Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Expressing Libertarian Frustration

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Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. writes,

here we are in the 21st Century with Obamacare’s futility characterized as “glitches” and “hiccups” by the Washington Post and NPR.

Those aren’t “glitches.”

They are, as one title by the great Ludwig von Mises put it, an inevitable manifestation of the impossibility of Economic Calculation In the Socialist Commonwealth.

In modern America, this abomination should never have even been suggested, let alone enacted.

The entire essay expresses frustration. If you are in the minority in a majority-rules environment, how can you be anything but frustrated?

A Voice of Social Conservatives

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I review Robert P. George’s Conscience and Its Enemies. My conclusion:

I think that libertarians will find George’s book to be well-reasoned. He usually anticipates the sorts of arguments and concerns that libertarians would raise about his positions as a social conservative. On the whole I think that libertarians will continue to disagree with his views on some of the central issues. However, his book has made me aware that the more aggressive moves by the Left in the culture war are putting liberty of conscience at risk.

Three Axes Meets Average is Over

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William Galston sees things along the oppressor-oppressed axis.

There’s nothing we can do, says Mr. Cowen, to avert a future in which 10% to 15% of Americans enjoy fantastically wealthy and interesting lives while the rest slog along without hope of a better life, tranquilized by free Internet and canned beans…He seems not to have considered the possibility that his depiction of our future might fill [us] with justified revulsion.

Patrick J. Deneen chimes in along the civilization-barbarism axis.

Thus, a philosophy that places in the forefront a theory of human liberty arrives at the conclusion that certain historical, technological, and economic forces are inevitable, and it is futile to resist them. One might bother to ask the Amish if this is true, but they didn’t go to Harvard. Clearly, they don’t value human freedom, since they are not on the historical merry-go-round to inevitable human liberty—and degradation.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Lifted From the Comments

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On this post, Jeff R. writes

The uncharitable view of liberal empathy is that humans did not evolve to feel empathy in order to solve problems; empathy exists because it helped our ancestors build and strengthen coalitions and outcompete other coalitions to ascend the status hierarchies of their tribal/feudal world.

There are two kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy (being able to gauge others’ thoughts or perspectives) and affective empathy (being able to gauge others’ emotions and attitudes). Cognitive empathy helps us guess what our adversaries are thinking and perhaps anticipate their actions; it is this capacity which made Robert E. Lee a great military leader and Boris Spassky a great chess player. It has tremendous value in the modern economy for entrepreneurs and managers, helping them predict what new products and services consumers (many of whom will have much different tastes and preferences from their own) might want to buy and how much they’d be willing to pay for them.

Affective empathy isn’t actually very useful for solving problems of any real complexity. It’s primary usefulness is enhancing group cohesion. We praise people who demonstrate affective empathy merely because we recognize that they’d make a good and loyal ally, and we want to signal to our existing allies that they should empathize more with us. Affective empathy is thus reduced to a crude Machiavellian tool for attaining (and retaining) power and social status. Liberals have much of this latter kind of empathy and somewhat less of the former.

One might think that we would evolve low-cost ways to signal affective empathy. For example, putting a political bumper sticker on your car is cheaper than making a large donation to charity.

Civilization vs. Barbarism Watch

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A reader points me to a story in Wired.

The prevalence of gun crimes in Chicago is due in large part to a fragmentation of the gangs on its streets: There are now an estimated 70,000 members in the city, spread out among a mind-boggling 850 cliques, with many of these groupings formed around a couple of street corners or a specific school or park. Young people in these areas are like young people everywhere, using technology to coordinate with their friends and chronicle their every move. But in neighborhoods where shootings are common, the use of online tools has turned hazardous, as gang violence is now openly advertised and instigated online.

My guess is that this sort of story will freak out conservatives. But my guess, and this is somewhat supported by anecdotes in the story, is that social media will not turn out to be a long-run boon to the forces of barbarism.

Note that much of the description of gang behavior favors Mark Weiner, not Michael Huemer.

Gotcha!

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Greg Mankiw (among others) points to new NBER working papers by Casey Mulligan that point out that marginal tax rates go up under Obamacare. I have not read the papers, but I assume that he counts as an increase in the marginal tax rate the fact that you lose out on subsidies as your incomes goes up. That is legitimate economic analysis, but try to do satisfy the following:

1. Use “means testing” in order to provide a significant benefit that is aimed at the poor.

2. Keep the marginal tax rate low.

3. Keep the budget cost low.

Those of us on the right tend to argue separately for all three. But collectively, they are not so easy to satisfy. (My undergraduate economics professor, Bernie Saffran, pointed this out, and I have not forgotten it.)

If you want to offer a means-tested benefit at low cost, then you have to scale-back the benefit rapidly as income rises, meaning a high marginal tax rate.

If you want to keep the marginal tax rate low and and the budget cost low, then you cannot offer a sizable benefit to the poor. So you can’t do much in terms of means-testing.

If you want to provide a significant benefit to the poor with a low marginal tax rate, then you have to phase the benefit out very slowly as incomes rise. So the budget cost is high.

If we want to, we can play “gotcha!” with any proposal that is aimed at helping people who are poor. It is bound to fail (1), (2), or (3). But how can we be constructive?

My solution was offered in the essay Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism. The idea was to offer a significant benefit with a low marginal tax rate. To hold down the budget cost, I shift away from in-kind benefits (such as food stamps or Medicaid) toward a cash benefit.

That essay is worth re-reading.

America 3.0

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James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus write,

As the 2.0 state fails, we are seeing increasing awareness, urgency, and activism in response to a deepening crisis. The emerging America 3.0 will reverse several key characteristics of the 2.0 state: decentralization versus centralization; diversity and voluntarism rather than compulsion and uniformity; emergent solutions from markets and voluntary networks rather than top-down, elite-driven commands. Strong opposition to the rise of America 3.0 is inevitable, including heavy-handed, abusive, and authoritarian attempts to prop up the existing order. But this “doubling down” approach is doomed. It is incompatible with both the emerging technology and the underlying cultural framework that will predominate in America 3.0.

That is from an essay that extracts from their book. I also have a review of their book. I write,

Bennett and Lotus argue that reformed government in America 3.0 would be strong but localized. They believe that the most unworkable aspect of the American welfare state is its scale, covering a population of three hundred million.

From Different Planets

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Daniel Little:

the idea that a properly functioning market economy will tend to reduce poverty and narrow the extremes of income inequality has been historically refuted — at least in the case of American capitalism.

Echoed by Mark Thoma.

On the other hand, Don Boudreaux.

Each and every thing that we consume today in market societies is something that requires the coordinated efforts of millions of people, yet each of us is able to command possession and use of these things in exchange for only a small fraction of our work time.

Barry Weingast on Violence

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This was a very interesting Russ Roberts podcast, which I missed last week while I was at the beach.

the median poor country has violence– Russ: Poor defined as? Guest: The bottom half of the distribution of countries. Russ: The median within that half. Guest: The median within that half experiences violence every 7 years. Russ: A regime change. Not just some fighting outside the palace. That’s shocking. Guest: Right.

When a regime changes through violence, the rules of property can change along with them. It is hard to invest for the long term under such circumstances. Also, people come to see control over government as the main route to obtaining or securing wealth. Finally, Weingast argues that in order to prevent coups, governments have to make economic concessions to groups that otherwise might become violent. Governments have to use regulation and subsidies to keep the peace.

I should note that in the United States, a similar process takes place but without the threat of violence. The housing lobby can threaten to throw a legislator out of office, and so the housing lobby gets what it wants. I am not convinced that the U.S. has less rent-seeking than less developed countries. Maybe it’s true, but I would like to see data. However, I am convinced that stability of regime is a good thing.

CR Symposium on John Zaller

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It’s all gated, but Critical Review is worth a subscription. I found Zaller’s own entry the most interesting. Some excerpts (each paragraph is plucked at random–they are not a sequence):

An ideology is a set [of] policy positions recommended by informal coalitions of political pundits, intellectuals, and interest-group representatives…The purpose of ideology is to persuade citizens at large, and espectially the more politically active segment of the populace, of what ought to be done in politics…different people are attracted to liberalism and conservatism for different reasons…what Conover and Feldman call symbolic attachments–e.g. disliking “Big Business,” liking “Women’s Liberation”–are more closely associated with evaluations of liberalism and conservatism than are policy preferences.

If there is one thing that my “political education” over the last 20 years has taught me, it is that one cannot tell a sensible story about public opinion and democracy in the United States without ascribing a central role to interest group and activist policy demanders.

Parties offer policies that are acceptable to their policy-demanding activists and calculate to appeal to particular voting blocs. There is no expectation that parties…will offer policies simply because voters want them. Nor does the median voter’s position…play a significant role. Majorities obtained through any means consistent with the agendas of policy demanders are what parties care about.

According to [Larry M.] Bartels’ analysis, each term in office (after the first) [for one political party] offsets 1.29 percentage points of Q14/Q15 growth [in real disposable income in the spring and summer of the Presidential election year].

The Bartels model raised a number of interesting questions to me. As I read the chart in Zaller’s paper, a first-term-for-the-party incumbent is likely to be re-elected as long as real disposable income does not fall the spring and summmer of the election year. That seems like a low bar. The finding that the bar gets higher the longer the incumbent party has been in office could be due to a combination of two things. One is that the voters get tired of the incumbent party, regardless of what the other party does. The other possibility is that the longer a party is out of power, the more desperate it comes, and the more willing it is to adapt in order to win. I think of those two possibilities as having rather different implications.

The vast amount of government policy-making…that is beneath the radar for most voters…is ceded to the demands of interest groups and activists…Where does the sending of cues by partisan leaders fit into this model of respresentation? It doesn’t have a primary role. Its secondary role is to increase political harmony within coalitions by gaining the assent of members for the common agenda.

My three-axis model would describe part of the cueing process. A politician who wants to send a “cue” to progressives can talk about issues along the oppressor-oppressed axis. A politician who wants to send a “cue” to conservatives could talk in terms of civilization vs. barbarism. A politician who wants to send a “cue” to libertarians would talk in terms of freedom vs. coercion.

Note that Republicans have a more complicated problem, because they want to send cues to conservatives and libertarians.

Note that all of the exercises in mobilizing voters, whether using group-identity or three-axis cues, or other means, are simply for the purpose of winning elections. Once in power, politicians primarily serve interest groups. That is why an ideologically committed voter always feels keen disappointment with how little is accomplished when his or her preferred politicians win.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon [imposed] emergency wage and price controls…[in] a survey of Republican activists…Support for price controls was 37 percent before the speech but 82 percent afterwards

My guess is that a survey of Democratic activists on NSA snooping would show a similar before-and-after. That is, before it was revealed that the NSA was snooping on Americans on Obama’s watch, a small percentage of Democratic activists would have favored such snooping. Now, I conjecture, a much larger percentage of Democratic activists favors such snooping.