Showing posts with label Libertarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Libertarianism. Show all posts
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Sunday, June 24, 2007
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:
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:
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."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:
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.
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.Tying in to the Hayes column: a robust state can be less prone to abuse and authoritarianism than a more easily captured minimal state.
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?
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.
Friday, November 10, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
An Ideal Culture
With the respect to the Nozick thing, I have similar criticisms. It is, of course, a thought experiment, which gives Nozick some license to set the rules. And the rule he sets, near as I can tell, is that people will behave in exactly the manner Nozick needs them to in order for him to make his theory work. They are generally virtuous in a state of nature and generally respect everyone else's rights (borrowing heavily from Locke on this point). They misbehave just enough for Nozick to justify the evolution of a minimalist state (through an immaculately rights-preserving process), and not one ounce more. It's all very convenient, very shoddy. None of his assumptions or suppositions about the way people will behave in his model are discussed or defended, it's just delivered as "this is what will happen". Well, if we're all willing to buy these 1001 assumptions and conditions, then yes, this is a fine theory. I'm not a fan. Apparently it's a pretty well-known book in the field though...
Moving on to the meat of the discussion: democratic process. Your main thrust is that culture is the significant element, rather than institutional structure. I have a hard time disagreeing with that, and the archives of this blog will show that I've made the exact same argument with respect to democratization numerous times. However, as you note in your final paragraph, there is a symbiotic relationship between culture and social institutions. Institutions are products of culture, but also vessels and conveyors of culture. Properly understood an institution includes not just the bells and whistles, but social understanding the underlies it. Institutions, as you note, express and establish norms. And given the general chaos of cultural "progress", institutions may serve as one of the best means of trying to place a twig in the river to redirect the flow (to the degree that it can be consciously directed at all, which I assume to be a fairly small degree). I'm not sure that institutional objectives and cultural objectives can be cleanly divided.
I think it's also important not to fetishize an ideal culture, as that may prove as illusory as a true state of nature. One of the most powerful insights of our founding fathers was that people are flawed and will always be so, and that institutions of government must be built to withstand imperfection. I'm not suggesting that those institutions could survive total cultural collapse, but rather that they can be built with certain tolerances, and even built to provide some self-correcting mechanisms that will feed back into civic culture.
Also, I have to take issue with slippery slope argument against non-minimal states. Frankly, the regulatory tide has generally been receding in the US for the past 25 years or more. There has been a strong push towards deregulation in many areas, particularly the traditional regulated industries (power, gas, telecom), as well as in some populist areas (welfare reform). The judiciary has been overrun by Chicago school libertarians and antitrust regulation has been rendered virtually non-existent. I don't see a slippery slope at all. We careened towards libertarian excess in the first couple decades of the 20th Century (known in legal circles as the Lochner era), then over-corrected through the middle part of the century, and I think are now trying to establish some sort of balance.
Finally, I think you should be careful in assuming that if there were an ideal culture it would be a libertarian one. I think a strong argument can be advanced that the best approach to social justice and social institutions would be something along the lines of Rawls's two principles of justice (although I don't think Rawls has made that argument). I find it to be a far better fit for our intuitions about justice than a libertarian institutional structure. According to a theory like Nozick's, if A is born with every possible advantage and goes on to great success, fame, wealth, and power while B is born with every possible disadvantage and ekes out a miserable existence before succumbing to a preventable disease, then A deserved everything he received and B was entitled to nothing more. This Nozick would call this justice. Rawls would cry injustice, and frankly I think so would most people. And I think that even if people took Confucius's advice and acquired knowledge and insight, they would probably still agree with Rawls. It seems quite plausible to me that even if we had a state of remarkably educated, diligent, civic-minded, and rational people, you might find that it is still a non-minimal state.
Moving on to the meat of the discussion: democratic process. Your main thrust is that culture is the significant element, rather than institutional structure. I have a hard time disagreeing with that, and the archives of this blog will show that I've made the exact same argument with respect to democratization numerous times. However, as you note in your final paragraph, there is a symbiotic relationship between culture and social institutions. Institutions are products of culture, but also vessels and conveyors of culture. Properly understood an institution includes not just the bells and whistles, but social understanding the underlies it. Institutions, as you note, express and establish norms. And given the general chaos of cultural "progress", institutions may serve as one of the best means of trying to place a twig in the river to redirect the flow (to the degree that it can be consciously directed at all, which I assume to be a fairly small degree). I'm not sure that institutional objectives and cultural objectives can be cleanly divided.
I think it's also important not to fetishize an ideal culture, as that may prove as illusory as a true state of nature. One of the most powerful insights of our founding fathers was that people are flawed and will always be so, and that institutions of government must be built to withstand imperfection. I'm not suggesting that those institutions could survive total cultural collapse, but rather that they can be built with certain tolerances, and even built to provide some self-correcting mechanisms that will feed back into civic culture.
Also, I have to take issue with slippery slope argument against non-minimal states. Frankly, the regulatory tide has generally been receding in the US for the past 25 years or more. There has been a strong push towards deregulation in many areas, particularly the traditional regulated industries (power, gas, telecom), as well as in some populist areas (welfare reform). The judiciary has been overrun by Chicago school libertarians and antitrust regulation has been rendered virtually non-existent. I don't see a slippery slope at all. We careened towards libertarian excess in the first couple decades of the 20th Century (known in legal circles as the Lochner era), then over-corrected through the middle part of the century, and I think are now trying to establish some sort of balance.
Finally, I think you should be careful in assuming that if there were an ideal culture it would be a libertarian one. I think a strong argument can be advanced that the best approach to social justice and social institutions would be something along the lines of Rawls's two principles of justice (although I don't think Rawls has made that argument). I find it to be a far better fit for our intuitions about justice than a libertarian institutional structure. According to a theory like Nozick's, if A is born with every possible advantage and goes on to great success, fame, wealth, and power while B is born with every possible disadvantage and ekes out a miserable existence before succumbing to a preventable disease, then A deserved everything he received and B was entitled to nothing more. This Nozick would call this justice. Rawls would cry injustice, and frankly I think so would most people. And I think that even if people took Confucius's advice and acquired knowledge and insight, they would probably still agree with Rawls. It seems quite plausible to me that even if we had a state of remarkably educated, diligent, civic-minded, and rational people, you might find that it is still a non-minimal state.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Libertarianism and Paternalism
It is clear to me that there is much involved in a system of torts. I do not claim that the many systematic and idiosyncratic determinations that must be made under such a system are easily made or have obvious outcomes. I acknowledge that the very existence of a system of legal protection requires a great deal of value-laden judgment. Of course the rights of both parties are at stake in a tort judgment. I only mentioned those of the victim because I was highlighting the injustice of that particular situation, where the tortfeasor seems secure in his rights.
As far as Nozick's ideas go, they do sound odd. I will say a thing or two based upon my limited understanding of them, let me know if I'm off the mark.
It seems very odd to suggest that a liberal state is the natural outcome of anarchy. I have often said that either anarchy does not exist or we are living in it right now. People are so accustomed to living under a large impersonal state that they are unaccustomed to think of what government fundamentally is. As I have said before, and as you are surely already aware, government is merely superiority of force. If gangsters have the run of a city and the official authorities are powerless to contradict their decrees, then the 'authorities' are no longer sovereign, and the gangsters are a government unto themselves. Advocates of anarchy, in suggesting the abolition of government, either fail to understand what, fundamentally, government is, or are making the absurd assertion that it is possible to do away with the physical inequality of parties and the resulting power differential. Anyplace where there are two people there is government. The point of this is that anarchy is either an insubstantial philosophical construct or it is universal. Assuming the former, Nozick's assertion is merely a theoretical exercise; assuming the latter, Nozick's assertion is disproved by the repeated evidence of history. Why on earth would power groups, in the absence of formal government, restrict themselves to selling their protection, when they could quite easily force defenseless parties into a state of clientage and then extract whatever portion of the client's production they desired? They wouldn't. The evidence of history shows quite clearly that they haven't. As for such power groups being rights protecting… lol. There is certainly no guarantee that governments will be good.
As far as using defaults in existing programs. I'm all for it. I may doubt that a program is the most effective way to achieve the ends aimed at, but so long as we're going to do it we ought to do it as well as we know how in order to minimize the loss we incur by not following the optimal path. I do think that, in the context of the programs he mentioned, Sunstein's defaults would cause them to realize their ends more effectively. If you sell defaults as a way of making intervention more effective I won't argue. It is only when they are sold as a way of making intervention not intervention that I object.
When I said that "[determining a rational set of defaults] through the auspices of modern democratic government virtually guarantees that we will botch the process", I was speaking in very broad terms. I was talking about culture as a default. It is definitely the government's role to create defaults within the proper sphere of government. I am only talking about government setting defaults in private decision making. When it does this, I call it 'intervention', and I think it a mistake.
Your next point is very important: "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". Absolutely (my discussion of the constitution was not suggesting that a constitution could protect an ideal of government; I was just noting that the idea of defaults provides an interesting insight into why constitutions have any effect at all). One might say that good government is not a state of law and institutional organization, but rather a state of culture. No set of laws can cause a culturally destitute people to govern themselves well and no rule can be so detrimental as to prevent a culturally rich people from doing so. This is why I have lost interest in practical politics. What is the point of struggling for changes in laws when what really matters in not the virtues of government but the virtues of the people? This idea is highlighted in the ridiculous programs of 'democratization'. There are groups of people who are culturally democratic, and with such groups no power can hold them back from democracy. There are other groups who lack the cultural prerequisites for democracy and who will not become properly democratic no matter how hard you shove the institutions of democracy down their throats. This goes back to the recognition that government is power. We tend to confuse government with institutions, but if the institutions do not have the support of the people they do not have power and thus have nothing to do with government.
That idea is at the heart of my political philosophy. Good government is the product of a strong culture. It is a recursive model of societal improvement:
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.
Confucius, The Great Learning
This is why my own investigations focus not on how to impose change on people externally but rather on what culture is and how it is transmitted. This, I think, is the road to improvement. If we can understand why some groups of people spontaneously generate wealth, creativity, and good governance, while others seem trapped in a state of degradation, then we might actively promote the welfare of mankind.
Finally, I do not agree that such policies as redistributive taxation and financial regulation reduce people's clamoring for more intervention. In fact I think such policies lead to more regulation. I believe that these policies result in outcomes that are the opposite of their intended aims. So if redistributive taxation makes people poorer and financial regulation makes markets more dangerous, then obviously you enter into an unstable feedback loop. One might call it a slippery slope. The more you intervene, the worse the problem becomes, and the more people demand intervention. I think this sums up the story of twentieth century governance nicely. Take the war on drugs as an example. The more effort they put into fighting the drug trade the more valuable drugs become. The more valuable drugs become, the stronger become those who traffic in drugs and the more difficult it becomes to stop them. So the harder you fight the problem the more virulent it becomes (and the harder you try to fight it, ad infinitum). An argument that supplements this perfectly sufficient point is that interventionist concessions create a norm. Interventions give people a sense of entitlement and this begets greater expectations of future paternalism.
As far as Nozick's ideas go, they do sound odd. I will say a thing or two based upon my limited understanding of them, let me know if I'm off the mark.
It seems very odd to suggest that a liberal state is the natural outcome of anarchy. I have often said that either anarchy does not exist or we are living in it right now. People are so accustomed to living under a large impersonal state that they are unaccustomed to think of what government fundamentally is. As I have said before, and as you are surely already aware, government is merely superiority of force. If gangsters have the run of a city and the official authorities are powerless to contradict their decrees, then the 'authorities' are no longer sovereign, and the gangsters are a government unto themselves. Advocates of anarchy, in suggesting the abolition of government, either fail to understand what, fundamentally, government is, or are making the absurd assertion that it is possible to do away with the physical inequality of parties and the resulting power differential. Anyplace where there are two people there is government. The point of this is that anarchy is either an insubstantial philosophical construct or it is universal. Assuming the former, Nozick's assertion is merely a theoretical exercise; assuming the latter, Nozick's assertion is disproved by the repeated evidence of history. Why on earth would power groups, in the absence of formal government, restrict themselves to selling their protection, when they could quite easily force defenseless parties into a state of clientage and then extract whatever portion of the client's production they desired? They wouldn't. The evidence of history shows quite clearly that they haven't. As for such power groups being rights protecting… lol. There is certainly no guarantee that governments will be good.
As far as using defaults in existing programs. I'm all for it. I may doubt that a program is the most effective way to achieve the ends aimed at, but so long as we're going to do it we ought to do it as well as we know how in order to minimize the loss we incur by not following the optimal path. I do think that, in the context of the programs he mentioned, Sunstein's defaults would cause them to realize their ends more effectively. If you sell defaults as a way of making intervention more effective I won't argue. It is only when they are sold as a way of making intervention not intervention that I object.
When I said that "[determining a rational set of defaults] through the auspices of modern democratic government virtually guarantees that we will botch the process", I was speaking in very broad terms. I was talking about culture as a default. It is definitely the government's role to create defaults within the proper sphere of government. I am only talking about government setting defaults in private decision making. When it does this, I call it 'intervention', and I think it a mistake.
Your next point is very important: "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". Absolutely (my discussion of the constitution was not suggesting that a constitution could protect an ideal of government; I was just noting that the idea of defaults provides an interesting insight into why constitutions have any effect at all). One might say that good government is not a state of law and institutional organization, but rather a state of culture. No set of laws can cause a culturally destitute people to govern themselves well and no rule can be so detrimental as to prevent a culturally rich people from doing so. This is why I have lost interest in practical politics. What is the point of struggling for changes in laws when what really matters in not the virtues of government but the virtues of the people? This idea is highlighted in the ridiculous programs of 'democratization'. There are groups of people who are culturally democratic, and with such groups no power can hold them back from democracy. There are other groups who lack the cultural prerequisites for democracy and who will not become properly democratic no matter how hard you shove the institutions of democracy down their throats. This goes back to the recognition that government is power. We tend to confuse government with institutions, but if the institutions do not have the support of the people they do not have power and thus have nothing to do with government.
That idea is at the heart of my political philosophy. Good government is the product of a strong culture. It is a recursive model of societal improvement:
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.
Confucius, The Great Learning
This is why my own investigations focus not on how to impose change on people externally but rather on what culture is and how it is transmitted. This, I think, is the road to improvement. If we can understand why some groups of people spontaneously generate wealth, creativity, and good governance, while others seem trapped in a state of degradation, then we might actively promote the welfare of mankind.
Finally, I do not agree that such policies as redistributive taxation and financial regulation reduce people's clamoring for more intervention. In fact I think such policies lead to more regulation. I believe that these policies result in outcomes that are the opposite of their intended aims. So if redistributive taxation makes people poorer and financial regulation makes markets more dangerous, then obviously you enter into an unstable feedback loop. One might call it a slippery slope. The more you intervene, the worse the problem becomes, and the more people demand intervention. I think this sums up the story of twentieth century governance nicely. Take the war on drugs as an example. The more effort they put into fighting the drug trade the more valuable drugs become. The more valuable drugs become, the stronger become those who traffic in drugs and the more difficult it becomes to stop them. So the harder you fight the problem the more virulent it becomes (and the harder you try to fight it, ad infinitum). An argument that supplements this perfectly sufficient point is that interventionist concessions create a norm. Interventions give people a sense of entitlement and this begets greater expectations of future paternalism.
A Response on Libertarian Paternalism
First off, I have to admit to not watching the video, although I believe I listened to an audio file of the same lecture (or a similar one by Sunstein) some time ago. Henry's post hits pretty close to some stuff my political theory course has been covering (particularly Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia), and that I discussed briefly with V recently (hopefully he'll chime in). I'm going to respond in chunks, hopefully it won't fragment the discussion too badly.
In fact, one of my (many) objection's to Nozick's theory is that he imagines there will be numerous regimes of justice developed by individuals and associations in the state of nature, and he is indifferent to which one prevails (which would occur through economic competition of the associations). Any rights-protecting regime is apparently as good as any other in his view. But process can be slanted heavily to favor particular groups and actions, and it seems to me fairly important that there be a conscious and rational effort to create the "best" system, rather than the one most appealing to those with the greatest economic power.
This, in fact, has always been my biggest objection to libertarian theory. I simply cannot see how a libertarian government 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 political speech financing, 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?
In the case of the car accident loss being left where it fell, the government is clearly failing to protect the rights of the victim. The goal of the government (under the aforementioned philosophy) is to secure individual's rights to life, liberty, and property. It would be ludicrous to suppose that this could be accomplished without torts (or likewise without the use of police power to try to prevent wrongful conduct)Even accepting that a tort system is a necessity, this still leaves a huge range of determinations to be made with respect to process and defaults. Default legal burdens of proof and persuasion, burden-shifting rules, rules of evidence and courtroom procedures, etc. And to suggest that only the victim's rights are implicated neglects the fact that the tortfeasor's property rights are equally implicated. A faulty or unfair process could easily result in an unjust invasion of his rights. Protecting everyone's rights is a complicated business, packed with value-laden judgments.
In fact, one of my (many) objection's to Nozick's theory is that he imagines there will be numerous regimes of justice developed by individuals and associations in the state of nature, and he is indifferent to which one prevails (which would occur through economic competition of the associations). Any rights-protecting regime is apparently as good as any other in his view. But process can be slanted heavily to favor particular groups and actions, and it seems to me fairly important that there be a conscious and rational effort to create the "best" system, rather than the one most appealing to those with the greatest economic power.
I sincerely believe that the principle is merely a backdoor approach to regulation, and that his use of the word libertarianism is a usurpation of the term (this is the slippery-slope argument that Sunstein says is silly). Many of his examples involve at least some components which are involuntary and do not allow for choice. My second point along this line is a much more interesting one. Can such policies really be implemented (meaningfully) without imposing upon the liberty of the parties involved?Sunstein's argument is fairly limited in this regard. I don't think he wants to get into the argument about whether or not programs like the 401k program should exist, but rather given that it already does exist wouldn't it be smarter to set the defaults in a manner that will produce the socially optimal result? We can get into the topic of what optimality means (and I will below), but let's assume Congress created the 401k program for some purpose and that purpose can be furthered by adjusting the default as Sunstein suggests. It would be a paternalistic change to an existing regime that creates no additional burden with respect to interfering in anyone's rights and that produces a better outcome. That seems fairly unobjectionable.
So it makes sense that we would be better off providing people with a rationally determined set of defaults to prevent their credulity mechanism from accepting a bunch of random crap. But this is harder than it sounds. I mean the 'determining a rational set of defaults' part. It can be done, but it requires a great deal of thoughtfulness, trepidation, and investigation. From my point of view, doing so through the auspices of modern democratic government virtually guarantees that we will botch the process.Modern American government warrants a healthy dose of cynicism, but this is more like nihilism. Our institutional system is a bit of mess, and in my view needs some significant reform. But that stands entirely aside from the discussion of libertarianism as far as I can tell. Even the classic night watchman government requires a structure of governance. And if that system of governance sucks, you kiss your night watchman government goodbye in short order.
This, in fact, has always been my biggest objection to libertarian theory. I simply cannot see how a libertarian government 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 political speech financing, 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?
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I just posted the following on a /. thread about the idea of an Open Source model of government.
In response to:
I replied:
I'd like to develop this sort of thing further. I definitely think that this sort of 'fleshing out the alternative' is a fruitful avenue for more writing. I think political discussion tends to be so frequently futile because we have such strong emotional associations around a lot of our ideas. If you associate your opponents ideas with images of bleakness, desolation, and misery and your own, with images of hope, enlightenment, and progress (and vise versa), then obviously there is virtually zero chance of either of you convincing the other of anything (because how could you possibly be convinced that bleakness is better than hope).
Unless we engage people at this deeper level of meaning, feeling, and association, (with images of how you feel the world could be) people will probably continue to talk past each other.