Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

The Libertarian Solution to College Sports

Posted on by

Glenn Reynolds wrote,

If the NFL and NBA want farm teams let the build their own.

The Washington Post has done a nice expose series on the money that gets spent on college sports. But even on its editorial page, the Post only talks about reforms that tinker around the edges.

I agree with Reynolds. I suspect that the romanticization of college sports comes from the same human tendency that produces the romanticization of government. Lots of people will tell you that they hate pro football and hate pro basketball, but they love college sports. Because it is non-profit.

I have the same problem with the Olympics.

And with non-profits organizations.

We over-rate the status of people who do things for “free” and we under-rate the status of those who seek to earn profits.

Steven Pinker on Utopian Ideologies

Posted on by

Quoted at Fee.org

There are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a Utopian cost-benefit analysis: If your belief system holds out the hope of a world that will be infinitely good forever, how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in pursuit of this infinitely perfect world?

…Moreover, imagine that there are people who hear about your scheme for a perfect world and just don’t get with the program. They might oppose you in bringing heaven to Earth. How evil are they? They’re the only thing standing in the way of an infinitely good world. Well, you do the math.

I think that it is the conservatives who are most willing to see extreme, utopian ideology as a threat can only be stopped by government leadership. Conservatives emphasize the barbarism in human nature and the need for institutions to protect civilization. Progressives are less worried about utopian ideology, because they tend to see humans as inherently good but held back by oppression. Libertarians see human nature as flawed, but they are reluctant to endorse strong government for protection. Instead, they believe that coercion in any form, including government, is more of a problem than a solution.

In fact, some conservatives fear that libertarianism is itself a utopian ideology. Remember Whitaker Chambers thinking that Ayn Rand’s subliminal message was “To a gas chamber–go!”

Trolling Anarcho-capitalists

Posted on by

That’s not what I’m really doing, although it may seem like it. A commenter writes,

things like eBay show that enabling cooperation (which does not require the use of force) provides advantages that overwhelm the costs of punishing defectors. In this regard economies of scale favor an-cap

Taking existing institutions as an existence proof for the feasibility of an-cap is not a valid argument. The fact is that eBay exists in a world with government. People who use eBay probably assume in the background that if a situation comes up where they think that they are getting shafted they can take the other party, or eBay itself, to a government court. That court will resolve the dispute, and everyone understands going in what that process will consist of. If we suddenly switched to an-cap tomorrow, that process would have to be worked out, and in the mean time, people might be a lot more cautious about undertaking transactions on eBay, or anywhere else for that matter.

I am suggesting that people see government as an institution that gives them confidence that disputes will be resolved in a reliable, peaceful way. If you take away government, you cannot be sure that people will still have that confidence, even if you think that in theory they should.

Jim Tankersley on Matt Ridley

Posted on by

Tankersley writes,

Matt Ridley shares America’s eroding faith in institutions, but he doesn’t much believe in supervillains. He is a true libertarian, to an extreme you rarely see in American public discourse.

Similarly, I wrote that He offers full-frontal libertarianism.

Unfortunately, Tankersley goes on to say

In the world Ridley sketches in the book, everything will eventually work itself out for the better, thanks to free markets and survival of the fittest — so no one feels any obligation to try to change things for the good.

This is a straw man. No libertarian, including Ridley, expresses such a point view. Libertarianism is perfectly compatible with individuals feeling an obligation to change things for the good. What libertarianism rejects is the notion of equating “changing things for the good” with government planning and coercion. The day to day commercial activities of people change things for the good in an inexorable fashion, although the process works by trial and error, so it is never flawless. The attempts by politicians and government officials to change things for the good tend to work out less well on average.

From the Comments

Posted on by

On Debate is not about Debate

Back in the 1950’s, let’s say, I read your views in a book or magazine and wished to argue with them, I might have sent a letter to the editor or written an article of my own — preferably for a publication with high status (The New Criterion, say) or salience (Architectural Review) or visibility.(The Saturday Evening Post). I’d have to be reflective, I’d have to argue logically, I’d have to consider objections to my comments, etc. My piece would have to pass scrutiny by an editor and possibly be revised. And after that I’d have to wait for it to be published and for others to react, This was a slow process.

On the internet, I can react to opinions almost as quickly as I encounter them, with little screening for sense or relevance or accuracy. I can indulge my emotions IMMEDIATELY, which sadly provokes quick responses. And to make matters worse, a major source of satisfaction for internet commentators is getting their comments in particularly quickly, both to be noticed (“I’M FURZT DUDES!”) and to shape the discussion which follows.

I’m not sure if there’s a cure for this. My heart longs for the good old days of Little Magazines and earnest journalists living in garrets and Concerned Readers from the provinces penning their long Letters To the Editor. But that environment rested on exclusivity and economic supports of advertising and subscriptions which aren’t easily duplicated on the internet. It seems irrecoverable.

I would say that the Internet has given us three things, all of which are mixed blessings. I expect that Martin Gurri’s book, which I have just started [UPDATE: well, actually I have finished it, but as you know I work a lot with scheduling posts in advance, in part to discipline myself against reacting instantly], will speak to these.

1. More sources of information.

2. Less centralized filtering of information.

3. The ability to react instantly.

It is possible that all three of these are harmful to our culture. But I think that (1) and (2) can be more of a plus than a minus. (3) is what worries me. We are training people not to reflect, not to be charitable to those who disagree, not to try to open minds but to close minds–especially the minds of people who are inclined to agree with us. We encourage put-downs and “this one chart proves….” and ad hominem arguments.

My e-book The Three Languages of Politics describes the result: a strongly tribalized political culture, in which communication consists of signals that simplify issues so that they fall on each person’s preferred axis.

Meet the Totalitarians

Posted on by

Jonathan Haidt writes,

Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

You will find me posting quite a bit on Roger Scruton’s recent book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, which is mostly about left-wing European philosophers. I am inclined to dismiss the significance of these characters. However, their totalitarian impulses are frightening, and the way that they have permeated part of the academic culture is depressing.

Douglass North vs. Anarcho-capitalism

Posted on by

In Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, he wrote (p. 58),

players may devise an institutional framework to improve measurement and enforcement and therefore make possible exchange, but the resultant transaction costs raise the costs of exchange. . .The more resources that must be devoted to transacting to assure cooperative outcomes, the more diluted are the gains from trade. . .The more complex the exchange in time and space, the more complex and costly are the institutions necessary to realize cooperative outcomes. Quite complex exchange can be realized by creating third-party enforcement via voluntary institutions. . .ultimately, however, viable impersonal exchange that would realize the gains from trade inherent in the technologies of modern independent economies requires institutions that can enforce agreements by the threat of coercion. The transaction costs of a purely voluntary system of third-party enforcement in such an environment would be prohibitive. . .there are immense scale economies in policing and enforcing agreements by a polity that acts as a third party and uses coercion to enforce agreements. But. . .If we cannot do without the state, we cannot do with it either. How does one get the state to behave like an impartial third party?

Think of two ways to organize a pee-wee baseball league, with players aged 8 to 10. The anarcho-capitalist approach would be to have the players on the teams meet before each game and agree on rules and enforcement mechanisms. The state-based approach would be to have a league commissioner articulate the rules and arrange for their enforcement. If you’ve ever observed 8- to 10-year-olds involved in a discussion over rules, you know that the an-cap league would never play any baseball. The negotiations would occupy all of the time scheduled for the games. What North is saying is that the equivalent would happen to an an-cap economy–it would be buried in the transaction costs involved in trying to enable the sort of market exchanges that we take for granted.

As you know, I am re-reading North because of the overlaps between his work and that of Peter Turchin and other theorists of cultural evolution. I have suggested that North in 1980 anticipated their major insights. The quotation above is from 1990. By that time, some of the seminal papers in cultural evolution had appeared, and North cites them. But no one in the field cites North. If his work were more widely known, I believe that: (a) North would be considered a founder, perhaps even the founder, of the study of cultural evolution; and (b) scholars of cultural evolution would still be mining North’s books for insights.

Peter Turchin on Cultural Evolution

Posted on by

The new book is called Ultrasociety. It has many interesting ideas. However, some of them I find quite unpersuasive.

One of his core ideas is that because groups need to cooperate, competition within groups is harmful. Meanwhile competition among groups is helpful, because it promotes cultural adaptation. So if players on a basketball team or soccer team are competing with one another, the team will do poorly because they are not cooperative. But competition between teams will lead to improvement, as good ideas from one team get copied by another.

Turchin equates inequality within a team to competition within a team. He claims that this has empirical support, in that teams with less unequal salaries tend to win more games. This makes me think of Lebron James getting paid a lot more than a teammate who spends most of the game on the bench. If you really believe Turchin’s analysis, the team would cooperate better and win more games if it did not have Lebron. I call baloney sandwich.

Outside of sports, I am not sure that the terms “group,” “cooperation,” and “competition” can be defined clearly enough. Is a professor of ecology at the University of Connecticut a member of the “UCon group,” cooperating with other members of that group while competing against the “Harvard group?” Or is he a member of the “ecology group,” cooperating with other ecologists while competing against the “economist group” or the “sociologist group?” To me, neither description seems appropriate.

Turchin is quite contemptuous of the “Rank and Yank” personnel policies practiced by Enron, in which employees were ranked and those who did not make the grade are let go. But what is academic tenure other than a “Rank and Yank” system? The top law firms and management consulting firms also tend to operate on a “Rank and Yank” basis. Wouldn’t Turchin’s framework predict the collapse of these institutions?

If and when I review the book, I will have to remark on the irony that it is filled with mood affiliation for progressive attitudes and yet he keeps stumbling on ideas that are part of bedrock conservatism. These include the importance of culture, the fragility of civilized society, the benefits of traditional marriage, and the value of keeping nations culturally homogenous.

Professional Government

Posted on by

Alberto Mingardi writes,

I was also quite struck by a comment from Ben Carson, which I only now realise was one of the recurring themes of his campaign. Carson said that “our government was set up for citizen statesmen, not for career politicians.” I think he nailed a very important fact.

Read the whole post, which is about the tension between the desire for amateurs as elected leaders in a democratic society and professionals as technocrats in a bureaucracy. My view, which I think is Alberto’s also, is that the professionals will become increasingly powerful, and the elected leaders will become increasingly more like figureheads.

In terms of the Murray Edelman/Merle Kling model of insiders and outsiders, the bureaucrats become increasingly powerful players in the real game of controlling resources. Meanwhile, the elected leaders become increasingly irrelevant showmen, distracting the public with symbolic gestures.

Merry Christmas.

The Grumpy Case for Conservatism

Posted on by

John Cochrane said,

Our society codes its experience into its institutions; in a grand edifice we call limited government and rule of law.

His theme is that there is more knowledge embedded in institutions than in individual technocrats. Remember to take note of Joseph Henrich’s anthropological support for that in The Secret of our Success, one of my five favorite books of the year.

The entire talk is moving and masterful, but if there is one sentence with which I would argue it is the first one in the quote below.

People who distrust the government are less likely to vote for the next big personality promising big new programs. Instead, they might be more attracted to candidates who promise restraint and rule of law; to administer competently and to repair broken institutions.

I think that as distrust in government rises, you get more demagoguery, not less.