Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Jonathan Haidt’s six-step program

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for viewpoint diversity on campus. The steps include

Look inside the mind. Learn a little bit of psychology to see the tricks the mind plays on us, making us all prone to be self-righteous, overconfident, and quick to demonize “the other side.”

Understand the moral matrix. Learn how each team or tribe builds a comprehensive worldview that can explain everything, while making it harder for its members to think for themselves.

Venture beyond your moral matrix. Step outside your own moral matrix by exploring the mindsets, perspectives, and principles of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I think that my book, The Three Languages of Politics, does a good job with these three steps. For the remaining steps, Haidt’s other resources are needed. My book will be out in two days, and it is available now for pre-order.

Political speech to close minds

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Scott Alexander writes,

if everything you’ve tried so far has failed, maybe you should try something different. Right now, the neutral gatekeeper institutions have tried being biased against conservatives. They’ve tried showing anti-conservative bias. They’ve tried ramping up the conservativism-related bias level. They’ve tried taking articles, and biasing them against conservative positions. I appreciate their commitment to multiple diverse strategies, but I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a possibility they’ve missed.

The blatant anti-conservative bias in the media and on campus makes no sense if you think that their goal is to open the minds of those who agree with them or of those who disagree with them. However, it makes perfect sense if you think that their goal is to close the minds of those who agree with them.

My theory of political speech is that it has exactly that purpose: to close the minds of those with whom you agree. That theory is spelled out in The Three Languages of Politics.

The new edition will be out next week, and it is currently available for pre-order. Comments on Amazon refer to the first edition. The new edition has been revised and extended.

Provocative Sentences

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From a commenter,

The mistake libertarians tend to make is in thinking that the state is the enemy. Actually, the state may well be on the libertarian side – but the neighbors, not so much. The thing is, relatively libertarian political orders have become more wealthy and more successful than less libertarian ones – and states know that.
So, states tend to impose more relative liberty than their populations would like – not full-on liberty, but more than the populations would like.

Instead of “impose more relative liberty,” it would be better to say “impose fewer restrictions.”

I think that it is generally true that people with ideology X tend to assume that most people really want a more X-like polity, but the evil System will not give it to them, when in fact the reverse may well be the case. Progressives believe that if the will of the people were followed, then we would have Progressive policies. Conservatives believe that if the people had their way, then Conservative policies would be followed. And libertarians are often guilty of reading into public opinion more libertarian sentiment than is really out there.

This is related to the issues posed by Jacob Levy. See this forum.

Arguments for Liberty

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That is the title of a new and recommended book. From my review:

Arguments would make an excellent book of supplemental readings for a course in political philosophy. Such a course could use another supplement, consisting of readings of philosophers arguing for non-libertarian ideas.

Later, I write,

After reading this book, I could not help pondering why it is that libertarianism does not hold sway among most philosophers or with the general public. My answer is that people rely on what I call small-community intuitionism.

Adam Ozimek’s Doubts about Libertarianism

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He writes,

you can argue that places with big government are great for other reasons, and this draws people there despite the big government and not because of it. And I think there’s a lot of truth to this. But what it tells you is that revealed preferences show that having a small government is less important to people than the other things that make a place great, like culture, quality of life, agglomeration, and economic dynamism.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. In response, David Henderson points out that what is unrealistic today can change if you can change people’s opinions. My thoughts:

Find the locality with the most freedom of all of the localities in the U.S. Call it Libertymax. If economic liberty is what is most conducive to wealth creation, then why is Libertymax not the richest town in the country? If personal liberty is your highest priority, then why are you living where you are instead of moving to Libertymax?

Here is the way that I think about it. Statism comes from the Fear Of Others’ Liberty. The statists are more than 90 percent wrong. As people, they represent a positive externality–they make me wealthier, and I enjoy being around them. But as FOOLs, they represent a negative externality–their wrong views lead to statist policies that are clumsy, ineffective, and based on delusional notions of the benevolence and wisdom that political leaders can possess.

You cannnot escape from the statists. But it is still worth trying to convince them not to be FOOLs.

Re-reading Bobos in Paradise

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On p. 47, there is this:

For one reason or another the following people and institutions fall outside the ranks of Bobo respectability: Donald Trump, Pat Robertson, Louis Farrakhan, Bob Guccione, Wayne Newton, Nancy Reagan, Adnan Khashoggi, Jesse Helms, Jerry Springer, Mike Tyson, Rush Limbaugh, Philip Morris, developers, loggers, Hallmark Greeting Cards, the National Rifle Association, Hooters.

That is David Brooks, copyright 2000. Unless you think I have a photographic memory, I did not recall this sentence when I first wrote that the 2016 election was along the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo axis.

Seaweeding

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Seasteading is a new book by Joe Quirk, with Patri Friedman. I cannot resist calling it quirky. If you are expecting the book to consist mostly of wacko libertarian ideas, you are wrong. It consists mostly of wacko environmentalist ideas. Apparently, there exist visionaries or crackpots, or both, who think that seaweed and other ocean life can provide cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap carbon sequestration. Here are some random excerpts:

Ricardo has shown that his most basic sea farm costs only $200.00 US to construct, covers only a half hectare in size, and supports five people with year-round harvests of diverse crops. (p. 85)

an ultrahealthy algae species called dulse. . .smoking it as if it were meat they were astonished to find it tasted like [bacon] (p. 98)

The authors suggest that adding iron to the Southern Ocean circling Antarctica alone could reduce carbon dioxide levels by 15 percent. (p. 146)

the ocean’s stored energy can be tapped by OTEC, or ocean thermal energy conversion. . .OTEC produces no greenhouse gases, blights no land, is not visible from shore, requires minimal maintenance, and runs twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. p. 146-148

If you take away any message from this book, it is this: Seasteading is about emigrant rights.
p. 301

1. I am skeptical that there are these twenty-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk floating in the oceans.

2. Even if there are twenty-dollar bills floating out there, it is not clear to me that you need to live on the ocean in order to collect them.

3. Do not mistake resources for wealth. Wealth consists of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. There is plenty of land in the U.S. Land is only scarce in places like New York or San Francisco, where the patterns of specialization and trade are so lucrative.

4. From a PSST perspective, the most promising economic model for a seastead would be as a seaport. Find a part of the coast that lacks a natural harbor, set up a seastead harbor, and build a bridge or tunnel to connect the seastead to the land. That would create new opportunities for specialization and trade.

A Seasteading Skeptic

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Reviewing a new book on seasteading by Patri Friedman and Joe Quirk, Shlomo Angel writes,

there is also no particular urgency to settle the oceans, as plenty of land remains for building cities: They occupy only about 1% of the land of countries today. And it is much cheaper to build cities on land than on the oceans.

That is somewhat beside the point. All of that land is now claimed by governments, and those governments will not allow you to build a city with its own set of rules.

I hope to review the book at some point.

Political Language Appropriation

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A web site called Campus Reform reports,

A conservative student at Orange Coast College has filed a civil rights violation report after a knife was found lying near hateful graffiti messages targeting him by name. . .

“I am personally appalled by the fact my case was never reported as a hate crime, even though in the state of California it is one by law,” Recalde-Martinez continued. “I wasn’t notified that the incident occurred until the case was already closed, and am also shocked [that] all evidence of the incident was destroyed by campus employees before the incident was reported to the Costa Mesa Police Department.”

“Hate crime” is a term that fits with the progressive oppressor-oppressed axis. It is meant to refer to a crime against a member of an oppressed group that appears to be motivated by hatred of that group.

Set aside the question of whether it is possible to tell when an assault/threat includes “hate” and when it does not. I want to make the point that trying to call an attack on a conservative student a hate crime amounts to appropriating the progressive oppressor-oppressed axis in a way that will not compute with progressives. They are not going to see conservatives as an oppressed class. I would advise conservatives not to bother trying this linguistic trick.

The Cato Institute on the Future of the Free Society

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They write,

We have reached out to leading thinkers and challenged them to answer the following questions: What are the most pressing challenges that free societies face in the coming years? What is the most important reason for optimism about the free society? What is the most important but still unappreciated idea that lies just ahead? What’s the most important thing that you have learned about free societies that you wish you knew all along?

By “leading thinkers,” they mean only Tyler Cowen. Evidently not me. But here is how I would answer.

I would start with the last question. I think that the most unappreciated idea is that ideas are underappreciated. As I have said before, the social sciences disciplines that study human society are too materialistic. They try to base their explanations and interpretations on material conditions. In economics, it is the rare Joel Mokyr or Deirdre McCloskey who will recognize the significance of the mental-cultural world. Recall also my essay on cultural intelligence.

The most pressing challenges that free societies face are the David Brin challenge and Fear Of Others’ Liberty.

The David Brin challenge is that we live in a world where surveillance is increasingly feasible and arguably necessary. The challenge is to avoid a dystopia of asymmetric power, in which the state has surveillance capability but the ordinary citizen does not. Brin’s distinctive recommendation is to increase the surveillance power of the citizen, rather than make what he predicts will be a futile attempt to reduce the surveillance power of the state.

FOOL makes it possible for politicians to sell the public on policies that take away freedom. People are afraid of what will happen if other people have economic liberty, such as the liberty to decide on a mutually acceptable wage or the liberty to decide what they want in terms of health insurance or the liberty to purchase products from other countries. etc.

Historically, sometimes we overcome FOOL (as in the American founding), and sometimes FOOL overcomes us (as in American slavery and Jim Crow laws). The present day strikes me as a time when FOOL is ascending, both on the right and on the left. Roughly from 1960 through 2000, on the left there was a trend toward increased support for freedom of expression and market economies. That trend has reversed. Today, we have the leading edge of the left openly advocating for suppression of others’ speech and for socialism. To me, this means that the mental-cultural sky is darkening. That bodes ill for the future, especially for when the left returns to power. Which is bound to occur, probably sooner than most people currently expect.

A reason for optimism? In 2017??? Twenty years ago, I was optimistic that the Internet would empower individuals relative to big corporations, government, and the education establishment. I guess that the most optimistic thing I could say is that maybe it will still turn out that I was right then and that I am wrong now.