Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Yoram Hazony on classical liberalism

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He writes,

Modern classical liberals, inheriting the rationalism of Hobbes and Locke, believe they can speak authoritatively to the political needs of every human society, everywhere. In his seminal work, “Liberalism” (1927), the great classical-liberal economist Ludwig von Mises thus advocates a “world super-state really deserving of the name,” which will arise if we “succeed in creating throughout the world . . . nothing less than unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions.”

Hazony sees this as universalism, and he sees universalism as leading to the project of worldwide dominion and hence, for example, to the war in Iraq. He draws a line from Mises and Hayek 80 years ago to the neoconservatives of recent decades.

I found the essay to be odd. He writes,

Establishing democracy in Egypt or Iraq looks doable to classical liberals because they assume that human reason is everywhere the same, and that a commitment to individual liberties and free markets will arise rapidly once the benefits have been demonstrated and the impediments removed. Conservatives, on the other hand, see foreign civilizations as powerfully motivated—for bad reasons as well as good ones—to fight the dissolution of their way of life and the imposition of American values.

I have some differences with the folks that I think of as contemporary classical liberals. But I think I can speak for what they would say about the foregoing paragraph.

1. Democracy is not the same as classical liberalism, and majoritarian democracy can be antithetical to classical liberalism.

2. A classical liberal society is one with strong individual rights, including economic rights.

3. A classical liberal society is a universal good, but that does not imply that the American government should send people with guns to other countries to try to turn them into classical liberal societies. Even non-military intervention by our government is wrong. Our idea of universal is that just as we oppose American government officials trying to run our own lives, we oppose them trying to run the lives of people in other countries.

Hazony also writes,

Integrating millions of immigrants from the Middle East also looks easy to classical liberals, because they believe virtually everyone will quickly see the advantages of American (or European) ways and accept them upon arrival. Conservatives recognize that large-scale assimilation can happen only when both sides are highly motivated to see it through. When that motivation is weak or absent, conservatives see an unassimilated migration, resulting in chronic mutual hatred and violence, as a perfectly plausible outcome.

With this paragraph, I believe that he frames the debate about immmigration between classical liberals and conservatives correctly. On this blog, I have seen many commenters take the conservative position. And you know that elsewhere Bryan Caplan speaks for the classical liberal position. I hope that the classical liberals are correct, but I fear that the conservatives may be correct. Rather than eliminate immigration enforcement entirelyl, I would prefer to incrementally increase legal immigration and observe the results.

Overall, I believe that Hazony is correct that the right is divided about President Trump, and that classical liberals are not happy with his economic nationalism. However, I think that when he positions classical liberals as the foreign policy interventionists and conservatives as the non-interventionists, he gets it almost 180 degrees wrong.

After I first composed this post, but before it was scheduled to appear, Alberto Mingardi did a nice job of making the points that I wished to make. Mingardi writes,

Mises was actually criticising the international body of the time (the League of Nations), but expressed hope for “a frame of mind” that looks to see individual rights protected, not just within one’s country but also abroad. I agree that Mises’s use of the word ‘superstate’ is unfortunate, but it is clear that all he is pointing toward is a liberal sensibility that traverses national boundaries.

Suggestions for Facebook

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On the one hand, Ben Thompson writes,

Facebook should increase requirements for authenticity from all advertisers, at least those that spend significant amounts of money or place a large number of ads. I do believe it is important to make it easy for small companies to come online as advertisers, so perhaps documentation could be required for a $1,000+ ad buy, or a cumulative $5,0000, or after 10 ads (these are just guesses; Facebook should have a much clearer idea what levels will increase the hassle for bad actors yet make the platform accessible to small businesses). This will make it more difficult for bad actors in elections of all kinds, or those pushing scummy advertising generally.

On the other hand, John Tamny writes,

Facebook is a free service. Robinson’s decision to sign up for what is free in no way entitles her to knowledge about and control of the advertisements sold by the free service. If she feels as though “shadowy foreign interests” buying ads on the social network somehow altered her policy views, then she should quit Facebook altogether. No one charged her to set up a Facebook page, no one forced her to, so if she’s bothered by an income stream that enables the site’s free-of-charge feature, she’s obviously free to close her account.

Those who want to regulate Facebook are not afraid of how they use it themselves. They are afraid of how others use it. This is a classic case of Fear Of Other’s Liberty. FOOL is the root of nearly all regulation.

Tamny is telling FOOLs to use exit rather than voice. When you have a valuable entertainment franchise that relies on its reputation, exit can have devastating effects–just ask the NFL. If Facebook implements new policies, I hope it is because those policies help to ward off exit, and that they are not necessary to ward off regulation.

My TLP Regrets

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I have two regrets about The Three Languages of Politics, both of which concern the cover.

1. I am really jealous of the graphic for Andrew Sullivan’s piece in New York Magazine. It depicts three separate clusters of sheep, with each cluster a different color. You get the sense that each individual sheep wants desperately to be in the middle of its cluster, so they crowd closer together. As they crowd closer together within a cluster, the more distinct the clusters become from one another.

2. I think that the subtitle we came up with, “talking across the political divides,” is misleading. It makes it sound as though I offer a pat solution for political polarization. Instead, I delve into the nature of the problem. In terms of the sheep-clustering metaphor, I talk about what makes us cluster and the importance of resisting the urge to push into the middle of your cluster.

Mulling the rule of law and legislation

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What is the opposite of the rule of law?

Maybe your first thought is “arbitrary dictates by the ruler.” But my first thought is violence and banditry.

If you take my point of view, then in order to have rule of law, you need to have legitimacy. That is, people need to accept the authority of the legal system, whatever they perceive it as being.

What this implies is that the rule of law is something of a consensual hallucination. That is, whatever people tacitly agree is lawful, is lawful.

This gets back to the question of the role of legislation vs. common law. If people readily accept that law enacted by legislation is lawful, then even though legislation may resemble the arbitrary dictates of the ruler, it serves the rule of law. The problem with arbitrary dictates is that they undermine the legitimacy of law in the eyes of people (at least in the eyes of modern people). Similarly with legislative excess.

Possibly related: Dani Rodrik writes,

Markets need regulatory and legitimising institutions to thrive – consumer-safety rules, bank regulations, central banks, social insurance and so on. When it comes to providing the arrangements that markets rely on, the nation-state remains the only effective actor, the only game in town. Our elites’ and technocrats’ obsession with globalism weakens citizenship where it is most needed – at home – and makes it more difficult to achieve economic prosperity, financial stability, social inclusion and other desirable objectives. As we’ve all seen, elite globalism also opens political paths for Right-wing populists to hijack patriotism for destructive ends.

UPDATE: contra Rodrik, here is Don Boudreaux.

Jeffrey Friedman’s best essay (so far)

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One random excerpt:

Citizen-technocracy is not only impossibly demanding; it is highly paradoxical.

As a citizen-technocrat, I can participate in politics, whether by voting or through more persistent activism, only if I am first convinced that I know the truth about the social and economic problems facing millions of anonymous fellow citizens (or if I think I can learn the truth through political participation). But if citizen-technocrats took the full measure of the knowledge they need, either (a) they’d recognize that as a practical matter the truth is unobtainable, leading them to select themselves out of the electorate; or (b) their political participation would consist of handing power over to experts (or people who strike them as being experts). In the latter case, citizen-technocracy would turn itself into epistocracy. In the former case, citizen-technocracy would perpetuate itself, but only by weeding out the most sophisticated citizen-technocrats, leaving the most simplistic and thoughtless to make decisions. People who (overall) don’t know what they’re doing would end up running the citizen technocracy. And among them, disagreement would congeal into mutual hostility.

I strongly recommend the entire essay.

TLP Watch?

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A reader points me to an article on conservative support for lawyers for indigent defendants.

Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers across the country have passed bills to reform public defender systems in Louisiana, Michigan and Utah; similar efforts are underway in Tennessee, Mississippi and Indiana. Meanwhile, legislators in blue states like California and Washington have failed to address their own dysfunctional systems. (There are exceptions. Left-leaning Colorado recently beefed up public defense funding, and New York state just promised funds for counties to meet higher statewide standards.) But the momentum on this issue is clearly being driven by red states, which have proved remarkably responsive to a constitutional argument that departs from progressive ideology that often emphasizes racial and class inequality.

The reader points out that in terms of the three-axes model, the Republicans are using conservative and libertarian rhetoric.

Journalism races to the bottom

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Bret Stephens said,

Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test. Those of us who otherwise believe in the virtues of unfettered capitalism should bear that fact in mind.

His speech was on the topic of how to disagree reasonably. It is here where I think that Paul Krugman has met the market test and failed the public responsibility test. To be responsible, you have to set a good example of how to disagree. To set a good example, you have to take the most charitable possible view of those who disagree. This is difficult, as commenters frequently remind me when I do a poor job of it. And even if I do sometimes offer a charitable view of those who disagree, obviously I don’t generate clicks in the volume that Krugman does.

But I want to emphasize that we need to try to disagree reasonably. The alternative approach of fighting tribally is not working well and will only make things worse. Again, see The Three Languages of Politics.

Andrew Sullivan on tribalism

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He writes,

I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.

That describes the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo divide. But the tribalism among ideological conservatives, progressives, and libertarians also is strong, as I discuss in The Three Languages of Politics.

Read Sullivan’s whole piece, which deals with the social psychology of tribalism.

What are the antidotes to tribalism? Sullivan suggests trying to view yourself and others as individuals, not as tribes. He also recommends mutual forgiveness, rather than wallowing in the offenses committed by the other tribe. Russ Roberts and I also recommend humility, rather than insisting that your tribe is certainly right and that the other side’s view has no merit. We also think that reading TLP can help.

Jeffrey Friedman watch

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His latest essay argues that Trump supporters are flag-waving nationalists, not sheet-donning racists. He winds up,

Trumpism represents not a monstrous perversion of modern politics, but an expression of some of its most blandly familiar features.

Mick Jagger sang, “He can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.” Let us abbreviate “he can’t be a man” as HCBAM.

Nationalism is HCBAMist toward citizens of other nations, and Friedman would like to talk Trump supporters down from that. But people who take great pride in their opposition to Trump have become HCBAMist toward Trump supporters, and Friedman would like to talk them down from that.

I fear that HCBAMism is very much a part of human nature (recall my recent post on politics as religion). Friedman says that just because behavior is instinctive does not make it right.

We can drop our arbitrary group attachments for rational reasons.

Yes, but a more pessimistic outlook is that when we drop our arbitrary group attachments we then pick up other arbitrary group attachments that have the same consequences, or worse.