatively high) incomes would suggest. And no less than the super-rich, (we) symbolic analysts attempt to shape ‘the system’ in accordance with our own will and priorities. We facilitate the operation of the prevailing order, ensure its continued viability, and implement reforms.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Matt Yglesias’ intern’s farewell post
The fundamental thing about freedom is that some people will use it for stuff you don’t like.
Also,
I think left-of-center people should reclaim the mantle of free speech, and specifically, I think they shouldn’t cheer on the virtual marginalization of anyone nonviolent, including their ideological opponents.
Read the whole post. Matt is good, but the way I see it Marc the Intern is definitely better. I will miss him.
Deficit spending means more spending
But the costs of financing government spending should always be front and center. When they aren’t, cost-benefit tests simply become benefit tests.
Without the norm of a balanced budget, the political cost of government spending drops to zero. So we get more and more of it. That is why tax cuts do not lead to less government spending. In the absence of a balanced-budget norm, lower taxes make more spending seem all the better.
De-institutionalization just shuffles the institutions
The question now is not, “What happened to the asylums?” but “What replaced them?” Following the mass closure of state hospitals and the establishment of a legal regime that dramatically restricted involuntary commitments, we have created an “invisible asylum” composed of three primary institutions: the street, the jail, and the emergency room.
Here is an issue that is better framed by conservatives than by progressives or libertarians, no?