Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

The Elite vs. The Elect

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This lecture by Joseph Bottum was three months ago. It is based on his book An Anxious Age.

I do not think I can do justice to it in a blog post. In fact, the Q&A may be the best part, even though he seems to be rambling in his answers.

I might describe the overall theme as being that liberal-progressive politics is a substitute religion that is Protestant in character, with progressives serving as the elect. A few comments.

1. Although he is hardly the first person to offer this hypothesis, he is perhaps the most eloquent.

2. It is a very uncharitable hypothesis. It violates the Caplan Turing test (no progressive would recognize himself or herself in Bottum’s description).

3. Jonathan Rauch, during the Q&A, points out that if one were to apply similar reasoning to the Tea Party, it might also come across as a substitute religion. I think that Bottum’s best answer is to suggest that the Tea Party religion emerges as a reaction against the progressive religion.

4. The news in recent weeks has prominently featured the severe punishment meted out to business executives for violating speech norms. This may fit the religious zealotry paradigm.

5. Bottum suggests that a better term for progressive intellectuals than “elite” is “elect.” A difference is that an elite must prove its merit. An elect starts from an assumption of superiority and proceeds from there.

I am most interested in this last point. I think that it raises some interesting questions:

Do conservatives and libertarians also have an “elect” mindset? By that, I mean a mindset in which you believe that you occupy a moral high ground that others do not.

I believe that the three-axes model would say that conservatives and libertarians also have an “elect” mindset. It would say that the progressives think of themselves as the elect that fights for the oppressed against the oppressors, conservatives (including Bottum) think of themselves as the elect that fights to preserve civilization against barbarism, and libertarians think of themselves as the elect that fights for liberty against coercion.

As an aside, On my Krugman/Rothbard post, a commenter wrote,

Surely Rothbard’s intellectual lows of racism, sexism, and homophobia are lower than Krugman’s straw man arguments.

Bottum would put this comment squarely in the column of the new Protestantism. The evils of racism, sexism, and homophobia are, according to Bottum, examples of the metaphysical evil that has replaced original sin, witches or the devil. I got the sense that the commenter is excusing Krugman’s unreasonable tactics by using Rothbard’s views on race, gender, and sexual orientation as some sort of moral trump card. I hope that interpretation of the comment is wrong.

I cannot speak for Rothbard’s admirers, having never been one myself. But it would not surprise me if some of them share, or at least are willing to excuse, his troglodyte opinions. The point I was making in my original post is that both Rothbard and Krugman attract rabid followers who would never question the master’s words. Whereas with me, you will often have commenters who write, “I usually agree with you, but in this instance….” And I prefer that sort of audience.

Robert Higgs asks the Huemer Question

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He writes,

(1) Who do these people—that is, the state’s kingpins, Praetorian guards, bootlickers, and key private-sector supporters—think they are to treat us as they do?

(2) Why do nearly all of us put up with the state’s outrageous treatment?

…As for why we submit to the state’s outrages, the most persuasive answers have to do with fear of the state (and nowadays, for many, fear of self-responsibility as well), with apprehension about sticking one’s neck out when other victims may fail to join forces with those who resist first and, probably most important, with the ideological “hypnosis” (as Leo Tolstoy characterized it) that keeps most people from being able to imagine life without the state or to understand why the state’s claim to intrinsic immunity from the morality that binds all other human beings is the purest bunk.

Pointer from Don Boudreaux.

I believe that the answer is what I call FOOL–Fear Of Others’ Liberty. That is, we tolerate restrictions on our liberty because we want to live in a world where others’ liberty is restricted.

Elsewhere, Matt Mitchell quotes Higgs.

I believe crony capitalism—the alliance between business and government—is the biggest problem of our age. And the reason is that it is robust. As alternatives to free-market capitalism, communism and old-fashioned fascism are thankfully dead. And genuine socialism has no real constituency in America. But crony capitalism, unfortunately, has a very active, organized, well-funded, and vocal constituency. It is the greatest threat to our prosperity and our freedom.

These days, there are many people, not just big-time capitalist cronies, who benefit from government economic restrictions. People in licensed occupations, for example, will have Fear of Others’ Liberty.

Spending Our Accumulated Wealth: Who Decides?

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Reihan Salam writes,

in trying to avoid a doom loop of oligarchy we instead wind up with a doom loop of technocracy, in which elite research universities grow ever larger and more powerful and non-profit organizations press for the expansion of a government that operates largely through private administrative proxies. This doom loop might move at an even faster clip than the doom loop of oligarchy, as non-profit organizations are tax-exempt, a fact that has had significant consequences for jurisdictions like New York city, where non-profit medical providers have been growing robustly. Imagine “profitable non-profits” that offer their employees lavish salaries, thus drawing talented workers away from firms engaging in productivity-enhancing business-model innovation, and devoting just as much of their effort to preserving and extending their privileges as they do to their ostensible social missions.

Consider three groups that might decide how to allocate large concentrations of wealth:

1. Private individuals and money managers, seeking the highest return.

2. Government officials.

3. Non-profits.

Progressives fear (1). Conservatives fear (2). Salam is saying that at some point we should start to worry about (3). He has a point.

Voluntary Private Cooperation

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Mike Munger makes the case.

Poverty is what happens when groups of people fail to cooperate, or are prevented from finding ways to cooperate. Cooperation is in our genes; the ability to be social is a big part of what makes us human. It takes actions by powerful actors such as states, or cruel accidents such as deep historical or ethnic animosities, to prevent people from cooperating. Everywhere you look, if people are prosperous it’s because they are cooperating, working together. If people are desperately poor, it’s because they are denied some of the means of cooperating, the institutions for reducing the transaction costs of decentralized VPC.

I think it helps if people understand this. However, progressives will argue that we cannot have VPC without government and that, moreover, government can improve VPC.

Pointer from Don Boudreaux.

Yuval Levin on Scientism and Skepticism

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He writes,

But understanding human limitations does not mean we can overcome them. It only means we can’t pretend they don’t exist. It should point us toward humility, not hubris. And in politics and policy, understanding the limitation that Klein highlights should point us away from technocratic overconfidence and toward an idea of a government that enables society to address its problems through incremental, local, trial-and-error learning processes rather than centrally managed wholesale transformations of large systems.

I suggest reading the whole thing. I could have picked about any paragraph at random to excerpt.

Ignorance, Exit, and Voice

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In this essay, I suggest that even if voters were knowledgeable about issues, our democratic process would still not be as desirable as having the exit option. This is in the context of talking about a recent book by Ilya Somin. In my view, an even more frustrating problem than voter ignorance is the enchantment that many people have with democratically elected leaders.

As I see it, reasonable government, including the protection of liberty, requires those in office to follow norms of behavior that are bound by Constitutional constraints and principles of limited government. The problem with democratic enchantment is that it sanctions whatever majority-elected political leaders can get away with.

Kevin Williamson on Democracy

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He writes,

[Rand] Paul’s challenge is to seek a smaller state while not advocating cuts to anything anybody’s grandmother cares about, to sell a live-and-let-live social policy to busybodies and bluenoses on both sides and to articulate a foreign policy that is less reliant on the projection of national strength without projecting weakness instead. Trouble is, he has to do all that to the satisfaction of an electorate whose members mostly think that a libertarian is somebody who works in a library, courting the debased descendants of Patrick Henry as they shout with one voice: “Give me liberty, or give me a check!”

In 2016, they’re going to vote for the check.

His argument is that when it comes to how they actually cast their votes, the American electorate is opposed to libertarians. If he is right, and I tend to think he is, then the feeling is mutual.

I remember in the 1960s, the opponents of the Vietnam war were divided between those who wanted to work within the system to change policy and those who believed that your best bet was to stay outside the system (“tune in, turn on, drop out”). The folks who took the latter approach started communes. Now, years later, I see libertarians facing the same question. The modern equivalent of communes would be seasteads.