A useful 24-minute video from Tom Bell for Reason TV. I think this may be the best hope for libertarians. Demonstrate that experimental forms of modest government can work.
Category Archives: Libertarian Thought
The Progressive People’s Romance
In this essay, I review a book by Internet-savvy political consultant Nicco Mele.
Mele combines a sophisticated understanding of what he calls “radical connectivity” and its applications with what strikes me as a romantic view of history and politics.
Mele is a young progressive who placed great hope in phenomena like the Obama Presidential campaign and the Arab Spring. In the essay, I try to point out how his perspective might change with more awareness of important libertarian concepts, notably public choice and spontaneous order.
The Neocon Servile Mind
The conservatism that [Irving] Kristol was referring to is neoconservatism. Neocons came in for a lot of criticism during the Iraq war, but neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement. Conservatism was at its peak when the neocons were dominant and nearly every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival.
Kristol and others argued that the G.O.P. floundered because it never accepted the welfare state. “The idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with conservative political philosophy,” he argued. In a capitalist society, people need government aid. “They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it. The only interesting political question is: How will they get it.”
I am reading The Servile Mind, by Kenneth Minogue, which takes the opposite point of view. Minogue argues that the welfare state substitutes political agency for moral agency. As citizens, we lose our moral compass and instead pick up a political one.
I find the book rather heavy going, but I probably will review it somewhere down the road. If you are looking for someone who concedes nothing to the oppressor-oppressed axis and instead views it as undermining Western values completely, then Minogue is your champion.
Back to the squishier conservatives, Reihan Salam lauds Brooks and Irving Kristol.
the right response to programs that really do undermine self-reliance and individual liberty may well be to eliminate or consolidate or devolve them. But it is important to acknowledge that not all programs undermine self-reliance and individual liberty, e.g., wage subsidies are designed to entice low-wage workers into the labor market, a crucial first step if these workers are eventually to climb the economic ladder to self-sufficiency. Wage subsidies are a paradigmatic example of a conservative welfare state initiative, and when well-designed they can do a great deal to strengthen the social foundation of a free enterprise economy by making it more inclusive.
Read the whole thing.
China and Democracy
Eric Li gives a talk. He argues that China’s process for selecting leaders is more open and competitive than the typical democracy.
Thanks to Greg Mankiw for the pointer.
My thoughts:
1. Exit is much better than voice.
2. We over-romanticize democracy and the leaders it produces.
3. Li probably over-romanticizes the Chinese system and the leaders it produces.
When Econ Bloggers Changed My Mind
Noah Smith started this game.
Don Boudreaux convinced me that respect for political leaders is a cultural bug, not a feature.
Robin Hanson convinced me that things are not what they seem.
Scott Sumner convinced me that low nominal interest rates are not a sign of easy money.
Tyler Cowen convinced me that Fischer Black had useful things to say about macroeconomics, and also to think about the question
Is the financial crisis — which is rapidly becoming the “real economy” crisis — somehow the “dual” of the socialist calculation problem?
Bryan Caplan convinced me that immigration is a fundamentally important issue.
Non-Profit Rent-Seeking
For much of U.S. history, nonprofits have operated as a check on government by providing private avenues to serve the public interest. Unfortunately, American charities—and more broadly, the entire nonprofit sector—have become a creature of big government…
The publication Giving USA, which tracks charitable spending, reports that the government now supplies one-third of all funds raised by not-for-profit organizations.
… According to a recent report by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, government funding of such charities grew by 77% between 2000 and 2010, while private support for such groups grew by just 47%.
I keep emphasizing that the main difference between non-profit and for-profit is that non-profits are accountable to donors and for-profits are accountable to customers. This means that the non-profit sector is going to be more elitist and more less efficient than the for-profit sector. It does not mean, as so many people think, that the non-profit sector operates from better motives or provides more social benefit.
I am not saying that a non-profit sector is a bad thing. Just remember that it is inherently paternalistic, and that is problematic.
Given my view, the trend for the non-profit sector to align with government is not surprising, but still disturbing.
UPDATE: Steven Moore also weighs in.
The Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank in North Carolina, recently published an analysis of the financial statements of the left-wing groups sponsoring these rallies, such as the Community Development Initiative and the Institute of Minority Economic Development. It found they have collected about $100 million in state grants, loans and contracts. No wonder they’re enraged over GOP lawmakers’ attempts to rein in spending.
Do You Concur?
I have been participating in a discussion of Mark Weiner’s book at the legal theory web site, Concurring Opinions. On this post of mine, Gordon Sollars commented,
A federal government with considerably less power than presently exists in the U.S. is not necessarily a “weak” government, opening a society to a resurgence of clans, given the existence of state and local government structures… If the only choice is between clans or governments with a direct span of control over the lives of hundreds of millions of people, the contemporary liberal project is as doomed as the libertarian one.
Indeed, there are plenty of examples of successful small states. And there are plenty of examples of successful Federal states. Canada seems less centralized than the U.S. these days, including for health care. The provinces appear to have more independence than our states do.
There are also plenty examples of successful states that do not have hundreds of millions of people. Singapore and Sweden.
Finally, there is the example of Switzerland, which is both much smaller than the U.S. in terms of population and a more Federal system of government.
A Provocative Claim
From “Dalrock.”
Child support crowds out marriage, and even in cases where weddings still technically occur the option for the wife to unilaterally convert the family from a marriage based family to a child support based family always exists. This is part of the threatpoint designed to empower wives and dis-empower husbands. Men simply don’t have the option to choose the marriage based model over the child support model.
Incidentally, I have downloaded Robert George’s Conscience and its Enemies. He takes the conservative point of view on family issues, and I admit that I am not yet persuaded. However, it may be worth writing a longer review. Robby and I happened to overlap a bit at Swarthmore. He now teaches at Princeton. These days, he would get my vote for number one on the list of Professors Who Are Unlikely to Receive a Standing Ovation–at either place. Let’s just say that Swarthmoreans are all about the oppressor-oppressed axis, not so much about civilization-barbarism. I’m guessing Princetonians are similar.
Basically, I am just another liberal Painglossian when to comes to trends in family law. That is, I have never thought that child support laws were anything but good. I never thought that loosening divorce laws was a mistake. I am on the pro-choice side on the abortion issue. etc.
While one blog post is not going to change my mind, “Dalrock” leads one to consider the question that economists ask about well-intended policy: but then what? what happens in the long run?
Suppose you make it easier for a woman to divorce a man and to obtain child support. Then what?
Then men will prefer not to get married. Staying unmarried makes it harder for the woman to break up the relationship and still receive child support.
I am not sure that these are top-of-mind issues among young people. Of course, my contacts with young people are pretty much limited to the affluent children of Vickies. What these young people say is top-of-mind is that they really, really, don’t want to go through divorce. Compared to my generation, they seem to regard marriage as belonging to a later stage in life. My line is that for our generation, getting married was like starting a new business–a moment of promise and hope. Today, it’s like going IPO–a moment of affirmation and triumph.
Sentences to Ponder
Charles Hill wrote,
To understand the current Islamist assault on world order, it is necessary to recognize that every major war of the modern age has been an ideologically driven attempt — no two alike — to overthrow and replace the Westphalian international state system.
The quote is from page 49 of Trial of 1000 Years: World Order and Islamism, cited by Roger Kimball.
I have not read the book, but I would be curious how Hill fits World War I into this framework. Instead, this might be an example of over-reaching along the conservative civilization-vs.-barbarism axis.
Let us take at face value the claim that the protections of US citizens against surveillance were violated only incidentally. Let us also accept that states will privilege their own citizens over others. Implicit in the debate is a premise few seem to have questioned: that it is justified for the US to violate the privacy rights of citizens of other countries without just cause. It has rendered meaningless whatever domestic protections citizens of other nations may enjoy against their own democratic governments. Why should an Indian citizen fight unregulated surveillance at home when the US can carry it out anyway?
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I wish more people took David Brin’s approach to thinking about surveillance. We do not necessarily have to see surveillance as a tool of coercion or as oppression. But once people put it one of those axes, it is hard to get them to reconsider.
Re-Reading David Brin
Early in June 2013, a major news story was the revelation of a government program called PRISM, which taps into electronic communications in an effort to identify and disrupt threats to America. The controversy over this discovery sent me reaching to my bookshelf for David Brin’s 1998 work, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Re-reading it made me realize that Brin articulated more than just an unusual approach for addressing the issue of surveillance technology. He offers a perspective on the relationship of citizens and the state which challenges conventional libertarian thinking.
Read the whole thing. I really enjoyed going back to Brin’s book and writing this essay.
UPDATE: Here is Brin on Snowden.
Snowden — and Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks) — are part of a vital trend. I do not find either spectacularly admirable. Given that the heinous things they have revealed were kind of yawners, it strikes me both were propelled by today’s addictive high — self-righteous sanctimony.