Noah Smith does it again.
Instead of spinning theories that extol the virtue of unfettered markets — theories that by now, no one outside the profession actually believes — they should be diving into the gritty details of the regulatory state, or gathering evidence on how best to curb government’s excesses.
He cites Will Wilkinson .
The war against the welfare state hasn’t slowed growth in welfare-state spending so much as it has made our system unusually loathed and unusually shoddy. Mostly, it has fostered a divisive, racially-tinged “makers vs. takers” narrative while encouraging opposition to reform measures that might have made our safety net fairer, more efficient, and better at minimizing the economic anxieties that drive populist political sentiments fundamentally at odds with an open society of free markets, free trade, liberal migration, and peace.
My thoughts.
1. I do not believe that either Smith or Wilkinson is sincerely trying to appeal to libertarians. (Of course, with my last-minute decision to write in Paul Ryan on Tuesday, I am in no position to claim to speak for the libertarian movement.) They are not trying to pass an ideological Turing test. Instead, they employ slurs and charges against libertarians that are popular on the left, which suggests to me that the motive is not to offer constructive suggestions to libertarians. It is not Cato and Reason that are trying to inject racial overtones into American politics. And it is not that I believe in the absolute perfection of markets–what I believe is that markets are better than government at adapting to solve problems.
2. I am not going to be bullied into supporting policies that I believe are bad just because they are popular. If you want to talk me out of my position against a policy, tell me what is good about the policy.
3. The welfare state, like any Ponzi scheme, can be quite popular as long as it is still functioning. However, some time in the next decade, I think it is probable that one of the major welfare states is going to be unable to borrow enough to meet all of its current obligations (this sounds like a prediction on which one can construct a bet), and so it will be faced with a need for either sharp government austerity, hard default on its debt, or soft default (high inflation). The U.S. will not be the first country to suffer from this, because our reputation as a safe haven is so good that the world always will lend to us. But Italy does not enjoy that status. Nor does Japan. Neither does Greece, but they are small enough to be bailed out. Once one country that is “too big to bail” has to resort to extreme budget austerity or money-printing, this will call attention to the precariousness of the others, including the U.S.
I am sincerely trying to appeal to libertarians, and having some success. Noah can’t pass a libertarian Turing test, but I *am* a sort of libertarian. Pushing on at the edges of what libertarianism means from inside is fundamentally different from failing to understand what it means from the outside.
“Noah can’t pass a libertarian Turing test, but I *am* a sort of libertarian.”
OK, my first libertarian Turing test question 🙂 is:
Do you support the government taking money from some people, and giving it to other people?
Don’t even bother Mark. Will phrases things this way because he knows there’s no good way to dispute or adjudicate certain claims of ideological identity. He’s a translibertarian.
“Don’t even bother Mark.”
I don’t consider it a “bother” to discuss disagreements I have–or might have–with people who are civil. After all, I might even change my mind…it happens occasionally.
Best wishes,
Mark
I can imagine a situation where welfare is pragmatic, probably mostly because I have a pretty good imagination.
I read recently that a small infusion of cash at the right time can postpone homelessness for years.
Is Wilkinson proposing A-B testing such empirics?
I can take my libertarian hat off and put my technocrat hat on at the drop of a hat, no problem. Can they?
“I read recently that a small infusion of cash at the right time can postpone homelessness for years.”
If Will Wilkinson had specific proposals like this, I would be happy to take off my libertarian hat, too…especially since it often falls off anyway. 🙂
But my general impression from his posts on the Niskanen Center blog is that he seems to be proposing that we simply accept big government, without offering specific ways that big government can be made more libertarian.
Yes, they seem to be strawmanning. I/we DO think about these things all the time.
I would retort that uncritical support for team welfare also keeps good reforms from consideration.
Mark,
Wouldn’t the Turing test ask Will to answer that question as if he was a libertarian? My take on Will, who I have been reading for years, is that he could answer it convincingly. He is quite aware of libertarian positions, frameworks and arguments. He does though have some disagreements with the conventional wisdom.
Here is a question for you as a libertarian. Not a Turing test, but an actual question. Do YOU support people having the freedom to agree to using the government to take money from some people in some circumstances and give it to others?
Hi Roger,
“Wouldn’t the Turing test ask Will to answer that question as if he was a libertarian?”
Yes, and order to pretend to be a libertarian, Will would have to answer, “Of course I don’t support the government taking money from some people, and giving it to other people.”
This answer would clarify that it isn’t libertarian to take money from some people and give it to others. It doesn’t appear that anyone at the Niskanen Center is willing to admit this.
“Do YOU support people having the freedom to agree to using the government to take money from some people in some circumstances and give it to others?”
A few responses:
1) That’s a very curious definition of “freedom”…the “freedom” to take from others.
2) I think James Madison expressed it best, when he wrote: “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/fee/constitution.html
In other words, there is nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress the legal authority to take money from some people and give to other people (for no service rendered). So Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare…all of those violate the Constitution. (Note that the constitution says nothing about *states* taking money from some people and giving it to other people (for no service rendered).
3) Having said all that, it would be a disaster if the federal government one day just stopped writing checks for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, etc.
4) In summary, I don’t support people having the “freedom” to vote to take money from other people. I don’t recognize that as a “freedom.” And as far as the federal government is concerned, it violates the Constitution for Congress to spend such money. But I certainly recognize we’re very far into the pit of constitutional violations. But the best thing to do would be to at least acknowledge that, and stop digging deeper. I don’t think the Niskanen Center’s pretending that nothing is wrong is a good idea.
An argument in favor of Wilkinson’s point here is that almost nobody cares about his policy proposals, other than libertarians.
An argument in favor of Kling’s point is that the only reason libertarians care is because they feel Wilkinson is trolling them.
Barring mass deportation the future of America is electing Bernie Sanders with brown skin. Libertarians were completely asleep at the wheel while they created that inevitable scenario. The rest is footnotes.
No, Bernie Sanders lost the Primary by a lot and most of the wealthiest liberals on the Coast are left center. On top of that it was the Democratic base Southern African-Americans who were not sold on Bernie’s policies. (And please leave on the Brown stuff…Trump is President and conservatives are going to have to leave that stuff behind.)
Please name a strong leftist Democratic President candidate since Mondale.
Survey after survey shows that minorities favor statism. The cities they have taken over (Baltimore, Detroit) show this pattern of governance as well.
Blacks voted for Hillary because she had massive name recognition and a huge patronage network developed over decades. Also, her opponent was literally the most low T white nerd in history.
When Obama ran against Hillary in 2008 he ran to the left of her on economic issues and blacks voted for him overwhelmingly. These people are not voting on policy or ideology (beyond generally wanting more cheddar for themselves). You put Brown Bernie out there and we are going full Venezuela.
Clearly, we must elect a white version of Juan Peron to stop the Latinos from importing their statist ways.
That sounds funny and ironic. But that doesn’t stop it from also being tragically accurate. We are not good at early, reasonable correctives, especially through our democracy. No one gets really motivated until things get really terrible. And then we get extreme reactions which may anyway come too late.
Maybe cutting the the underbrush would have worked a decade ago. But now the wildfire rages and one has no choice but to back burn a big chunk of the forest to save the rest.
How long do you think it’s going to take for the Republican party to arrive at this conclusion and use this rationalization to grant Trump whatever power is necessary to durably de-progressivize the government?
What on earth are you talking about?
We’ve had a big liberal welfare state for the last 80 years. If you wanted an “early corrective” the time for than was in the 1930s. Nevermind that Trump did not campaign on any such platform. He wants to deport illegal immigrants and abbrogate NAFTA, not roll back “progressivism” whatever you think that means. His victory represents the victory of “progressivism” on entitlements and infrastructure and trade policy.
Or are you talking about “correcting” the ethnic imbalance caused by Hispanic immigration? Sorry, but I don’t consider that a “raging wildfire” that requires an authoritarian figure to fix.
You can drop the ‘authoritarian Trump’ shtick.
The Ruling Class has weaponized the federal and some state governments (IRS, WI ‘John Doe’ investigations, etc). So a burn back is simple self defense.
The passage of Obamacare alone is ample precedent for, say, 50 senators approving a Scalia-like SC justice.
Trump has explicitly stated that he would use executive orders to go after people who have written against him in the private sector, including libertarian Jeff Bezos, by threatening him with anti-trust lawsuits.
How is that not authoritarian?
If you didn’t want it used against you then you shouldn’t have weaponized it.
That’s the downside of eroding the rule of law.
“If you didn’t want it used against you then you shouldn’t have weaponized it.
That’s the downside of eroding the rule of law.”
Hazel Meade eroded the rule of law? How in the world do you imagine her doing that?
Yes, with the GOP now controlling a majority on the Supreme Court, the Presidency, the Senate, the House, the majority of governors and of State legislatures, clearly the future is the end of the GOP and only “electing Bernie Sanders with brown skin.”
Have you considered comparing your priors with current reality?
A genuinely conciliatory column would have said that libertarians and people on the left of various stripes ought to be able to find common ground on making government more efficient, less burdensome, and then work together to make it so. Smith, though, had to inject his personal opinions into it, essentially saying “Libertarianism is useless and irrelevant except for the part where I agree with it.” Great coalition building, guy!
I have been a libertarian since 1970 and have never voted for the LP candidate. It is futile to try to sell full-scale liberty to the American electorate. I would be happy to see the government do beneficial things more efficiently, while pruning the harmful and useless parts. Let’s start with freeing education from government interference – this would be the best thing for poor black (and white) communities.
I think Trump is going to very helpful in this regard. Watch.
“I have been a libertarian since 1970 and have never voted for the LP candidate.”
Why is that?
If it’s not too personal, who did you vote for this year, if not Gary Johnson? Which candidate was more libertarian than Gary Johnson?
I voted for Trump, enthusiastically. As a resident of PA, I am glad to have had a small part to play in his victory. I always vote Republican – none of the LP candidates has ever impressed me and I don’t feel a need to demonstrate my libertarian bona fides. I am not a fan of open borders and am definitely not a fan of illegal immigration, or other lawless behavior of Obama, Clinton or the Democrats.
Weird definition of libertarian then.
You are a libertarian than opposes immigration and trade? That doesn’t sound like a libertarian…
There’s a curious variety of libertarian who thinks that being a libertarian is about the freedoms to own guns and discriminate against minorities and gays.
This is why libertarians don’t get off the ground.
If being a libertarian requires a belief in unilateral free trade and open borders, it will never get anywhere.
On the other hand, there are many, many people who are sympathetic to the ideal of free trade and immigration.
But they’re turned off in the extreme by the jackass behavior of extremists who shout down people who are sympathetic to their ideals because they’re not sympathetic to the extreme version of their ideals.
“I voted for Trump, enthusiastically.”
But…he isn’t even remotely libertarian. (Hillary Clinton obviously is also not even remotely libertarian.) How can you vote enthusiastically for someone who is not even remotely libertarian?
“I am not a fan of open borders and am definitely not a fan of illegal immigration,…”
If there was a situation where 200,000+ highly educated, highly skilled, and/or wealthy people wanted to come to the U.S. each year, would you be against that? (If you would, why would you be against that? Don’t you think highly educated, highly skilled, and/or wealthy people would contribute much more than they would take away from the U.S.?)
As far as illegal immigration goes, it looks like the number of illegal border apprehensions has gone down from 1.7 million in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2013.
http://sites.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2014/07/27/sunday-shorts-hillarys-money-midterm-turnout-and-illegal-immigration/
Let’s assume that 50% of people escape apprehension, so that 400,000 get apprehended, but 400,000 successfully make it in illegally.
How much would you be willing to pay to reduce that number by 50%? 90%?
There were two candidates that would have an impact in the real world. Of the two, he offered a marginally greater potential for independence from government coercion, in both the short and long term.
Non-citizens do not enter into the calculus. They have their own countries in which they can advance freedom.
Voting for non-viable candidates may be emotionally satisfying but it doesn’t actually accomplish anything.
So, you don’t care about freedom for other people, only for yourself?
I care about freedom for American citizens.
Freedom in other countries is the proper concern of citizens of those countries.
I think there’s a good case for libertarians to prefer closed borders: that they would like their ideas to be actually implemented rather than replaced by large scale vote buying.
Actually, does democracy and voting even make the slightest sense with open borders?
Vote for your Johnson! Dude weed lmao!
“Let’s start with freeing education from government interference – this would be the best thing for poor black (and white) communities.
I think Trump is going to very helpful in this regard. Watch.”
If Trump were to successfully manage to get Congress to end all federal spending on the Department of Education, I don’t think anyone would be more pleased than I. (Other people might be as pleased…but not more. :-)) I look forward–skeptically, I’m afraid–to his progress in this area.
The one thing the next President can do immediately is to close the Civil Rights Division at the E.D. and have them turn in their SWAT gear.
So, do you think he will?
Romney isn’t libertarian but neither is he left. I view this as treating libertarians as the ideas behind the right, so you be less offended and more flattered though I doubt you have that much influence. I would be happy if libertarians just saw market failures less as opportunities to be exploited which seems common among the right with its penchant for con men and conspiracy theories.
Then why do libertarians never build momentum? I thought the press gave Gary Johnson plenty of opportunity to win votes but by the end of the election he barely mattered. (Admittingy Gary was not very good.) But look at Rand Paul run…It was a waste of time. And yes they are trolling you.
In terms of popular and relatively bad policy, it can be more successful because you have more people working together for a goal and economic decisions can not be made in a vacuum from culture. Anyway, libertarianism seem to go nowhere because:
1) Libertarians seem to dream of both Laura Wilder and Ayn Rand in which in the long they represent two opposite heroes.
2) I always assumed in Ayn Rand hero John Galt becomes a huge success but becomes The Taggarts in 10 years. (Look up the Walton kids or Bill Gates.)
3) Libertarians need a stable and moral low wage workers but constant creative destruction creates conflict.
Anyway, I vote Japan is the first one go. The European nations can sort of support each other to put off 10 years after Japan. But the problem isn’t policy and debt…The problem is the growth working age population to retirees. Family formation and culture is important.
“Then why do libertarians never build momentum? I thought the press gave Gary Johnson plenty of opportunity to win votes but by the end of the election he barely mattered. (Admittingy Gary was not very good.)”
Yes, Gary Johnson was not very good. He isn’t a very good communicator…and he holds views that the vast majority of the members of his party don’t consider to be libertarian.
His main good point, in my opinion, was that he was a two-term governor (as was Bill Weld). But we ended up getting a president has absolutely zero political experience. So it seems to me that political experience is clearly not necessary, as long as the candidate is a good communicator and is famous. It seems to me that the Libertarian Party needs to look for that in 2020.
We just had 8 years of one with nothing but “political” (small scale) experience.
The “art” of politics is the creation and maintenance of perceptions.
“We just had 8 years of one with nothing but “political” (small scale) experience.”
Barack Obama’s experience prior to becoming president was nowhere near as appropriate for the presidency as being a two-term governor of a state on the border with Mexico.
2 Party System.
I think your #3 is spot on. Thanks for bringing up this very important point and framing it so elegantly. I agree with you that although the topic of sovereign default is nowhere near the top of timely topics, it is just a matter of time before it will be, due to the current and growing mismatch between revenues and expenses. I also think your point reinforces my own belief that 95% of humans ignore financial consequences that are more than 5 years in the future.
It’s a mistake to measure the size and scope of government in terms of budget. That’s a metric of convenience but not meaning in terms of liberty or the span of control over people and affairs. The Fiscal solvency of redistributive programs is also a separate issue. We could have a giant and solvent UBI program with a minarchist state and would be profoundly freer, but under this measure of ‘the size of government’ things would look worse. We could cut welfare programs in half and double regulations and DOJ lawsuits and things would appear ‘improved’.
Wilkinson has a fair point, but should acknowledge (and maybe he has somewhere that I’ve not read) that good faith efforts to make the welfare state fairer and more efficient are often met with accusations of racism and cold-heartedness. (The Cato Institute is racist? Really?)
I notice that those with the harshest view of welfare recipients are people who actually live near a lot of welfare recipients, so maybe they have a point.
Likewise for immigration. I’m a pro-immigration guy, but I have to be sympathetic to those whose neighborhoods and communities have been upended by low income immigrants.
It is easy to dismiss the “makers vs takers” argument when 1) You’re not a maker. or 2) You don’t come in contact frequently with the takers.
I also especially like your third point, and will only add that another reason the U.S. won’t be first is that it has the largest supply of contributors (of varying degrees of willingness) to the Ponzi scheme. European countries and Japan, not so much…
Maybe someone is trying to bully you, Arnold, but I don’t have that problem: nobody, including my wife, cares what I think and (publicly) say about national policy. If I think policy A is best, while between inferior policies B and C the former is better, no one is telling me that I should “advocate” B rather than A. (If asked, I will say, “I rank them A, B, C, in that order”; but no one asks.)
Arnold – aren’t you betting on something that has already happened in Sweden? And in a very real sense already happened in Greece?
I wouldn’t take the bet against your prediction….
Since the R’s have gone full-scale authoritarian, there’s a chance, that political dynamics being the way they are, the D’s could shift in a more libertarian direction.
That’s 3% of the electorate up for grabs which would have put Hillary in office had she been able to appeal to them. And if R’s can abandon their principles for the sake of political expediency, why not D’s? I don’t expect the D’s to go full-scale free-markety, but they might suddenly decide that free trade wonderful, if only because they feel compelled to be against whatever Trump is for (and vice-versa).
They are likely to move in a more open borders direction in opposition to Trump.
Personally, what I would like to see it libertarianism evolve in a more racially inclusive socially liberal direction. Libertarians often claim to be socially liberal, but are just as often pushed into positions like opposing anti-discrimination states. A tactical abandonment of the anti-discrimination issue would allow libertarians to align themselves with liberal Democrats and maybe form a socially-liberal open-borders open-markets internationalist coalition. Throw in criminal justice reform, drug legalization, asset forfeiture reform, and eminent domain reform too, and we have a winner.
Or you could just vote progressive. All the racially inclusive social liberalism you need, and if not you can work them from the inside. And don’t worry, capitalism is already on the train. Enjoy!
As productivity increases the viability of the welfare state increases. You might be right that one of these countries is ahead of that curve and will face a funding crisis. But eventually providing basic welfare should be just a small slice of a big pie.
Normative Libertarianism is framed by the impacts of the functions of governments on Liberty and thus to limit those impacts by limiting those functions.
There are said to be social conservatism and economic conservatism; perhaps there is a “normative conservatism.”
But, there certainly is a normative libertarianism.
The entire Niskanen Center is a leftist scam trying to find shelf space by calling itself libertarian.
Jerry Taylor – tell us where the libertarian touched you…
The election results do open up possibilities for new alliances and new directions in libertarian tactics and strategies. Now would be a fine time to jump on the convention of states bandwagon. Libertarians might find themselves with a seat at the table if they could successfully appeal to disaffected Clinton voters to support replacing the current US federal government structure with a parliamentary system incorporating proportional representation. Consistent conservatives would endorse as well. Trump’s house intellectual, Frank Buckley, wrote the dispositive book ( http://faculty.law.gmu.edu/fbuckley/ )demonstrating the superiority of parliamentary systems over presidential systems. Everyone – left, right, libertarian, green – supports pluralism, prosperity, tolerance, peace, and civility. The current system does not foster these values. A parliament would.
We’re not going to rewrite the constitution. But we might be able to get rid of the electoral college.
Hazel, I’ve noticed that I enjoy your comments here and at other blogs. Are you on Twitter or Facebook, or do you have a blog?
I could go for allocating electors by congressional district instead of entire states (like Maine)
More representative while providing a firewall against voter fraud in any one district
It seems like there are less extreme, compromise solutions to libertarian complaints that are too often ignored.
Increase legal, skilled immigration; decrease illegal, unskilled immigration.
Don’t subsidise demand for things that you think are too expensive (healthcare, higher ed, housing), work to increase supply. Side effect of reducing the cost of living overall to make US workers internationally competitive, without needing minimum wages.
Abolish the classification of persons by racist category labels.
Negotiate harder on trade deals.
Start moving away from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution. Means test any remaining defined benefit plans.
Or simply, before you abolish the borders, make the state socially and fiscally resilient to abolished borders. It’s possible you can’t, of course.