Libertarians aren't as economically enlightened as liberals

How likely do you think it is that this follow up paper by Buturovic and Klein will make the Wall Street Journal and sweep the blogosphere the way their first paper with the opposite headline did?

Of course the correct conclusion from this paper ought to be not only that my title to this post is wrong, but the first headline (that libertarians are better at economics) is wrong too. The correct conclusion is that everyone can do badly depending on the question, and in this particular paper libertarians and conservatives did badly.

I still think there are a few outstanding problems with this paper - I still think they're failing to differentiate between what people actually know and the way they answer the question (i.e. - seeing it normatively or positively). It's a misnomer to say they're looking at "enlightenment" at all. Many of these people may be perfectly enlightened, but also sentimental. They also stick to their guns on the interpretation of the "right" answer to these questions - some of which have been highly suspect.

But every study has empriical pitfalls that it will never be able to answer completely. The important thing is that you tailor the extent of your claims to those imperfections. If you have a shaky study you don't blare out a bizarre conclusion. "Libertarians are better at economics" should never have passed the smell test and it says something about the circles that the authors move in that it did pass the smell test. That study and this follow up may not be perfect, but they at least eliminate that claim.

Hopefully there is equal buzz about this finding, but I'm not optimistic.

More on libertarian social engineering and rationalism

Autofyrsto links to an old post of mine on libertarian social engineering, where I make the argument that libertarians are the biggest viable social engineers in America today (I'm assuming - safely, I think - that state socialism is off the table). Strict libertarianism takes a blueprint for the organization of society that it has derived rationally from a few essential principles and seeks to impose that blueprint on society. They don't see it as an imposition, of course, because they see it as a reaction to other impositions. But their perception is largely irrelevant. The strict sort of libertarians (rather than "libertarians on the margin", like Greg Mankiw) pursue radical change on the basis of very little experimentation or experience. That's not inherently good or bad, but it's something to be cautious about.

Autofyrsto primarily takes issue with what he perceives to be my assault on reason and rationalism. He starts by making an issue out of the point in the David Brooks article I link where Brooks notes that Edmund Burke was "horrified" that "individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time". Atuofyrsto goes on to protest when in the blog post I link to Greg Mankiw admits that he "recoil[s] at more radical libertarian positions". Autofrysto writes that "If steam comes out of the libertarians’ ears, it is only at the frustration of arguing with people who openly and proudly muzzle the voice of reason so that they may continue to believe, at our expense, whatever makes them comfortable." Muzzle the voice of reason? This is an odd interpretation of what Brooks, Mankiw, and I were doing. We aren't unreasonable or unrational people, after all. It would be strange for us "openly and proudly muzzle the voice of reason". All we're suggesting is that human society is complex and a single person or a group of people can't map out a blueprint for it. Reason is a tool of the mind to be used, not abused. Autofyrsto seems to be arguing that the admonition not to abuse reason is an attempt to muzzle it. I disagree.

Autofrysto then goes on to cite a favorite of this blog, Thomas Paine:

"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival and a bear your master."

Again, no one here is renouncing the use and authority of reason. Quite the contrary. I am renouncing the unreasonable application of reason. I am renouncing the fetishism of reason. I am upholding the idea that man's reason is a great asset but renouncing the idea that it is capable of forseeing and planning all things. I'm advocating common sense, in other words, which makes the rebuke with Paine a little laughable. Autofrysto ends with this point, which I can agree with him whole-heartedly on:

"We should carefully scrutinize the so-called “wisdom of the ages” in light of reason, and abandon it when it fails that scrutiny. I don’t even know how to explain why. It seems so self-evident."

Bleeding Heart Libertarians on "What is liberty"?

This new blog, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, is living up to the hype in my opinion. Lot's of good stuff so far. Today they ask "what is liberty?" and provide a variety of answers based on the way people use and understand the word. They have:

"1.Freedom as Absence of Obstacles: Someone is free to the extent that no obstacles impede her ability to do as she pleases.
1a.Freedom as Absence of Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
1b.Freedom as Absence of Deliberate Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one deliberately interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
1c.Freedom as Absence of Wrongful Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one wrongfully interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
2.Freedom as Capacity: Someone is free to the extent that she has the power, ability, capacity, or means to do as she pleases.
3.Freedom as Autonomous Self-Control: Someone is free to the extent that she exhibits sufficient deliberative self-control, such that she is authentically the author of her actions.
4.Freedom as Non-Domination: A person is free to the extent she is not subject to another person’s or group’s arbitrary will.
5.Freedom as Moral Virtue: A person is free to the extent she has the power to recognize and act upon her moral obligations.
6.Freedom as Absence of Pressure: A person is free to the extent she feels no social pressure to do anything.
7.Freedom as Absence of Reasons: A person is free to the extent she has no grounds or reasons for making decisions."

I especially like this point in response:

"Most of the right libertarians I’ve met are hardcore revisionists (about the English language) when it comes to freedom. Most of them think the only valid conceptions of liberty are 1b or 1c above. They think other uses are confused, ideological, or demonstrably wrong."

They promise to demonstrate why this is wrong, and to make a case for liberty as capacity. I've made this point recently as well, and made a case for a sort of "liberty as capacity" argument here, where I wrote:

"All social life is about power and coercion. The exercise of the fruits of that coercion - the exercise of rights - can't be thought of as the opposite of coercion. Liberty is not the opposite of coercion, so what is it? Liberty is the arrangement of these coercions in a way that is consistent with human dignity and human potentiality."

I'm not sure if others have made this point or not, but it will be interesting to see the argument presented on Bleeding Heart Libertarians over the next couple days.

They did forget one definition from their list, though:

Three interesting things about libertarians

1. They like diamonds.

2. They intimidate major economics bloggers out of criticizing their favorite politicians.

3. They published a proposal for an individual health insurance mandate in Reason magazine in 2004.

Reason.com video and thoughts

Gary Gunnels shares this video from Reason.com - it sounds like an interesting project. Gene Callahan also shared thoughts on it here.



I don't follow the Reason blog, but I really should. I want to share something I really like about the group and something I don't like as much:

1. I like how positive the Reason pieces are for the most part. They do not denounce people the way a lot of libertarian outlets do. They do not have a negative view of their own libertarianism (i.e. - what libertarianism is not) - they have a very positive view of their libertarianism (what libertarianism is or could accomplish). That's extremely refreshing. It is a very creative group of people and a group of people with a constructive vision. That's all anyone can ask for, but it can be a rare thing in this world.

2. One thing I don't like, though, is how they manage to idolize libertarians, almost as some sort of "higher man". For example, this interview with James Fallon where he treats the claim that libertarians are more logical than non-libertarians as an actual working hypothesis. The interviewee here says this sort of thing too at 4:33 in this video. She talks about how much sense libertarianism makes the more you talk to people and "how it's really hard to deny" it after a while. Now, this is her opinion and everyone is entitled to their opinion, but my reaction to this is "No it's not - it's really easy to deny libertarianism! Libertarianism is better than a lot of other philosophies, but the problems with it are glaringly obvious!". I guess what bugs me about the Reason.com material is that these sort of self-congratulations seem to be in there a lot. Somewhat obnoxious and somewhat naive.

Libertarians, Logic, and "Free Liberals"

Andrew Sullivan shares a great post by Tim Lee contrasting Hayek with Rand and Rothbard. Lee writes:

"One of the more pernicious influences of Rand and Rothbard on the libertarian movement was their tendency to treat every policy problem as almost reducible to a logical syllogism. Too many libertarians act as though they don’t need to know very much about the details of any given policy issue because they can deduce the right answer directly from libertarian principles. The practical result is often to shut down internal debate and discourage libertarians from thinking carefully about cases where libertarian principles may have more than one plausible application. Hayek seems to have written “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order” with the explicit purpose to combat that kind of dogmatism. He thought it “highly desirable that liberals shall strongly disagree on these topics, the more the better.”"

I've critiqued the Austro-libertarian fetish for deduction on here before, and Lee makes largely the same point here. I think you have to start a step back, though, and simply point out that human society is immensely complex. You can take a few first principles that you make up, like mathematical axioms, and derive a logical system from it that you can apply to situations that seem to be relevant to those first principles (like physical matter). That's a deductive project that can have real payoffs. But you simply can't do that with human society. Too much is going on. Even if you have a true axiomatic claim about human action, you're very likely to miss lots of other first principles and contingencies that could completely change the picture. Imagine if we just dropped half the field axioms in mathematics. The set of deductions you would be able to come up with would be incomplete! You wouldn't be able to demonstrate nearly as much, and you'd certainly be missing substantial portions of the way classical mechanical systems behave. Or, as another way of putting it, think of what happens when you add additional field axioms in higher mathematics. We have a hard time getting to the bottom of physical reality this way, and yet many Austro-libertarians go through life as if they can rule out empirically derived social science because their deductions from their axioms don't come to those conclusions.

I've recently been in contact with Jan Helfeld - a fairly well known libertarian interviewer - that covers these same frustrations that Lee is sharing. Jan uses a Socratic Interviewing method based on a few underlying claims that he uses to try to demonstrate inconsistencies in the arguments of various politicians and media personalities. Kevin Rollins (editor at Econ Journal Watch and a GMU student) suggested I debate with him and exchange some thoughts. We're still trying to set that up, but I sent him some written thoughts I had on his whole project. This is a selection of what I sent him that is relevant to this point about libertarians and their use of logic:

"Your interviewees note this [the problems with his axioms], but they don’t always articulate it in the best way (probably because they are caught off guard or just haven’t thought about these issues). But they do realize there are fundamental problems with the deductions that you make. My concern with some of your interviews is that your interviewees tell you this – they tell you your questions miss the point – but you never change or try to think about what may be wrong with your questions, or work with them to figure out a better way of approaching the problem. You keep asking the same question over and over again instead of considering the possibility that you’re asking the wrong questions. You may catch them in logical inconsistencies, but if the logical structure you impose on them is meaningless that doesn’t really prove much except that you were able to trap them in a word-game. Is the point to prove Congressmen are not the greatest logicians or that they don’t understand basic principles of a liberal society? You may succeed at the former – it’s not clear to me you succeed at the latter.

It reminds me of something Keynes said about Hayek. He wrote that one of Hayek’s books was an “example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam”. You strike me as this sort of “remorseless logician”. You take a first principle that you don’t appear to closely interrogate (or at least that you don’t appear to think has the problems that I see in it) and then you persist at it until you elicit a reaction from your interviewees."

Jan seems like a great guy but I feel like the method that strikes him as being so effective can be very misleading. People will nod their heads to claims like "individuals don't have the right to initiate violence" and "individuals can't delegate rights they don't have". These sound like pretty reasonable assertions. There's nothing particularly absurd about them. So his interviewees nod their heads in agreement. Jan then takes those axiomatic building blocks, shorn of their qualifications and problems, and makes a quick case for libertarianism out of them. But that seems to just gloss over the really hard questions! What are rights really? Is government just an institution that individuals delegate their rights to or is it something else? What are some extenuating circumstances where an initiation of violence might be justified? Are rights themselves an initiation of violence (a la Proudhon)? Is government action that seems on the surface to be an initiation of violence really an initiation of violence? Most of the time these secondary questions (which come up because of flimsy "axioms") don't even come up - or if they do come up they get plowed through as if the interviewee is changing the topic.

The confidence that libertarians get from this deduction-fetish, which Lee points out in Rand and Rothbard, is very dangerous when they start talking about organizing society. It raises the specter of libertarian social engineering, which I've critiqued at length here. I have no quarrel with social engineering, but this sort of large-scale social engineering and the risks that it involves simply isn't conceivable for a more empirical framework that does not insist that its deductions are universal and unimpeachable (except by another logician's ability to see a flaw in the logic).

One solution is simply to be more open minded and pluralistic when it comes to libertarian thought. That sounds like a "no duh" solution, but the simple willingness to be speculative, entertain alternative possibilities, and impute significance to competing priorities can go a long way. A good example of this is Kevin Rollins' own "Free Liberal" project*, which is outlined at his website and carried out socially in a variety of venues. Kevin's approach is interesting - I've had lots of opportunities to correspond with him and his group at this point, and their willingness to embrace a pluralist inquiry and perhaps most importantly a speculative inquiry is impressive. They are quite libertarian, but their discussion seems to be a lot more productive than the discussion you see in other venues. This is the sort of thing that is going to move liberal thought forward. Not every libertarian is a Misesian or a Rothbardian or a Randian either (and these three gangs don't always get along with each other). There are lots of libertarians that don't use these logic games, and there are lots that like the logic-games, but don't rely exclusively on them.

*I am hereby issuing an open invitation to Kevin to offer a guest post here exploring Free Liberalism further.

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.

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.

Calling BS on "Taxation as Theft"

On several occasions, I've noted to Evan that I think people who refer to abortion as a "holocaust" are being disingenuous. Nobody actually thinks that at all - they don't draw the moral equivalence, although they find it politically useful to claim they do (or psychologically settling to convince themselves they do). But ultimately they don't. If you actually thought a holocaust worse than the Nazi Holocaust was occurring (at least four times worse), not in isolated secret camps but in clinics in your neighborhood, you would not stand idly by for decades. If people actually believed what they said about it being a holocaust, they would rise up violently against the practice. So I'm convinced there are a few clinic bombers and doctor-murderers who do actually believe it's a holocaust, but most don't. Most implicitly admit that the abortion of fetuses - even if it does raise real moral problems - is by no means the moral equivalent of killing fully developed and born human beings. It would simply be unconscionable for the pro-life movement to actually believe that but act the way they've acted. When tens of millions are slaughtered in a holocaust, you don't just picket the Supreme Court once a year. So I like to call BS every once in a while on that one.

A similar instance I've been thinking of recently is the tendency of some libertarians to refer to taxation as theft. Modern citizens of just about any state pay a lot of money in taxes. Several thousand, if not tens of thousands for many Americans. If people honestly considered this "theft", it's more than enough cause to react violently. If a thief enters your home in an attempt to steal thousands of dollars, you would be well within your rights to respond violently to expel the thief, and given the means most Americans would. One response may be that the government itself is a criminal organization that makes resistance futile. Maybe, but this counter-point is riddled with problems. When well armed criminal organization like the mafia or drug cartels infest an area, victims demand some sort of response from other organizations. Sometimes rival gangs are formed, of course. But the law is also called in. Even if people did not openly revolt out of fear of the power of the state, there would be some action to put together a countervailing organization to fight the state. You would have relatively expansive rebel groups, even if they had little chance of success. The other problem with this explanation is that even if the state were a criminal organization, it would be a criminal organization where millions of taxpayers vote at regular intervals for the leadership. If people honestly believed that taxation was theft, you would see some sign of in the polls, or you would see plummeting voter turnout accompanied with plummeting legitimacy of the government. No gang or mafia where the victims had a say in the leadership and where the mafia don had to regularly pander to his victims and had to leave after eight years would commit theft on a mass scale. The idea is absurd.

The only conclusion I can draw is that libertarians (much less some broader community of Tea Partiers or conservatives) don't actually believe that taxation is theft, no matter how many times they may tell you they do. They may not realize they don't believe this - they may have convinced themselves that they believe this. But they don't. Just like pro-lifers who refer to the holocaust to make their points, if libertarians did believe it, they would behave very differently. Since they don't behave how you would expect them to behave if they actually believed taxation was theft, it's reasonable to infer they don't believe it.

So what do we conclude? Americans broadly agree that taxation of citizens is an entirely legitimate and appropriate action. There is nothing criminal or inherently illegitimate about it. We may disagree on what the right level of taxation is, but nobody (aside from a few nuts) actually believe it is theft. It is not a reasonable moral equivalence.

As an aside, I thought of this last night when I was thinking about Jefferson (after commenting on this post and this post) and specifically the points Jefferson raised to justify the revolution against England. I thought "what would justify, or specifically what would libertarians think of as a justification for armed revolt against the federal government today?". Because it seems that whatever may theoretically justify armed revolt in the minds of libertarians hasn't occurred in the United States yet, because they haven't revolted.

I think these previous posts of mine on libertarianism and state violence and on the idea of "the empire of liberty" (which was a very well received post) are probably relevant to this point as well.

Me and the Libertarians

So, going to that talk yesterday made me reflect on something I'm kind of forced to reevaluate every once in a while: what is my relationship to libertarianism? When we were introducing ourselves I mentioned being a research associate to the Urban Institute and I said "I have sympathies with and an interest in libertarianism". It just kind of came out of my mouth, but what did I mean by that?

First, I do see myself as an American classical liberal. I generally feel like a Jeffersonian although I have strong Hamiltonian sympathies as well, especially on certain topics (I like to think this Jefferson/Hamilton blend makes me a Washingtonian). Locke and Smith have both been important for me. I don't define classical liberalism in the same way that a lot of libertarians do. I see the communitarian elements of classical liberalism that have blossomed into what we might call "modern liberalism" as being original and indigenous, not fundamentally socialist in origin. There have been some interesting socialists over the years, and there has been some useful cross-pollination, but I don't see my framework as having its origin in anything other than classical liberalism. Again - libertarians will probably take issue with some of this, but I personally feel like libertarians are close cousins (regardless of whether they would agree). And they are close cousins that deliberately engage (despite the fact that I think they sometimes misinterpret) the classical liberal tradition in a way that many modern liberals don't. So my relationship with libertarians is, if nothing else, genealogical.

Libertarians are also to a large extent contractarians, and this is something that I am in strong agreement with as well. Again, I don't always interpret it in the way they do - I think of any sort of rights-contract in the same way that I think of economic contracts, and I place a lot of emphasis on the externalities and institutions that govern contracts. This leads me to differ in my contractarianism from libertarians in important ways. But it's another common thread that I see more explicitly in libertarians than in "modern liberals". I may agree with a lot of what "modern liberals" have to say, but I arrive at it in a way that is more reminiscent of the libertarian approach. Libertarians get it on the point of free contracts in a way that a lot of people don't. I suppose in that sense I feel like there's some hope of conversion to my position, since they have the fundamental building blocks right. I think their perspective on the Constituion is very similar - they get an awful lot wrong about the Constitution, but they explicitly care about it in a way that a lot of people don't - and I appreciate that.

Finally, libertarians' enmity against the federal government makes them usually fairly sympathetic to federalism, which is of course something that's been important to me. The whole reason why I don't think of government as an unalloyed bad thing is that some things are better solved collectively, deliberatively, and with everyone on an equal footing than individually or in a market. Circumstances with substantial externalities, substantial implications for future generations, or situations where we don't think "ability to pay" should be a factor in decision making make sense to solve with a classical liberal, republican, constitutional government. But the level of government at which it is appropriate to decide these things of course depends on the situation as much as the question of whether it is an appropriate task of government in the first place! Modern liberals who understand the proper role of government shouldn't have trouble understanding that different things that are "proper" to government are "proper" at different levels of government. Libertarians at least say they understand this too. How well they understand it is a little unclear to me. Let's say we did devolve a lot of federal activities to the states. Would libertarians then just turn around and say that the states are out of line for engaging in these sorts of things? They promote the idea of letting different states and localities go off on their own and do their own thing, but would libertarians really countenance this in practice? I just don't know - I hope so, but I don't know. Anyway, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and so a respect for federalism is another thing that draws me to libertarians.

Finally, I simply find libertarianism interesting. It's a political and social phenomenon that has grabbed my attention, and to a large extent that motivates me as well.

"Liberal Economists and the 2010 Election" Event

The Event
Yesterday afternoon I attended a forum hosted by Kevin Rollins at the Mercatus Center called "Liberal Economists and the 2010 Election". Rollins is a George Mason graduate student and an editor of Econ Journal Watch who knew me through my recent publication there. The event title refers to what I like to think of as the new definition of the old definition of "liberal", namely "liberal" as "classical liberal" which itself is recast to mean "libertarian".

The event consisted of a panel of three speakers - J. Bradley Jansen, Garett Jones, and Paul Gessing - and an active discussion with the audience. The discussion was on the prospects of the Tea Party in the mid-term election, the role that libertarians and libertarian economists might play in influencing a Tea Party in power, and the likelihood that the Tea Party could act as a libertarian power-broker in the future.

One thing that struck me as soon as I got off the elevator and started talking to people before the panel was how political (in an electoral sense) this group was. Lots of people were involved in campaigns, on Capitol Hill, etc. A lot of it was internal libertarian politics as well - candidates that I wasn't even familiar with. Norm Singleton, Ron Paul's legislative director, was fascinating to listen to. He was talking about a lot of the trade-offs in the way that Ron Paul and Gary Johnson (I hadn't heard of him before, but apparently he's another regular libertarian candidate) would present their message - the trade-off between being more appealing to voters and getting the message across. He was happy at the prospect that two or possibly even three libertarians would be on the stage in the Republican primary getting their message out, but also concerned about the reaction of more traditional Republicans. It was nice to arrive a little early and hear some of this back-and-forth. I'm working in D.C. on policy issues every day, but I'm in a whole different world from this Congressional/Capitol Hill/elections universe.

The Speakers

J. Bradley Jansen spoke first, and I think he raised the most concerns for me. To begin with, I think he was far too sanguine about the Tea Party, essentially interpreting it as a fundamentally libertarian movement. I've found that there is significant divide among libertarians in how they view the Tea Party: some view it as a libertarian/Ron Paul movement, while others view it as having substantial populist elements to it. I'm clearly sympathetic to the latter view. Over the course of the discussion Jansen seemed compelled to concede the populist point, simply because both other speakers and most of the audience insisted that the Tea Party did not represent unalloyed libertarianism - but in his opening discussion it was clear that he thought (hoped?) he could pass it off as libertarianism.

From there, Jansen said two other things that I couldn't agree with. First, he set up a "Glenn Beck history of the United States" (which later in the discussion he actually did attribute to Glenn Beck), in which we started on a Constitutional trajectory, and then the big bad Progressives came along and put us on a "Progressive detour", the current task being to return to Constitutionalism. Anyone who has read this blog for a while would know my objections on this point. Some posts I've written on the Constitution are here, and needless to say I consider myself an originalist, and as I read the Constitution most of the policy innovations of the 20th century - although they might not have been convincing or appropriate in the late 18th century - fall well within the Constitutional scope and intent of the founders. I see guys like Jansen as placing artificial limits on the ability of Americans to engage in republican self-governance, which makes the whole idea that he's preserving the intent of the founders a little absurd to me. Jansen's brand of libertarian constitutionalism strikes me as more akin to George III than George Washington: a benign neglect for the most part, with an absolute refusal to let Americans solve their own problems with their own means.

The second thing that bothered me about Jansen's talk (and a point which I questioned him on) was the idea that the Tea Party could play a "kingmaker" role in the United States in the way that the Liberal Democrats have in the UK and the FDP has in Germany. The problem with this, for me, is that you can only play this "kingmaker" role if your party can plausibly work with either major party. I simply don't see this for the Tea Party - they can't govern with the Democrats, and therefore they'll never be able to fulfill this role. When I asked him about it, Jansen referenced the fact that a third of the electorate doesn't identify with either party. OK, so what? I'm in that independent third. I never respond as a Democrat or a liberal on surveys, and I've voted for Republicans and Democrats. I think I'm representative of at least a good portion of American "independents", and it's because I'm a moderate. These independent moderates are not leaning Tea Party. Jansen assumed these sorts of things a lot in his discussion - he made a similar assumption when somebody brought up immigrants and what they mean for the Tea Party. His response was that a lot of immigrants are innovative and entrepreneurial (that's why they come here in the first place), so they'd fit in perfectly with the Tea Party. It never dawned on him that entrepreneurs aren't by definition libertarian. Kevin Rollins himself (I believe) made a similar mistake later talking about investor reaction to the election - implicitly assuming that all investors are going to react the way libertarians react and that no investors might actually be happier to see a traditional Democrat or Republican in office. I don't think you can assume these things.


I liked more of what Garett Jones had to say, because I think he was more realistic and honestly probably because he was an economist rather than a political activist (which Jansen and Gessing both are). Jones noted the populist elements of the Tea Party and said he fully expects them to act like run-of-the-mill Republicans when in office. He did leave open the possibility that they might pull the Republicans slightly libertarian. He doubted anything substantial would be done in terms of fiscal austerity measures until the bond-market began to respond negatively, although even there he noted that what ultimately happens is uncertain. Libertarians want to slash spending now for more political/philosophical reasons. But there is a large contingent of people (including myself) who see the budget problem as being a long-term entitlements and revenue problem having nothing to do with short-term spending increases. Jones suggested it was not a foregone conclusion that the libertarian position would be the dominant one, and that when the bond-market does start to get concerned these two perspectives would be competing to set the narrative. I spoke up at this point and also ntoed that it wouldn't only be a fiscal policy debate - when long-term interest rates start to show signs of trouble, we're going to see even more pressure for monetary easing. Jones responded that we still don't know all that much about monetary policy and long-term rates, which I would agree with him on.

Paul Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation was the final speaker and he discussed the situation of New Mexico, which has been dominated by Democrats for decades and is now starting to turn Republican/Tea Party. He described the severe poverty in New Mexico, and how some reforms started by libertarian governor Gary Johnson and current governor Bill Richardson have helped out. In many ways, Gessing's talk was the most open (from a political perspective) of all three of them. Gessing is clearly a strong libertarian, but he had no problem praising Richardson for what he did right and not rejecting all non-libertarians simply because they didn't adhere to everything he stood for. I imagine if your state is as dominated by a single party as his is, you get to appreciate decent policy whenever you can get it. Like Jones, Gessing was skeptical of the idea that the Tea Party would be any different from the Republican Party when in power. Another thing that came up during Gessing's talk was the importance of federalism, which of course is another thing I talk about a lot on here and I think is central to reform in this country.


Kevin Rollins Plug
Before closing this, I want to promote Kevin Rollins's website, The Free Liberal, where he promotes this work, as well as Econ Journal Watch, which he edits. He expects to hold more of these events in the future, which I hope to continue to attend, contribute to, and write about. The Free Liberal group (a lot of the attendees seem to be members) looks like a great, positive, libertarian forum in the Northern Virginia area.

More on what the NYT called the "intellectual ballast" of the Tea Party

Xenophon kindly shares a Reason.com article where they get as hysterical as Jeff Tucker. It must be very tense to always be in combat mode.

Interestingly enough, Lew Rockwell at Mises.org explicitly makes the argument that Jeff Tucker attributes to the New York Times - namely, that the Tea Party has a weak intellectual foundation and that it's going to betray the "party of liberty" (whoever that is... Lew doesn't say but I'm pretty sure I'm not invited to that party).

So we have the New York Times informing people about the treatises and books motivating the Tea Party and Lew Rockwell suggesting the intellectual underpinnings of the Tea Party are weak, and yet Steve Horwitz and Jeff Tucker and Reason.com are going after the New York Times... why? Because the Times said that Bastiat was outdated for worrying about beggars and vagabonds getting the vote? This is quite strange - these people are itching to fight. It's like the recent Krugman articles on war. Even when people agree with him they still write something up insisting he said something he never said, because disputing Krugman (or the New York Times, or [fill in the blank]) is so ingrained for them.

My feeling on the Tea Party? Look - it's a big diverse group. Many are very well educated. Many are somewhat educated, but reading some pretty good stuff like Bastiat and Hayek. It would of course be nice if they read other stuff too - but five years ago a lot of them probably weren't reading any of this stuff. I agree with Lew that it's largely a populist movement and not a libertarian movement, and I'm shocked at how many libertarians have embraced a populist political force. That might be the most disappointing thing of all. I've had differences with libertarians (obviously), but the one nice thing about libertarians is that they usually don't go off the populist deep end. The embrace of the Tea Party makes me worry a little more about that than I used to. I think the Tea Party will eventually fizzle out - I don't think it's a game changer in any long-term sense. But it will be important in the next several years. And when it does fizzle out, maybe I won't pull out my hair over some of their historical and constitutional revisionism. I think it's a genuine movement, it's a well-intentioned movement. It could only be a dangerous movement if some malign force within it sparks something, but there's nothing about the movement now that's particularly worrisome. And ultimately it's just as political as any other movement we've ever seen (which is another odd thing - to see people argue that it somehow transcends politics... the need to explicitly make that argument is a sure sign that it's not true).

Violence and the State

What do people think of this point that if you're not willing to haul someone off at gunpoint for something then it's not a legitimate concern of the state? For the life of me I can't understand why everyone is so impressed with this blog post. Kevin Williamson starts out whining about a dissenting letter to the editor in The Economist. He then goes on to say that if you won't use violence for something the state shouldn't do it.

That seems absurd. Violence is an extreme recourse, even for a state, isn't it? What about private citizens that own guns? Ultimately, when the cards are down, they'll put someone at gunpoint to get something they want. It's an extreme reaction and it's a reaction that they rarely engage in, but ultimately the use of violence is the ultimate defense and enforcer for a private citizen, is it not? That's why we have the Second Amendment - so the government can't weaken that absolutely essential method of recourse. But you don't say "if a private family isn't willing to get something at gunpoint they have no business doing it". Kevin Williamson is suggesting that the law of the jungle is all there is and that we should judge institutions by the absolute most extreme action they might take. What a poorly reasoned argument!

Why don't we talk that way about private citizens? Why don't we say that private citizens should only be doing what they're willing to defend at gunpoint? Because we live in a society governed by contract, institutions, and norms of behavior. That's what allows us to transcend the law of the jungle. The thing is, the government exists in that society as well. Indeed, with the police force and the courts the government is part of the vast web of emergent institutions that make things like contracts possible.

Kevin Williamson's intellectual sloppiness reveals one of the biggest problems with modern libertarianism: it's obsession with "the state". Nobody talks about government more than libertarians. Why? Because they see it as some sort of alien institution rather than an emergent institution. They think about the state categorically, that blunts their arguments, and they sound ridiculous in the process and don't even realize it; instead, they think stuff like this is deep and insightful.

This is the problem with "road to serfdom" type thinking as well. As soon as you let this piece of categorical confusion in "the road to serfdom" follows easily - it's not exactly a tough argument to piece together. And you get people like Kevin Williamson sputtering about social democracies and Economist letter writers: "Well, bully for northern Europe and journalists with anecdotes! It’s not as though gunpoint politics has no history in Europe: Wait for the next all-European war and let me know how the Dutch and the Danes do."

Now he's just sounding like a garden variety conservative. I'll acknowledge good libertarian arguments when I hear one. There's a lot about the state that cannot be defended and I don't try. This isn't one of those good arguments and I'm baffled that so many people are linking it favorably.

Econ Journal Watch reply is up!

Several weeks ago, I and several other bloggers were asked to draft a response to Buturovic and Klein's (2010) widely reported study concluding that libertarians and conservatives are more "economically enlightened" than moderates and liberals. Four bloggers (myself included) submitted replies, and they are now posted.

The original article is here - needless to say I think it leaves a lot to be desired and probably could never have been published in any other venue. I know that sounds harsh, but well - it is what it is. I think the authors know that too.

My reply is here. My approach was to focus on the most glaring and damning oversight of the article: their identification strategy. To put it plainly, their evidence supported multiple (contradictory) conclusions and they had no way to isolate the explanation they chose to report - and yet they reported it anyway. I also got the chance to quote Keynes and suggest that Bastiat's wisdom is often ignored by libertarians: both things I enjoy doing. All in all, I think it was a successful response.

The next best response (IMO) was by Rod Hill and it is here. Rod's was good, but he went down a road I deliberately avoided: getting into the weeds of the specific questions that Buturovic and Klein (2010) posed. It's not that that critique isn't valid - it certainly is and I stated in no uncertain terms in my piece that it was not an impressive or thoughtful survey instrument. But in such a short reply (they gave us up to 1,000 words), I didn't feel like I could adequately address each of the questions. And even then, the problem often wasn't with the "enlightened" answer that they identified per se - it was more the designation of other answers as unenlightened, as well as the general vagueness and poor wording of the questions. I'm glad Rod took up this angle - I did not in anticipation that others would, freeing me up to address the authors' identification strategy (or lack thereof), which I felt was more pressing anyway.

E.D. Kain's response is quite weak in my opinion. Kain alternately suggests that the survey was vague, subjective, but then goes on to say he agrees with the authors. Later he appeals to the idea that the economy is more complex than Buturovic and Klein (2010) present it (this is clearly true), and that Americans in general could be more enlightened when it comes to economics. The piece was diluted and directionless overall - not much to see here.

David Ruccio took an interesting, but I think ultimately limited approach in his critique. He reminded me of my sociology days - lots of talk of dominant discourses, hegemony, the marginalization of Marxian perspectives, and the exclusivity of neoclassicism dressed in the authority of "science". I can appreciate taking the concept of a "discursive framework" out for a drive every once in a while, but ultimately I'm one that takes the "science" in "social science" seriously. These are complicated questions, and perhaps even questions that are so complicated that we can't provide anything but a heavily caveated answer to - but they are still scientific questions for which there is a positive answer. Ultimately, Ruccio to me comes out as mired in ideology as Buturovic and Klein. He's somewhat more thoughtful than Kain, but still not a serious critique of the original article.

Buturovic and Klein will respond in the next issue, which I believe is set to come out in January of 2011. I'll of course share that when it comes out.

Enjoy!

And remember - pay attention to your identification strategy!

Setting the bar ridiculously low...

Apparently all you need to do to be a libertarian is oppose government book-burning. Or at least that seems to be the message of Jeff Riggenbach's labeling of Fahrenheit 451 as a "libertarian book". There's no point in getting too caught up in the semantics - Bradbury's classic is certainly consistent with libertarianism. But it seems odd to call it a libertarian book.

Anyway - it's a very good review by Riggenbach - it makes me want to go back and reread it. Its been years for me, as I imagine it has been for most people.

Still, I think we need to be careful about this. With that kind of attitude practically every American is a libertarian. Libertarian simply becomes "pro-liberty", and all the things that make libertarianism unique get washed away. It also ends up confusing people. It's like how some less informed conservatives and libertarians are actually shocked to hear that George Orwell was a socialist. You only get shocked by something like that when you get fed a juvenile, misleading ideological taxonomy.

Was Bradbury himself a libertarian? I honestly still don't know. The Atlantic wrote about an LA Times interview of his recently, and some of his remarks leaned libertarian:

"There is too much government today"... but it went on in the next sentence to something way too cozy with democracy for a lot of libertarians:

"We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people" followed by some curmudgeonly (albeit somewhat endearing) Ludditism:

"We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now" to a decidedly non-Luddite, non-libertarian sentiment I can applaud:

"He [president Obama] should be announcing that we should go back to the moon. We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever."

So maybe he's a libertarian, maybe not. My guess is he's probably got a few libertarian slogans and ideas but isn't what a libertarian would call "libertarian". Ultimately that doesn't really matter - the point is if all it takes to be libertarian is opposition to book burning, it seems to me you're setting the bar pretty low!

.

I sent an email to Riggenbach just asking about his thought processes on that and whether he knew anything about Bradbury's personal politics - if he responds with anything interesting I'll post it here.

*****

And speaking of book-burning... we've got our own budding fascists down in Florida.

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.

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.

.

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.

.

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.