Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Three Axes Commentary

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Readers suggested that I check out these two posts:

1. James Pethokoukis on Arthur Brooks. Brooks writes,

the core problem with out-of-control entitlements is not that they are costly—it is that the impending insolvency of Social Security and Medicare imperils the social safety net for the neediest citizens. Education innovation and school choice are not needed to fight rapacious unions and bureaucrats—too often the most prominent focus of conservative education concerns—but because poor children and their parents deserve better schools.

Brooks appears to be suggesting that conservatives adopt the oppressor-oppressed language when talking about entitlements and about school choice. My guess is that this will not be successful. I do not think that most ordinary people respond so much to the rhetoric of the three axes. And I don’t think that political elites can be talked into changing sides with different rhetoric.

Most of the energy in political discussions goes toward closing the mind of people on your own side. This seems to work, because elites on all sides are pretty closed-minded.

Of course, if you ask me what might be successful for conservatives, I do not have an answer.

2. Scott Alexander writes,

My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment…. Leftism wins over time because technology advances over time which means societies become more secure and abundant over time.

Read the whole thing. I think there is a little bit there that is correct. That is, I think that conservativism tends to include a tendency to worry that we could go down the tubes. In terms of the civilization-barbarism axis, conservatives see many routes back to barbarism.

However, I do not think that either progressives or conservatives would recognize themselves in Alexander’s mirror. Progressives also can be pessimistic–about the distribution of income and the environment, for example. And conservatives are optimistic along some dimensions.

My goal with the three-axis model is not to explain away someone else’s beliefs. Instead, the goal is to describe political beliefs in a way that reflects how each side talks about issues, particularly as they reach a settled opinion.

Gun Control

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A reader familiar with the three-axes model asks,

The oppressed would seem to be victims of violence, but wouldn’t that make criminals the oppressors? How do hunters, recreational shooters, and the NRA end up being the bad guys?

1. The progressive model requires a villain who belongs to some sort of privileged class. Criminals do not fit the bill.

2. Hunting and recreational shooting are not approved activities for city-dwellers. Rural folks need to start acting like normal people and taking Zumba classes, going to restaurants run by celebrity chefs, and spending more time on smart phones.

The Dark View of Schooling

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Bryan Caplan thinks that schooling is not about education. He thinks instead it is about signaling.

Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.

society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. Mom doesn’t want them hanging around the house, the citizens do not want them out in the streets, and workers do not want them in the labor force. What then do we do with them? How do we get rid of them? We put them in schools. That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

Thanks to a commenter on this post for the pointer.

Bryan is also mild in comparison with Ivan Illich.

A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for de-schooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling for more of the same.

Illich’s DeSchooling Society starts with a chapter “Why We Must Disestablish School,” which opens

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. [Does this foreshadow the classic “not about” post by Robin Hanson?] Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends…

the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence…this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or “treatments.” I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats.

The New Left had its vices. As with the Occupy Wall Street movement, within their smoldering discontent it is difficult to discern how they would address economic organization. In The Mind and the Market, p. 345-346, Jerry Muller writes of New Left icon Herbert Marcuse,

his work, unlike Keynes’, was less than useless in providing tangible institutional solutions. For Marcuse was fundamentally uninterested in institutions, whether economic or political….Marcuse proceeded as if these fundamental issues of modern political and economic life could simply be ignored.

The New Left also bequeathed to us an academy where the oppressed-oppressor narrative becomes the sum of all scholarship. As Muller puts it on p. 344,

Scholarship, in this understanding, was not about objectivity…The model of the professor as critical intellectual, liberating his or her audience from one or another variety of false consciousness, became institutionalized in some academic disciplines, above all literary studies and sociology. Three decades after the zenith of the New Left and the publication of Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation, for example, the annual convention of the American Sociological Association was devoted to the theme of “Oppression, Domination, and Liberation”; it focused on racism as well as “other manifestations of social inequality such as class exploitation and oppression on the basis of gender, ethnicity, national origin, sexual preference, disability and age.”

But one thing I will say for the New Left is that they were not the hard-line statists that we see on the left today. On the contrary, they viewed government technocrats as part of what they called “the system,” and opposition to this system was a centerpiece of New Left ideology.

Ken Kesey, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, coined the term “the Combine” to describe forces of control that deprived people of freedom supposedly for their own good. Interestingly, John Taylor Gatto, another anti-schooling radical, wrote a Cliff Notes version of the novel that emphasized its anti-authoritarian aspects.

I imagine that if universal pre-kindergarten had been proposed by Richard Nixon, the New Left would have denounced the scheme as fascist. In that sense, I miss them.

Jonathan Haidt’s Three-Axis Model

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I recommend this half-hour video. He talks about a near-far axis, in which people close to you matter more than people far away. He talks about a hierarchy axis, in which you treat people higher on the totem pole differently from people who are lower down. And he talks about a divinity axis, where some actions are considered sacred and others disgusting. However, there is much more in his talk, which I think you will find stimulating.

For politics, I prefer my own three-axis model, but Haidt is very interesting. You can see that I have borrowed his views on libertarians as logical thinkers.

Vickies and Thetes

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Ross Douthat writes,

Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich.

Pointer from Reihan Salam.

As befits his role as a conservative NYT columnist, Douthat gives this a civilization vs. barbarism spin.

Here the decline in work-force participation is of a piece with the broader turn away from community in America — from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship. Like many of these trends, it poses a much greater threat to social mobility than to absolute prosperity. (A nonworking working class may not be immiserated; neither will its members ever find a way to rise above their station.) And its costs will be felt in people’s private lives and inner worlds even when they don’t show up in the nation’s G.D.P.

Note: Joseph Sunde thinks along similar lines.

Paul Romer on Separation of Powers

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He writes,

the evidence suggests that giving citizens the ability to “vote with their feet” will not discipline the leaders of a community. More fundamentally, the evidence shows that while the opportunity to vote is one difference between public and private systems of city governance, it is not the most significant one. In private systems, it is the lack of a separation of powers between an executive and an independent judiciary that is the more troubling weakness.

Deterring crime is one of the essential challenges for any large city. All of the evidence suggests that deterrence on this scale requires people to investigate crimes, and people to punish those who commit them. When private organizations carry out these functions, the decisions about which offenses to prosecute, and — crucially — how to determine whether a person is guilty of an offense, are made by the same people who exert executive authority. The actions of these private organizations give us a useful — and troubling — window into what can happen in the absence of an independent judiciary.

The examples he gives of poorly-behaved institutions with both police and judicial powers are Penn State and the Catholic Church. As he points out, the opportunity for customers to exit does not provide a sufficient incentive for the police-judicial systems to function properly. Does that mean, as Romer suggests, that policing and judicial powers must be separate in order to work well?

In his examples, the policing and judicial functions are bundled with other services, and those other services are what drive the choices of most consumers. I think that the same holds true for cities. A city provides a bundle of services, many of which come from the private sector–jobs, entertainment, etc. If you want fair, efficient law enforcement, the built-in incentives can be pretty weak.

If these functions were privatized, would it in fact work out badly if policing and dispute resolution were provided by the same agency? Perhaps, but I do not think Romer’s examples settle the issue.

For example, in a hotel, suppose that one of the guests is accused by another guest of creating a disturbance. Does the hotel have to use separation of powers in order to take care of the issue? I think not.

[note: I drafted this post a while ago, but as far as I know I have not run it. If I have, apologies for the duplication.]

Two Essays on the Modern Political Elite

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1. Megan McArdle on Mandarinization. Read the whole thing. Trying to excerpt is frustrating, but I’ll use this:

And like all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should. Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less. But if they think there’s anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will. For the good of everyone else, of course. Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.

This is an issue that I have been mulling for quite some time, and my thinking is very similar to hers. I believe that our modern elite is more insulated than American elites from the past. The movie Lincoln portrays a President much more exposed to contact with ordinary people than a modern President. And I believe that Franklin Roosevelt really understood how he differed from the typical citizen, so that he could talk with people rather than talking down to them. In contrast, Barack Obama strikes me as an elite liberal bubble-person.

Like Megan, I believe that I am more familiar with the Mandarin class than I am with the rest of America. But I still think that somehow I am less insulated than the elite pundits and policy makers.

But perhaps the biggest difference that Megan and I have with the Mandarins is that we are skeptical of the wisdom of the Mandarins. I am no populist. But looking at the elites close up, I see a lot of blemishes.

Another issue is the desire to affiliate with power. If a Mandarin encounters a powerful person, the Mandarin’s instinct it to ingratiate himself or herself. My instinct is to try to knock the person down a notch. That is in fact one of my most deeply-ingrained personality characteristics, one which I had to consciously stifle when I worked in organizational settings.

2. Angelo Codevilla on the court party vs. the country party.

Thus by the turn of the twenty first century America had a bona fide ruling class that transcends government and sees itself at once as distinct from the rest of society – and as the only element thereof that may act on its behalf. It rules – to use New York Times columnist David Brooks’ characterization of Barack Obama – “as a visitor from a morally superior civilization.” The civilization of the ruling class does not concede that those who resist it have any moral or intellectual right, and only reluctantly any civil right, to do so. Resistance is illegitimate because it can come only from low motives.

Codevilla’s essay is mostly about the inability of Republican leaders to forsake the court party. Actually, I think that one should be skeptical of Codevilla’s framing. It is empty to complain that “the people” are not represented by party leaders. That is true of all parties, at all times. I do not think that those of us with strong libertarian or conservative leanings are going to be saved by a populist uprising. Instead, we fact the daunting prospect of attempting to change the dominant views among the elite.

Philanthropy and American Exceptionalism

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In Why Philanthropy Matters, Zoltan J. Acs makes the case. I was sent a review copy, which I only skimmed. p. 202-203:

what differentiates American-style capitalism from all other forms of capitalism is its historical focus on both the creation of wealth (entrepreneurship) and the reconstitution of wealth (philanthropy)…

…Historically, much of the new wealth created in the United States has been given back to the community to build up the social institutions that enhance future economic growth.

He is thinking of philanthropic support for education, scientific research, and the like. He claims that little of this take place in Europe. The picture there is one in which the wealth of the rich goes toward their own spending or toward taxes, with little in the way of philanthropy.

I am not such a fan of the non-profit sector. I prefer consumer sovereignty to donor sovereignty. In the academy, donors build too many buildings and do not offer enough research prizes.

Yes, I believe that philanthropists are better than government at investing in public goods. So, the choice is between taxes/government on the one hand and philanthropy on the other, I favor philanthropy. But if we hold the size of government constant, at the margin I think we are better off with a larger for-profit sector and a smaller non-profit sector.

Ends and Means

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Cass Sunstein writes,

In recent decades, some of the most important research in social science, coming from psychologists and behavioral economists, has been trying to answer it. That research is having a significant influence on public officials throughout the world. Many believe that behavioral findings are cutting away at some of the foundations of Mill’s harm principle, because they show that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

Sunstein later writes,

Until now, we have lacked a serious philosophical discussion of whether and how recent behavioral findings undermine Mill’s harm principle and thus open the way toward paternalism. Sarah Conly’s illuminating book Against Autonomy provides such a discussion. Her starting point is that in light of the recent findings, we should be able to agree that Mill was quite wrong about the competence of human beings as choosers. “We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future.”

Then there is this:

Because hers is a paternalism of means rather than ends, she would not authorize government to stamp out sin (as, for example, by forbidding certain forms of sexual behavior) or otherwise direct people to follow official views about what a good life entails. She wants government to act to overcome cognitive errors while respecting people’s judgments about their own needs, goals, and values.

Try to imagine a dialog between Conly and Michael Huemer (or another libertarian).

Libertarian: if a random stranger came to you and forcibly stopped you from drinking a large soda “for your own good,” would you find that acceptable? I would accept advice from a stranger. I might accept forcible restraint from a friend or someone to whom I had given permission to restrain my impulses (like Odysseus with the Sirens). However, why should I want government officials to interfere with my decisions because of my supposed incompetence?

Conly: Government officials are not random strangers. They are experts. That is why the should be allowed to interfere with your decision.

Libertarian: I listen to experts all the time. But what makes government officials so wonderfully expert that I should be forced to listen to them? When it comes to “staying out of debt” and “saving for the future,” are government officials the experts to whom you would have me defer? Seriously?

Maybe someone can help me be more charitable here.