Some More Rawls Discussion

Speaking of meritorious blogging content, someone smart must have submitted this email to Andrew Sullivan. :) Having appeared on Fallows' blog some time ago, I wonder if this qualifies me as an Atlantic Monthly groupie.

Liberalism, the State, and Free Markets

I promised last week to eventually to get to the discussion of Rorty and Rawls. For various reasons, I've decided I'd rather not. But if anyone wants to read the discussion on their own, it goes something like this: Yglesias, Linker, Yglesias, Linker, Sullivan, Douthat.

Also, before getting to my main topic, and because it tangentially relates to that topic, I'd like to throw this in. Christopher Hayes has a column on the merits of bureaucracy and the fine people who inhabit our federal bureaucracy. If you look into the details of the DoJ scandal, it's hard to be as dismissive as Hayes about the lasting impact of the Bush administration on the bureaucracy, but he makes good points nonetheless. An excerpt:

It's slander with a long pedigree--Cicero called the bureaucrat "the most despicable" of men, "petty, dull, almost witless...a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog"--but in the last forty years, conservatives have converted this casual contempt into an ideological fixture. Since as far back as the Goldwater campaign, the American right has generally found that "the government" is too abstract an entity for most people to actively loathe. It's far more effective to demonize the people who execute its daily functions. Bureaucrats are to conservatives what the bourgeoisie was to Marx: an oppressive class of joyless knaves. Milton Friedman quipped that "hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned"; Ronald Reagan said in 1966 that "the best minds are not in government" because if any were, "business would hire them away"; and George Wallace expressed his desire to "take those bearded bureaucrats" in Washington who were in the process of desegregating the South, "and throw them in the Potomac."

But a funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government.

...

But the moral of the Comey story specifically, and of the failures of the Bush Administration more broadly, is the sublime value of bureaucracy. Not only is governance of any kind impossible without it; so too are the checks and balances of a constitutional republic. Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim. That's why an Administration hostile to any checks and balances has sought to reconstitute the federal civil service as just another lever in its machine.

So, anyway, on to the main course. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has a blog post excerpting from a lengthy article by Stephen Holmes in the American Prospect (from a few years back) on the views of classic liberals on the role of government. The basic gist of the excerpts is that the liberal ideals of individual rights and free markets are tied inextricably to the existence of a strong state to protect them. It very much reminds me of my previous discussion with Henry on libertarian paternalism and Rawls where I wrote:

This, in fact, has always been my biggest objection to libertarian theory. I simply cannot see how a libertarian state could ever remain so for any appreciable length of time. The initial structure of the government will not bind it in libertarian form, even if you had a constitution without amendment procedures. It was not a constitutional amendment that allowed the development of the administrative state in the US, but judicial interpretation. And it wasn't just uppity judges responsible for that (although I'm not sure it would be significant to my argument even if it were), but intense political pressure placed on them by political branches motivated by quite serious concerns about social stability and unrest (and rising socialist sentiment). Whether it's a Great Depression and populist outrage or rent-seeking businesses and other economically powerful interests, a state will always be subject to pressures (of varying intensities) to do non-libertarian things. The state will always have the power to do those things; it is inherent in being a state. That power cannot be ignored, and there is no structural way to make it go away. It just sits there begging to be used.

I have a strong suspicion that some of the policies necessary to keep those pressures at bay (to the greatest degree possible) are themselves non-libertarian (e.g. some level of redistributive tax policy and regulation of finances and political speech, etc.). In the end, I tend to believe that our rights (which may or may not be limited only to life, liberty, and property) are likely best protected by a state that overtly recognizes the threat of instability and subversion of state power and is structured to best address that threat, even if that structure is not a strictly libertarian one. The state may need to be more powerful and far reaching than a night watchman state in order to be a stable, free-standing system. What good is the night watchman if it ends up being overthrown by communists or turning into a plutocracy?

Tying in to the Hayes column: a robust state can be less prone to abuse and authoritarianism than a more easily captured minimal state.

One of the fundamental premises of Rawls's political liberalism is that the point of a liberal state is to create a platform for social cooperation that is the prerequisite for everyone to share in the benefits of, among other things, free markets. Libertarians suppose that you can rip away the institutions that result from this political compromise while still gaining the benefits they are meant to provide. This seems to miss something fundamental about human nature and social interaction.

Political compromise is necessary to create stable institutions, and stable institutions are necessary to enforce the rules of the market (e.g. to protect property rights, enforce contracts, settle disputes, and police fraud). Institutions that are not broadly considered legitimate will, as Rawls argues, be subject to instability, as each faction that even briefly manages to achieve power will attempt to tear down illegitimate institutions and replace them with institutions of their own preference.

So it becomes important to try to determine how people assess legitimacy. Rawls suggests fairness as a crucial benchmark. That seems to have a lot of merit. We've had Boys Weekend discussions on the topic before, noting psychological studies to the effect that people are willing to sacrifice their own benefit in order to enforce a system of fairness, even when there will be no opportunity for direct reciprocity. (I thought it interesting to see recently that humans are not alone in this behavior.) This suggests that even if a libertarian institution is quantitatively superior to some non-libertarian institution it might still be regarded as less legitimate if it produces outcomes that are perceived to be unfair.

Returning then to Dani Rodrik. Rodrik's main specialty is economic globalization. He argues that globalization promoters have been shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring populist complaints about trade unfairness, countering these arguments only with statements of the quantifiable benefits of more trade. Economists too often ignore procedural fairness in favor of simple economic gain. Regular people tend towards the opposite. Rodrik argues that domestic political perceptions of the globalization process are the key to further progress on trade. In other words, to create the social platform for cooperation necessary for global markets to expand we will require a more robust social safety net to remedy distributional unfairness and create perceived legitimacy for the whole endeavor. Otherwise the social compromise on which economic globalism is built collapses into a morass of protectionism. The market can only go as far as the state can carry it.

UPDATE (6/25): Rodrik posted again today with further evidence for his thesis on globalization. He cites a recent academic paper studying a survey of people from 18 countries that found an inverse relationship between the size of the state (measured by percentage of GDP) and preferences for protectionism. Rodrik quotes from the paper:

Our results provide microeconomic evidence consistent with the long-standing argument that the state and the market are in fact complementary. Openness and globalization can introduce uncertainty into peoples’ lives, and this additional risk can lead some people to oppose trade. Government expenditure can help to reduce this risk, and thus shore up support for open markets. It would seem that the ‘grand bargain’ that was embedded liberalism is politically effective.

Political Liberalism

A week ago a philosopher named Richard Rorty passed away. I had never heard of Rorty, but his passing prompted a round of discussion between New Republic writer Damon Linker and Atlantic bloggers Matt Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and Andrew Sullivan. Certainly any discussion that involves 3 of the Atlantic's 5 bloggers is likely to catch my attention, but particularly one that involves John Rawls's concept of political liberalism as heavily as this one did. Hank and I had some discussion of Rawls here last winter, but we focused on his two principles of justice rather than the general concept of political liberalism. I thought this might be a good chance to discuss it a bit. I find it to be highly relevent in contemporary politics. Whether or not Sullivan would admit to being a Rawlsian (probably not), there is a strong strain of Rawlsian political liberalism in comments like this one:

Count me convinced of the case for forgoing moral certainty in politics in favor of a shallower, skeptical formalism of live-and-let-live.

The genius of America, it seems to me, is its capacity to include people of radically different worldviews within a loose, flexible and constantly adjusting constitutional system. Given the huge differences between, say, a born-again evangelical in Georgia and a pot-smoking post-boomer in Seattle, no single cultural strait-jacket can ever hold America together. That's why we mercifully don't have such a strait-jacket, despite the excesses of the cultural left and right. We have a constitution that allows us to live together and even learn from each other in a morass of competing life-choices.

And when Barack Obama made his highly regarded speech on politics and religion last summer (video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) he went directly to Rawls's playbook for this:

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Rawls first gained notoriety from his book A Theory of Justice. In it Rawls attempted to develop a comprehensive political philosophy. He developed from first principles a full system of political justice and fairness resulting in a well-ordered society. But this required Rawls to make many philosophical commitments along the way. In defending A Theory of Justice from its critics (and there were many) over the next decade or so Rawls came to the conclusion that it was unrealistic to believe that any such comprehensive theory would capture the public imagination such that everyone would adopt it. This was particularly so when he considered that his theory was in competition with other comprehensive theories, namely religions, to which people tend to be quite attached. People had too many existing philosophical commitments.

So Rawls decided that a comprehensive approach to political philosophy wasn't particularly fruitful. What was needed was a way to reconcile the many existing and competing comprehensive theories already present in our society into a workable political theory. This motivated his second major book: Political Liberalism. The goal was no longer to try to establish his theory of justice as being true, but rather to make it a focal point of social agreement among a pluralistic mish-mash of comprehensive philosophies.

Rawls presents a long and fairly complicated theory in Political Liberalism and I won't attempt to sum it all up here. But there are two points I'd like to pull out:

First, Rawls sets a baseline for the participation of any comprehensive philosophy in a pluralistic democracy. Rawls requires that all must be reasonable. He defines reasonable to mean that they a) be willing to abide by rules of fair cooperation as long as others do the same, and b) that they accept Rawls's concept of "the burdens of judgment". The burdens of judgment reflect the fact that on deep philosophical questions (the focus of comprehensive doctrines) our evidence is complex and conflicting, weighting is difficult, many concepts are vague, there is much reliance on life experience and competing normative considerations. So we should expect different conclusions about what makes life good even from perfectly rational and reasonable people. Any comprehensive philosophy that cannot accept this uncertainty, that insists that only its conclusions can be true, is one that cannot peacefully exist in a pluralistic democracy. This is what Sullivan is talking about in the excerpt above (and in much of his book from what I gather). It's a simple concept, but one that went out of fashion with the rise of the religious political right, and is only now making a comeback.

The next point relates to part (a) above. As one of the rules of fair cooperation that Rawls suggests any comprehensive philosophy compatible with pluralistic democracy needs to accept, Rawls proposes public reason. Public reason is a way of talking about political issues in a language that everyone can understand. Obama's excerpt above pulls directly from Rawls's thoughts on public reason. Political actions must be taken for reasons that everyone (regardless of respective comprehensive beliefs) can see as legitimate, even if not everyone agrees on them. Actions motivated purely by artifacts of one comprehensive doctrine will not be seen as legitimate by supporters of other comprehensive doctrines. So, as Obama says, if you want to take such ideas into the public sphere they need to be reseated in principles more broadly accessible to everyone; simply citing chapter and verse of the Bible isn't good enough. Rawls argues that any argument that assumes that the listener shares the same comprehensive doctrine as the speaker (or should convert to the same doctrine) fails to respect the burdens of judgment and is an argument inappropriate for public politics in a pluralistic democracy.

Next time I hope to discuss the bloggers' discussion of Rawls and Rorty...

More Barack

A great in-depth profile from the New Yorker. Not too surprising to see some quotes from fellow Chicago Law prof (and BWJ favorite) Cass Sunstein, but there's also some stuff in there from Robert Putnam, from whom Obama took a seminar based on Bowling Alone. And Sunstein even throws out a Rawls reference. It's a regular BWJ-fest. Here's some of the meaty stuff:

Obama’s drive to compromise goes beyond the call of political expediency—it’s instinctive, almost a tic. “Barack has an incredible ability to synthesize seemingly contradictory realities and make them coherent,” Cassandra Butts says. “It comes from going from a home where white people are nurturing you, and then you go out into the world and you’re seen as a black person. He had to figure out whether he was going to accept this contradiction and be just one of those things, or find a way to realize that these pieces make up the whole.” In the state senate, this skill served him well—he was unusually dexterous with opponents, and passed bills that at first were judged too liberal to have a chance, such as one that mandated the videotaping of police interviews with suspects arrested for capital crimes. “In our seminar, whether we were arguing about labor or religion or politics, he would sit back like a resource person and then he would say, I hear Jane saying such and such, and Tom seems to disagree on that, but then Tom and Jane both agree on this,” Robert Putnam says. (For a couple of years, Obama participated in a seminar about rebuilding community, inspired by Putnam’s article “Bowling Alone.”) “I don’t mean he makes all conflicts go away—that would be crazy. But his natural instinct is not dividing the baby in half—it’s looking for areas of convergence. This is part of who he is really deep down, and it’s an amazing skill. It’s not always the right skill: the truth doesn’t always lie somewhere in the middle. But I think at this moment America is in a situation where we agree much more than we think we do. I know this from polling data—we feel divided in racial terms, religious terms, class terms, all kinds of terms, but we exaggerate how much we disagree with each other. And that’s why I think he’s right for this time.” Even when he was very young, Obama was scornful of, as he puts it, “people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.”

Sometimes, of course, there is no possibility of convergence—a question must be answered yes or no. In such a case, Obama may stand up for what he believes in, or he may not. “If there’s a deep moral conviction that gay marriage is wrong, if a majority of Americans believe on principle that marriage is an institution for men and women, I’m not at all sure he shares that view, but he’s not an in-your-face type,” Cass Sunstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago, says. “To go in the face of people with religious convictions—that’s something he’d be very reluctant to do.” This is not, Sunstein believes, due only to pragmatism; it also stems from a sense that there is something worthy of respect in a strong and widespread moral feeling, even if it’s wrong. “Rawls talks about civic toleration as a modus vivendi, a way that we can live together, and some liberals think that way,” Sunstein says. “But I think with Obama it’s more like Learned Hand when he said, ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’ Obama takes that really seriously. I think the reason that conservatives are O.K. with him is both that he might agree with them on some issues and that even if he comes down on a different side, he knows he might be wrong. I can’t think of an American politician who has thought in that way, ever.”

Scooter and Me

Nick Bromell, an English professor at UMass - Amherst, has written a a brilliant column on his childhood friend L. Scooter Libby, fundamentalism, liberalism, and truth. I can't recommend it highly enough. He gets a bit abstract at points, but his discussion of liberalism and self-doubt and Truth is, I think, dead on the money (and quite Rawlsian at that).

Rawlsian Justice

I want to respond mostly on the topic of Rawls and his theory, but I'd like to briefly address the normative effect of civic institutions. I think institutions can create a much broader range of norms than simple expectation. The U.S. constitution provides a fine example of the sort of impact that civic institutions can have. You can look at the debate over the war on terror detainees and habeus corpus. Modern Americans have instincts about this that I don't think most people would have had in 1787. A lot of our popular conceptions about due process come from our institutions. Consider net neutrality. Right now both sides are advancing plausible moral values-based arguments for their positions. In the next year or two Congress is going to rule thumbs or thumbs down on net neutrality. My guess is that 10-15 years from now if someone raises the moral argument of the losing side of this debate (whichever way Congress goes) our instict will be to reject it (and similarly to accept the winning side's argument). We rely on our political and legal processes to help navigate through the innumerable moral and ethical dilemmas of modern society and to provide some sense of resolution to these sorts of questions. Consequently there are many more norm-setting opportunities for civic institutions than mere expectation.

Moving on to Rawls then. First, it's important to note that Rawls is not a utilitarian. In fact, in A Theory of Justice utilitarianism is the bogeyman against which Rawls argues his case. On the first page he writes:

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by the many.

There is, however, an element of utilitarianism in Rawls's Original Position. The objective of the Original Position contractors is supposedly to maximize their likely outcome in society. This is sort of utilitarian, with a curveball thrown in (the veil of ignorance blinds them to exactly what represents utility to them as individuals).

But Rawls's excursion into utilitarianism, in my humble view, is a mistake. I don't think he actually meant it. It really doesn't follow from his justifications of why we should have the Original Position that it should necessarily be a maximizing exercise, nor does his output from the Original Position (the two principles) reflect a maximizing approach. A maximizing approach would produce, as Henry noted, basically whatever principles would maximize the average amount of primary goods (Rawls's stand-in for utility) for everyone. Instead what Rawls claims the Original Position contractors will embrace is a maximin approach (maximizing the amount of primary goods provided to the least well off member of society). You can see this in the difference principle (part of Rawls's second principle of justice): social and economic inequalities are permissible only if they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. This would make no sense as output from the Original Position as Rawls proposes it. So something doesn't fit here, and I think there has to be a better explanation linking Rawls's fundamental premises to his two principles of justice.

Rawls's entire argument is motivated by his conception of justice as fairness. At this point I think I need to try to flesh out the basic Rawlsian argument (I am, of course, skipping over many, many details). Rawls views the benefits of social cooperation as the product of everyone acquiescing to a social ordering that allows for and facilitates that social cooperation. Those benefits should therefore be allocated in such a manner as to ensure such cooperation, resulting in what Rawls calls a well-ordered society. This requires that "(1) everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these principles." Lacking a well-ordered society various factions will vie for the power to reorder the state to fit their own needs, and the resulting instability will hinder social cooperation and deny everyone its benefits. Rawls conceives of the Original Position in order to satisfy condition (1) above; to create principles of justice that everyone can accept. In the Original Position our theoretical contractors will evaluate the question of social justice in a completely unbiased manner and generate broadly acceptable principles of social justice. He appears to assume (initially!) that what people will all accept will be principles designed to produce the greatest average outcome.

So far, so good. But there's a problem here, one that Rawls acknowledges (and that informs his choice of the maximin approach), but that he strangely does not allow to alter the conceptual setup of the Original Position. There are certain social outcomes that people will simply not accept, no matter how well conceived the principles of justice are. A utilitarian principle (which is what the Original Position as Rawls proposes it would produce) could, for example, result in some people being made slaves in order to improve the overall average utility of the society. No matter what their Original Position alter-ego might have thought, the actual slaves could never recognize this principle as just, and consequently you would not have a stable, well-ordered state.

So the instruction to the Original Position contractors really ought not to be to maximize the average amount of primary goods, but rather to devise principles of justice that everyone can agree to. Of course, that was what we created the bloody thing for anyways. How should that be approached? We can assume (without too much controversy, I think) that the people least likely to agree to any principle of justice will be those who gain the least benefit from it. Hence the maximin approach. These least well off people should certainly agree to a principle that would maximize their welfare.

A first blush approach to maximin would be to simply be divide the social benefit in equal shares. However, as Rawls recognizes, that only makes sense if the social benefit is fixed and unchangeable. But we know that the benefits of social cooperation are not fixed, that by providing people with incentives we can get them to produce greater social benefits. This requires allowances for some inequality so that we can provide those incentives for increased cooperation. Of course, if those greater benefits only go to the well off, we have gained nothing from a maximin approach. Increasing the size of the pie is only beneficial to the extent that some of the increase goes to the least well off. And so we arrive at the difference principle: inequalities that in some way benefit the least well off are acceptable, those that don't are not. And you hopefully by now can see why I say that I don't believe Rawls took the utilitarian aspect of the Original Position very seriously.

Now, with my Rawlsian primer complete let me address your comments more directly. I read your argument to be compatible, in principle, with Rawls's difference principle. It is a 'rising tide lifts all boats' argument. In essence any inequality produced by a free market will operate to the benefit of the least well off. The difference principle would only limit market inequalities or justify redistributive policies to the extent that this is not true. Of course, the other part of the second principle, fair equality of opportunity would also support redistributive policies (public education, for example) that would conflict with your position.

Rawls writes at length about economics in the latter part of A Theory of Justice (which I have not read). Scanning through it, Rawls does not engage in serious discussion regarding exact details of market structure and regulations (and in fact brushes this off to some extent as being dependent on "the traditions, institutions, and social forces of each country, and its particular historical circumstances" and some evaluation of the impact of various policies in practice). But it is clear that he believes that some baseline minimum standard needs to be maintained through redistributive policies to protect against the "contingencies of the market". Beyond that "it may be perfectly fair that the rest of total income be settled by the price system, assuming that it is moderately efficient and free from monopolistic restrictions, and unreasonable externalities have been eliminated."

Rawls also hints at another objection related to the quote at the top of my post regarding the inviolability of individual rights. While he does conceive of the maximin principle being based on long run expectations, he would not allow the justice of particular groups of people to be sacrificed to long term generalized gains. There would need to some line-drawing to determine what is an acceptable short term sacrifice in the long term interests of those least well off, and those sacrifices that treat those people as means to achieve some remote end. This also harkens back to the motivation for the maximin approach. Outcomes that are bad enough to cause social unrest (those that the victims cannot possibly regard as being the products of a just society) need to be avoided even if temporary and in the long run interest of everyone.

To a considerable degree the dispute here has to be an empirical one. Your claim about charitable giving could be interpreted as a counter to many of Rawls's arguments. Suffice it say I find the claim that charity could completely replace redistributive policy somewhat dubious. There would also be arguments about the existence and degree of market failures, of anticompetitive strategic behavior, externalization of costs, collective action problems, behavioral critiques, etc. I think there would also have to be discussion as to the general degree of churn in markets and the degree to which it is possible and probable that some proportion of people would fall through the cracks, including but not limited to those who are disabled or suffer serious health ailments and impairments or possess limited natural talents and abilities. I don't see us resolving such issues at this moment, but to the extent any such problems exist they would suggest a conflict between a minimal state and Rawls's difference principle.

Liberalism

Before I get started addressing your major points I would just like to note that I disagree with your view of Locke. Though Nozick may lean on Locke, this only indicates that Nozick is poised for a fall, as, I assure you, Locke is not leaning back (I must note that this statement is predicated upon my limited knowledge of Nozick's arguments). Also, the State of Nature does not characterize human behavior. It is a legal structure: the absence of any formal agreements. I would discuss this further but it probably isn't relevant enough here to justify the time.

I will not properly counter your suggestion that public institutions are good tools for cultural transformation. This is a very complicated issue and I don't think I have the time now to do it justice. I will make a few general statements that may give you some sense as to what points I think are important in this regard.

You point out that there is a relationship between culture and institutions. I can't argue. To do so would be absurd. In fact, there are things which we call institutions that are obviously nothing but culture (here of course I am using a much broader definition of institution than just public institutions). Hell, I could make a pretty decent argument that all institutions are primarily culture (I first began to grasp the potential complexity of this topic when I tried to carefully define culture and its aspects, institutions and their types, got two pages in, and still had not worked out a satisfactory framework). Once these particulars where hashed out I'm pretty sure I could make a good case for my point. But in doing so I would have to elaborate most of my theory of culture; and I know from experience that I can't do that in brief. So I'm not going to try here.

When I think about examples of public institutions that have a strong cultural complement it seems that these are primarily institutions that were created because the cultural 'institution' already existed (an example here would be marriage). So that’s one point. Public institutions often have cultural counterparts, but it is usually the culture that brings about the public institutions rather than vice versa.

Another point would be that public institutions are only good at creating an inferior sort of gross culture. I did indicate, unintentionally, that institutions can create norms. This is true. But a norm in this sense is a very feeble sort of culture. It is a simple expectation. I can modify a rat's behavior by establishing the norm that it will be fed every day at 9AM, but even for rats this is not a very impressive utilization of their brainpower. In the modern use of the word 'culture' such ideas are dominant. You could have a culture that hates blacks, or favors democracy, or values punctuality, etc. This is culture as merely a set of irrational preferences. It is definitely true that such things can be an important part of a culture, and that they can have major impacts on people's behavior. It is also true that there are many examples of public institutions having succeeded in changing these aspects of culture. This is not however a part of what gives a culture 'richness'. You cannot develop a meaningful appreciation for Shakespeare, Hume, or Darwin, with posters and PSAs. These things are deep and thought provoking. They utilize the human mind's capacity for nuance, intuition, and rationality. I think that they are infinitely more powerful as means for improving social outcomes than mere propaganda. I also think that to not use these sorts of culture is to squander the potential of the human mind. This potential is infinite. Propaganda is a cop out. It is what we resort to in order to control people when we can't figure out how to make proper use of them. Human intelligence is a hindrance when you want to manage society from the top down like a block of clay (as, in a non-rich culture, the idle brain power is bound to bring about all manner of wickedness), but it is a great asset when you approach society at the fine structure level and try to change it from the bottom up.

I do not think that I could be said to fetishize an ideal culture. I do talk about a rich culture, a healthy culture, a natural culture, etc. but there are infinitely many cultures which would be worthy of these appellations. These are cultures that are of sufficient complexity to utilize the potential of the human brain, that contain the notions necessary to maintain the well-being of their hosts, and that in other ways resemble the cultures that coevolved with the human body. The methods I suggest for improving culture have less to do with the contents of culture than with how it is transmitted. I certainly believe that the contents of a particular culture have a huge impact on its ability to improve human well-being, but any healthy culture is better than none. In any case, the problem is much less important in modern times. So long as the culture we create includes an understanding of the value of rationality, free information, and self-determination, it will naturally accumulate the best and most valuable ideas (since we have so many available ideas and such facility in the distribution of information).

Your argument against the idea that government is increasing is an empirical one. Facts require a lot more effort to generate than ideas. So I'm not going to argue this thoroughly. I don't have the time. Here's my gut reaction (and there are more nerve ending in my gut than in my brain you know). You address the issue from a legal perspective. You certainly are in a better position to make this judgment than I. And from what I do know about the actions of the courts your assessment seems justified. This is encouraging. I'm tempted to vote republican just to get more Chicago school libertarians onto the Supreme Court. But I think this is really an elite movement. It is an ideological battle being waged by a group of intellectuals (and hooray for them). But I think its pretty crazy to argue that the trend in government over the last century is not decidedly up. Government spending as a percentage of GDP has certainly increased dramatically. I don't have any hard figures, but I bet that the quantity of legislation has increased (both in aggregate and in pages issued annually). I'm pretty sure the size of the federal register has grown over the period. What is more difficult to measure, but perhaps more meaningful is the change in people's attitude toward government. Whenever there is a problem today it is automatically assumed that we should turn to government for the solution. When government regulates and prohibits, modern Americans see this as natural and unsurprising. I think we have a much more submissive attitude toward government than we did a century ago.

Your closing paragraph addresses what is probably the core of the difference between the understanding of the modern liberal and the classical liberal. I will use a few different approaches to describe how libertarianism is an appropriate model for guiding social policy working from your comments.

Rawls derives his principles of justice from what he calls the Original Position. Where we assume that we are choosing the structure of rules of the world into which we are going to be born prior to having any knowledge as to what our initial physical or social condition will be. In this way we will not be biased by any particular class assumptions. I think this is a fine way to assess social welfare. It appears to be roughly equivalent to a judgment based on utilitarianism, if by that term we mean the greatest satisfaction to the most people. Another way of stating this principle would then be to maximize the happiness of the average person. This seems to fit the Rawlsian problem. In the Original Position my expectation is that I will be the average person (in statistics that is the very definition of 'expectation') and so I seek, by arranging the rules of society, to maximize my expected happiness as such. That's all fine. Where I would disagree with Rawls is in the supposition that using the redistributive and regulatory powers of government will enhance the common welfare. From the Original Position I would choose a libertarian structure. Let me give a couple of examples.

Would I choose a rule structure that supports the existence of unions? Certainly not. I must consider what impact it would have on me as a random member of society. The only circumstance in which I would be benefited would be if I happened to be a member of a union during the first generation or so of that union's existence. If I am a member after the union has been long established, the economic inefficiencies of the union's existence will have already eroded my well being sufficiently to negate any benefits it might provide. If I am not a member of a particular union, it harms me in at least two ways and quite possibly more. The union harms me because I, as a consumer, must pay more for, and hence consume less of, the product that the unionized industry produces. In the long run the inefficiencies of the unionized labor market further harm everyone by reducing overall economic output. If I am an unemployed laborer in the unionized industry, I am harmed because the union impairs my opportunity to find employment by offering my services at a more competitive rate. If I have invested in an industry prior to its unionization, the value of my fixed capitol will be reduced by the appearance of the union. So, since a union only benefits a small group of people for a short period of time it would be irrational to create rules supporting unionization from the Original Position.

Would I support government-financed distributions of wealth to the poor? No. Admittedly, in the first generation or so this policy will enhance my well being if I happen to be poor, but if I should be born at some later date I would be better off without it. The policy will reduce capitol investment by removing wealth from the people who have a sufficient quantity to invest (and who largely have such sums because they are skilled at allocating capitol efficiently). It will imply annual structural costs involved in administering the taxation and distribution system. It will dramatically reduce the incentive of my parents and their parents to strive to improve their economic standing. As the allocation of a dollar is a production order, it will, in essence, transfer the direction of the economy from those who have established economic prowess to those who have demonstrated economic incompetence. These forces will both further degrade my relative economic standing and will put a drag on the development of the economy as a whole. A five percent increase in my share of the total wealth of the economy at the cost of a half percent reduction in economic growth is not a good long-term trade off. Rationally, I would prefer the situation where I have more real wealth, even if inequality is higher.

Those are the sorts of arguments I would make against Rawls's principles of justice. I don't think his principles follow from his idea of the Original Position. Superficially policies of economic equalization seem like a good idea, but in the long run they are detrimental even to those they are intended to benefit.

One might argue that there is a threshold of poverty below which one experiences such an acute level of suffering that its intensity would weigh down the average well being so much that we must do something to alleviate it. Sure; of course. But it seems ridiculous to me to suppose that we need government to provide this support. Honestly, people aren't monsters. Even in the presence of extensive government support systems Americans contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to charity every year. I have to imagine that if people kept a much larger portion of their income, and if they did not expect that the government would take care of every problem under the sun, they would probably be even more generous. Even if they weren't, I sincerely believe that, had our government not become so interventionist over the past century, our current output would be several times what it is today, so that even if people only contributed the same amount that they currently do, as a percent of GDP, it would at least equal, in real terms, what is currently provided to the poor through government programs and private charity (and the want this money would serve would be less intense).

I think the fear that, if the government did not provide all of its supports and regulations, we would experience a humanitarian disaster is just a scare tactic used by people with a relatively extreme class warfare agenda. Kids may have to work in sweatshops in the third world out of economic necessity, but this would never happen in modern America. Nobody, anywhere in the world, would accept such a situation if they had the economic wherewithal to avoid it. There is a stage in economic development when atrocious conditions are common. But it replaces a preexisting state in which atrocious conditions are universal. Dickens may have been miserable when he was a boy, but he grew up to be a famous author. That could never have happened before the industrial revolution. Had he been born two hundred years before, no one today would ever have heard of him. He would have been just another miserable boy, just like every other boy in the world. The point is that liberal policies had been so successful by his time that people finally realized that it was actually possible for many people to not be miserable. We like to think that we're very superior. We imagine that people in the past thought it was wonderful to work a hundred hours a week and to live in piss reeking hovels. But I think that in this we are mistaken. We think that we wised up, passed laws against living like that, and moved on. But perhaps the economic development that followed naturally from the adoption of liberalized policies had already largely done away with those things and all we did was ban the vestigial remains of ways of life that had once been universal. I believe that this is the case. I believe that the most rapid way to eliminate terrible living conditions is to allow the market to operate unhindered.

That is a very important point. Liberal institutions did not create child labor. They did not cause people to have long working hours or low wages. Liberal institutions were the very force that made these things so uncommon that what remained of such practices began to appear abominable. It is a wonderful thing that the wealth that liberalism had created made people's moral sentiments more gentle and sensitive. If this should cause them to aid and succor those who still must suffer this is a very good thing. But if this should cause them to destroy the very system which is creating the wealth necessary to lift others out of poverty, then it is a genuine tragedy.

It goes without saying today that people work fewer hours, for greater wages, and under better conditions than they did in the past because we have passed regulatory laws to make it so. This belief is nonsensical. These laws would have no effect if the physical wealth that make this standard of living possible had not already been brought into existence by liberal policy. We could go and pass such laws in Afghanistan or North Korea but that would not make people better off. Laws do not improve living standards, wealth does. It is an indisputable fact that prior to the time when we began passing laws to constrain working conditions, wages had been going up, hours worked had been going down, and working conditions had been getting better for centuries. There can be no reasonable doubt that this trend would have continued on its own throughout the twentieth century in the absence of any interference. From my perspective, it is obvious that, in each of these regards, the average worker today would be better off had no paternalist regulations been created.

I could go on in this vein indefinitely. I guess the point is that the argument between liberals and statists is not what ends we should aim towards but what means will best achieve our ends. Liberals do not believe that poverty is good. They do not loathe children. I might like to bring down the welfare state, but in doing so I would intend to promote social welfare. I have come to despise communism, but this does not mean that I do not value community. I once thought that Jesus was a communist. After all, he said that everyone should give their wealth to those less fortunate than themselves. But this is not equivalent to communism. There is a vast gulf between suggesting that charitable action is righteous and emptying people's wallets into the basket at gunpoint. I don't recall Jesus saying anything about 'overthrow thy neighbor'. I guess that's a diversion. What I'm trying to say is that I believe in libertarianism for entirely pragmatic reasons. It may happen to be true that freedom is a pleasure in itself. That liberty is an ennobling and dignifying status. But I did not come to embrace liberalism for such reasons. I honestly believe that it is the best system for enhancing the well being of every person in society.