Seriously - how can you guys not love Brad DeLong

This is pretty funny.

Number 10 is the reaction I repeatedly try to invoke when I write posts like this. Or this. Or this.

Basically the world would be a better place if people read more Jefferson.

The solution to DeLong's #10 is, of course, to recognize the world for what it is, recognize what is laudable, and don't be dogmatic about abstract concepts and norms that we make up.

The sabbath is made for man - man is not made for the sabbath.

More on property, political philosophy, Callahan, and all that

Mattheus has a response here. He's wrong, of course, and fails to quote precisely the passages from my post and Gene's post that would answer his questions - but he gives it a shot :)

Roderick Long - I presume completely independently - has a post on libertarian claims about property here.

I also want to share this great passage from John Dewey's Liberty and Social Control (1935):

"Demand for retention of powers already possessed on the part of a particular group means, therefore, that other individuals and groups shall continue to possess only the capacities in and for activity which they already possess. Demand for increased power at one point means demands for change in the distribution of powers, that is, for less power somewhere else. You cannot discuss or measure the liberty of one individual or group of individuals without measuring the difference of levels.

In the third place, 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 exists 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.

Return now to the fact that historically the great movements for human liberation have always been movements to change institutions and not to preserve them intact. It follows from what has been said that there have been movements to bring about a changed distribution of power to do - and power to think and to express thought is a power to do - such that there would be a more balanced, a more equal, even, and equitable system of human liberties.

The present movement for social control of industry, money and credit, is simply a part of this endless human struggle. The present attempt to define liberty in terms of the existing distribution of liberty is an attempt to maintain the existing system of control of power, of social restraints and regimentations."

Gene Callahan is a wise man...

...who understands that coercion is inherent in social life, and that true liberty is a minimization of coercion, but that this is not necessarily the same thing as a minimization of political decision making. This ought to be reproduced in its entirety:

"and a totally bogus way to describe your own political program.

Here's what happens in real politics: a bunch of people have different views as to how society should be governed. They hash these views out: preferably, by reason and persuasion, next best, by propaganda and voting, and worst of all, by civil war. Ultimately, one group comes out on top, and thus has the ability to enforce its view on others. The people who lost either grumble and go along, are dead or in prison, or move away.

That is the way politics has always proceeded. There really isn't any other possible scenario.

Except in the fantasies of some people who believe imposing their vision is actually not an imposition on anyone at all! Consider anarcho-capitalist Geoffrey Allan Plauché, who asserts of he and his cohorts that:

"We do not seek to impose centralized controls on 'society' but rather to remove them! We do not seek to impose our preferences on 'society' by force but rather to prevent certain members of society from imposing theirs on us by force!"

Of course, by "removing" controls, they mean "placing everything under the strict control of strong property rights." By "not imposing their preferences on others by force," they mean "imposing the property rights regime we like on others by force."

For instance, what would Plauché and his ilk say to, for instance, communists, who certainly do not agree to Plauché's preferred property rights regime? "Well," no doubt he would respond, "they are free to implement communism on their own property!" Of course, "their own property" and "Plauché's own property" are the very concepts that the communists don't buy into, so this response amounts to, "Once you have acquiesced to the private property regime we are imposing on you, we will let you have your little play communist islands within it... because we've won, and would like to be magnanimous."

Good God, this limp-wristed libertarianism makes me appreciate Hoppe, who at least has the cojones to say, "My political system is correct, and I damn well will enforce it on you given the chance, and boot your arse right out of town should you complain too much."

Politics is about deciding what the rules for a society will be. The winners must impose their favored controls on society, because otherwise we can only have anarchy in the sense of chaos, and not in Plauché's preferred sense of order without a ruler. Plauché, if he wins, means to impose his system of controls (rule by strong property rights) on society just as surely as any other political advocate does... he is just too timid to admit it."

It's not just the presence of property rights either (although Gene makes a good point vis-a-vis the communists) - it's also exactly what those rights are. Property rights aren't just something that you turn on or off like a light switch. They're deeply embedded in institutions and they evolve over time. And they're also historically contingent - we don't enter life as blank slates. We enter this world in families that provide us with a more or less advantageous start, and they entered this life into older families that provided them with a more or less advantageous start. When we say "property" that's just the advantages that several generations have laundered into respectability and passed on to me which my fellow Americans have sworn to defend my title to. That's all it is. To say "I believe peoples' (presumably current, status quo) property rights should be honored" is only to say "I believe that the vicissitudes of history ought to be legitimated by the force of society - if not the state itself".

This isn't to complain about property rights, of course. I'm a big fan of property rights and so is Gene Callahan. It's only to complain about the people who are deluded into thinking that standing up for the status quo property regime is inherently the most liberal position to take, or that it distinguishes itself in being the "non-coercive option". All social organization is coercive, period. There is no non-coercive option. We can accept that, be liberals, and seek out the least coercive, most dignified option - or we can talk ourselves into a logically coherent but practically meaningless infinite loop by telling ourselves that there's a way to avoid coercion.

David Sobel on Property Rights

A good post covering libertarian understandings of property rights, the role that risk plays in property rights, etc. He cites a pollution example which I think meshes nicely to the way I talk about externalities and property rights, and the fact that a lot of people talk about property rights in a way that is self referencing. I can't make a defense of climate change legislation or public investments on the basis of property rights if you don't acknowledge property rights associated with the climate we live in, the air we breath, or the property rights of future generations. It is the very incompleteness of property rights and their self-referentialism that introduces these problems.

Rights are social constructions

Which means that you, as an individual, can't "experiment" in the construction of alternative rights regimes. You can agitate and persuade. You can try to construct a community from scratch (although that seems quite hard and more than a little artificial). But you can't "experiment" with a system of rights because that individual action of experimentation is nested in a social context of rights.

Take a recent post from Troy Camplin - an Austrian blogger and one of the few commenters at Coordination Problem who acts like it's a Cafe Hayek comment section. He writes:

"One of the things the Mises Institute is big on is opposing intellectual property. In that spirit, I have decided to try something, which is to offer one of my plays, a satire called Hef's Bunnies for anyone who wants to produce it. The entire text is on my blog Interdisciplinary World. Producers may feel free to pay me a commission, or not, as I discuss there. Please, feel free to spread the word. Only if it gets produced will this experiment work, after all."

On his other blog, Camplin provides much the same introduction to the satire. He says "I've decided to give their idea a try". The problem is, he's not giving a rights regime that does not include intellectual property rights "a try" at all! He is decidedly acting within the existing IP rights regime. He is exercising a fairly conventional right to alienate his property. The same goes for collectivists who "give up" private property in communes. They are actually exercising fundamental property rights. Now, perhaps they are building a social group which, within its own context, does not acknowledge and therefore does not enforce rights in the same way that the wider community does. In this sense they are attempting at least to socially re-construct rights. But the regular failure of these communes demonstrates not only the efficiency of property rights, but also how ingrained these rights are in our psychology. Commune dwellers could live in squalor, after all. The squalor of an American commune dweller is probably better than the way a lot of the third-world lives, and there may even be bit of romance in it given the common cause they share. It doesn't break down for the squalor alone - it breaks down because people find deliberate social reconstruction quite unnatural.

But at least they have a "society" to speak of - a social fabric - and thus some prospect of erecting a substantially new rights regime! Troy Camplin doesn't have a social fabric. He is one guy exercising his property rights, which is why it's so ironic that he thinks he's experimenting in dismantling the very property rights he's exercising.

Rights are social. Rights are relational, to put it more precisely. You can't change a regime of relations by staying within the domain of your own relational priveleges. You have to at least do something yourself that transcends the rights you had in the first place, but even that doesn't construct a new rights regime. That just rebels against the old. A better example is Julian Assange at Wikileaks. He is doing something that actually breaks out of the constraints placed by the existing property rights regime. Now he's just violating that rights regime until it catches on, of course. Until society reconstructs its understanding of rights. But Assange's work can at least be properly characterized as an "experiment" in an alternative intellectual property rights regime. He is not exercising the rights he has in the existing regime in the way that Camplin is.

Kidrock did a youtube video a while back that was actually trying to discourage IP theft in the music industry by facetiously saying it was OK, and people oughta just steal everything while they were at it. Now, he wasn't sincere here - but this is similarly what "experimenting" in a new rights regime would constitute. Not an exercise of rights you have, and not an opportunistic violation of those rights, but the erection of a new ethical alternative to those rights - the promotion of a basis for a new rights regime:



Anyway, rights are socially constructed which means its very hard for determined individuals to just create them from scratch. And you're certainly not creating them by exercising your existing property rights!!!

Benjamin Franklin on Property

From Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania (1789):




*****

One day I want to write a book called Jeffersonian Political Economy and American Keynesianism: 1729-1947, tracing the American tradition in economic thought back to its early days, and demonstrating how that formed the basis of an approach to the economy that made the ground fertile for the thorough adoption of Keynesianism in the 1930s and 1940s. Franklin figures prominently in that early story (not for this piece specifically - but for another paper he wrote even earlier), along with Jefferson, of course. I've been thinking about this for a while, but of course it's not something that you just sit down and write. Some day, though...

Lovecraft, Me, and Jefferson on Property

"Private control of large resources only exists by accident - as a result of certain past conditions and of public inertia - and is upheld solely by the physical force of the majority. Were this physical force to be withdrawn, the natural resources would again - as in feudal times - be in a state of constant transfer, through force of arms, among groups of the physically strong and shrewdly organised. Capone and his racketeers gave us an idea of the general trend of an unpoliced modern world. Well - the majority have hitherto lent their physical support to existing capitalism because they believed it gave them a better deal than feudalism did. Probably they were right up to about 70 years ago - for the worst pressure of capitalism is its recent pressure, whilst the techniques of industry and economics did not make practical socialism possible till the last two generations. Today, however, the masses do not get as much from the capitalistic order as they would get from feudalism... Sooner or later, the beneficiaries of capitalism are going to lose the physical support of those who have hitherto kept the system in existence. - the physical support of the masses they have neglected, ignored, and evicted from the hope of a livelihood."

- H.P. Lovecraft, October, 1936

*****

Let's forget the concerns about capitalism or claims about socialism for the time being. What I'm intrigued by is this idea of private property as an institution that is maintained by force. It's traditional to think that anybody who tries to take my property is initiating force against me. But the only reason why I can assert this privelege to my property is because I have a gang of hundreds of millions of people putting others on notice that they'll get the crap beat out of them if they try anything. What is the difference between private property and a gang claiming urban territory other than strength of numbers? They assert a monopoly on territory and back it up with force. I assert a monopoly on the goods that I "own" and I back it up with force. There is no difference, really. Maybe that's efficient, but that's not the point. From an ethical stand-point, it's something to grapple with for anyone that sees the violation of property rights as an initiation of force.

The picture becomes more complicated when, like Jefferson and Paine, you introduce the dimension of time. Inheritance allows the appropriation and accumulation of property with no legitimate claim at all. The inheritor didn't work for the property. It's solely his by virtue of the pact of violence between him and society to bash the skulls of anyone else who would claim it. What is the difference between the heir and the non-heir that warrants the award of property to the heir? Sheer luck of birth, and nothing more. Add on top of that the fact that over time, property rights offers a perfect money laundering scheme. At least one branch of my family owned slaves - they owned human beings like livestock - and they derived advantages from that, and I enjoy advantages from that. If I held slaves today against the law and derived benefits from that, the state could take those benefits back from me (and then some). But because of the property pact, no one will ever challenge my right to the benefits won for me by my slave-driving forefathers. It is mine.

I'm not advocating the overthrow of capitalism, but when you really think about it, it all gets awfully hazy. It would be like asserting the overthrow of Mubarak is unethical because they challenged his right to rule, when the right itself was only ever enjoyed because he had powerful friends willing to be violent on his behalf. The very nature of society is to coerce. What we know as social institutions are the frameworks that other human beings that I've never met would use violence, shunning, ostracism, and the withholding of favor to enforce. When I say "I own this", what I mean is "I would normally have to defend this with force if I wanted to use it but I have three hundred million people who will defend it for me, so I can just assert my possession without putting anything on the line". 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.

The myth of natural rights is a convenient myth, and a nice mental device, but it introduces the very problematic idea that rights are things-in-themselves which human conduct is measured against. If you believe in natural rights, a violation of liberty is twisted into that which alters or departs from rights. Liberty is conceived of as the state of life which follows from adherence to rights. The reality is just the opposite. Rights must be arranged to promote, approximate, or approach liberty, and not the other way around.

And an arrangement that is quite successful - the best we have so far - is a system of private property, with adequate social organization to support those who suffer in that arrangement through no fault of their own. That is a system that maximizes dignity and our potentiality (socialism would not do this for the obvious reaons). This was the Jeffersonian vision of liberty:

"That the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by an individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society. If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation of its lands in severalty, it will be taken by the first occupants. These will generally be the wife and children of the decedent... But the child, the legatee or creditor takes it, not by any natural right, but by a law of the society of which they are members, and to which they are subject. Then no man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living, which would be reverse of our principle."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1789

"Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right"

-Thomas Jefferson (proto-Keynesian), 1785

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.