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Category Archives: Libertarian Thought
My Latest Review Essay
About The End of Power by Moises Naim, I write.
Naim combines strong conceptual thinking with an ability to summon impressive statistical evidence. His book is particularly valuable in showing the importance of growth and change happening in the emerging economies of the world. If those of us who lean libertarian differ from Naim’s conclusions, we should still be aware that his views are much closer than ours to those of most of the world’s elite.
It might be interesting to compare and contrast his book with my book on the knowledge-power discrepancy.
Peter Thiel Wants a Rat Thing
Look at what Peter Thiel is investing in:
Over the past six years RoboteX has developed a lineup of sturdy robots versatile enough to be used by the military, police, or people who think they might have heard something in the shed. Their Avatar series Security Robot goes on patrol so humans don’t have to. Realtime video is fed to a control center wirelessly for monitoring, and a two-way audio feed allows controllers to ask questions first and get answers hundreds of miles away. Its camera has full 360 degree coverage and shoots in both visual and infrared – so there’s no hiding in the dark. It’s also hard to get away from – capable of climbing stairs and moving over carpets, wet floors, even rugged outdoor terrain
It reminds me of the Rat Thing, one of my favorite elements in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. If people believe that they can address their own safety issues without government, that becomes a big deal.
Robin Hanson on Clans
In most farmer-era cultures extended families, or clans, were the main unit of social organization, for production, marriage, politics, war, law, and insurance. People trusted their clans, but not outsiders, and felt little obligation to treat outsiders fairly. Our industrial economy, in contrast, relies on our trusting and playing fair in new kinds of organizations: firms, cities, and nations, and on our changing our activities and locations to support them.
Read the whole post.
The Tea Party vs. The Common Core
It is the lead story in today’s Washington Post.
Lawmakers have responded by introducing legislation that would at least temporarily block the standards in at least nine states, including two that have put the program on hold. The Republican governors of Indiana and Pennsylvania quickly agreed to pause Common Core, and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), a vocal supporter of the plan, is nevertheless expected to accept a budget agreement struck by GOP legislators that would withhold funding for the program pending further debate.
I strongly support the Tea Party on this one. I was an early opponent of national testing. Ten years ago, I wrote
For the standardized testing approach to accountability, success by definition means making schools responsive to top-down control. In the case of the Bush administration “reforms,” standardized testing increases the leverage of the Federal government over local schools. Any conservative ought to think twice about supporting such a trend.
Anarchism
From Kelefa Sanneh in the New Yorker.
Rothbard was an anarchist, but also a capitalist. “True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism,” he once said, and he sometimes referred to himself by means of a seven-syllable honorific: “anarcho-capitalist.” Graeber thinks that governments treat their citizens “like children,” and that, when governments disappear, people will behave differently. Anarcho-capitalists, on the contrary, believe that, without government, people will behave more or less the same: we will be just as creative or greedy or competent as we are now, only freer. Instead of imagining a world without drastic inequality, anarcho-capitalists imagine a world where people and their property are secured by private defense agencies, which are paid to keep the peace. Graeber doesn’t consider anarcho-capitalists to be true anarchists; no doubt the feeling is mutual.
The article is a profile of David Graeber, an anthropologist who got involved with the Occupy movement.
The Charitable Deduction
The IGM Forum asks an odd question. Agree or disagree with the statement
Reducing the income-tax deductibility of charitable gifts is a less distortionary way to raise new revenue than raising the same amount of revenue through a proportional increase in all marginal tax rates.
Janet Currie writes
The wording implies that distortion is bad, but the point of the charitable deduction is to encourage charity, ie to “distort” behavior.
Angus Deaton agrees with the statement, but adds
If minimizing distortion is your target, though seems like a very odd one.
In fact, the consensus seems to be that this was not the right question.
For more on the charitable deduction, you might look at this Hudson Institute event.
For me, the difficulty of assessing the charitable deduction concerns the relevant margin. If the relevant margin that it affects is the mix between profits and non-profits, then I would rather see more firms driven by profit. Non-profit to me means not being accountable to consumers, and that is not a good thing. On the other hand, if the relevant margin is the mix between private charity and government-run charity, then I do not think that shrinking private charity to grow government charity is a good idea.
David Boaz on Libertarianism
He lists the top ten ways that he tries to explain it.
the number 1 way to talk about libertarianism — or at least a sentence I found effective when I was talking about Libertarianism: A Primer on talk shows: “Libertarianism is the idea that adult individuals have the right and the responsibility to make the important decisions about their lives.” Every word is important there: We’re talking about individuals. We’re talking about adults; the question of children’s rights is far more complex. Responsibility is just as important as rights.
The objection from progressives is that this ignores a lot of harm in the world–the harm that people do to themselves, the harm of market failures, and the harm of oppression. To meet this objection, I would say that I believe that humans make mistakes in the context of government that do more harm than the mistakes that they make when pursuing their individual interests in the context of the market.
The objection from conservatives is that this ignores the need for collective action to suppress barbarism, both as an external threat and as an individual tendency. To meet this objection, I would say that I believe that government enforcement of civilized values is more often than not an oxymoron.
What I’m Reading
New books by Kevin Williamson and by Tim Kane and Glenn Hubbard. Both take as their premise the thesis that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal course. In The End Is Near and It’s Going to be Awesome, Williamson treats this as an opportunity, while in Balance, Kane and Hubbard treat it as a threat. Perhaps it would be appropriate at some point to jointly review them at length.
If I might boil the Kane-Hubbard book down to one sentence, it would be that without a balanced budget amendment to avert fiscal collapse, America will lose its great power status. I can imagine conservatives, thinking in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis, nodding firmly in agreement. However, by the same token, I can picture progressives and libertarians shrugging with indifference.
Williamson appears to be in the latter category. So far (I am less than 1/3rd finished), the book is assembling a standard array of libertarian arguments. Anyone who already resonates to the freedom-coercion axis is bound to like it. My guess is that Williamson is headed toward an embrace of what I have called civil societarianism. So far, it looks as though he is arguing for views that I share, although he expresses them with greater certitude.
Questions Lifted from Comments
Why do we have the axes that we have and why do some people adopt one axis over another? Is it nature, nurture, free will or something else? Is it is more than just group identity and signalling?
I think that the oppressor-oppressed axis must have very deep roots in human nature. I look at the Passover story of Pharoah and the Jews as a story that is readily told in terms of that axis. I know, I know, it can be read in terms of freedom and coercion also, but it’s not as if the “happy ending” frees everyone.
I also think that the civilization-barbarism axis has roots that go deep, because it ties in with xenophobia. It is common to view “the other” as barbaric, and therefore to view the prospect of defeat by the other in cataclysmic terms.
Perhaps it is the freedom-coercion axis that is most unnatural. Most people think that government has existed and always will exist. They are not necessarily wrong. And my guess is that most Americans feel that, on balance, state power is exercised for them rather than against them. Again, they are not necessarily wrong. I would guess that while libertarians raised objections to the way the police in Boston handled the aftermath of the Marathon bombing, if you were to take a poll, the support for the authorities among the public at large would be overwhelming.
In answer to the third question, I think that the axes are most useful for group identity and signalling. Framing an issue in terms of the axes is a way to dog-whistle to those with whom you agree. Characterizing those who disagree with you as being at the opposite end of your preferred axis (“they only want to help the rich!” “they just want to tear down America!” “they just want a police state!”) is a way to reinforce your own group identity.
I don’t know how to predict your preferred axis based on some other characteristic. But I will predict that articulate, politically-engaged people in the U.S. will tend to gravitate toward one axis, and to use that axis for group-identity and signaling purposes. I do believe that it is human nature to take mental shortcuts and to pursue status within a tribe. As Brink Lindsey pointed out at lunch at Cato yesterday, the more we learn from experimental cognitive psychology, the more we see that we are prone to biased thought processes. Perhaps as more people become aware of these biases, they will be more willing to detach themselves from any particular axis.
What areas do the axes agree on and why? Do we at least agree on the liberal project (broadly defined) of individual rights, democracy and science, but disagree on the right mix?
I would not think of the axes as philosophical pillars. Again, I think they perform tribal functions, including group identity and signaling. Certainly, there are general areas of agreement among all three groups. But “individual rights” mean different things to different tribes: one tribe believes in a “right to health care” and the other ones don’t; One tribe believes in the “right to life” (vs. abortion) and the other ones don’t; One tribe believes in the “right to ingest whatever substance he or she wants” and the other ones don’t.
Do people change axes or moderate their views over time? What might cause a change or moderation?
I have changed axes over time. In 1970, I was with Noam Chomsky, who explained the Vietnam war in oppressor-oppressed terms, as driven by American corporations seeking to dominate Vietnamese markets. I think that if you are capable of realizing that your tribe’s position is silly (as this one was), you are capable of change or moderation. And I think every tribe has taken a silly position at one point or another (and by the way, I still think that the Vietnam War was a terrible mistake, but the process by which that mistake was made was complex.)
in what circumstances will the rent-seekers triumph over the technocrats in affecting policy? Virtually every time? Or can the technocrats rally enough support from their drummer pals to defeat them, and if so, in what circumstances?
My father, who unlike me was a political scientist, would have taken a hard line on this one. He would have said that the rent-seekers (he would have called them insiders or interest groups) win every time. The tribal drummers serve as “useful idiots,” creating drama that captures the imagination of the public, while in the back rooms the insiders divide up the goodies. I should note also that he did not feel outraged by this. He just thought it was the natural order of things. In fact, if you had asked him, “What should I personally do about this?” his answer probably would have been “Become an insider!”
The technocrats can operate along some margins, particularly in areas where rent-seekers give them some slack. But when the stakes in terms of rents are high, you should always bet on the rent-seekers. So the Fed has a little slack in terms of choosing to pursue slightly higher or lower inflation. It probably had a lot less slack in choosing whether to bail out Citi and Goldman.