A Tyranny of Fantasy

Some ideas just seem so obviously wrong, that we don't even bother with them.  Yet history is filled with terribly wrong ideas that have become enormously popular, and had enormously terrible consequences for society.

Libertarianism is one such idea.  Having only a couple of decades ago been relegated to the fringes of American politics, it seems an idea that has gained enormous traction.  However, its impact seems less as a political philosophy or party on its own, but in the way in which it has taken root in the conservative movement more broadly, most importantly in the Republican party.  One of the candidates causing the most excitement in recent years on the right has been the libertarian Ron Paul, and to some extent his son Rand Paul.

There has always been a strange alignment between the religious right and the economic right.  Libertarianism, of course, doesn't mesh very well with religious conservatism.  This may be why it seemed to have gone under the political radar during the ascendancy and dominance of the religious right over movement conservatism in recent decades.

But society has also been changing.  Social mores have loosened considerably.  While America is still enormously religious, it has also become much more tolerant, to the point of gay marriage - homosexuality openly displayed approvingly in the media - seems an inevitable national right.  Libertarianism's embrace of social tolerance seems a growing fit with the country.

All the while, the conservative movement has only moved further to the right economically.  Even as economic inequality is at historically high levels, and tax rates are historically low, conservatism seems as angry as ever with national spending.  While military budgets have always been criticized by Libertarians, they seem to at least hold some solidarity with the "bare-bones" vision of the Libertarian state - police, military, maybe basic roads, etc. .  While social programs represent the worst sort of "redistributionist tyranny", defense spending - at least in pared-down form -  isn't an ideological anathema.

There are good reasons for why Libertarianism was always kept to the fringe.  Of course, its social liberalism never went over very well in puritanical America.  But its economic vision was also at odds with great American traditions of a healthy, robust government that actively provided services that Americans could actually remember having not existed.  Now, it seems, Americans are quite receptive to the notion that the many government services they used to accept as clearly reasonable and important, are at best wasteful, and at worst a threat to their liberty.

It is difficult to say what caused this change.  It was a slow process.  As social mores shifted, minorities became a larger part of American consciousness - as did their social despair.  The "southern strategy" capitalized on fears of the other, galvanizing resentment.  Manufacturing changed, as the factory model could be replicated overseas for a fraction of hard-won labor pay, American workforce became more fragmented.

Interestingly, I am suspicious it doesn't correlate perfectly with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and right wing radio.  They no doubt gave voice to something lurking in the American soul.  Whether for ratings, or necessity of the format, AM radio was able to fashion a rhetorical narrative, vision of conservatism at war with liberalism, that enraptured millions.  Their language - a mixture of overheated rhetoric, anger, and victimhood - slowly crept into the national conservative dialogue.

Opposition to "Big Government", AM radio's ultimate evil, at the feet of which blame for almost any conceivable social ill could be lain, came to define the Republican party.  No matter that big government often merely meant "things I don't like", it was an easily graspable and repeatable mantra that seemed to boil every possible American anxiety down to a single, eminently attackable bogeyman.

And the more single-minded and ideologically driven people became, having little to debate or argue than how to get rid of this beast, the easier it became to find solace in Libertarianism's utopian vision for what America could look like without big government.  For not content to simply attack government, Libertarianism has actual specific details: get rid of the departments of trasportation, get rid of FEMA, get rid of the EPA, get rid of the department of labor.  Heck - get rid of public schools, libraries, parks - maybe even roads!  With big government being the only real problem, its absence is the perfect solution!

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an influential anarchist and member of French parliament, summed up the libertarian, now conservative impulse:

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
—P.J. Proudhon, "What Is Government?", General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294. 

This seems as good a place as any to take on this extremely unserious and absurd vision of government.

I have no doubt he was a very smart man. Yet of course, otherwise brilliant people often become so blinded by ideological fantasy that their ability to reason can fall apart. My favorite recent example.

So, the first logical fallacy - I'm not sure its proper name - but he is taking things that sometimes happen, or have a chance of happening, and stating that they always happen. Maybe this.

Maybe this. "The government says it wants to do X. X causes something bad to happen. Therefore the government does not want to do X.

Its just also riddled with inaccurate statements. "To be governed is to be fleeced"?

I wouldn't be surprised if we all shared some of the ideas contained within his incredibly broad and meandering rant. Is to be governed to be law-driven? Regulated? Sure.

It is also inevitably to be abused in some form, in that someone, under government somewhere will likely experience any of his listed laments. But that could be said of nearly any system. To be human, as such, is to be tortured, beaten, enslaved, raped, exploited, etc.

The irony of libertarianism to me - and maybe its grand failure/fallacy - is that it fastidiously picks over an area of government's specific failings, and then assumes that because without that area of government the failings would not exist, the absence of that area of government things will be necessarily better.

An example: Public schools are inefficient, etc. (private schools seem to be better). So getting rid of public schools will mean better schools. (see if you can find the glaring problem there!)

These criticisms always contain the concept of "liberty". When government, defined as tyranny, is imagined away, liberty is assumed to take its place. The opposite of tyranny is liberty, right? Yet this ignores the reality that tyranny comes in many forms - threats of violence, exploitative labor conditions, inequality, etc. Government is generally a response to that tyranny. Because it is not always perfect, does not mean that its absence is necessarily better.

For this reason, the existential rhetoric of libertarianism is a sort of continuous, hyperbolic dishonesty. Which has, it seems, completely washed over conservatism as well. There's a quality of cherry picking and relativism to the enterprise - in that likes are not compared to likes, and generalizations are used as first principles. Its all a bit sloppy and unserious.

Making Galt

Over at Crooked Timber John Quiggin's post Not Going Galt has generated a considerable degree of debate.  The thrust of the piece is this: The hero of Ayn Rand's objectivist/libertarian opus Atlas Shrugged eventually decided that he was going to leave behind all the "moochers" in society, who clung to him (and men like him like parasites), and establish a sort of libertarian paradise in the wilderness he would call Galt's Gulch.  The reason that no state like this actually exists on the planet is that it is Utopian.  Structurally, its economic model is incoherent.

   "While our hero would never become disabled or unemployed, it’s bound to happen to some people. That means either budgeting for organised charity or putting up with lots of beggars. Randians might appreciate this daily testimony to their own superiority, but I suspect others would prefer that these losers move elsewhere.

   All things considered, it seems pretty clear that Libertopia would yield its residents a greatly reduced standard of living, compared to what they could get from a government. Of course, the ideal would be a nearby government jurisdiction that would provide the large-scale industry needed for a ready source of consumer goods, a home for contracted-in service providers, support for losers and so on, but would not be able to tax the Libertopians."

I would go further.  While from a strictly economic standpoint, I agree that it would be a farce.  But it would also be silly because of the faulty assumptions it makes about human nature.  Not necessarily because some humans are incapable of living in such a fashion, but that the nature of human development itself could not function in anything like an equal or free manner because such a system of government could not provide a sustainable level of social cooperation required to facilitate even current levels of civilization.  Society must be capable of providing its citizens with not only the opportunity to attain some level of social equity, but the means with which to take advantage of it.  The choice can be there, but the will must also be there to take advantage of it.  And because will is not free, society must establish certain structures that facilitate its use.

I always think this is the central issue between the right and left on economics, that is, the idea of what choice is and its relation to human social behavior. It's basically the free will debate, upon which rests all of our assumptions about the way society ought to be structured. 

So take the idea of choice and advertising.  It is not a gun to someone’s head, forcing you to make the decision to buy a certain product. But it isn’t nothing either. The fact that it works is evidenced by the billions spent on it every year. It functions in very coercive ways, in the sense that it operates in areas of the unconscious that, by definition, people can’t be said to be consenting. There are any number of examples, but as someone with bad neck pain, I always think of the example of acetaminophen: Tylenol costs 2x as much than the generic, which is exactly the same stuff, yet enjoys no million dollar advertising campaign. That’s coercion.

Now, coercion is a pretty negative word, yet I think that it is often quite benign. Just because advertising is coercive, it isn’t necessarily bad. Maybe it’s a net gain for the economy. Maybe people actually feel happier buying Tylenol. That’s a fascinating rabbit hole to go down, but I’ll just say right now that there is an empirical process happening, for good or bad.

Back to “free will”, choice, coercion, etc. There is very good research on human agency, or the ability for people to facilitate their own choices in life. If we were to create a life from scratch, there are optimal and sub-optimal structures we would want that individual to develop within. And our assessment of each is mostly based on how much agency it provides the individual. So things like parenting, culture, nutrition, education, peers, etc. would all be organized around providing the individual maximum efficacy. Another word for this is “freedom”. We want the structures to provide him the maximum development of his ability to facilitate his own freedom.

What liberals (and modern research) says is that citizens have great variation in this self-efficacy because of structures in which they have developed. Thus, in order to maximize freedom, we ought to structure society so that each citizen is guaranteed a minimal amount of freedom, or agency. So for example, an individual who inherits millions, comes from a stable home in a nice neighborhood, goes to school with similar children, learns the important cultural norms, etc. will be – in general – more more free, that is, have much more self-efficacy and agency. This is incredibly predictive. If you look at the numbers the pattern is born out in any number ways.

The counter example is the individual who grows up in poverty, from a broken family in a dysfunctional neighborhood, who goes to school with similar children, who does not learn the norms, etc. will be – in general – less free. He will have much more limited self-efficacy and agency. Again – totally born out in the data.

The standard argument against all of this is essentially absurd: people have free will and make their own choices. Hah! This hypothesis would thus predict that individuals in different circumstances would, on average – being essentially the same biologically (I won’t go into the logic that here begins to feed into racism on the right) – generally end up with similar levels of self-efficacy. Basically, we should see as many millionaire white children in prison as poor blacks. Its preposterous really, but this seems to have never quite been worked out by conservatives/libertarians in general. Like I said previously, this is not rational, evidence-based thinking.

So, in terms of coercion, or the ability of an individual to be free from it, in the sense that he possesses a high degree of consciousness about himself and the world, as Bob Marley put it “emancipated from mental slavery”, individuals all possess it in varying degrees. And it is entirely dependent upon biological and social structure. We all make choices, but upon what do we base those choices? And upon what is that basis itself based? This deterministic conclusion is indeed quite frightening to many. But it isn’t any less true. The facts are facts, no matter how much we wish they might be otherwise.
The real question is what to do about it.

Rand Paul Is Making Sense

Well, not to me of course.  But what he's done is very important.

He isn't saying anything that isn't entirely consistent with decades of conservative rhetoric.  For years all we have heard is how terrible the federal government is.  Regulations are evil.  Taxes are evil.  Progressive legislation and judicial philosophy is evil.

Now, what conservatism used to mean was that government had a tendency to be wrong.  Government wasn't necessarily wrong in principle.  Sure, the real crazies thought that.  But they were sidelined to the fringes of mainstream conservative thought.  Of course we had to have government.  It did important things.  The rhetoric was OK because it was merely hyperbole; it was useful as a bludgeon against the steady leftist march towards more social protections, environmental regulations and higher taxes.  But the intelligent conservatives knew that it could only ever be talk.  Actually following the rhetoric would be politically and practically insane.

But then something happened and the smart conservatives left the room.  Maybe they were drummed out.  Or maybe times changed.  But suddenly the voices of responsibility and reason were no longer there to keep the boat from capsizing.  Instead of being the hyperbolic froth above the ideology, the rhetoric became the ideology.  The tradition of temperance and moderation had faded away and all that was left was the crazy.

So, after the worst financial crisis since the depression forces the government to take drastic measures, bailing out the financial industry, then the auto industry, then pouring nearly as much into a Keynesian stimulus plan for economic recovery and stability - up pops the tea party, with the force of a thousand blustering AM radio jockeys and the FOX broadcasting corporation supplying a steady infusion of rhetorical red-meat.  Yet it is incoherent and preposterous.  Beyond the anger and recrimination, there is little substantive political philosophy.  Conspiracy theories are flung out left and right, and in the profound ideological vacuum, each seems as acceptable as the next.  The list is breathtakingly long: Birthers, FEMA camps, NAFTA superhighway, Socialism, Death Panels, Federal Reserve, Acorn, Secret Muslim, etc.  Each seems as plausible as the next because the ignorance at the bottom and and crazy at the top is so profound.  Medicare is something to be protected from the government.

And Rand Paul gets elected, claiming and claimed as the Tea party's first big success.

Sure, he wasn't the first nutter.  His father made sure of that.  But when Ron Paul talked about returning to the gold standard, pulling out of the UN or shutting down most Federal Agencies people mainly rolled their eyes.  I mean really, who the heck wants to try and understand fiscal and monetary policy?  But that was before.

Now people are really listening.  They want to find out what they really believe.  And by golly, he's telling them!  It turns out that if government is evil, and taxes are evil, and regulations are evil, then a lot of what we've been doing for the past century is really, well... evil.  It turns out that we can't make people pay taxes for the government to regulate private businesses anymore - whether they put rotten meat in hotdogs, pay their workers $3 an hour, dump sewage into the creek, or deny minorities employment.  I suppose you could add any number of other things to the list - things that we as a nation have fought very contentiously over for decades, but that now seem as American as apple pie.

These are Rand Paul's principles.  They are libertarian principles.  And they are now the principles of the modern conservative movement.

The nice thing about a democracy is that we get to elect our leaders based on what they tell us.  The problem has been that Republicans have been taking advantage of the fact that the public hasn't understood the difference between the rhetoric and the policies their party has supported - if often grudgingly - for the past century.  The trick was simple: just say one thing and do another.  One wonders if they were able to do this because their candidates were either ignorant of simple political philosophy or just dishonest.

Yet somehow this trick just didn't work so well anymore and for whatever reason they elected a man who wasn't afraid to make sense of what they have been saying.  Not only that, but he actually believes it.

So I say, "Good for you Rand Paul!"  An honest Republican for once.  "Don't let those handlers keep you down.  Preach it, brother!"  He's like a big bullshit magnet.  I just hope he can get as many of the other tea partiers to sign on with his brilliant plans so we can watch as many of them as possible get flushed down the drain when the public is finally able to see what enormous a-holes they all are.

Free Agency and Government Intervention

In a recent NY Times column, Robert Frank argues for progressive taxation:

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that we grant the libertarian premise that private pay systems provide the best ethical template for society’s income distribution. As closer scrutiny of that premise will make clear, the libertarian denunciation of income transfers fails on its own terms. 

He then goes on to make the case that private companies are actually highly redistributive in their pay structure, as higher productivity rarely translates into a proportionate increase in pay.  Whether this is true or not, the exercise seems largely irrelevant.

While I concede that as a practical matter, taking libertarians/conservatives on their own terms might be a wise strategy in the short term, it doesn't get us to what I think is the next fundamental conceptual transformation that society must undergo.

What is being taken on their terms is this: "an ideal world would be one in which well informed people could exchange freely with one another with no significant market frictions".  The key phrase here is "well-informed people", and it needs a bit of unpacking.  For there to be an equal "playing field", in which individuals perform transactions in which exchanges can be made freely, the individuals must have similar levels of "human capital".  This entails not just comparable levels of objective knowledge, but also everything else that goes into self-efficacy.  They must have similar cognitive and communication skills.  They must have knowledge of self and emotional and behavioral awareness.  In short, being "well informed" is everything that goes into being a productive citizen.

Our biggest problem in society today is that we don't grasp how important this understanding of human development really is.  We have a somewhat schizophrenic, incoherent view of humanity, in which on the one hand we value things like culture, parenting, education, and other social institutions, yet on the other we treat individuals as if they all possess equal levels of self-efficacy and free agency.  We assume that each individual determines his own choices - whether that is to create a run business or rob a liquor store.  We acknowledge that children do not have this sort of free agency, but when they reach adulthood, it is magically acquired. 

I say magically because there is no evidence for anything like free agency.  It is something we intuitively "know" exists, but all evidence points towards it being an illusion concocted by our conscious mind.  A quick debunking can be done, however.  If all adults have equal levels of free agency, we ought to see a random distribution of ability across all socioeconomic demographics.  Just as say, 20-20 vision, the ability to walk upright, or speak language is distributed evenly across groups, so to would behaviors that are purported to arise from man's free agency. 

Of course they do not.  In fact, one can predict life outcomes before people are even born, simply based on their mother's environment.  Things like neighborhood, environmental toxicity, parental education level, income, and others are very predictive of life success.  A child born in a ghetto is simply much more likely to have lower levels of self-efficacy, or agency than one born in a wealthy suburb. 

Libertarians and conservatives deny this reality.  Some might claim they accept it, but claim that there is nothing to be done - that government intervention won't help.  But this is simply not true, both for those who are currently experiencing the effects of structural disadvantage, as well as young children who could be thriving with adequate government intervention at home and at school.  Further, if we accept that free agency is a myth, then we accept that humans are socially determined.  This has consequences not only for our treatment of the less fortunate, but for the fortunate.  Wealthy people, to the extent that they benefit from social structural inequalities, have no right to their wealth.

Now, deciding what to do about all of this as a practical matter is quite difficult.  But before we can even begin that project, we must as a society come to terms with the transformative notion that free agency is a myth, and that true freedom lies in accepting our limitations as conscious beings.

Information and Society

Matt Yglesias ponders the regulation of salty foods:

Clearly, the goal here is to get people to eat less salt. And it’s true that once we accept that concern for public health is a legitimate public concern we are opening the door in principle to a lot of government activity. On the other hand, even though a lot of people have libertarian instincts about novel paternalistic measures relatively few people have a consistent view in the other direction. Government policy encourages vaccinations against infectious diseases and you never see anyone agitating for the right of poor people to use SNAP to buy tax-free cigarettes.

This is about information. The strong libertarian believes that if it is possible for one to have the knowledge necessary to make a decision, they must be held accountable for the decision. So for instance, it is obvious that smoking crack is bad for you. If you do it, you have only yourself to blame. Basically, information is liberty.

The problem non-libertarians generally have isn’t that we don’t believe in liberty – it’s that we are more skeptical that information is so free. We see evidence of people on a daily basis making decisions that, were they to have had the information, they would not have otherwise. There is a large amount of evidence for this.
This explains why the non-libertarian is skeptical of business: to a large degree, business often profits from an imbalance in information. The whole Goldman Sacks fiasco is predicated on just this sort of dynamic. On a small scale, you can see this happen when the auto mechanic charges too much for a service because the customer doesn’t understand the procedure or has no knowledge of cheaper service elsewhere.

Libertarians are generally thought of as utopians because there is obviously not a perfect distribution of information – nor will there ever be.

Now, taking things to the next level, we ought to ask, “What is information?”. Because when one makes a decision, they are not only making a rational decision, but also acting from countless hidden, unconscious impulses. The advertising industry is predicated on this fundamental truth about human nature. Businesses hire advertisers not only to selectively provide specific information to consumers, but to actively craft messages that exploit the human unconscious. The fact that Tylenol exists is a testament to this fact: despite the generic being the exact same product, and sitting right beside Tylenol in the pharmacy aisle, Tylenol is a very profitable brand.

So the libertarian not only must deal with citizens not having access to equal levels of literal information, but unconscious and emotional information as well. The two together are what social scientists refer to as “human capital”.

Both of these together conspire to create a world in which the libertarian assumption of liberty through information really amounts to a world in which liberty is very unequally distributed. The coherent intellectual and moral response to this is to try and structure society in a way that maximizes information. Intellectually dishonest libertarians will peddle the claim that this social structure is one in which government is highly limited and markets are thus free.

But the obvious answer is that not only will information become even more stratified, but so too will the means of action. Wealth and information are power. Those who have more will always have an advantage. As we have seen throughout history, if left unchecked power will accrete. Liberty is eroded. The non-libertarian’s response is thus to strategically erect governmental bulwarks against this natural process.

Of course, the opposite of the libertarian, the communist, will end up doing much the same thing. Although instead of power accumulating among business oligarchs it accumulates in the state. Interestingly, both ideologies claim to be on “the side of liberty”. Yet if liberty is both information and the ability – conscious or otherwise – to act on information, neither system provides it. In fact, both actively destroy it.  The answer then, which  most responsible democracies have adopted, is a mixture of both market freedom and government regulation.  The question is not whether regulation or markets are bad, but how you do them.

The Small Government Utopia

 Jon Chait ponders why conservatives seem consistently unreflective.  They are much less likely to trust facts that don't come from conservative sources.  He points to Julian Sanchez who calls it:

"epistemic closure" -- an intellectual world in which the only trustworthy sources of information are those within your movement.

Chait argues that they are considerably less critical than progressives.

Liberalism is not really an ideology in anything like the sense that conservatism is. Conservatism is an ideology organized around the belief that big government inherently destroys freedom. Contemporary liberalism is the ideology of people who don't share that conviction, though it lacks any strong a priori beliefs to hold it together.....Liberals are not ideologically pro-government in anything like the sense that conservatives are ideologically anti-government -- conservatives view shrinking government as an end in and of itself, while liberals would view expanding government a success only to the extent that doing so furthers some other real-world benefit. I think it's the fundamental distinction between the two parties, and it explains all kinds of asymmetrical behavior -- a loose coalition versus a coherent ideological movement.

But how did we get here?  The way I see it, the right is basically where the left was when Communism was still taken seriously.  That is, the entire movement has swung deeply into the radical end of the spectrum.   But now that Communism was actually implemented in numerous countries around the globe, with disastrous results, the left has been forced to be much more discriminating.  It is no longer possible to dogmatically claim that all business is evil.

Yet this is what the right now does almost to a person.  They consistently claim that "all government* is evil.  They talk about "tyranny" and the "end of liberty", as if any minute now we'll be in Stalinist Russia.  But this is a blatant misreading of history.  In the early 20th century, this fear would have been more plausible, as many countries indeed were "on the road to serfdom", as Hayek put it. 

But in the ensuing decades, socialism was implemented with very different outcomes.  In countries with a weaker democratic base and large scale inequality, Marxism was used as a blunt tool to overthrow the existing paradigm, installing Communism as a hopeful guarantor of social justice.  Meanwhile in countries where power was much more diffuse, and democratic institutions were strong, Marxism simply meant a gradual buffering of enterprise.

When progressives in the early 20th century were promoting communism, they were doing so in the face of a much more abusive and tyrannical capitalism.  It was therefore much easier to fall into dogmatic hyperbole, and at that point communism seemed a benign alternative to a capitalism that seemed irrevocably corrupt.  But today's progressive sees capitalism and communism much differently.  It has witnessed both the undeniable brutality and practical inviability of communism, and the ability of a strong social democracy to soften the edges of capitalism's social and environmental failings.

Modern conservatives have drawn different historical lessons.  They certainly have always understood the dangers of communism.  But they obviously never adequately processed the lessons of untrammeled capitalism.  This sort of historical amnesia is difficult to counter, as so many generations have no passed since we've had the sort of weak federal government they argue for.  And internationally, all modern, successful and wealthy nations are the sort of social democracies they despise.  If one were find a country with an economic system similar to what they claim to want, it would likely be a war-torn failure.  Granted, these countries would not have had the sort of founding stability that might give economic libertarianism a fighting chance.  But the fact that such a system is not taken seriously by any otherwise functioning democracies seems evidence that reasonable people simply prefer a minimum level of social democracy.

And so American conservatism continues to live on in a sort of Utopian vacuum, in which premises are based on a dogmatic vision of a history that is always just around the corner.  Failures of capitalism, such as the recent economic collapse, are instead viewed as the result of government intrusion.  And because no clear evidence of what a modern state would really look like under their version of capitalism exists, straw men can be created to fit seemingly any scenario.

Where Are the Real Libertarians?

I could spend all day listening to people try to argue against things like mass transit and infrastructure spending.


The only thing missing ever missing from the discussion is Tina Turner in leather.


Where are the real Libertarians?!!!! I’m serious. I want to see some spaced-out shit for real. Can’t we give them a piece of land some where and watch. It could be like… what was that show called… the XFL or something? Maybe some Hollywood seed money could get them started. We’d have to set up a perimeter of course, for when the bombs start going off. It’d be like the Apprentice – meets Big Brother (Little Brother?) – meets Survivor – meets – well, I was going to say Rock of Love just for the douche factor but you know it would be a total sausage-fest (Galt-fest?).

Who Else Will Do It?

My response to the main appeal of libertarianism - that government is just consistently inefficient, if not in a sense corrupt, is the same response that I think most people have: how else would the same job get done?

If the answer is that it could be done by the private market, I have no problem with that, and actually prefer it. But the problem is that so often times it can't be done by the private market. I mean, who else if not the EPA is going to try and protect the environment? To the extent that businesses are able to police themselves out of a moral sense, or even just market pressures to behave cleanly, that's great.

But of course there will always be businesses don't act responsibly, and in fact have a profit incentive not to.

What is more, as the environment is a common, there ought to be democratic input as to what level of damage we allow it to endure. In this way, Libertarianism ends up being opposed to the common freedom. Just as would the idea that there should be no police protecting us at night or firefighters putting out our neighbor's fires.

Frankly, I find libertarian philosophy incoherent: as soon as you concede that government should play some role, then very quickly you are no longer a libertarian but a democratic socialist.  The only question has become not whether government, but how much?  And unfortunately, this is not an argument you generally get on policy from libertarians or conservatives.  Instead, you get all sorts of appeals to broader philosophical principles, which in the end amount to little more than anarchy.

Libertariopia

Are we really not going to pass health care?  Have that many people really bought into the private-market-as-savior mythology?

Makes me think it might take a reverse starve the beast to get people to wake up: wait until the government is so broke we end up with a Libertariopia.  Its slowly happening in CA, where the state is forcing cuts in social spending.  Class sizes are hitting forty now.  Maybe once they get to 50 we'll be rid of public education once and for all.  I mean, what's the point of educating the poor if they're just going to end up in the fields anyway?

I mean, after we've built our electric border fence and conducted mass immigration raids.

Determinism and Social Justice

Julian Sanchez had a great post on free will on his on his blog last year, in which he generally argues from a compatibilist perspective, while making the point that referring to free will as an "illusion" misses the point:

But to call these things an “illusion of free will” just seems like a mistake.  It is as if someone had told me for the first time about subatomic theory, and I mused that I nevertheless have this illusion of a solid desk chair, when after all, it is really these clouds of quarks and whatnot. And this would be silly: The parameters of “solid” and “desk chair” are given by ordinary life, and within those bounds the chair is exactly as solid as it ever was.

I think this is right.  How could an illusion be an illusion?  But I think we generally have a realistic believe that something like free will exists, and then make decisions as if it does, which we would not have made otherwise.  This is not the case with the "illusion" of solid objects.  Whether or not I understand the molecular forces at wok in my apple has no bearing on whether or not I eat it.  Although I am reminded of the story of the woman who, upon witnessing for the first time the bacteria inhabiting her mouth via an early microscope, promptly had her teeth removed.

What seems important to me to emphasize is the disconnect from how we approach retribution emotionally, and how we should instead understand it from a utilitarian perspective.

I think the problem is in degrees.  An angry man outside an execution calling for blood highlights the broad spectrum of human emotional response to "justice".  Should the convict be killed (or possibly tortured - you could argue our current prison system is quite tortuous), or should he be locked away, yet with compassion?  Or in the case of positive behaviors, if the goals are ostensibly the same (appealing to him and others), how many riches should the well-behaved, successful man be allowed?

I think these questions go to the core of the schism between modern liberalism & conservatism.  Most conservatives will emphasize the man's role in determining his life, "Who cares how bad his childhood was?!!!"  While liberals will emphasize the role of society, "Look at the demographic disparities in life success!!!"

There is still a basic human desire for justice.  When we stub our toe on a misplaced chair we will still want to kick it.  But was it responsible, or whomever moved it?  Certainly not to the degree that we feel momentarily driven to punish it.  We must chasten our responses in order to find a justice that promotes both social prosperity and fairness.  If most people cannot simply "choose" to be rich and successful, how fair is it to reward those who do, even as a sort of "carrot" for the rest of us to emulate similar - assumedly dignified -  behavior?.  Likewise if most of us cannot simply "choose" to rape, murder, cheat or steal, how fair is it to punish those who do, even as a "stick" for the rest of us to fear.

So as a matter of degree, we can both be responsible for our actions, and ultimately not responsible.  We can live in the micro-, yet structure law and order around the macro-.  We can create prisons that are uncomfortable enough that no one should ever want to be sent to one, but are not torturous hells.  And we can progressively tax individuals who have demonstrated good behaviors so that they enjoy a comfortable enough lifestyle that should entice us all to be our best, yet not so much that while there are common goods that need to be provided for by a government.