On libertarians and the welfare state.

I think that increasingly, especially if the Trump becomes a thing but likely trending that way without him, libertarian wonks are going to become a subset of the Democratic coalition since that is already the coalition of highly educated people sensitive to the harm principle of morality.

Their role in the democratic coalition will be to provide the propaganda for:

1) UBI [universal basic income], which various libertarian heroes have already proposed in the past

2) “Nudge” policies based on statistical studies. These will be sold as the “less intrusive” alternative to some new bureaucracy (“a tax on Soda’s is preferable to a new Soda Safety Department”).

3) Loosening of regulations on a the democratic client base the way they’ve done so for the republican client base.

4) Anything anti-cop.

On #1 I doubt they will succeed in dismantling current welfare/service bureaucrats, but they may manage to add a layer of direct UBI on top of that.

I disagree with (2). I think that even those libertarians who I think of as fitting the commenter’s model are quite skeptical of governmental nudging.

Otherwise, however, I think that it is quite difficult for libertarians to dissociate themselves from the highly-educated class. Libertarians will tend to emphasize issues on which they and the educated left can agree, rather than focus on changing the minds of the educated left on issues on which they disagree.

Libertarians may not formally join the Democratic coalition, but in recent years all of the libertarian victories (marijuana legalization, gay marriage) have come from liberal issues, none on free-market issues. We could not even persuade people on the left (or the Republican establishment) to oppose the Ex-Im bank.

Concerning the issue of voter rationality, a commenter writes,

When applied to markets, this is known as the wisdom of crowds. Should we therefore be skeptical of that as well?

The arguments about voter irrationality say that individuals have less incentive to think carefully about their votes than about their purchases. As a result, they will act more wisely in markets than in the voting booth.

However, I do not make a “wisdom of crowds” argument for markets. Seeing the goods and services that many people consume but I don’t, as well as the goods and services that I consume that others don’t, I cannot say that I am a believer in crowd wisdom.

On the contrary, for me one of the main virtues of markets is that they allow for a diversity of preferences to be satisfied, so that I do not have to rely on the crowd’s wisdom, or lack thereof. The market offers me a spectacular array of goods and services to choose from, and the bundle that I select keeps getting better all the time. This fall, the voting booth may end up offering me a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Enough said.

3.

I watched this panel with Charles Kesler and Peter Wood live. I thought it was well worthwhile, and I recommend viewing it, all the way through the Q&A.

At one point in his presentation, Kesler waxes nostalgic for the New Left of the 1960s. Wood later challenges him on this point. However, I agree with Kesler that what student demonstrators of the 1960s wanted was to be treated as grown-ups and to be free to take risks. Today’s radical students seek protection. It seems to make today’s students place a lower value on freedom than did the New Left of the 1960s.

Another interesting idea was that there is a “presentism” among today’s students. TColleges cater to this by not assigning books written before the students were born.

Maybe I’m guilty of “pastism” at my age. But with my high school students, I find myself frequently wanting to talk about history. The second World War, Vietnam, the Nixon Administration, the Arab oil embargo, etc.

He writes,

Were libertarians to ungrudgingly accept the case for a more adequate social safety net (a case, after all, accepted to some extent by libertarian heroes F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman) and give up on their blanket, dogmatic opposition to all regulation and market intervention (a perfect example is their remarkable hostility to mainstream climate science), they’d find a ticket to intellectual respectability. They would also find a ticket to political relevancy — something that is being well demonstrated by the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Read the whole thing. It is a concise, erudite post.

I think, however, that it is not a good idea for libertarians to try to get on board with Bernie Sanders. That is like a woman becoming a married man’s mistress in the hope that he will divorce his wife to marry the mistress. It’s a recipe for becoming used.

In general, my view of politicians is that even when they espouse some libertarian positions, those tend to be the first positions that they abandon once in office. To the extent that they implement parts of their agenda, it tends to be those parts that are anti-libertarian.

In the WaPo, Amber Phillips reports on a survey of trust in government.

Gallup found that an average of 64 percent of residents in the smallest 10 states have confidence in their state government, a fairly high number. Again, the reason may be that in smaller states people live similarly and thus have similar wants and needs the government can more easily address.

Thanks to a reader for the pointer.

The next time someone tells you that we need to be more like Denmark, you should say, “Break up the big states!”

One of my longstanding beliefs is that smaller polities are better polities. Imagine that we broke up any state with a population larger than ten million, and suppose that we then gave states full domestic policy autonomy. The federal government would be tasked with providing for the common defense, but do not with promoting the general welfare.

Rather than use the terms capitalism and socialism, formulate the question by making two statements:

(1) When it comes to X, the market tends to create the problem and government offers the best solution.

(2) When it comes to X, government tends to create the problem and the market offers the best solution.

X could be health care, or poverty, or unfair economic advantages, or environmental sustainability, or banking crises, or what have you. I think that people will tend to align on one side or the other, and you don’t need to define “capitalism” or “socialism” to describe their disagreement.

Challenge: Define capitalism and socialism in ways that are not ideologically loaded.

People on the left are inclined to define capitalism in ways that are negative, emphasizing greed and exploitation. They are inclined to define socialism in ways that are positive, emphasizing fairness and community.

People on the right are inclined to define socialism in ways that are negative, emphasizing tyranny and inefficiency. They are inclined to define capitalism in ways that are positive, emphasizing freedom and innovation.

Is it possible to come up with definitions that would be agreeable to both sides? Here is my attempt:

Capitalism is the term that we use to mean a system in which economic decisions are decentralized, with prices and profits serving to coordinate production and guide the evolution of economic activity.

Socialism is the term that we use to mean a system in which the results that would arise from decentralized markets are significantly altered by collective action. In representative democracies, this collective action is undertaken by government officials, who are subject to periodic judgment from the voting public. Under non-democratic systems, this collective action is undertaken by government officials without giving the public a meaningful electoral voice.

In this formulation, the phrase “significantly altered” is the question-begger. Depending on where you set that bar, the proportion of socialist countries in the world could be anywhere from a handful to 100 percent.

In fact, I think that we are better off without a binary classification system. I believe that there is conflict between those of us who want fewer outcomes altered by collective action and those on the other side who want more outcomes altered by collective action.