Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Libertarian or Conservative?

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A reader pointed me to the home page for this year’s Freedom Fest, presumably a libertarian event. It features a 2-minute video with the theme that we are like the Roman empire, in its state of decline. The reader sees this video as

completely based on the civilization-barbarism axis.

My reaction:

1. Although the video does pay some lip service to freedom issues, I tend to agree with the reader. It seems to me that the video itself would appeal more to conservatives than to libertarians. My guess is that libertarians will not be totally turned off by the video, but they may not be attracted by it, either.

2. There is some irony in talking negatively about Roman debauchery in advertising a conference that is held annually in Las Vegas.

3. The conference agenda is rather heavily weighted toward investment strategy. Only a couple of the currently-listed speakers have topics that pertain to libertarian theory or practice.

4. Perhaps these ambiguities are a good thing. The conference may attract a mix of libertarians and conservatives, wealthy right-wingers, financial advisers, and academics.

5. I do not like large conferences at all, but perhaps that means I should force myself to go to some of them. But not in Las Vegas, which is one of my least favorite cities.

Asymmetrical Surveillance

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Bruce Schneier writes,

welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.

I was strongly influenced by David Brin’s The Transparent Society, which envisioned a world where surveillance is symmetric: you can be watched by corporations and government, but in turn you can watch them. The current state, as described by Schneier, is asymmetrical.

My own view is that we need a new set of checks and balances for the 21st century. I articulated this about ten years ago in The Constitution of Surveillance. Comments on that essay would be welcome. However, please compare my proposals to the status quo or to alternative proposals, not to nirvana.

Angus Burgin on The Great Persuasion

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Interviewed by Russ Roberts, Burgin says,

if you argue that you have an abstract logic that’s universally true, that you can derive wholly from thoughts within your head, if other people don’t believe that they share that logic, you are going to have an enormously difficult time convincing them that you are right. And Friedman said, in contrast, what I can do, my method, is I can say: Okay, we both share the same end; we share the end of the well-being of the poor; but I think that if you examine the data, I can show you that my way of organizing society will be more successful at achieving that than your way. And whether or not one buys into how Friedman read the data, Friedman was adamant that that mode of argumentation was much more likely to get somebody to rethink the views that they already hold than a mode that proceeds based on an abstract logic alone.

And here is a quote that’s a keeper:

this representation of ideas as being scientifically based that aren’t necessarily so can happen on the right and on the left. And the one uniform thing is that it bothers colleagues on the other side of the aisle who watch it occurring.

Toward the end, Burgin contrasts the pessimistic outlook that he associates with Hayek with the optimistic outlook that he associates with Friedman. Hayek resonated in the Depression era and again after the financial crisis. Friedman resonated in better times. I am reminded of one of my favorite Scott Sumner blog posts, and my response to it.

I may have to give Burgin’s book another chance. My first impression was that I would not like the author’s framing of the subject.

Tyler Cowen on the Classical Liberal Tradition

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He writes,

The nation-state is a good practical institution, but it does not provide the final moral delineation of which people count and which do not. So commentators on trade and immigration should stress the cosmopolitan perspective, knowing that the practical imperatives of the nation-state will not be underrepresented in the ensuing debate.

Read the whole column.

Also, read Peter Sutherland.

migration is the original strategy for people seeking to escape poverty, mitigate risk, and build a better life. It has been with us since the dawn of mankind, and its economic impact today is massive. Migrant remittances exceed the value of all overseas development aid combined, to say nothing of the taxes that migrants pay, the investments they make, and the trade they stimulate.

Pointer from Kari Kohn.

Development economist William Easterly coined the dichotomy between searchers and planners. The strong relationship between migration and poverty reduction shows the value of bottom-up searching.

The History of American Education

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Kevin Carrie-Knight reviews The American Model of State and School, by Charles Glenn.

At root, The American Model of State and School tells the story of a gradual centralization of many local models of schooling in America into an increasingly uniform system with increasing government involvement. Before the Whig reformers of the 1830’s and 1840’s succeeded in ushering in common schools, “the state role in schooling – apart from the rhetoric of state constitutions – was long a matter of financial bookkeeping than of determining how education would be provided and for what purposes” (p. 125). Using a wide array of primary and secondary sources, Glenn shows how reformers (with the best of intentions) evolved a school system that became more centralized and standardized and less responsive to American diversity and parental input.

Some random thoughts:

1. Goldin and Katz describe the expansion of schooling in America from the early 1800s through 1950 as a highly decentralized process.

2. I do not know if Glenn gets into this, but the consolidation of school districts since the 1940’s has played a major role in making schools more centralized and less responsive to parental input. It is doubtful that school district consolidation resulted from the sort of grass-roots reform movements that drove earlier efforts to standardize education.

3. When I saw this:

American public education should be “disestablished,” just as state churches were in the decades after the revolution.

I thought of Ivan Illich, who used the same term and made the same plea in 1971. It appears (based on a search at Google books) that Glenn mentions Illich, but only once and not in the section of the book quoted in the review.

4. Lately, I have been puzzling over the relationship between coercion and education. Do we not often act as if we believe that education must involve coercion? If left to themselves, young people would not learn what “we” think they should? If left to themselves, parents would not educate their children? If left to themselves, teachers would not teach the “right” curriculum? If left to themselves, local school principals would not promote quality education? It seems to me that beliefs like this implicitly underly the American education system today.

State Officials and Vigilantes

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In response to some pushback on this post.

Should we treat state officials differently from other people? Suppose someone puts on a siren and goes speeding through traffic. Why should we defer to them?

One answer is that it depends solely on their purpose. A vigilante who puts on a siren to pull over a driver who is violating the speed limit has just as much right to authority as a police officer who does so. Conversely, a police officer who arrests someone for ingesting a plant is just as wrong as a vigilante who does so.

I do not think that answer holds up. At some point, we need more than just on-the-spot moral intuition. We need articulated laws. Who articulates the laws? Going with the principle of treating government officials no differently from anyone else means that laws articulated by legislators are no different from laws articulated by anyone else.

I continue to believe that it makes sense to think about government officials having rights and responsibilities that differ from that of other citizens. Although we certainly can and should make moral judgments about how they exercise those rights and responsibilities, I do not think that the simple heuristic of “what if an ordinary citizen did that?” can settle the issue.

Wealth, Saving, and Inequality

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Noah Smith writes,

If you do the math, you discover that in the long run, income levels and initial wealth (factors 1 and 2 from above) are not the main determinants of wealth. They are dwarfed by factors 3 and 4 — savings rates and rates of return. The most potent way to get more wealth to the poor and middle-class is to get these people to save more of their income, and to invest in assets with higher average rates of return.

Is this true? If so, it strikes me as a very conservative proposition. It suggests that the civilization-barbarism axis is what drives inequality of wealth, because deferred gratification is one of the civilized values in the conservative pantheon. In effect, Smith is saying that wealth comes from civilized behavior and lack of wealth comes from barbaric behavior.

Utterly oblivious to irony, Smith proceeds to recommend that government teach people to save.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

Huemer Unbound

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Michael Huemer writes,

the question of political authority is not “Should we have government?” The question is: Should the government be subject to the same moral constraints as apply to private agents? The failure of theories of political authority means that we must apply to the state the same moral standards that we apply to private agents. If a private agent would not be justified in using coercion to achieve a particular goal, then the state is also not justified in using coercion to achieve that goal.

The state is an institution, not an individual. Individuals play roles within this institution, such as legislator, policeman, or citizen. These roles are defined partly by law and partly by custom. When one talks about applying moral standards to the state, what I think this means is that we are applying moral standards to its laws and customs. For that purpose, using the metaphor of the individual to characterize these laws and customs may be helpful but it is not obligatory.

Consider another institution–a business. Should we say that a business is like a family, and the owner should be subject to the same moral standards as apply to a parent? Some people might find that analogy attractive, but I do not.

I think that the term I am looking for here is “category error.” Saying that a business or “the state” belongs in the same category as an individual strikes me as such an error. Instead, I think that “the state” belongs in a category that is closer to “relationship” or “institutional arrangement.” Within that institutional arrangement, we give authority to firemen to break traffic laws in the line of duty. When they are off duty, they are subject to the same laws as the rest of us. There are many relationships and institutional arrangements in which we authorize people to do things to us that differ from what we would permit a random stranger to do.

The problem I have with government is with the scope and scale of monopoly control. I think that the laws and customs in the United States today give too much authority to government officials. I wish that everyone had much more freedom to choose laws and customs without being forced to accept the territorial monopolies that we call government. However, I would not lean on Huemer’s arguments to make that case. Instead, I focus on the knowledge-power discrepancy.

I wrote about Huemer’s book here, and we had a follow-up exchange here.

Big Sugar’s Gall

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This is the first time I have ever written a blog post to comment on a newspaper advertisement, in this case in The Washington Post, on March 6th. I assume that there is no way to link to it. The ad says:

Big Candy’s Greed
[picture of a suit pocket stuffed with cash next to a picture of a farm with a foreclosure sign]
Jeopardizing 142,000 U.S. jobs and America’s food security isn’t a game. It’s a travesty.
So why are Big Candy executives lobbying Congress to outsource America’s sugar production?
To boost their already bloated profit margins at the expense of American farmers, workers and consumers.
Winners: A few corporate executives.
Losers: America
Support Current Sugar Policy–It Works for America
American Sugar Alliance
Backing America’s Beet and Cane Farmers

Why did the trade association executives choose to run this ad? Consider these possiblities:

1. They do not actually believe the oppressor-oppressed narrative they have concocted (to support sugar tariffs, of course), but they think that they can fool people with it and thereby influence policy.
2. They do not believe the narrative will influence policy, but they believe that they can fool the donors who sponsor their organization into thinking that they are getting something valuable for their contributions.
3. Actually, they are not trying to fool anyone with this narrative. In fact, they believe it themselves, even though to everyone else it is transparently ridiculous.

I lean toward (3). When you cash your paycheck from a pure rent-seeking organization, you want to convince yourself that you are actually a good guy, and in the process you make someone else the bad guy.

Tod Lindberg On the Left’s Success

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Read the whole essay. He views the Left as animated by egalitarianism. This is close to my thesis that progressives use the language of oppressor-oppressed. Some excerpts:

The Left shares the suspicion of government power at the heart of classical liberalism, but only up to a point. Individuals need rights to protect them from overweening government intrusion, true, but government power in the proper hands can do good, and indeed the proper hands must wield the power of government in order to do the good of pursuing equality.

I have written that progressives believe that what their goals require is sufficient moral authority. Getting government to do good things is just a matter of summoning enough moral authority.

Few on the Left are willing to grant that their critics are likewise reasonable — in other words, that the Left has anything to gain from taking its critics seriously. That leaves the Left in search of an explanation for why it hasn’t won over its critics. The Left has three main explanations. The first is ignorance, in the sense that its critics lack sufficient knowledge of how society could be improved and why what the Left seeks would constitute improvement. For this category, there may be hope in the form of remedial education. The second is stupidity; its critics are simply unable to understand superior wisdom when they face it. There is little hope for them, alas. The third is venality — that its critics know better but seek to defend their position of personal privilege anyway. The only way to deal with these critics is to defeat them politically.

Lindberg notices, as I do, that this is not the New Left of the 1970s, with its revolutionary rhetoric and anti-establishment ideology.

The Left’s ambition is to obtain majority political support — no more, no less. The Revolution has been canceled. “The system is the solution.” The Democratic Party is the sole legitimate representative of the aspirations of Left 3.0.

Lindberg also notices the hard-line stance of today’s left. This may be the key quote of the essay:

The notion of an invincibly center-right electorate was anathema to the emerging Left 3.0. A key moment in its reconciliation with the Democratic Party was the latter’s abandonment of policies designed with a center-right electorate in mind. For the foreseeable future, the party would lay claim to the center not on the basis of adopting positions to appease moderates and independents, but on the basis of winning more than 50 percent of the vote on election day for candidates congenial to Left 3.0 and garnering majority public support for positions congenial to Left 3.0.

I see this hard-line stance evident in the progressive’s resistance to any suggestion for reducing government spending. You cannot suggest cuts in the short run, because that would mean austerity. You cannot suggest trimming entitlement promises, because Social Security is sacred and control over health care spending is a job for technocrats.

As an aside, possibly related, I find Venezuelans’ grief at the passing of Hugo Chavez to be fascinating and frightening. If nothing else, it suggests that earning popular support does not vindicate a politician’s wisdom or benevolence.