Losing my contractarianism...

...I haven't entirely yet, but I feel as if it is looming. I'm attempting a controlled descent into this pragmatism business, which I feel is warranted. James, after all, willed himself to believe in God and argued that he had warrant for doing that. This idea that beliefs are functional and we can pick up beliefs like we pick up hammers or rakes - trying them out, assessing their utility - seems to give me warrant to do this. If there is no chance of conclusively establishing a correspondence between perception and reality, all that we have available to us is to assess experientially the value of certain beliefs in navigating the every day world we live in.

One belief I have consciously "kept" is a contractarian emphasis on property rights (because it's easier to talk about how rights function if you conceive of all rights as a sort of property right). Social contract theory has always bothered me tremendously, and although I've always agreed with Bentham on rights ("nonsense on stilts"), we certainly act as if rights meant something, even if they are fundamentally meaningless. That seemed to make them more productive than the idea of a social contract, which we don't even pretend is real (or so I think). So I've been interested in talking about democratic self-governance in contractarian terms in order to justify the common sense of how democratic self-government works without slipping into a naive libertarianism (i.e. - "I didn't agree to be governed so the state is illegitimate"). A lot of these attempts in the past have been "government of the gaps" attempts, similar to "God of the gaps" apologetics. I find both of these to be unsatisfying. It seems both insufficient and something of an insult to your subject of inquiry. "Government of the gaps" proofs amount to a litany of market failures. "God of the gaps" proofs amount to fillers for where science hasn't made a case (yet). But you can also understand why people might make these attempts. With the tremendous progress of science, they hypothesis of God (to uses Laplace's formulation), no longer seemed necessary. Anyone truly interested in justifying the idea of God had to reckon with this. There was no point in denying the science. The same goes with market economics. No modern non-Marxist economist wants to overthrow market economics. The advances are obvious, and yet there is an intuition that this doesn't simply negate the state. But the state can't be justified on claims that do violence to our insights about the market. If I were given the choice, I would choose the market - hence a "government of the gaps" argument emerges. But that just doesn't seem right. A lot of us don't feel like the government is naturally opposed to the market the way naive libertarians suggest, but because of the way the argument is structured it can be hard to explain why. So in my attempt at understanding why democratic self-government is "justified", but not on the basis of a "government of the gaps", I've hit on a few basic reasons that I find to be convincing and not "government of the gaps":

1. Macroeconomic instability - Keynesian democratic socialization of investment. Macroeconomic stability emerges because of aggregation issues and monetary issues as a problem distinct from microeconomic stability and efficiency, which property rights and free exchange are able to guarantee.

2. Temporal autarky - Jefferson referred to it as "swindling futurity". We are coerced by generations that come before us and we coerce generations that come after us, so a contractarian system grounded on contemporary rights and exchanges is necessarily a coercive system. Democratic self-government is tasked with reducing these coercions.

3. Necrocratic political economy - Our system of political economy is necrocratic - it is ruled by the dead. Property rights crystallize past inequalities and pass them on to future generations by the roullete wheel that is birth. Coercion in the past only takes one generation to legitimize itself. This is also a major concern of Jefferson and Paine*.

These start to provide, without losing a contractarian perspective at all (indeed with introducing what I think is a more robust contractarianism), a basis for democratic self-government that may be coercive from a naive contractarianism, but which is ultimately a reduction of coercion. It provides a broad basis particularly for (1.) investments, (2.) egalitarianism, (3.) education, and (4.) social stabilization. Add to this basic agreed upon justifications for police powers, and you largely have a picture of that which American democratic self-government had taken for itself.

But it also provides the seeds of the unraveling of contractarianism. What you start to see is that "property rights" are historically contingent and are themselves inherently coercive (democratic self-government is, after all, a response to the coercion of the property rights regime). As Dewey wrote "this relativity of liberty to the existing distribution of powers of action, while meaning that there is no such thing as absolute liberty, also necessarily means that wherever there is liberty at one place there is restraint at some other place. The system of liberties that exists at any time is always the system of restraints or controls that exist at that time. No one can do anything except in relation to what others can do and cannot do. These... points are general. But they cannot be dismissed as mere abstractions. For when they are applied either in idea or in action they mean that liberty is always a social question, not an individual one. For the liberties that any individual actually has depends upon the distribution of powers or liberties that exists, and this distribution is identical with actual social arrangements, legal and political - and, at the present time, economic, in a peculiarly important way."

I feel like I've chased contractarianism to its implications, and come back out at something like social contract theory! I'm losing my contractarianism. If this gets pursued far enough, clearly the same old problems with social contract theory are going to come up.

So what does one conclude? Well, precisely the point that these are just beliefs that we use because they are useful, not because of any correspondence with reality. Rights are a convenient fiction. When we pretend that we are real and think about them long enough as if they are real, we run into all sorts of self-contradictions that force us to conclude that system of private property rights is necessarily coercive. The solution, however, is social and coercive as well. This is largely where I've come out; my respect for abstractions like "property rights" and "self-government" has both dwindled and been reinforced. It's dwindled because their fundamental fictive nature seems more or less obvious to me now. But it has been reinforced because I'm starting to see how the interplay of these two fictions produces real results. We have a guide of sorts for when self-government reduces and when it increases coercion. We have a guide for when property rights reduce and when they increase coercion.

Writing this is in many ways just an attempt to think through all these ideas again... I will be going to "debate" Jan Helfeld later today, and I am increasingly of the opinion that his method does not get to the heart of the issue... although I'm concerned I won't be able to adequately express why. We shall see.


* I recently came across an interesting post by Gavin Kennedy on Adam Smith that has a great passage from Cantillon emphasizing this "necrocratic political economy" problem: "It does not appear that Providence has given the Right of the Possession of Land to one Man preferably to another: the most ancient Titles are founded on violence and Conquest. … But howsoever people come into the property and possession of Land we have already observed that it always falls into the hands of a few in proportion to the total inhabitants"

Thesis, Anti-Thesis, Synthesis: Kuehn and Wonacott on Higgs and Tautological Libertarianism

...(this is the synthesis)

A couple days ago Ed Glaeser said the moral center of gravity of economics was human liberty. Probably a more scientific way of putting it (because I like to think of economics as a science) is that the central message of economics is that free humans make for an efficient society. Either way - a wonderful sentiment, and I said as much.

In response (to Glaeser, not me) Robert Higgs suggested that Glaeser was tying himself up in knots. The state and liberty are anti-thetical. I was not amused. I accused Higgs of philosophical elginism - robbing a rich classical liberal tradition advocating human liberty to support his own ideological ends. Samuel Wonacott was not amused. We went back and forth for a while (my obstinancy probably dragging it out longer than necessary), and I think I've come to a better way of putting my frustration with Higgs:

Perhaps I overstated my case with Higgs because I really don't know him well enough to say where he's coming from. Let me say this at least - he comes across as being an ideologue. He clearly thinks there is an inherent opposition between liberty and government. That establishes that he and I are in disagreement - but disagreement is OK. However, he states it as if its just a self-evident fact. That's a clue-in for ideology.

Then he says this, which was the real clincher for me: "To be sure, many mainstream economists do think about policy just as Glaeser says they do. But in doing so, they are mistaken. I find it difficult to believe that a man of Glaeser’s intelligence has really given much thought to what he is saying in these passages."

I don't think I could ever say such a thing to, for example, Nozick or Hayek - or to thoughtful anarchist thinkers (even though I disagree with their conclusions every bit as much as I disagree with Higgs's). The arrogance of that statement suggests to me he's coming from a more ideological than a genuinely philosophical foundation.

The claim that the state and liberty are anti-thetical may be right or it may be wrong. But if it is right it is not tautologically right. Too many libertarians treat it as if it were tautologically right.

This isn't an exclusive failing of libertarians, I hope it goes without saying. It's a failing of lots of people. But I'm not blogging about lot's of people in this case - I'm blogging about libertarians.

I hope this is clearer - I think it does better expressing my initial frustration.

Reading things like this makes me want to drop economics and pick up political or social philosophy as a full time pursuit...

Much of what passes for libertarian thought today boils down to philosophical elginism - the robbing of a rich classical liberal tradition of one of its featured pieces - human liberty - to serve baser ideological or political ends. This does not characterize all libertarian thought. There are certainly classical liberals with sincere emphases that can be described as "libertarian" who are not arguing in the service of some ideological end. Robert Nozick springs to mind. Hayek as well, as far as I can tell. Others barely try to hide it.

Robert Higgs on Ed Glaeser, in its entirety (HT Mark Thoma):

"In yesterday’s New York Times appears an op-ed article by Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard. Glaeser’s article is remarkable because arguments in favor of freedom, insisting that economic analysis implicitly rests on a moral presumption that individual freedom has fundamental value, do not appear every day — or every month — in “the newspaper of record.” So, I am glad to give two cheers to Glaeser, one for his theme and another for his courage in placing the argument in such a hostile outlet.

I cannot give Glaeser a third cheer, however, because toward the end of the article he inserts a concession that I find wholly inconsistent with the rest of the argument. He writes:

Economists’ fondness for freedom rarely implies any particular policy program. A fondness for freedom is perfectly compatible with favoring redistribution, which can be seen as increasing one person’s choices at the expense of the choices of another, or with Keynesianism and its emphasis on anticyclical public spending.

Many regulations can even be seen as force for freedom, like financial rules that help give all investors the freedom to invest in stocks by trying to level the playing field.

To be sure, many mainstream economists do think about policy just as Glaeser says they do. But in doing so, they are mistaken. I find it difficult to believe that a man of Glaeser’s intelligence has really given much thought to what he is saying in these passages.

In fact, a presumption in favor of freedom rules out virtually everything that modern governments do, certainly nearly everything they do in interfering in economic affairs. Redistribution of income, for example, requires that the government rob Peter in order to benefit Paul (and its own functionaries, who serve as middlemen in this transfer). This action is not freedom; it is a crime against Peter, a raw violation of his right to his own legitimate property. Keynesian countercyclical spending requires the government to spend borrowed money whose acquisition is premised on future taxation (that is, robbery) of taxpayers in order to service the debt and repay the principal. Again, innocent persons have their rights violated. How can anyone fail to see that robbery is incompatible with freedom? Finally, the financial rules that Glaeser finds compatible with freedom entail threats of violence against financial transactors who do not follow arbitrary government rules — often extremely foolish and even destructive rules — in making their transactions, notwithstanding the fact that the parties to the transaction may be perfectly willing to proceed without such regulatory compliance. Such regulation is the very opposite of freedom; it is instead the sheer imposition of outside force, intruding on willing transactors, and thereby discouraging them to some extent, if not entirely, with consequent loss of the wealth that such transactions would have created, in addition to the loss of liberty.

Perhaps it is unseemly for someone such as I to make a recommendation to a Harvard professor, yet I cannot resist the urge to suggest that Glaeser read, say, Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market. Expositions of that sort would help him to gain a clearer vision of the distinction between individual freedom and state domination in economic affairs. Glaeser quotes Milton Friedman to good effect in his article, but Friedman’s writings ought to be the beginning, rather than the end of wisdom in this area. In regard to freedom, Friedman’s arguments were good as far as they went, but they did not go nearly far enough. Like Glaser [sic], Friedman was prepared to make many concessions to state power, and his focus on utilitarian arguments, as opposed to moral principles, diminished the intellectual force of his laudable efforts to enlarge the scope of liberty in economic affairs."

A Revolution of Liberty, a Philosophy of Equality

Tyler Cowen noted a Google book search function yesterday, and he charted the fate of "liberty" since the mid-18th century. I was curious about doing some comparisons with "equality". Liberalism is really a philsophy of liberty, equality, and self-government, but the relative weight placed on each of these concepts shifts over time. One of the tough things about this google function is that the scales are not always comparable - but "liberty" and "equal" seemed to show up at roughly the same scale, so that their relative position could more easily be observed.

Below I've presented findings for American English, British English, French, and German (Blue is "liberty", red is "equal". The years are fuzzy, but its from 1720 to 2000). A few things stand out to me:

1. "Liberty" is a fightin' word. The spikes for "liberty" associated with the French Revolution and the American Revolution are obvious. You also have a run-up to increased levels of "liberty" that peak at 1848 for Germany. France's radical mid-19th century maintains mentions of "liberty", in contrast to America which largely sets the term aside after the Constitution is ratified.

2. "Equal" emerges as a dominant term in America, not with the Revolution or the Constitution, but with the Jeffersonians. It maintains its position until present times. What's even more interesting is that if you substitute "freedom" for "liberty", then "freedom" surpasses "equal" in the late 1840s - at the end of the dominance of the Jeffersonians. I think there are two forces at work here: first, "freedom" was the word of choice in the abolitionist literature, rather than "liberty" - and after the war it stuck. Second, of course, is the Jeffersonian liberalism was a democratic liberalism rather than a strictly libertarian liberalism. It was liberalism. It's not like ideas of liberty were left out in the cold by any means. But it was a liberalism that emphasized both liberty and equality, and of course democratic self-government.

3. The British case is the only case where "equal" dominated "liberty" for the entire period (although Germany came close). This would likely look very different if the data stretched back to the 17th century. If "liberty" is truly a fightin' word, as I suggested in point #1, then the British had already had their fight.

It's dicey to draw too much from this data, but that's what I noticed - the point that "liberty" is associated with revolutionary breaks, while "equal" is more stable I think comes across very clearly, though. Is there anything else worth noting?

American

British

French

German

Daniel Klein, Progressivism, and Rights

Arnold Kling links to an essay at Cato Unbound by Daniel Klein on the political philosophy of progressivism that I find a little troubling. Klein's case is that progressives found their perspective on the "overlordship" of the state, that all rights and freedoms are derived from the state, and that the state has ultimate ownership of all things.

I struggle with how to react to something like this. On the one hand, I feel like it's such nonsense that it really ought not to be responded to. I'm even more frustrated because I'm starting to notice a pattern with Klein: evidently, he really believes that non-libertarians are not friends to liberty, that they ignore or are ignorant of economics, and essentially that the position is bankrupt. Instead of actually discussing some non-libertarian position with him, one ends up trying to walk him back off the brink of his own claims. It's not a productive dialogue, and it's not a very pleasant dialogue to partake in when you know he thinks you're ignorant of economics and indifferent to liberty.

I struggle with how to react - but clearly I'm "reacting" with this blog post so I better get to it. I don't find Klein's point especially convincing. He cites several late nineteenth century and early twentieth century collectivists claiming that the state owns everything. Fine - that certainly isn't hard to find. What's not clear is how that is the basis of modern progressivism. As far as modern progressives go he only really cites Cass Sunstein (and some co-authors of Sunstein). Even that is hard for me to evaluate because he doesn't cite him extensively at all. The only citation is that "Private property [is] a creation of state action". I wouldn't imagine this is that controversial even if you wouldn't agree with it. I think private property can be an emergent social institution as well, but I wouldn't quibble too much with Sunstein on this - the state, after all, is the source of the legal framework for property rights. To say that property rights are somehow contingent on the state is not the same as saying the state owns everything, of course. But this is one of the many points that Klein simply finesses. So it's very hard to get a handle of the argument. There is no real connection offered between early collectivists and modern progressives, and the sparsely quoted quoted Sunstein is hardly representative of modern progressives - Sunstein is an interesting guy, but a very odd, unique guy.

I've sketched out my basic political philosophy (which I see as essentially classical liberal and able to accommodate multiple classical liberal ideologies - so not uniquely "progressive", but it certainly includes progressivism) here before, but this seems like a good opportunity to again because Klein - in the end - is trying to erect a progressive political philosophy in terms of its understanding of property rights.

My view is similar to Sunstein's (as quoted by Klein - I'm not deeply familiar with Sunstein) insofar as I think property rights (by which I mean our claim to anything for use or disposal) are largely artificial or constructed. I do not find "natural rights" to be a coherent position. Klein's error is in assuming that this artificiality implies (1.) meaninglessness, or (2.) contingency on the state. It doesn't imply either. But it does imply that property rights may be incomplete, unfair, etc. The fundamental problem and justification of the state is not that our property rights are contingent on the state (that would be circular), but that justice is contingent on property rights. I cannot establish the injustice of theft unless I can identify what is stolen as my property. Otherwise it's simply free appropriation. So justice becomes contingent on an artificial framework of property rights, that are incomplete and hereditary. We inherit our property rights regime and the property that has been amassed under that regime from prior generations. What we have is wide scope for injustice. If I take a pump and run poisonous smog into your house, I could be prosecuted for poisoning you. If a firm pumps the same poisonous smog into the air they could not be prosecuted (at least they couldn't at one point... and they're limited in prosecution now). Why? It's the same act. The difference is the arrangement of property rights.

This is what bothers me so much when libertarians act as if they genuinely believe their's is uniquely a philosophy of liberty, or that those who raise questions about the property rights regime are somehow unfriendly to liberty. When you ignore one act of poisoning because property rights are incomplete but pay attention to another because property rights are complete, you're not espousing a philosophy of liberty or non-coercion at all. You're espousing a philosophy that legitimizes coercion by virtue of the incompleteness of property rights. There is nothing classically liberal about that.

But what is the alternative? That's not easy either. What we're stuck with - which John Dewey noted back in 1935 - is a situation with coercion in either direction. But people weren't waiting around for Dewey to say this. It was implicit in the property rights regime. People understood its fundamental artificiality when fields were being enclosed in England, and when titles were being passed down. Do you think it's coincidence that the nation-state emerged with the rise of property rights and market activity as the fundamental principle of social organization? Of course it's not coincidence. We are faced with coercion on all sides. I am coerced when someone pollutes the air I breath, and that happens because property rights to the air are incomplete. I face a fundamental disadvantage in remedying the situation because the law acts on the behalf of property-owners and the very fact of property-ownership gives property-owners a resource advantage in challenging my claim. The solution has been the emergence of the institutions of a democratic state to weigh these claims and represent people independent of property although that, as libertarians are quick to note, is coervice too - we are coerced on all sides. The classical liberal idea of the state (I am not using the word as Klein does - as a synonym for libertarianism) is therefore not one of overlordship of the state, but a repudiation of the assumption that a fundamentally artificial property rights regime is natural - and an attempt at a weighing of various coercions in a way that is consistent with human liberty, human equality, and human dignity. This is not in opposition to property rights - quite the contrary! Democratic, liberal states emerged precisely to purge coercion from an artificial property rights regime, when necessary. What I think is appropriate for classical liberals of all stripes to acknowledge is that this does mean that the authority of the state is artificial and coercive in the context of the existing property rights regime. But what libertarians like Daniel Klein need to recognize is that it is an artificial institution that has emerged naturally in response to the artificiality and coercion of an emergent property rights regime. In that sense it is not inherently more coercive than a minimalist libertarian state (which itself has the potential to be extremely coercive for the reasons I outlined in the previous paragraph).

I need to bring Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine into this before I close. Jefferson and Paine wrote a lot about the role of time in political philosophy, particularly as it related to this question of property rights and coercion. They noted that property rights are inherited and over the course of English history they were legitimated by their inheritance. Centuries ago theft, conquering, and corruption established privilege and over the centuries privilege evolved into property. That which was artificial and coercive became legitimate. That isn't all - inherited privilege granted resource advantages to descendants. We see the same thing in America today with the legacy of slavery. Inequality is durable. Slavery may have ended one hundred fifty years ago and segregation may have ended fifty years ago, but if your father didn't get a good education because your grandfather was forcibly prevented from getting a good education or from earning the money to send your father to get an education that is a tangible disadvantage for you. Jefferson and Paine recognized the power of time in translating these disadvantages. The black community today is still being coerced by the institution of slavery and by the institution of segregation because of the heritability of property rights.

Libertarians puzzle and fret over the nation-state as if its some accident that the state and the market emerged together. Similarly, some libertarians puzzle over why good freedom-loving guys like Jefferson and Paine were so keen on inheritance taxes. It's not an accident that inheritance taxes, popular democracy, and liberty were all embraced by the same people in the founding era! It's not an accident that enemies of inheritance taxes and popular democracy were also the enemies of liberty. It's because what is known as "libertarianism" today is fundamentally imbalanced and coercive (when it's left on its own), so people who were opposed to coercion in the founding era added popular democracy, inheritance taxes, and the like to their calls for liberty. Those who embraced coercion opposed all three. Real classical liberalism always embraced self-governance, equality, and liberty. Libertarians quote the support for liberty and try to recreate a classical liberalism that excludes the other priorities.

Finally - I want to share a link that Xenophon shared with me the other day on a libertarian critique of Rothbard's views on the rights of children. It hinges on the idea that children didn't choose the families they're born into, and therefore it's legitimate to expect certain care for children from parents. Otherwise, parents are coercing children into acquiescing to a situation they didn't freely choose. I think the ties between this argument and the Jefferson-Paine point about the role of time and inheritance should be clear, and I largely agree with it. Not surprisingly, Jefferson was also a big fan of universal, public education for children. This makes sense when you see classical liberalism as a claim about artificial, potentially coercive inherited social constructs. It makes less sense to support public education in the way that Jefferson did if you see classical liberalism as synonymous with libertarianism.

Musings on the Empire of Liberty

What would you advocate doing if a criminal organization took control of an American city or state by force, imposed their own illiberal laws brutally, and suspended or made a sham of elections? Well first, of course, the courts and the police would battle this organization throughout it's rise to power - but let's say it ended up taking power anyway. The federal government would come down on it with overwhelming physical force. Not only would this organization inevitably stumble into some sort of inter-state or otherwise federal crime justifying federal involvement, but any sort of dictatorial power-grab would be a violation of the Constitution which guarantees a republican form of government at the state level. This sort of thing seems and probably is inconceivable for the time being, but if it came to that we would see overwhelming force from the federal government. And rightly so.

When I read things like Matt Yglesias's post sharing evidence that Dick Cheney wanted to invade Syria after Iraq, my first reaction is further revulsion at the man I already found repulsive. I did support the war in Afghanistan, but I was strongly opposed to the Iraq war from day one, so needless to say I would have been opposed to a Syrian war too. But why? Why is this sort of neo-conservative "empire of liberty" mindset so problematic for us? It is for one reason: nationalism. The concept of the nation-state. If we had what H.G. Wells called a World State, adventures like a Syrian war would be considered entirely justifiable - as readily supported as a campaign against a crime syndicate taking over New York or Los Angeles would be supported. The only thing standing in the way of this sort of thing is the perseverance of the nation-state and the conceptualizations of sovereignty that come with it. When you think about it, this is an extremely unsettling realization. There's something deeply unsatisfying and arcane about the very idea of "national sovereignty". At one time, one must admit, nation-states, sovereignty, and self-determination served a valuable purpose in the struggle against autocracy and imperial oppression. But now national sovereignty seems to also conceal great evils. We acknowledge what we call "universal" and "human" rights - mostly standard civil liberties that are recognized in the U.S. - but although we nominally recognize their universality, these rights are easily discarded if a nation-state makes it its business to ignore them. Such rights, then, aren't in practice universal at all. I think it's plausible and perhaps even good that we are moving towards a World State and away from national sovereignty. It will be slow, and it will probably evolve from some sort of confederacy and collection of international institutions that already exist or that will be created. But because it is in all likelihood coming, I don't think we can just dismiss these neo-conservative wars. They are here to stay, I think they will increase, and I think they will become more palatable. We have a framework for acknowledging universal rights, and within that framework military action to stop genocide or terrorism has already become palatable - again, as it should be probably. As the universality of these rights is accepted more broadly, and as it is formalized, it will be harder and harder to justify intervening in the case of genocide but not, say, dictatorship. Many neo-conservatives lament the criminalization of terrorism in the sense of terrorists being treated as criminals rather than enemy combatants. Ironically, though, it is this very process of criminalization that is going to make it possible to forcefully pursue a broader and broader array of international bad guys. At first glance this is very troubling. I haven't abandoned my opposition to the Iraq war, after all, so its unsettling to think about it in these terms. But if I think about what we would do if someone like Saddam set himself up with a similar outfit in a U.S. state, what I would consider to be the appropriate reaction would be entirely justified by the most basic understanding of domestic law enforcement. An easy-out might be rejection of the idea of a World State that would make this change of perspective possible (because it would essentially turn all acts of military and state aggression into criminal acts). It's not quite as much of an easy-out for me because I actually embrace the idea of an eventual World State. But even if I were to use a rejection of the idea of a World State to assuage my opposition to the Iraq war, I would still have to accept that all of this opposition to the invasion of Iraq is predicated on an embrace of the abstraction that is nationalism.

And that's not very satisfying either.

So where do we go with this? Anarchism seems like the only way to consistently avoid such wars and avoid the World State or nationalism. But anarchism isn't personally satisfying to me. Libertarianism won't do the trick - libertarians certainly support the protection of civil liberties by law and basic policing powers. So a libertarian that wants to reject both pure anarchism and these neo-conservative wars (and most do) would have to be a pacifist nationalist (because as I said, libertarian principles applied in a World State would accept the necessity of using the force of law to guarantee civil liberties). But I don't think a pacifist nationalist libertarianism really works. Any libertarian principled enough to be a pacifist is unlikely to be a nationalist.

So, unless we embrace anarchism we seem to be stuck with either neo-conservatism or nationalism (or, if we elect neo-conservatives before we institute a World State, both). This is troubling to me. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising. Man is a violent and divisive species. This is not news. And if we want a liberal society we may need more than sugar and spice and dreams and hopes to get it. As you all know - I'm not a libertarian or an idealist and I don't mind it when things are ambiguous, messy, or indeterminate - so I can accept this. But it's still all fairly depressing.

Catalan on Progressives

Jonathan Catalan wrote a great post clearing up a bizarre assessment of libertarians on the "Ground Zero Mosque". Great until this line at least:

"Is the libertarian position regarding Islam and the United States “leftist”? If that means that the progressive-left position is similar to ours: yes and no. I think that the progressive-left offers Muslim-Americans prioritization over other Americans, for the sake of political correctness (when talking about Muslim rights in the United States). This is not the libertarian position. The libertarians hold Muslims equal to others, and this includes rights to property."

I'm going to refrain from the recent fad of whining that "Jonathan doesn't understand progressives", and simply say that "Jonathan is wrong". This is something I'd expect out of Arnold Kling, not Jonathan Catalan.

To borrow and paraphrase from Mayor Bloomberg, there isn't a single inch of the United States of America that is off-limits to Muslims or any other faith. If you don't like that, tough. If you repudiate that to win an election in Nevada, you're an asshole. If you think your small ideological cadre is the only group of people that thinks this, you're wrong and you need to get better acquainted with people who don't agree with you.

The Conservative and Liberal Impulse

Patrick Appel shares a thought from Jonathan Bernstein:

"I do think that there's something authentically different between liberals and conservatives, at least some of the time, and at least in some cases. If not first principles, though, perhaps we can call them impulses. To me, the liberal impulse is basically: We Can Do Better. And the conservative impulse? Don't Make It Worse. Liberals, or perhaps all of us when we're inspired by the liberal impulse, look around and see a variety of problems and available resources and want to alleviate pain and suffering; they want to solve problems. Conservatives, or perhaps all us us when we're inspired by the conservative impulse, remember all the cases of noble intentions gone awry, the cases of unintended consequences, the cases in which problems seemed terribly severe but then they seemingly melted away without anyone, and certainly not everyone collectively, trying to address them. Liberals appreciate the promise of the future; conservatives appreciate how rickety the accomplishments of the present are, and how easily what we think is safe can be destroyed."

This is of course reminiscent of the old adage that liberal economists say "markets fail, use government", conservative economists say "markets work, use markets", and an assortment of other economists say "markets fail, use markets".

I guess it makes some sense to assign these "impulses" this way, but the whole exercise strikes me as kind of dumb. Do people honestly have one of these impulses and not the other impulses? I suppose some people do, but that strikes me as wrong. The "impulse" we have oughta be context-dependent. With some market failures I'm tempted to say "markets fail, use markets" either because the public choice problems are so great, there's no feasible non-market solution, or there's an ethical reason to maintain the market. With other market failures, I'm tempted to say "markets fail, use government" because the public choice problems are not as significant and the prospects of success are greater.

But this doesn't seem like an impulse that you should naturally have based on an ideological predisposition. It seems like an impulse that should be contingent on the situation at hand.

I think it's also pretty dumb to say that the liberal impulse comes from the impulse to "solve problems" while the conservative impulse comes from the recognition of "unintended consequences". When a liberal suggests we act, it's usually precisely because they are highlighting the unintended consequences of the market institution. When a conservative suggests that we don't act, it's precisely because they want to see a problem solved. And that's all before we even get into the wrinkle that often liberals say "don't act" and conservatives and libertarians say "act".

The more I think about this quote the less I like it actually! If nothing else these judgements should be context-specific, not person-specific. And the underlying motivations they identify I think are all wrong.

Now I'm starting to feel like a political orphan again...

Conor Friedersdorf on Yglesias

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the Yglesias post I linked to earlier here. He agrees that statism is a strange way to frame the difference between liberals, conservatives, and libertarians.

It is, however, a politically strategic way of framing it, which probably explains why so many libertarians have been convinced by it.

Matt Yglesias on what it means to be a liberal

Matt Yglesias has a had a few posts up recently on how stupid regulating barber shops is. I haven't mentioned it because it's not really that interesting. Of course regulating barber shops is stupid. Doesn't everyone know that? What possible function could there be to barber shop regulation? It seemed like one of those issues where 98% of the public would agree on, but nobody would be bothered enough by it to make the effort to change the laws.

Matt has a more interesting post up today, though, that I do think is worth commenting on here. He responds to people who think his opposition to barber shop regulation makes him conservative:

"A colleague mentioned to me the other day that I’m “pretty conservative” on some state and local government issues, with reference to some recent posts on occupational licensing. Someone on twitter asked if I’m trying to score a date with a Cato staffer. I’m not. And I’m not. And I think that whole framing represents a bad way of understanding the whole situation.

I think it’s pretty clear that, as a historical matter of fact, the main thing “the state” has been used to do is to help the wealthy and powerful further enrich and entrench themselves. Think Pharaoh and his pyramids. Or more generally the fancy houses of European nobility, the plantations of Old South slaveowners, or Imelda Marcos’ shoes. The “left-wing” position is to be against this stuff—to be on the side of the people and against the forces of privilege. It’s true that some useful egalitarian activism over the past 150 years has consisted of trying to get the state to take affirmative steps to help people—social insurance, the welfare state, infrastructure, schools—but dismantling efforts to use the state to help the privileged has always been on the agenda. Don’t think to yourself “we need to regulate carbon emissions therefore regulation is good therefore regulation of barbers is good.” Think to yourself “we can’t let the privileged trample all over everyone, therefore we need to regulate carbon emissions and we need to break the dentists’ cartel.”"

These kind of assumptions are why I started posting my "what was Arnold Kling thinking?" series (so far there are only two posts but I'm sure he'll give us enough material to keep going through the fall). Kling makes a habit of making really weird, dumb statements about what liberals are and think that often boil down to "liberals hate markets and trust the state", and often seem to originate in the assumption that "since I like this liberals must not like this".

Yglesias demonstrates why this absolutely isn't the case, and he actually does it in a way I wouldn't have - which is kind of nice. What I think you have to remember is that modern liberalism is grounded in the same classical liberalism that modern conservatism and modern libertarianism are. There is no presumption that markets are bad, there is a presumption that markets are good. Whether markets are always the best solution to a given problem is up in the air, but there is no natural suspicion of markets. This is what separates liberals from "the left", which did emerge from a suspicion of markets (although even many leftists, since the fall of communism, are moving away from that).

As I've said before, I'm personally not really a liberal, although obviously I have some sympathies. That's why it was kind of nice to see Yglesias's distinctly liberal (i.e., egalitarian) take on why regulation is often bad. I would have put it somewhat differently and framed it in a less egalitarian way. I would have said we know what kinds of problems markets solve well. They solve problems where agents can bargain over all costs and benefits affected by the bargain, where both agents are relatively well informed and can't take advantage of each other, and where "ability to pay" isn't a major concern (i.e. - markets aren't always the best way to feed poor people, although they are the best way to produce food for poor people and they are the best way to distribute food to the vast majority of people). Markets are the ideal social institution for situations like this. Insofar as the situation departs from these requirements, something else might be more appropriate.

Readers please take note. If you think liberals disapprove of markets, like regulation, or if you at all were suprised to read Yglesias rail against barber shop regulations then you really need to reconnect with reality. You've invented a conception of a huge swath of the public.

What is Arnold Kling thinking? Part 2

...in which we chronicle Arnold Kling's bizarre obsession with and ideas about li'brulz.

Bruce Bartlett shares his experience with the otherwise brilliant Kling's preoccupation with the detailed description and taxonomy of modern American political ideologies. Essentially Kling botches the reporting of what Bartlett said about his normative position on marginal tax rates and how he reported the results of the paper he was citing. But that isn't what Kling focuses on in these posts, so that isn't what Kling bothers to check up on.

This is what Bartlett has to say about his ideology:

"On the question of where I place myself on the political spectrum, I will have more to say as time goes on. In my own mind, I have the same political philosophy I've always had--basically libertarian but tempered by Burkean small-C conservatism. But I am no longer a member of the Republican Party and no longer consider myself part of the "conservative movement." That's not because I changed, but because I believe that they have. The Republican Party of today is not the party of Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan that I was once a member of; it stands for nothing except the pursuit of power as an end in itself, with no concern whatsoever for what is right for the country. In a recent interview with The Economist magazine, I characterized the Republicans as the greedy, sociopathic party. I stand by that...

...Anyway, I am happy to classify myself, politically, as an independent these days; nothing more, nothing less."

That sort of "I've criticism for all sides" approach never goes down well with true believers.

Kling also recently had this post on the three dispositions of modern liberals. This is one of his more taxonomical posts. In it, we learn that liberals would be libertarians if they were more than "modestly" concerned about the impact that state power has on freedom.

And speaking of crazy fears of and conspiratorial attitudes towards liberalism, maybe Kling could write a few posts for Conservapedia, which holds that the theory of relativity is a liberal conspiracy. Actually, I was somewhat impressed that the author of the article on relativity in Conservapedia made something of a reference to "spukhafte Fernwirkung", or "spooky action at a distance", which gave Einstein pause and violates certain principles of relativity. He mangled the critique, of course, but it's pretty clear from the subt-text that he at least googled "problems with relativity" before writing the Conservapedia article.

What is Arnold Kling thinking?, Part 1

OK, for a while now I've been toying with the idea of a "what in the world is Arnold Kling thinking?" sort of post, but I never went ahead with it. Arnold presents a very interesting case. His posts on macroeconomics are often fascinating. He takes Minsky seriously, which is more than can be said for a lot of libertarians - and he integrates it with some innovative work on the macroeconomics of labor by Garett Jones. This stuff is always great to read.

But quite regularly, Kling writes up posts where he speculates on "liberals" or "the left" or some other formulation of mainstream, non-libertarian, non-conservatives that are nothing short of bizarre.

Here, Kling asks how people who think the state should solve market failures should in some way be evaluated on the basis of the fate of the Soviet Union. He describes the Soviet Union as an experiment that tests this "market failure" position, an experiment which inevitably liberals ignore. The problems with this framing of the question should be obvious to anyone that knows even a small amount of economics. Since when is state control of retail trade (the issue he specifically cites) an attempt at addressing a market failure? People who set out parameters for when markets succeed and when markets fail would have predicted the total failure of the Soviet excursion into retail trade, not to mention the Soviet experiment in general. Kling asks how we can cope with such damning empirical evidence. The logic is barely comprehensible.

If the "market failure" school of thought were to describe their ideal society, what kind of society would they describe? One like the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, etc. - that's what. If you take market failure seriously you think these societies get it right and the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc. get it wrong. The problem isn't a lack of examples of societies that address market failures - the problem is a lack of a libertarian counter-factual to compare it to!

This is just one example of Arnold's odd take on liberals. There are many others that consistently lead me to ask "is this the same Arnold Kling that just wrote such an enlightening post about Minsky and Jones?"

For example:

- Liberals don't like markets and think markets are unfair

- Liberals don't like school choice, think that "technocrats" and social scientists have "mystical" powers, and don't understand "the knowledge problem" (i.e. - Hayek's point)

- Liberals "tend to affiliate themselves with Harvard types, and Harvard types believe that they are smarter than markets" (keep reading that quote... it gets even crazier and more conspiratorial)

- Liberals (1.) don't see inconsistency between legalizing marijuana while banning trans fats, (2.) want to ban trans fats, and (3.) don't want to legalize marijuana because they believe in limited government (they want to legalize marijuana because they don't think it's a problem)

- Liberals "are confident that they are smarter and better educated than conservatives"

What's weird is how insightful Kling can be in certain posts, and how completely disconnected from reality he can be whenever the topic of "what liberals think" comes up. Usually I'm not convinced by psychoanalytic interpretations, but I'm seriously tempted to think that there is some deeply-rooted, unresolved issue in Kling's past that leads to posting like this.

Anyway - very strange. I go back and forth between personally identifying as a "liberal", but I'm certainly left of center and I do think the ideas behind "market failures" are very important for understanding how a wide variety of social institutions work (or do not work). So apparently I identify with "Harvard-types", think I'm smarter than everyone else, and should have my ideas evaluated on the basis of the performance of the Soviet Union.

Hmmmm...

I labeled this "part 1" because from now on I'm not going to refrain from reposting the craziness here. It's just too weird not to share. If anyone else has any particularly egregious examples please feel free to share.

Libertarians and Ideological Cross-breeding

Xenophon shares a great link from the blog Really, Libertarians?, about whether libertarians should form alliances with liberals or not. The blogger starts by affirming the libertarians shouldn't attempt to place themselves on the political spectrum. But he goes on to emphasize that that doesn't mean there shouldn't be substantial interchange between the left and libertarians (presumably there has already been such interchange between the right and libertarians).

The discussion is very interesting. I have a few thoughts:

1. First, I find it interesting that he thinks about the "liberaltarian" phenomenon as liberals turning more libertarian and not libertarians turning more liberal. Empirically, I have no clue what direction of conversion dominates. Anecdotally, I can say that I personally moved from libertarian to what I guess you'd call "liberal".

2. And the reason why I made that conversion is important. Libertarian insights in a lot of ways are basic, Econ 101 insights about the efficiency of free contracting writ large and converted into norms or political values. In other words, I think one of the most essential libertarian fallacies is building a politico-ethical system around positive social science findings (and, I want to stress, basic and introductory social science findings at that). It's kind of an odd way of going about formulating a politico-ethical system. We don't adopt Nietzschean super-man ethics because of evolutionary biology, and we shouldn't simply adopt libertarianism because of these insights. I want to be clear - my point is not that you have to mix up normative and positive findings to come to libertarianism. My point is only that it's possible to get everything there is to get out of libertarianism simply by improving people's knowledge of social science. This is only to say that it's not entirely clear to me what should be important here: teaching people more social science, or sharing libertarianism.

3. But even that isn't entirely satisfying - after all, the reason why I abandoned libertarianism was because I kept learning social science. Yes, the market is efficient and the price mechanism leverages decentralized knowledge. But if institutions don't or can't internalize costs and benefits social scientific insights start to militate against the efficiency of markets. Uncertainty and imperfections ensure that market forces, as fantastic as they are, are going to remain sub-optimal. I haven't abandoned any of the introductory insights in adopting these views - the complement the introductory insights that I still use. I still have a relatively contractarian view of human relations. I still take a fairly atomized, individualist view of things. I still come down on Hayek and Mises's side of the socialist calculation debate. But I can't call myself a libertarian. So, if what we really want is to get people to take the implications of social science more seriously, then its not clear that that would move people towards libertarianism either.

4. This all reminds me of something that's been bugging me lately about the way libertarians talk. I recently got Marginal Revolution on my blogroll. I know, I know - that sure took a while. Anyway, the blog uses this language "market-oriented economists" a lot. At first it confused me - Cowen wrote something about how no "market-oriented economists" think the minimum wage raises employment. My response was "haven't you ever heard of Card and Krueger?!?!? It's a little much to say that no market-oriented economists think this". Later it dawned on me - what he meant was "libertarian economists". I think this gets to the point of my feelings on this particular blog post. A lot of libertarians have a pretty twisted view of what non-libertarians think, and the idea that if you're not a libertarian you're not "market-oriented" or "pro-market" is high on the list. I think this sort of thing is completely unproductive. If I were more cynical, I might just as easily turn the epithet on libertarians. I've said before that the market is a lot like a tool in the sense that it works for certain jobs and not for others. You use the right tool for the right job. If you saw someone banging on a screw with a hammer, your reaction wouldn't be "wow - that guy has a deep respect for hammers". Quite the opposite. That's how I see libertarians and markets. I could go around referring to people that see things my way as "market oriented economists", but that would confuse things, just like Cowen and other libertarians that use this phrase as a synonym for "libertarians" confuses things. The fact is there are fundamental differences of opinion - let's leave it at that and stick to the clear terminology when we talk. [Mises.org does this all the time with "pro-liberty" too. It can be very confusing if you don't know what the code-words mean].

This is starting to get a little farther afield, but I think the point I want to make is simply that (1.) the link that Xenophon shares is a very good one and the impulse is very good, but (2.) the guy clearly has blinders on and that limits the usefulness of his more fundamental insight. This is fine. We all have blinders on. I'm providing a few counter-arguments here to help take those blinders off, and people should take them how they will.

Personally I, like the blogger, don't see a lot of use for these ideological spectrums. Mostly I just feel like a non-descript moderate, often I feel like a liberal, sometimes I feel conservative, on occasion I feel downright leftist, and fairly regularly I do feel like a libertarian. The center of gravity for me is probably what you'd call "center-left" but the point is spectrums are often a dumb way to think about this stuff, and even distinct ideologies like "libertarianism" is a dumb way to think about this stuff. It is convenient, though - and convenience matters.

Anniversary of Constitutional Government in Virginia

Yesterday, June 29th, in 1776, Virginia adopted a constitution for the commonwealth. It was the first state to do so. Patrick Henry would serve as the first governor of the free and independent Virginia. For the better part of the following decade, Virginians would give their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause of American independence and union.

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The Harmony of Economics

Don Boudreaux links to an interesting looking paper by Daniel Klein on musical analogies in Adam Smith's writing - specifically in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Klein writes that:

"Adam Smith often used musical and synchronous figures of speech to convey
the notion of sympathy, as when our sentiments “keep time together.” In this
way Smith explored social cooperation or “harmony.”"

Smith was not alone in the use of this analogy, though. Two other cases immediately come to my mind - Bastiat's Economic Harmonies, and Carey's The Harmony of Interests, both of which remark on the point that interests that at first glance seem to conflict actually progress in harmony and are naturally complementary. I seem to remember this sort of language being applied to republican political philosophy in Drew McCoy's The Elusive Republic as well. Liberalism and republicanism are dispositions that have always emphasized the inherent harmony of society, despite the superficial chaos. The harmony is that much more impressive when we relaize that there is order to that chaos.

Does anyone else have any other examples of thinking about human society or political economy in terms of "harmony"? I'm sure there are many.

Democracy, the State, and the Web of Power Relations

Jonathan Catalan has a brief post with an extensive comment section that works through the classic critique of democracy and "social contract" ideas more broadly. I concur with a lot of these critiques of the social contract, and I've said as much in the past. I've been meaning to flesh out my thoughts on this in more detail for a while, but I'll mention it briefly here as a sort of response to Jonathan.

1. Human beings are social beings and they are constantly interacting. These interactions are sometimes voluntary and consistent with human liberation, and sometimes involuntary and inconsistent with human liberation. Voluntary and involuntary interactions can both be either private or corporate. In Truth and Power, Foucault talked about an idea that I think is very similar - the "web of power". We are caught in a web of involuntary impositions on our liberty. It is the human condition.

2. There is often recourse for these impositions. Sometimes we have institutions like courts, or we have parents that arbitrate disputes between siblings. We can always revolt or strike back (self-defense is almost universally considered an appropriate justification for violence). But the ability to respond to an imposition doesn't make that imposition voluntary. Recourse to courts does not change the fact that pollution is an assault on personal liberty. Recourse to revolt does not change the fact that a tyranny is an assault on personal liberty. It is very good that we have recourse in many situations, but it doesn't make the involuntary act voluntary.

3. The state is involuntary. A social contract is distinct from other contracts precisely because the parties to the contract don't necessarily agree to their inclusion. However, the state can evolve or be designed (or a little of both... and after all, when it comes to human institutions what is "evolution" and "emergence" except for an accumulation of designs over time?) in a way that deliberately privileges citizen participation, control, and decision making. So yes it is involuntary, but that does not mean it is the equivalent of slavery. We need to be careful not to embrace sentimentalism that confuses the issue in either direction: the state is involuntary, but it is also an institution that is controlled by the people (at least the kind of states I'm concerning myself with here are).

4. The purpose of the liberal state is to minimally impose itself on human liberty but act as a bulwark against private tyrannies that emerge in the "web of power" that is natural to the human condition. The reason why non-libertarian classical liberals still embrace the state is precisely because they are concerned about private tyrannies that would threaten liberty in the absence of the state, and they conclude that in the optimal balance between private tyrannies and the public tyrannies implicit in the social contract, there is a role for the state. This brand of classical liberalism is not libertarian precisely because we consider libertarian restrictions on the state to threaten human liberty. Libertarians act like we don't care about human liberty, but the whole point of why we're not libertarians is because of what we perceive to be the libertarian threat to liberty. Libertarians downplay or ignore private tyrannies for some always unexplained reason. Tyranny is almost always public for them, and discussions always come back to government. Why? I still don't know. But because they see things that way they are always going to have a blind spot and they will always be an inadequate defense of human liberty. I don't really care about the etymology of their label - I'm not a libertarian because of how much I value liberty. There are definitely worse things to be than a libertarian if you value human liberty, of course. Libertarianism is definitely high on the list of second-bests. But it is not ideal.

5. This conception of the liberal state excludes non-liberal states as surely as it excludes libertarian states (and libertarians almost universally embrace the existence of some form of state). I don't have to answer for Nazi Germany or some other tyranny any more than any other non-anarchist, non-Nazi does. Slippery slopes are legitimate to talk about, but (1.) don't ignore the slippery slopes of libertarianism, which slide to anarchy on one side and crony capitalist oligarchy on the other, and (2.) don't think you'll get away with convincing me that the liberal state is on the road to serfdom. Libertarians love to bring up the slippery slope but they hate to apply it to themselves. Whenever crony capitalism emerges it's never the bottom of their own slippery slope. They won't even consider the possibility.

6. I'll also note that my thinking on this has been influenced by John Dewey's political writings as well. There's a piece where he talks about freedom in the same way that Foucault talks about the "web of power". I'll track it down, but he basically points out the path dependence of our ideas of freedom. Often (not always) when people complain about violation of their rights as a result of a state action, that state action has relieved a violation of other people's rights. When people complain about state imposition on BP and violations of liberty, what they forget is that this action helps to relieve impositions on the liberty of people suffering from the spill. Bastiat might call it the "seen and the unseen". Defenders of BP ignore the "unseen" violations of the liberty of the people the state is helping. In other words, we're dealing with a dense web of freedoms and rights, just like Foucault's dense web of power. Often it's a trade-off between competing liberties, and often we accept involuntary state action because it is less pernicious than involuntary private action.


So that's a long sketch, but believe me it's still just an outline. I think you get the gist, though.

The Danger of Libertarian Social Engineering

David Brooks had a great column up yesterday contrasting the French Enlightenment with the Scottish Enlightenment, and cautioning against people who rely unduly on rationalism to impose massive change on society.

Don Boudreaux completely missed the point - that Brooks was calling out conservative and libertarian social engineers and radicals as well as liberal ones. Boudreaux regularly advocates these huge imposed changes, derived from deduction from simple principles rather than real testing in the real world - precisely the sort of change that Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment were disposed against.

Greg Mankiw gets Brooks's point, and has this great anecdote:

"A couple years ago, I participated in a panel discussion on libertarianism in Mike Sandel's Justice class, along with my friend and colleague Jeff Miron. Jeff is a true libertarian, and he defended that position with gusto. By comparison to Jeff, I seemed lacking in conviction. I described myself as a "libertarian at the margin." By that, I meant that given our starting point today, I believe more reliance on individual liberty and less on governmental solutions is usually a step in the right direction, but I often recoil at more radical libertarian positions.

David Brooks's column yesterday offers a good explanation of skepticism about big radical ideas, such as pure libertarianism. It made me feel better about my watered-down variety."

I regularly say I'm sympathetic to Austrians and libertarians here. I think I'm clear on how I'm sympathetic. I highlight their ideas that I agree with all the time, despite the fact that I also critique. Sure - I praise Hayek and Boettke and Garrison more than I praise Mises and Salerno and Rothbard, but I'm allowed to have preferences. Anyway - my sympathy is of the Mankiw variety, and I think he and Brooks nail it. Boudreaux, as usual, completely misses the point.

Beware of libertarian social engineers, and any radical social engineers that have a massive mega-project they want to impose on society based on a huge system they've built up from some first principles. John Dewey cautions against this and highlights the point about rationalism in The Quest for Certainty:

"From the side of the object those who put forward the claims of reason have placed the universal higher than the individual; those who have held to perception have reversed the order. From the side of mind, one school has emphasized the synthetic action of conceptions. The other school has dwelt upon the fact that in sensation the mind does not interfere with action of objects in writing their own report. The opposition has extended to problems of conduct and society. On one hand, there is emphasis upon the necessity of control by rational standards; on the other hand, the dynamic quality of wants has been insisted upon together with the intimately personal character of their satisfaction as against the pure remoteness of pure thought. On the political side, there is a like division between the adherents of order and organization, those who feel that reason alone gives security, and those interested in freedom, innovation and progress, those who have used the claims of the individual and his desires as a philosophical basis."

I'm not sure the distinction is quite so sharp (and Rothbard offers an entirely opposite thesis here), but Dewey makes the right point. When you think you can just think up the best way for society to be organized, you'll countenance radical changes and impositions of a new social order on society far more easily. Movements like Communism were at least explicit about this. I think one of the biggest dangers of libertarianism is that since it is ostensibly a doctrine of individual liberty, the fact that an entirely new, theoretical order is imposed on society is obscured. Try telling a libertarian they're imposing a grand plan for a new social order and watch the steam come out of their ears either because (1.) they're furious, or (2.) they can't process the accusation - it makes no sense to them. In fact I'm sure I'll hear a little of both in the comment section (which I probably won't be able to attend to today).

Remember, for all they belly-ache about their claims to classical liberalism, libertarianism largely emerged out of French liberalism and the French Enlightenment - not the British. I'm not saying even that the French Enlightenment is a bad thing (and I don't think Brooks is saying that either). Everyone makes their own unique errors - but it's important to be cognizant about what those errors are and what the implications are, even for fellow liberals.

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UPDATE: So when people write, they don't fact check every single word - we write on the basis of the wealth of knowledge that we've collected and stored over the years. Every once in a while, though, it's good to double-check some things. After publishing this I decided to double check my claim about the roots of libertarianism in French liberalism. I found enough to conclude that as a general statement it's a fine statement for me to make - I'm not claiming that there were no other influences after all, and the French vein seems to be substantial, consequential, and freely acknowledged by libertarians. While double-checking this, though, I stumbled across an interesting (admittedly, from Wikipedia) point about the origins of libertarianism. When the word first emerged in France, it was in a critique of Proudhon. The accusation was that he was "liberal, but not libertarian"... so in other words, in the early days libertarianism was not "classical liberalism" - it was explicitly opposed and quite distinct. For those libertarians, classical liberalism just wasn't good enough.

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UPDATE 2: Jonathan Catalán shares his thoughts on Mankiw's post here, and seems to think that libertarian sympathies aren't compatable with "strict adherence" to Keynesianism.

Classical Liberalism

Recently, I critiqued some thoughts that Bryan Caplan shared on liberalism and libertarianism. The post really got me thinking, and it highlighted what I think are a lot of the problems with the way that libertarianism thinks and works. Sometimes I feel like my affinity for and sympathy with libertarianism gets obscured by these frustrations, but the frustrations still stand. Anyway, I've decided to start a new blog called Classy-cal Liberalism. Since "classical liberalism" is staked out and regularly purged, I figured I'd highlight how classy I think my approach to the issue is and give the blog a catchy new name. I don't intend the blog to be too intensive - I basically see it as being a link farm where I aggregate other liberal blogging, particularly introspective liberal blogging that really engages what liberalism is ("liberal" constructed as it was in my critique of Caplan). I might also highlight instances where liberals try to purge their co-liberals (a la Caplan), as well as instances where liberals stray a little and either reject basic liberal tenets or add a few non-liberal (or even illiberal tenets). We'll see how it goes - it might be a dud. I'll probably be renovating it a lot over the next couple weeks - adding literature, links, etc. But the day to day blogging I want to keep simple and straightforward.

That's Classy-cal Liberalism. I also wanted to touch on a few of Sebastian's responses to my Caplan post. Sebastian starts with:

"One of the dangers of ascribing such a "broad definition" to liberalism/liberal is that it is in danger of ending up like terms such as "fascist" or "democratic" - in that it means whatever you want it to mean."

First, I suppose I disagree that "fascist" or "democratic" mean whatever we want them to mean. Democracy especially is quite broad - but just because it's broad doesn't mean it's indeterminate. When I hear "democracy" used formally (of course it does take on other meanings in casual speech), I think it means rule by the people - a plebiscite in its ideal type, but not necessarily. I don't usually think of democracy as assuming anything explicit about any other rights other than electoral rights. It can come with other rights, but it doesn't have to. In this sense, it makes perfect sense to think about "democratic socialism", although no socialism the world has seen has ever really lived up to this. Where is the ambiguity here? I don't see it. As for "fascism", I always think of "fascism" as non-dynastic autocracy.

"By the same token, this is on a much smaller scale than what modern American welfare statists, or modern progressive "liberals", propose. Not to engage in Jonah Goldberg-style polemicism, but it is excruciating that people whose political agenda contains many of the aspects of classical fascism can use such a word with such positive connotations (liberal) to describe themselves."

I do think its clear that welfare statists take as tenets of their views things that are not explicitly liberal tenets. I guess I would say, though, that they are not necessarily illiberal just because they're not the bedrock of liberalism. Liberals support representative government to improve society in a transparent way that is consistent with liberal principles. Some individuals may decide that welfare programs are one such improvement. Welfare programs as such are not a requisite part of the liberal program, but they are consistent with it. I tentatively view "negative rights" the same way. I don't personally buy into negative rights, and I would never argue that they are a "liberal" idea. But they can coexist with liberalism, depending on their implementation.

I'd also caution Sebastian against what in an earlier post I've refered to as the "presumption of ideological orthogonality". It would be illogical for Sebastian to say that because fascists believe X and welfare statists believe X too, then welfare statists are somehow fascists. Sebastian doesn't come out and say this, but he skims the edge of that sort of thinking. Even if that were a logically consistent deduction (which it is not), ideologies are not perfectly orthogonal. They do share common elements. I support the existence of a central bank and so do Communists. So? You all probably support provision for the national defense, and so do fascists. So? We share some common elements. Simply pointing that out proves nothing. The question is, are those common elements the essential elements of our ideologies, or do we differ on the essential elements of our ideologies? Lazy thinking and the presumption of ideological orthogonality leads to statements like "Lincoln was a fascist" or "Roosevelt was a fascist", or for that matter "there's no difference between Communism and national socialism". Sebastian goes on:

"This [4. secular, representative government] is the weak link. You seem to belittle libertarians on this one, yet it would seem bleedingly obvious that it is the one that produces results that clash so much with the other tenets."

Bleedingly obvious to a libertarian perhaps. But that's precisely why someone would be a libertarian - if that is the one that stands out, you're naturally going to gravitate towards libertarianism. Actually, I think private property rights also clash quite frequently. Private property can exercise coercive power, which is what progressives and left-leaning liberals highlight. Private property can perpetuate discrimination and caste systems in society, thus clashing with tolerance and pluralism. Imperfectly implemented private property can impose on freedom from coercion, and negative rights, and externalities make a mockery of the idea of individual responsibility. We could think about "clashes" that occur in any of these. Freedom and tolerance/pluralism clash all the time. Take a time machine back to the American South fifty years ago for an acute example, but it's not that hard to find modern examples either. I have to reject this assertion by Sebastian. Representative government certainly clashes with these other tenets. I'm not denying that. But the idea that it is at all distinguished in this regard is silly. Indeed, its one of the best mechanisms for righting and arbitrating other clashes. That's why a representative government was so important to the classical liberals.

"You obviously recognise such a clash. Yet you seem to view those with libertarian attitudes as childish or naive."

Sometimes naive, but never childish. And they're no more naive than any other liberal. They're just naive about different things. What may distinguish libertarians is their attempt to purge or disown other liberals - something you don't see many other liberals doing. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that most other liberals aren't thinking about this broader intellectual tradition on a regular basis - so it's not even on their radar as a tradition to actively maintain. At one point, a commenter asked why I criticize libertarians but not "democratic fundamentalists" (the commenter might even have been Sebastian - I forget). The reason is that libertarians are worth arguing with. They've thought through their ideas (usually). There are very few democratic fundamentalists left, for good reason. The ones that are left rely more on sentiment then clear thought. That's not worth engaging.

"At some point you basically have to get your priorities straight, stand for something and put your foot down, or else you end up with dissatisfying consensus politics and the gradual erosion of individual rights in the pursuit of some vague, illiberal "greater good"."

I was with you at the beginning of this sentence and lost you by the end. You seem to be assuming that an embrace of representative government and consensus is inconsistent with the maintenance of individual rights. You know what strikes me as "vague illiberalism"? This suspicion of "consensus"! A tradition that emphasizes free individuals can't simply dismiss the concerns and insights and perspectives of those free individuals. Consensus politics is central to liberalism.

"You might also want to explain how the current arrangement (by which I mean the progressive centralisation of political power, which you don't appear to oppose) is actually in any way representative. You criticised the Tea Partiers in an earlier post for ignoring the last part of "no taxation without representation". Yet how can they ever truly be represented by a distant central government? Is it representative if taxes collected in a conservative state are used to fund, say, an abortion clinic in a "liberal" state?"

I've opposed the centralization of political power many times on this blog. Part of the reason for the persistence and strength of liberalism in America is our decentralization of power - our federalism. During the health reform debate, I used this blog to oppose the creation of a national policy. There were a few things related to the tax treatment of employer benefits and Medicare that I thought could be done at the national level, but I advocated a 1996 Welfare Reform style health reform: broad experimentation at the state level. I've criticized restraints on state budgets that hamper state and local responses to problems, leading the federal government to step in. Granted, as time goes on more problems become legitimately national problems. I'm not instinctively opposed to things being done at the national level. But I don't think I've been a cheerleader for it either. As for its representativeness, we're seeing the Tea Party beign represented in primaries across the country. Congress is still elected, as is the president. If anything, Americans pay more attention to what the federal government is doing than what their state and local governments are doing, forcing the federal government to be more cognizant of the public's will.

I don't think my responses to Sebastian are in anyway the "liberal" response. Sebastian's views are just as consistent with liberalism as mine are. Some liberals are more suspicious of representative government, others are more suspicious of property rights, others are more suspicious of negative rights. These tensions make liberalism dynamic.

Caplan on Liberalism

Bryan Caplan has an interesting discussion of what he calls "liberal conflation". The discussion wanders, but it seems pretty clear that he is frustrated by how many different views political philosophers call "liberal", he wants to think more narrowly about what we call "liberal", and he wants it to center on some sort of libertarianism. I think he is unnecessarily bothered by this. Caplan is thinking about this in partisan/ideological terms when I think what we're really talking about is a political-philosophical school of thought. From an inherently partisan perspective, of course it seems weird to "lump almost everybody together". From a philosophical perspective this really isn't as problematic.

I see "liberalism" as having a few guiding tenets, including:

1. Individualism - individuals have agency and responsibility distinct from the collective, and they are equals.

2. Negative rights - liberalism is at its base a philosophy of negative rights

3. Freedom - the idea that individuals should be free from coercion

4. Secular, representative, government.

5. Tolerance and pluralism.

6. Private property rights, protected by law.

It's just a list off the top of my head, but I don't think it would be too controversial and I think it covers all the bases. As a philosophical framework, this does have a lot of adherents, at least in the West. But as a philosophical framework, I think it also has to be considered a general foundation rather than a specific or partisan creed. For example, some people put stock in the idea of positive rights as well as negative rights. I'm extremely skeptical of that for all the canonical reasons for being skeptical of positive rights, but I don't think that automatically disqualifies them from being considered "liberals", although that idea itself is not a "liberal" idea. Libertarians are quite good on 1., 2., 3., 5., and 6., but they often at the very least day-dream about (if not actively pursue) sabotaging 4. if there are ever any tensions between 4. and the other tenets. And this point about "tension" is an important one to raise. There are tensions in liberalism precisely because it is a broad philosophical disposition, rather than a partisan position with a platform that can be crafted to minimize internal tensions.

As I've stated on this blog many times, the ideal of 6. is imperfectly implemented in life (and certainly the same can be said of any of these). That leads to tensions between an imperfect implementation of 6. and the ideals of 1. and 3.. My freedom (number 3.) is imposed upon by polluters precisely because 6. (private property rights) has never been and probably can never be perfectly implemented. What is the "liberal" solution? There is no clear liberal solution (this would be a problem if "liberalism" were an ideology). One of the important things about liberalism is that when all six tenets are reasonably well respected, society has a tendency to right itself. The free market is by far the best example, but in more complicated cases like pollution externalities, 4. combined with 5., tempered by reminders of 2. can come up with a solution where 1. and 3. alone might not have been able to. So "liberalism" is an extremely robust philosophical disposition in that sense. But when you start privileging or removing any of these elements, it becomes less robust. This is one of my biggest concerns about libertarianism - not an error of commission so much as an error of omission.

So does this "lump everyone together"? It does and it doesn't. If you restrict the analysis to the West, it lumps an awful lot of us together. But there is differentiation - libertarians stress some elements, "progressives" stress others, and "conservatives" stress others. I think it is quite a strain to fit "socialists" into liberalism, unless we're talking about distinctly non-Marxist/non-Leninist socialists (and even these have pruned liberalism down).

I think the other thing to keep in mind is that this is only even on our radar as a "conflation" because the alternative has been so decisively destroyed so recently. A very popular illiberal political philosophy fell only twenty years ago. That isn't that long ago, and a new one may still emerge. Why splinter victorious liberalism just to pick an internecine fight when in a matter of decades there might be a new challenge? Former illiberal socialists are turning into liberals in droves, and libertarians want to shun them because they want to hijack liberalism and make it in their own likeness? I don't see the point, even if I were to sympathize more with libertarianism.

And what challenges could emerge? Well, with the improvement of data collection and information technology we shouldn't write off illiberal socialism just yet. People could easily come back to the opinion that they can plan society as technology develops. And what's even more scary is that they probably could fake it longer and more successfully than the Soviet Union did. It's doomed to failure, of course - but it could gain adherents. Pre-modern fundamentalism is presenting an increasing challenge to liberalism in many quarters of the world. If any of these threats become more formidable, "liberalism" is going to look less and less like a conflation to Caplan.

Part of me was simply frustrated when I read Caplan. "Liberalism" if anything started with 1., 4., and 5., with 2. being added as 4. and 5. became better defined, and 3. and 6. added as market capitalism began to emerge out of economic nationalism and mercantilism. If 1. and 4. form the basis of "liberalism" (which I think they do), it's not clear at all why libertarianism is the "first among equals" or the "true" liberalism. The more libertarians try to make these claims for themselves, the more someone else is going to get frustrated and push them out of the club (Caplan points out that "modern liberals" have a lot in common with illiberal socialists, but by the same token couldn't we say libertarians have a lot in common with illiberal anarchists?). There's good reason to be frustrated with Caplan in this way - he makes some pretty bad arguments. However, I think the best way to tackle this "liberal conflation" issue is simply to remember that this is a philosophical disposition we're talking about - not an ideology. An ideology that everybody buys into is indeed diluted and might require some purges. A philosophy that everybody buys into, on the other hand, is probably just a very sensible philosophy. After all, Bryan Caplan is well known for aruging that we should limit the franchise based on a person's economic and policy enlightenment. I don't get as apoplectic over that as some people - I can respect speculative, out of the box thinking. But it seems rather strange that an advocate of limiting the franchise should be so bold in claiming the liberal mantle.