Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Surprising Sentences

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From Alex Tabarrok,

More police on the street is one cause, among many, of lower crime. It’s important in the debate over better policing that we not lose sight of the value of policing. Given the benefits of reduced crime and the cost of police, it’s clear that U.S. cities are under policed (e.g. here and here). We need better policing–including changes in laws–so that we can all be comfortable with more policing.

You can lose your libertarian membership card for saying things like that. I’d be curious to see whether his commenters tried to stomp on him.

This is a topic where conservatives may have it right, and progressives and libertarians may have it wrong.

The case against policy analysts

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Robin Hanson writes,

On the other side, however, are most experts in concrete policy analysis. They spend their time studying ways that schools could help people to learn more material, hospitals could help people get healthier, charities could better assist people in need, and so on. They thus implicitly accept the usual claims people make about what they are trying to achieve via schools, hospitals, charities, etc. And so the practice of policy experts disagrees a lot with our claims that people actually care more about other ends, and that this is why most people show so little interest in reforms proposed by policy experts. (The world shows great interest in new kinds of physical devices and software, but far less interest in most proposed social reforms.)

Tyler Cowen adds,

Policy analysis, while it often incorporates behavioral considerations, when studying say health care, education, and political economy, very much neglects the fact that often both the producers and consumers in these areas have hypocritical motives. For that reason, what appears to be a social benefit is often merely a private benefit in disguise, and sometimes it is not even a private benefit.

Some comments of my own.

1. This is where George Mason has a very distinctive point of view. Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education will be out soon. There is Hansonian medicine. And of course The Elephant in the Brain.

2. My minor contribution is to say that whatever the policy analyst inputs to the policy process, the output is usually policies that subsidize demand and restrict supply. See my book Specialization and Trade.

3. And of course there is the whole Hayekian theme that about what policy analysts do not know about complex problems.

It is too bad that there is so much resistance to these ideas, all of which seem persuasive to me.

Jeffrey Friedman on expertise in public policy

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The abstract says,

How can political actors identify which putative expert is truly expert, given that any putative expert may be wrong about a given policy question; given that experts may therefore disagree with one another; and given that other members of the polity, being non-expert, can neither reliably adjudicate inter-expert disagreement nor detect when a consensus of experts is misguided? This would not be an important question if the problems dealt with by politics were usually simple ones, in the sense that the answer to them is self-evident. But to the extent that political problems are complex, expertise is required to answer them—although if such expertise exists, we are unlikely to know who has it.

Patri Friedman on competitive government

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Fifteen years ago, he wrote,

Government service providers have monopolies over wide areas. Most people live in buildings and own lots of physical property. They are likely to have family and friends in the surrounding geographical area, and to work at a nearby job. While there may be people who live in RV’s, only have friends on the internet, and telecommute every day, they are surely rare. Thus if an individual wishes to switch providers, they must physically relocate to a new country. This involves an onerous series of steps: sell their house, pack up all their possessions, quit their job, move to a new country, deal with immigration requirements, buy a new house, get a new job, make new friends, learn a new culture. This is an extremely costly process.

In other words, government is like Facebook. You can complain about it, but there is not much you can do about it, because you are stuck there.

He comes up with proposals for a system for competitive government, which he calls dynamic geography. If we already were living under his system, then it would work. But the problem is to get from where we are today to something new, given the switching-cost problem. The same switching costs that make government lazy and unresponsive to constituents make it very hard to get a new system going.

My approach to more competitive government would be to institute a right to secession or recombination, subject to a sort of common-law court. That is not a perfectly workable solution, but the idea would be to allow people who are otherwise happy with their location take advantage of competition in government services.

Movie review: The Post

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It is going to be one of my ten favorite movies of all time. I cried several times anticipating the outcome of tense scenes.

The key is to let the movie transport you back to 1971. At that time I was 16 years old, very caught up in student protests of the war, and co-editor of my high school newspaper.

A libertarian can get behind all of the major causes of the movie: women’s liberation; freedom of the press; anti-war.

Tom Hanks is forgettable playing Jason Robards.

For all the effort to make Bruce Greenwood look like Robert McNamara, his was the least convincing portrayal in the movie.

Jonathan Haidt on the fragility of liberal democracy

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He said,

Here is the fine-tuned liberal democracy hypothesis: as tribal primates, human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finely adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life. This seems to be what the Founding Fathers believed. Jefferson, Madison, and the rest of those eighteenth-century deists clearly did think that designing a constitution was like designing a giant clock, a clock that might run forever if they chose the right springs and gears.

Do read the whole thing. My comments:

1. This lecture could have fit in perfectly with the theme of American Exceptionalism.

2. The belief in the fragility of civilization (or, in this case, liberal democracy) is very conservative. It gets you to the civilization vs. barbarism axis. Haidt must be aware of this, as he has read The Three Languages of Politics and told me he is a fan.

3. Haidt sees a rise of extremism within two institutions: the Republican Party, which he sees as having moved hard right; and the college campus, which he sees as moving hard left.

From the where I and most of my readers sit, blaming all of the polarization in Washington on Republicans seems wrong. We probably are more inclined to recall examples of Republican weakness than Republican recalcitrance.

I recall once bitterly accusing President Obama of taking his political views from the faculty lounge of the sociology department. In other words, I saw the Democratic leader as a creature of the campus left. Granted, that was uncharitable as a blanket statement, but to the extent that there is truth in it, you have to admit that some of the radicalism in Washington has been on the Democratic side.

But let us not pursue that argument. Rather than dismiss Haidt’s view here, let us assume that we are too far to the right to be objective.

4. Haidt is optimistic that his Heterodox Academy project and other efforts will restore reason, free speech, and political diversity to college campuses. We shall see. My fear is that we will see Haidt get more and more invitations to reach conservative audiences (we saw him speak with Jordan Peterson, and this speech was given at the Manhattan Institute). But he will get fewer and fewer invitations to speak on college campuses, where the views expressed in the paragraph I quoted will make him unwelcome.

Russ Roberts on social control of sexual conduct

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Noting that Matt Lauer could be fired but Al Franken and John Conyers could not, he writes,

There’s an irony here. The government, which imposes regulations and other restrictions in a top-down way across the whole economy, has a strange degree of autonomy. The constraints on government tend to come from the bottom up, with limited effectiveness. The control is spread out over time and the process of competition among political parties is more like a cartel than a competitive market. The constraints on the private sector actors are top-down. The board of directors fires the CEO at will. There is much more command-and-control at NBC than there is in the oversight of Congress.

Read the whole essay. Russ does not offer any definitive answers on this topic du jour. I try very hard to resist du jour topics, but I may end up writing on this one.

The Paradox of Profits, parts 2 and 3

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Part 2 talks about the necessity of the profit system.

In a modern, large-scale economy, coordination takes place through a combination of bosses and profits. Bosses order people to undertake particular tasks. Profits and losses provide incentives to engage in certain economic activities and to curtail others.

Part 3 talks about the risks of trying to “fix” outcomes of the profit system.

1. The profit system is partially self-correcting.
2. Attempts to impose corrections are not as successful as one might hope.
3. Rather than attempt to identify and correct market failures, it would be better to advocate policies that enhance the self-correcting mechanisms of the profit system. In particular, government interventions should be focused on enabling competition to overcome entrenched economic power.

The essays are now attracting readers. But my guess is that I am almost entirely preaching to the converted.

What happened to the center?

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James A. Lindsay And Helen Pluckrose write,

When polarization is deep, the large and only slightly differentiated middle that normally has nothing to do with anti-modern extremists is repeatedly forced to take sides against whichever is, from their perch, easier to see as the greater existential threat. Thus, we see those leaning left largely internalizing the message of postmodernism and those leaning right widely embracing the message of premodernism. Everyone knows on some level that the anti-modernists are a threat to Modernity itself and thus the other side’s anti-modernists must be massively and directly resisted. This results in nearly everything becoming yet another political battleground, every election is an existential fight for the “soul” of the nation, and extremists on one’s own side are repeatedly excused and defended in the name of the Greater Good.

. . .A New Center is therefore the wrong way to bypass existential polarization. For most individuals on too many political choices, the stakes are just too high. As political events of 2016 showed, when forced to choose consequentially between representatives of two apparent existential threats, mostly everyone just loses their mind and digs in a little deeper.

Thanks to a reader for the pointer.

1. The title of the piece is “A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity.” They characterize the noisy left as post-modern and the noisy right as pre-modern.

2. Much of the essay strikes me as good, but some of it strikes me as daft. The attempt to squeeze Hayek into their pre-modern category was not persuasive to me.

3. In the quoted paragraphs, I think they come close to an important observation, which is that as the stakes of politics come to be perceived as high, centrists get thrown off balance. Michael Anton’s infamous flight 93 election essay is a case in point. In conversation, Yuval Levin has argued vehemently against the thesis of that memo. He prefers a point of view that says, “Wait, things are not that bad. The political process works very slowly. We are not on the verge of total defeat at the hands of the left.”

4. Part of the support for extremism comes from the view of each side that it has been losing. Ask someone on the left what has been the most important political development of recent decades, and they will answer “neoliberalism.” For them, policy has been taken over by free-market economic ideology. Ask someone on the right the same question, and they will answer, “the rise of the administrative state.” For them, policy has been taken over by technocratic interventionist ideology.

5. Both sides may suffer from over-simplification bias. If you believe that social problems have simple causes and obvious solutions, then the fact that the problems persist is evidence that some ideological demon has taken possession of the nation’s soul. If only they would let go of their free-market ideology. If only they would let go of their technocratic elitism.

6. I think that the media environment reinforces this tendency toward apocalyptic thinking. In the context of polarization, “If it bleeds it leads” translates into “If the issue can be used to illustrate in an exaggerated way the transgressions of the other side, it leads.” This accounts for the attention paid to a story of professional football players kneeling that otherwise belongs about 300,000th on any rational news-consumer’s list of concerns.

7. Perhaps the antidote to polarization is the attitude, “Things are not that bad.” And perhaps that applies even to the phenomenon of polarization itself.