Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Stability of Government

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In this essay, I write,

Ultimately, it is the cultural beliefs of citizens that determines whether a limited-access order or an open-access order can remain stable. For a limited-access order, the necessity is for citizens to give enough legitimacy to the monarch to enable the monarch to rule without having to give way to an open-access order. For an open-access order the necessity is for citizens to withhold legitimacy from the government when it tries to expand too much.

Since I first composed that essay, I have come to think that open-access orders have two sources of stability. One is the fact that nearly everyone feels that they have a stake in the system. The other source is the set of norms and beliefs that had to develop to make an open-access order possible in the first place. Those layers of beliefs provide a strong counter-weight to disorderly political activism.

Michael Strong Asks a Question

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He asks,

Has Romer “thought seriously” about a large scale government that can put people in jail? Not to mention ubiquitous police abuse and civil rights violations.

Apparently, Paul Romer is skeptical of private police forces.
My thoughts:

1. Suppose I were to fly to Honduras for a vacation, and I encounter individuals in uniforms who have the power to enforce laws, including putting me in jail. Would I prefer that those individuals be employed by elected officials or by a private corporation? It is not obvious to me that I should place more confidence in the former.

Actually, I think that most people are like Romer in that it does appear obvious to them that police accountable to elected officials will be more trustworthy than private police. This could be a self-fulfilling equilibrium. If people believe that their voice gives them status under a state, they may be more inclined to obey the laws of that state. When people confer legitimacy on the police and the state, the police need to employ less violence in doing their jobs. This reinforces the trust that people place in the state.

2. FOOL rules. I think that the issue of the power to put people in jail illustrates the importance of Fear Of Others’ Liberty. When one thinks of it as “the power to put me in jail,” it seems hard to trust anyone with that power. But when one thinks of it as the power to put an incorrigibly destructive person in jail, one wants someone to have that power. For example, I bet that if you took a public opinion poll after the non-stop television coverage of riots in Baltimore, the support for police incarcerating those involved would have been overwhelming.

Because of FOOL, I think that most people are willing to tolerate the existence of police and of punishment, including incarceration. I think that once you accept that those institutions will be present in a society, the best one can hope for is that laws are just and that they are justly enforced. I do not think that we can reach an ideal in practice, but I would like to see competitive forces at work. It seems to me that if we had competitive government with free movement of people and businesses, then perhaps places where laws are unjust or enforced capriciously would tend to lose population. Or perhaps one might see a pattern where different laws are considered just by different cultures.

3. If you think about how people actually choose where to live, they tend to place a high priority on avoiding areas with reputations for a lot of crime. This tends to produce a population distribution in which some areas are safe and affluent, while other areas are relatively dangerous and also poor. Police work in the former is relatively simple, and police work in the latter is relatively difficult.

4. As an aside, note that the three-axes model has predicted the reactions to the events in Baltimore among progressives, conservatives, and libertarians with uncanny accuracy.

Joseph Heath on the Roots of Conservatism

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He writes,

There is of course a much-observed tension between the cultural-evolutionary and the free-market versions of conservatism, particularly since the untrammelled free market is the most effective device for destroying traditional institutions that has ever been devised by man. Most of what cultural conservatives and religious fundamentalists hate about the modern world – the rootlessness, hedonism, crass commercialism, loose sexual morality, anti-authoritarianism, and general lack of discipline – is either a direct product of the market, or is a tendency that is dramatically amplified by it. What brings the cultural and the market conservative together is the conviction that these unplanned processes are better than the alternative, which is “social engineering” in the rationalist style.

Read the whole thing. I arrived at it starting from Alex Tabarrok’s link.

Thinking about the quoted paragraph in terms of the three-axes model, I would say that there is a tension about markets in the civilization vs. barbarism axis. A conservative would view productive work as civilized, and markets encourage productive work. However, a conservative would worry that consumer tastes are barbaric, and markets work to satisfy consumer tastes.

Another way in which the market process is civilized from a conservative perspective is that businesses fail. Failure builds character because it reinforces humility. It keeps us from developing too high an opinion of ourselves as individuals or of humanity as a whole. (David Brooks’ latest book, The Road to Character, which I have started reading, seems to stress humility.) In contrast, progressives seem to see government as a tool to eliminate all forms of failure.

Yuval Levin on the Roots of Conservatism

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He writes,

Conservatives tend to see the human person as an incorrigible mass of contradictions: a fallen and imperfect being created in a divine image, a creature possessed of fundamental dignity and inalienable rights but prone to excess and to sin and ever in need of self-restraint and moral formation. This elevated yet gloomy conception of man, deeply informed by the peculiar, paradoxical wisdom of the West’s great religions, sets conservatives apart from libertarians and progressives alike, and sits at the core of most conservative thinking about society and politics.

Don’t worry, he does get to civilization vs. barbarism.

A failure to initiate the next generation of children into the ways of civilization would not only delay or derail innovation but also put into question the very continuity of that civilization. This is why conservatives rarely imagine that our society is on the verge of utopia and frequently (perhaps too frequently) imagine it is on the verge of a breakdown. And it is a crucial reason why conservatives care so deeply about culture.

Another excerpt:

An enormous portion of the conservative worldview becomes clearer when we see the importance this view places on cultural continuity as a function of generational transmission—on the inescapable responsibilities human procreation imposes on each generation. An enormous portion of the progressive worldview becomes clearer when we see the degree to which it is shaped by a desire to be liberated from these obligations—and from the implications of the basic facts and character of human procreation. Many of what we loosely call the “social issues” in our politics involve debates about whether such a liberation is possible or desirable—whether the word choice can be poured like an acid over traditional social arrangements, burning all links of obligation and duty and making responsibility merely optional.

And another:

Conservatives tend not to share in the progressive confidence in technical expertise, doubting that any group of experts could ever have enough knowledge to pull off the feats of management and administration that the Left expects government to achieve.

I have not yet excerpted the parts of the essay that I like the best.

Several of the comments on the essay, many of them critical, are also worth reading. I think that these criticisms reflect the way that many on the right feel that they were “burned” by George W. Bush, who as a candidate appeared to embody many of the intentions of what Levin calls reform conservatism.

1. On domestic policy, what the Bush Administration considered to be tactical concessions turned out to be strategic defeats. No Child Left Behind is a poster child for that. This leads to a question of whether reform conservatism is feasible in practice, or whether it is doomed to founder on progressivism’s “home field advantage” in Washington.

2. Although as a candidate Mr. Bush scorned nation-building, he and other conservatives undertook a costly nation-building exercise in Iraq. Many people do not trust reform conservatives to exercise sound judgment and humility in dealing with barbarism beyond our shores.

I think that if reform conservatives want to overcome the skepticism of others on the Right, they will have to acknowledge this baggage and address these two concerns.

I Wish I Knew More About the Wisconsin John Doe Investigations

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David French writes,

For dozens of conservatives, the years since Scott Walker’s first election as governor of Wisconsin transformed the state — known for pro-football championships, good cheese, and a population with a reputation for being unfailingly polite — into a place where conservatives have faced early-morning raids, multi-year secretive criminal investigations, slanderous and selective leaks to sympathetic media, and intrusive electronic snooping.

That is not the way that the story has been covered elsewhere. For example, here is Wisconsin Public Radio six months ago.

As others were charged and convicted in what eventually became known as “John Doe One,” Democrats increasingly tried to make sure Gov. Scott Walker was politically wounded, partly because the probe grew to include people who were helping Republican election efforts in 2010 while working for Milwaukee County.

The heat on the governor grew again over the past 12 months, after news of “John Doe 2” came out. That second investigation looked into alleged illegal campaign coordination in 2011 and 2012 between Walker, other Republicans and the conservative group Wisconsin Club for Growth.

Obviously, French’s account is meant to arouse libertarian ire. However, there is nothing in the WPR account that would suggest anything other than a legitimate, successful probe into political corruption.

Are there any progressives willing to believe French’s version? Are there any conservatives or libertarians willing to believe WPR’s version?

What I’m Re-reading

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Violence and Social Orders, by North, Weingast, and Wallis. A major theme is that there are natural states, or limited-access orders, in which only a minority of the population enjoys political rights and economic opportunity. One quote:

One of the principal institutional issues that emerged in this chapter concerned the problems of constraining personality: putting the king under the law. At the level of societies, the head of the dominant coalition–whether the pope or the Catholic Church, the emperor of Rome, or the king of a European state–reflects the realities of these natural states: the ruler is often above the law. This allows him or her to adjust the rules, privileges, rights, and laws to suit the needs of the coalition as the fortunes of various elites rise and fall. Elites gaining power must be granted more privileges and rents while those losing power also lose privileges and rents. The rules is not free to make these decisions at his discretion, but must instead attempt to maintain a coalition to support the natural state. Failure to do so risks coups, civil war, and other forms of disorder.

In an open-access order, where essentially all adults have political rights and economic opportunity, the challenge of bringing the head of state under the law has presumably been met. Sometimes, I am not so sure.

Also, consider another quote:

Party competition forces parties to compromise and to moderate interest group and constituency demands. Rent-creation cannot be the primary product of party competition in open-access orders. . .Because parties need to gain the support of many interests, they must temper the (rent-creating) demands of each, lest the associated extreme positions hinder the party’s electoral prospects.

If the authors are not careful, they will seem to have explained why the sugar lobby and the real estate lobby are ineffective in the U.S. and why the teachers’ union is ineffective in Maryland. They will have explained why we have such a simple tax code, and why it is so easy for unlicensed health care providers and unaccredited schools to gain traction.

. . .the interests active on any issue are endogenous. If a group attempts to extract too much, then other groups who are not normally active on an issue are likely to begin paying attention and become active. . .The endogenous approach suggests that a few open access order markets might be cartelized and protected, such as agriculture, and certain markets regulated to produce rents, such as airlines in mid-century United States. However, these markets are the exception, not the rule.

They wish to claim that rent-preservation is the essence of limited-access orders, but it is incidental and held in check under open-access orders. Perhaps they could cite Uber’s so-far successful breakthrough into the transportation market as an example in which the open-access order was able to activate enough support for Uber to prevent its destruction by incumbent taxi companies.

However, reading these passages, I found myself inclined to disagree with the authors. I tend to give more credit to the power of interest groups and less credit to the ability of the open-access order to confine rent-seeking. I think of the sugar lobby, the housing lobby, the teachers’ union in Maryland, occupational licensing in health care, . . .But to the authors’ point, the size of these rents probably is dwarfed by the size of entitlements, which are policies directed at the broader public. And yes, they will make a frontal assault on the Olson-Downs view that special interests always win.

Exit, Voice, and Technocracy

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Tim Harford writes,

several economists suggested structures that would put decision making at arm’s length from politicians, delegating it to technocrats with the expertise and incentives to do what is right for Britain.

He reports on interviews he had with several mainstream economists. Pointer from Mark Thoma.

What this tells you is that mainstream economists distrust voice (the political process), as I do. However, for mainstream economists, the preferred alternative is fantasy despotism, with technocrats in the role of despots. For me, the preferred alternative is exit, with people given more opportunities to choose among different governing bodies. See the widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced.

The Case for Taxing College Endowments

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Jorge Klor de Alva and Mark Schneider make the argument.

many of the richest universities in the country–sitting on hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in tax exempt endowments, and garnering tens of millions of dollars of tax deductible gifts every year–receive government subsidies through current tax laws that dwarf anything received by public colleges and universities, institutions that educate the majority of the nation’s low- and middle-class students. For example, we estimate that in 2013, Princeton University’s tax-exempt status generated more than $100,000 per full-time equivalent student in taxpayer subsidies, compared to around $12,000 per student at Rutgers
University (the state flagship)

However, the flaw is not that rich educational institutions benefit more than other educational institutions from tax exemptions. The flaw is that our tax system has designated certain institutions as morally superior to others because they claim non-profit status.

The essay that I wrote on this topic is one of my favorites.

Other tax issues might be moot if instead of taxing income or profits we shifted to a tax on the consumption of goods and services. Such a tax system would place profit-seeking firms and nonprofits on an equal footing. It would continue to exempt donations from tax, but it would equally exempt other forms of saving and investment.

Elizabeth Anderson Podcast

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I was uncharitable to her here. I was wrong and I apologize. I listened to some of a podcast that Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus did with her. I was impressed by her command of the intellectual history of egalitarianism.

Nonetheless, I still think that she too readily equates working for a firm with being a slave. If you were a skilled craftsman and did not want to work for a big factory, you could still ply your craft. If you chose to work in the factory, it was because you could earn more in the factory than as an independent craftsman. Which in turn means that you are more valuable to society in the factory than on your own.

Today, nobody is forced to work at a low-wage employer. If you feel sorry for people who work for a low-wage employer and you want to donate money to them, you have my blessing. If you want to force the rest of us as taxpayers to donate money to them, then you are in good company, even among some of us who call ourselves libertarians (the bleeding-heart variety). But if your approach is to force the employer to become a high-wage employer, then I do not think much of your philosophy.

Conservatarian Dilemmas 3: Israel

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This is my third and final post prompted by the dialogue between Nick Gillespie and Charles C.W. Cooke. The issue is foreign policy, and although they did not discuss Israel, I think that it is about that country that conservatives and libertarians get most confrontational–and uncharitable–with one another.

Conservatives want a strong national defense, and some libertarians (seemingly including Gillespie) are ok with that. However, conservatives often want to intervene in this barbarous world, and libertarians are against intervention.

One libertarian argument against interventionism is that the U.S. government that is our agent to perform such intervention is the same flawed, bumbling entity whose intervention in domestic affairs we fear. Cooke concedes that point. However, he does not regard it as a decisive argument against any and all intervention.

There are more than a few libertarians whose vehemence against Israel makes it difficult for me to picture them joining a conservatarian coalition. The most charitable interpretation that I can come up with for the libertarian antipathy toward Israel is the following:

American libertarians are anti-interventionist. Israel is a country that wants America to intervene in ways to protect its interests. America has sometimes (often?) done so. Without Israel there would be less American intervention, and because of that Israel deserves to be singled out for opprobrium.

The conservative view might be the following:

Israel’s and America’s interests generally align. Along the civilization vs. barbarism axis, Israel is far more civilized than its enemies. American intervention is constructive and appropriate.

Some libertarians and progressives blame Israel for the costly, counter-productive attempt to force democracy on Iraq. I think it is unfair to hold Israel responsible. While some Israelis, notably Natan Sharansky, indeed were keen on spreading democracy, his views were much more popular in the U.S. than in Israel. Faith in democracy as a solution to the problems in the Middle East is as American as apple pie. If anything, President Obama took that faith even farther than President Bush.

My own feelings about Israel are similar to those expressed by George Gilder in The Israel Test, which I wrote about a couple years ago. Gilder sees hostility to Israel as reflecting a dislike for dynamism and entrepreneurial success. Progressives can seem nostalgic for the socialist poverty that Israelis shared before the liberalizations that took place over the past 30 years or so.

For some American Christian conservatives, support for Israel has a religious basis that is off-putting to more secular people (and to many Jews). Otherwise, I think that American support for Israel among conservatives is based more on Israel’s circumstances than on its diplomacy or lobbying. If there were as many medieval fanatics surrounding Singapore or Switzerland, my guess is that the conservatives who see America as the Indispensable Nation would want us to be heavily involved in those areas as well.

Another possible argument for leaning against Israel is that one should do so in order to counter Jewish political pressure. However, my sense is that most Jews feel a stronger affinity to the cause of progressivism than to Israel’s government, particularly with a conservative at its head.

Yes, there are American Jews who advocate for the U.S. to pursue hawkish policies in the Middle East, but they are far outnumbered by other American Jews who loathe the hawks. My guess is that if Binyamin Netanyahu wanted to get into a popularity contest in America with Barack Obama, he would do better if American Jews were excluded from taking part in the poll.

Finally, I have to say that I have concluded that this is a topic on which people have a hard time disagreeing with one another charitably. If you (or I) want to voice an opinion on Israel in order to vent, then fine. But you (or I) should not expect that someone’s mind is going to change as a result. Instead, expect an uncharitable response.

While I expressed some of my views on Israel, they are beside the main point, and feel free to ignore them. The main point in this post is simply the observation that Israel profoundly divides conservatives from a significant group of libertarians. If you disagree with that, or you think that the divide is caused by something I have not mentioned, then by all means weigh in.