..."if libertarianism is so great why don't you see it anywhere?"
It makes me worry that people I thought were serious about thinking about these issues are less serious than I had thought. Disregard the source - I don't particularly like Michael Lind either. In fact don't even read the post and just consider the question. It's an important one.
Either libertarianism is desired by people and just isn't robust (therefore we don't see it around), or few people consider it to be desirable, or ... ? The only other thing I can think of to fill in the "..." is that the few people who do like the idea of libertarianism know better than other people what's a good set of institutions. That doesn't seem plausible to me based on the set of libertarians and non-libertarians I know. And even if it was plausible, the best institutions should not have to rely on a small segment of the population being more insightful than the rest of society, because generally speaking that's not going to be the case. The best institutions curb excesses of government that everyone can agree ought to be curbed and then allow for well structured competition between different people with different ideas about how society ought to work and a healthy decentralization of authority so that different people can try out different ideas in different places and still live under the broader institutional framework.
What else is there as an explanation - maybe I'm missing something?
Anybody that dismisses this question risks sounding like a socialist that doesn't consider the question of socialism decided because all of the less-than-ideal experiments in socialism weren't REALLY what he had in mind. Socialists and libertarians can play that game until the cows come home. So can anyone. No one's precise plans for society ever work out. Ultimately you either have to admit that it just doesn't work out like you thought it would on paper or you rally behind the imperfect version that does work out in practice.
I take the latter option. I'm a classical liberal, a Jeffersonian, a sort of leftish centrist in the modern political spectrum. I don't like exactly how American institutions have played out. There are things I'd change and I'll continue to agitate to change, but overall I'm comfortable pointing to Western social democracies and saying "I like that sort of thing until I come across something I like better and then maybe I'll change my mind". And I can still have my idyllic classical liberal/Jeffersonian/lefty-centrist vision as something to shoot for and not sound like a complete idiot because I can accept the imperfect rendition of my blueprint in real life as something that works but maybe doesn't work exactly perfectly - but it's imperfection I can live with.
The socialists, the libertarians, and the anarchists want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to say that it's meaningless that we've never seen it anywhere. In other words they want to avoid the tough truth that this may very well mean the ideas can't work outside of their own blueprints and treatises. They see imperfect applications and assume they're off the hook when the real point here is that there's never going to be a perfect application of anything so you have to either embrace the imperfect application or accept that your ideas are unworkable. Maybe some day anarchism or socialism or libertarianism will work out OK. That could happen. But in the real world how these ideas are imperfectly practiced matters. Certainly it matters for decisions we are making today, but it's also a nice guide to the future.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
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AFAIK, the plains Indians had fairly libertarian societies. Problems arise with the ownership of land.
ReplyDeleteThis is something I kind of got into on facebook. It's possible that at different points in time different systems could be better than others. In the 1700s my liberalism probably would have expressed itself in what would now be called libertarianism. In 2313 I might be a socialist (doubtful - I think we'll find new frontiers which means new scarcity that will weaken the case for socialism just like it's weak in this century - but maybe I would be).
DeleteDifferent circumstances might bring different answers. But in any given circumstance the question is fairly meaningful. There might be a good answer to it, but it deserves to be grappled with at least.
I have no idea if you're right about the plains Indians or not. Sometimes modern eyes romanticize the past, and I thought they could be pretty brutal. I couldn't say one way or the other in this case.
Who says that libertarians aren't brutal? Not I. ;)
DeleteBut, IIUC, Sitting Bull was not a chief like, say, a Chickasaw chief. Nobody had to obey him. He was very influential, though. Much of his influence came from his prominence in the Ghost Dance religion, IIRC. Many plains Indians had, and still have, the same core value as non-Indian Americans, self-reliance. They did, and do, raise their children to be independent. Sometimes the kids are so independent that their parents are charged with child neglect. (I have two sources for that, a Cherokee psychologist and a non-Indian social worker.) My impression is that plains Indian culture is non-authoritarian.
Maybe it's a multiple-equilibria thing. If countries copy each other in designing their institutions, (which there is anecdotal evidence that they do) the western liberal democracy model may merely be one of many equilibria. Monarchies were pretty stable for a long time after all. Libertarianism may be another equilibrium.
ReplyDeleteThis is the first good answer I've seen to the Lind question that vindicates libertarianism. It took four hours. That's why it's a good question.
DeletePrometheeFeu,
DeleteHave you read Robert Wright's Nonzero? It's a bit fluffy, but very thought provoking. Basically, his thesis is that other countries don't copy other countries' institutions until forced to (militarily, politically, or socially). But improvements in technology tend to lead towards increases in freedom, as it becomes harder to control the masses.
I see the internet as boosting libertarianism in a much faster version of the way the printing press gave a push towards democracy. The first great techno-libertarian push will be the reform of the education system, via MOOCs.
John S - I get why the internet would boost freedom, but why do you think it would boost libertarianism? Could you explain that?
DeleteWouldn't free people still potentially want a government? Isn't that kind of what we've seen in the several hundred year history of liberalism so far? Why would you expect anything different when freedom is expanded by the internet?
"Wouldn't free people still potentially want a government?"
DeleteLibertarianism != Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism. I'm a gradualist--any steps toward more personal freedom and local autonomy are libertarian in my view.
"why do you think it would boost libertarianism?"
I think it already has. Ron Paul (I'm no fanboy) certainly got a huge boost from the online moneybombs. Reason.com is in the top 10,000 sites, Mises.org is around 30,000. Libertarian ebooks distributed for free. Bitcoin and exchanges possible due to the internet. Khan Academy, Coursera, MOOCs are breaking down the govt dominance of education. Open source, P2P sharing is weakening the IP regime. Even online info sharing on medical tourism costs chips away at the overregulated, dysfunctional US health system.
Let's take an issue like online gambling. The govt tried to ban it with the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). But they never could shut it down completely. Just a few years later, we have online poker now in one state (Nevada) and approved in two others. There's no way this could happen this fast w/o online organization of the poker playing lobby. Once people in other states see that the sky hasn't fallen in Nevada after a year or so, other states will take a close look at loosening gambling laws. It's getting to be impossible for govts to pull bullshit moves w/o getting called on it immediately.
Let me turn this question around--why would the internet reduce libertarian trends? I'm open to hearing interesting answers.
"local autonomy"--not libertarian, of course. But I take the Friedman approach that local govt control is preferable to centralized control, and individual liberty is better than both.
DeleteI know that libertarianism != anarchism John. That's the whole subject of the next post, after all.
DeleteLet me rephrase wouldn't free people still potentially want a non-libertarian government? Hasn't that kinda sorta been the whole history of liberalism?
I think you are thinking libertarianism = freedom and that's confusing your argument.
OK, as an empirical question ya libertarians have used technology well. But I thought you were saying that there was something inherent in the liberating aspects of technology that would promote libertarianism. That seems suspect to me - that presumes that free people and libertarian people are one and the same and that just doesn't seem true. However, as a historical matter I'd agree that libertarians have made great use of technology as a tool.
Your gaming example gets a little more at it. So I can see how that would be technology guaranteeing freedom but not necessarily libertarianism. I guess I just don't see keeping government from pulling bullshit moves as being the same as libertarianism. Isn't that just what all liberals would like to see? I think you're going to run into a lot of instances where there are non-bullshit moves by government that free people will still want the government to do, so that even as technological development continues to play itself out you're never going to get a libertarian society. You will strengthen a liberal society, potentially in some ways (like avoiding certain bullshit moves) that libertarians will appreciate. But I don't think that's gradually moving towards libertarianism any more than establishing central banks and child labor laws are gradually moving towards communism.
I'm not sure I'd say it would reduce libertarian trends or increase them. I think it will make things more transparent and cut down on the bullshit (as you say), and it will make everyone - public and private actors alike - more efficient. All this adds up to better governance. I'm guessing that governance will remain liberal but non-libertarian.
"I know that libertarianism != anarchism John."
DeleteHaha, I know you know this, which made me scratch my head at the question. As I've said before, blog comments can be tricky to interpret sometimes. I'm sure many of my comments are vague, too.
"I guess I just don't see keeping government from pulling bullshit moves as being the same as libertarianism. Isn't that just what all liberals would like to see?"
Hard to say. I think a lot of liberals would like to see gambling banned (to "protect" the poor--I like Reuven Brenner's counterarguments, check out the first chapter of "History: The Human Gamble"). A large percentage are opposed to school vouchers and see homeschooling in a decidedly negative light (after many conversations, I think many would be indifferent to or supportive of a ban on it). Certainly, checks on govt power and libertarianism aren't the same thing, but I'm pretty happy about both.
"You will strengthen a liberal society, potentially in some ways (like avoiding certain bullshit moves) that libertarians will appreciate. But I don't think that's gradually moving towards libertarianism"
True. I remain hopeful, though :) And we have at least a 1 in 5 chance of getting a (mostly) libertarian president in Rand Paul in 2016. [Honesty: I doubt more than 60% of Americans could even satisfactorily define "libertarian" w/o confusing it with "liberal" or "libertine." That's hurdle #1.]
"even as technological development continues to play itself out you're never going to get a libertarian society"
Perhaps (however, "never" is a long time!) But I feel that it's becoming easier than ever to live a life consistent with one's libertarian ideals. Eg: online education is making it easier and cheaper for anyone to homeschool (and thus escape govt schooling). Compared to a decade ago, the attitude toward homeschoolers has improved tremendously (nearly everyone today knows someone who was homeschooled or is homeschooling their kids). This encourages more people to try it.
"I think you are thinking libertarianism = freedom"
Perhaps there would be less confusion if we agreed on a definition for libertarian. What is yours?
I'll go with the Libertarian Party homepage:
"Let's start with Webster's definition:
libertarian: A person who upholds the principles of individual liberty especially of thought and action."
So I define libertarianism as freedom to do what one wants w/o infringing on others' rights. Would you modify this?
But do you really think the average person knows what libertine means ;-)
Deletere: "So I define libertarianism as freedom to do what one wants w/o infringing on others' rights. Would you modify this?"
I would say that I think this and I'm not a libertarian and you have to look past a political party or a dictionary if you're really going to probe how circular a lot of these ideas are and how contingent they are on theories of rights, etc.
John S,
DeleteI did not read "Nonzero". Though from your short description, the thesis sounds somewhat tautological. Countries don't really do anything until "forced" to do so politically, socially or militarily. In a sense, that's what doing something means for a country.
Daniel Kuehn,
I also don't think that it really matters whether free people want a government or not. If technology makes it easier to resist governmental authority, (through for instance easier organization of pressure groups) we are closer to a libertarian world. When coercion becomes harder, free rider problems make it harder to maintain governments and start working towards libertarianism. (as well as towards anarchism)
See Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter.
ReplyDelete(1) Assume economists are enlightened and Correct
Delete(2) Say the public are stupid for disagreeing with them
(3) Recommend virtual dictatorship to install economist's policies
At no point question whether your own opinions are just wrong.
The problem is though is that your question cannot be taken too seriously. It can be either a question to illicit thought or a cute retort to Libertarians, but if taken too seriously it runs right into the fallacy of assuming that evolution follows the optimal path. That simply isn't true. Not by a long shot.
ReplyDeleteOnce we accept that and accept that society is a product of human action, but not of human design, there is no reason why, if we accept the Libertarian creed as the optimal one, that society must evolve on that path to prove the correctness of that creed. Q.E.D.
Taking the question a bit less seriously, one can easily argue that the course of human history over the last three hundred years has been a Libertarian one and here it is absolutely correct to identify most Classical Liberals as Libertarians. Hairs can be split on the topic of John Stuart Mill, but John Locke, Adam Smith, Lord Acton, Frederic Bastiat, and Prime Minister Gladestone would all gather the adjective "Libertarian" just as Milton Friedman and FA Hayek would. The course of Western civilization, and more recently the world, has generally followed one that they would applaud: more views on politics starting from an individualistic perspective, more protection of individual rights, more free trade, and more capitalism (and more views that capitalism is the only way to go, let's not forget even Schumpeter thought socialism was possible, of how many could that be said today).
Certainly there are other policies that no Libertarian would agree with on the books today, but human society is not the product of human design and the prisoner's dilemma is everywhere. Society will continue to evolve based on what courses of action its constituent parts take, and it often pays off to defect from the Libertarian strategy in order to maximize one's payoff. Which is one reason I think you are absolutely wrong in thinking Libertarianism is hid behind public choice theory because it doesn't hide it, it can explain why the institutions at hand will lead to non-Libertarian outcomes. That's not hiding anything. That's taking emergent order in society seriously.
And why don't we get the right institutions? I'd say it's because getting the institutions right is largely a matter of historical luck. Once institutions have been gotten right (e.g. the American Constitution and English common law), they can spread via intellectual contagion, but until they've been gotten right, it's waiting for history.
re: "The problem is though is that your question cannot be taken too seriously. It can be either a question to illicit thought or a cute retort to Libertarians, but if taken too seriously it runs right into the fallacy of assuming that evolution follows the optimal path. That simply isn't true. Not by a long shot."
DeleteI think you're a little confused Harrison - there's no assumption at all that evolution produces the right institutions. Obviously a lot of the institutions that have emerged are not optimal. I'm not sure where you're getting this. The point is that if you've got an institution that can't survive it obviously isn't optimal! In other words, you seem to think I'm making the argument that evolutionary success is sufficient when I'm really only saying it's necessary.
The rest of your post seems to adopt this strategy of dumbing down libertarianism to just mean liberalism. If that's libertarianism than I'm a libertarian and lots of other people are libertarians too and it's not a very useful definition (not to mention the fact that it's not a definition anyone uses).
Or, if you're not trying to be that expansive I could say be the same argument that we're getting more communist over time since we are increasingly adopting planks of the communist manifesto. If - by the exact same argument - we can say we are more communist and more libertarian, it's probably not that sensible of a thing to say.
A better thing to say is this: we are getting more liberal, and it's a sort of social democratic liberalism that we're increasingly converging towards. That's not libertarianism or communism. Obviously it is not completely orthogonal to libertarianism or communism either.
"I think you're a little confused Harrison - there's no assumption at all that evolution produces the right institutions. Obviously a lot of the institutions that have emerged are not optimal. I'm not sure where you're getting this."
DeleteI'm not a little confused. You're question roughly translates into: if the Libertarian set of institutions isn't optimal, why don't we see Libertarian institutions. The first thing to think is that there isn't a problem since evolution doesn't lead to optimal outcomes, unless we define optimal to mean .
"The point is that if you've got an institution that can't survive it obviously isn't optimal!"
You're playing around with the word "Optimal" here to simply mean "Has survived." Surely if all we want from our institutions is survival,then sure, but I'm a bit more ambitious. I'd like our institutions to lead to outcomes I can stamp "Libertarian approved" and I'm only willing to call those institutions "Optimal."
After all, a military state might be the best institutional response to a war, but I wouldn't call that system of institutions optimal. Instead, I'd lament about how the demands of social evolution are guiding us along a path that creates institutions that cannot stamped "Libertarian approved."
“The rest of your post seems to adopt this strategy of dumbing down libertarianism to just mean liberalism. If that's libertarianism than I'm a libertarian and lots of other people are libertarians too and it's not a very useful definition (not to mention the fact that it's not a definition anyone uses).”
I'm not dumbing down Libertarianism, I'm asking the question of whether, at the margins, society has trended in a Libertarian direction over the past three hundred years. Given John Locke and Adam Smith's writings, I'd call the last three hundred years a reason for breaking out the champagne for Libertarian norms, life, liberty and property, have proven robust against all sorts of challenges whether they be the welfare state or two world wars.
If a Liberal says I'm misidentifying a Libertarian trend for a Liberal trend, I have two replies. First, we got there first. John Locke and Adam Smith (not to mention other Scottish Enlightenment figures) are within the Libertarian camp, so as society has trended to favor what the impartial spector might applaud, I'll call that a Libertarian victory. The Liberals might also call it a victory, and justly so, but that doesn't reduce the Libertarian victory.
Secondly, there is certainly the trend of the welfare state that contributes to seeing the overall trend as Liberal and may very well give the Liberal view a boost over the Libertarian view; however, I only take a inter-generational view of history, and the current welfare trend hasn't gone through the inter-generational stress test that my Libertarian norms (again, life, liberty, and property) have. We'll settle that account once the last Baby Boomer is six feet under, until then the historical jury is still out.
“Or, if you're not trying to be that expansive I could say be the same argument that we're getting more communist over time since we are increasingly adopting planks of the communist manifesto. If - by the exact same argument - we can say we are more communist and more libertarian, it's probably not that sensible of a thing to say.”
DeleteI don't think that's taking the two views seriously. First, I'll be the first to admit that maybe what I'm advocating needs to be called a Burke-Smith-Hayek line of Libertarianism, and maybe that the Mises-Rothbard line has true ownership of the term “Libertarian.” If that's so fine.
However, returning to the Burke-Smith-Hayek line, that line is about securing an individual certain rights within society (following the norms of life,liberty, and property) and ensuring that cooperation conditioned by the division of labor can progress society out of destitution. That is fundamentally the central tenets of that tradition of Libertarianism.
However, with Marxism (mind if I substitute your use of “Communism” with “Marxism”?) the central tenet is certainly not Marx and Engels' list of conditions for a “Socialist” state. Instead, their central claim is about history following a linear course as determined by the dialectic of history and driven forward by history. That claim is simply false, so therefore the current conditions of this world are not “Marxist” and a claim it is “Communist” fails because now the Communist has grabbed onto an arbitrary standard for what it means to be “Communist” (i.e. the conditions for a Socialist state) while abandoning what motivated the system behind those conditions.
The Libertarian description of events as cooperation conditioned by the division of labor simply wins out against the Communist description of class conflict. The Communist can pick things he likes and call the end-state “Communist”, but at that point his philosophy has deteriorated to emotivism where “Communist” means little more than “I approve this.”
Once again, if all you mean by "libertarianism" is Adam Smith, life, liberty, and property, and cooperation conditioned on the division of labor then I'm a libertarian as well as a lot of other people and the word is meaningless.
DeleteAdam Smith is not a libertarian - he's a classical liberal. Libertarianism is much newer than that. We have had wild success for liberalism. The very specific blueprint for society that is a form of liberalism called libertarianism has been considerably less successful.
So had you been around before the first democracy was established you would not have supported democracy ?
ReplyDeleteThe development of freedom of religious belief works similarly or the end of slavery, etc. Honestly it such an utterly vapid question it continues to surprise me that people keep on asking it.
DeleteSimilarly a more recent notion - the all volunteer army - was considered a strange idea in a modern context before it was actually promulgated. It is really a very silly question.
DeleteGood question. Daniel?
DeleteI don't know if I would have or not. Hopefully I would have. Hopefully I would have also said that it's sensible to ask why there had never been democracies before - I would hopefully accept that that's a really important question and not a dumb one.
Delete"They want to say that it's meaningless that we've never seen it anywhere."
ReplyDeleteCan I just plead with you never to lump in right libertarians with socialists and anarchists. The difference between existing socialism and existing libertarianism is that existing socialism was actively opposed by the most powerful countries in the world, meaning that socialist countries were either literally or effectively at war for their entire existence. This, more than anything else, explains many of the political shortcomings of existing socialism.