Category: Liberty – Libertarianism – Rights

The Supreme Court: Our Last, Best Hope for a Semblance of Liberty

In the second postscript to this post I reaffirm my conviction that government “could not have done as well as private citizens and business owners, had they been allowed to keep their tax dollars and use them to prepare for and recover from Katrina.” I then list several related posts. All of which, if read by anyone from Center to Left, would draw a retort along these lines: “How is a bunch of individuals going to deal with something as massive as a natural disaster. Only government can do things like that, and do them efficiently.” Or “There are just some things that people can’t be trusted to do for themselves.”

It’s precisely that kind of thinking which has brought us to where we are today: in the grip of the regulatory-welfare state, which has made us immensely less prosperous than we could be. Free-market capitalism, which is how individuals cooperatively make wise and fruitful decisions — when they are allowed to do so — has been brought to heel by legislators, executives, judges, and regulators.

A central rationale for the regulatory-welfare state, of course, is the notion that government should do things people can’t be “trusted” to do for themselves. There is the paternalistic assumption that someone else knows better than you how you should run your life. Paternalists are blind to the opportunity cost of paternalism, which is that when someone else makes your decisions for you, you are less able and less likely to make good decisions for yourself.

The paternalistic assumption, in other words, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When government makes certain decisions for you (e.g., by providing “free” education and a sort of retirement program) and then charges you for the privilege, you are in a double bind. You are herded toward or forced into certain government programs, which may fall far short of meeting your needs. But because of the taxes and fees you pay to support those government programs, you are left with less money. Thus you may be unable to afford the better alternatives provided by markets — where markets are allowed to provide alternatives, at all.

Paternalism on the part of the central government supposedly is curbed by the enumeration of Congress’s powers in the U.S. Constitution, which enumeration has long since become an irrelevancy. In any event, when it comes to paternalism, State and local governments are always ready to pick up any slack left by the central government. The end of Lochner-era substantive due process (defended quite nicely, here) effectively unshackled State and local governments, which can now justify almost anything as a “compelling governmental interest.” And, if they can’t, the U.S. Supreme Court can continue to manufacture other excuses for paternalism, as majorities of its members did this year in Raich and Kelo.

So, where does it all end? Unless the U.S. Supreme Court is turned around fairly quickly, I think it ends in the continued expansion of state control of what should be private conduct; for example:

  • Laws against certain “hateful” forms of expression.
  • Detailed regulation of Internet content, under the rubric of McCain-Feingold and the Commerce Clause.
  • More and more bans on the use of tobacco in so-called public places, and even in private clubs and homes.
  • Further reliance on regulation rather than property rights and free markets to control products and activities that might affect the environment.
  • Further interference with the actions of institutions that are private and voluntary (e.g., a holding that the Catholic Church’s impending ban on the ordination of gay priests violates “equal protection”).
  • More government interventions that undermine the shreds of our barely civil and self-regulating society (e.g., approval of involuntary euthanasia, requiring employers to put “partners” on a par with heterosexual spouses).
  • The creation of ever more massive bureaucracies to deal with “problems” that the central government (at least) shouldn’t be involved in (e.g., the creation of a “disaster czar”).

I could pile it on, as could many of you. But the drift is obvious. God save the U.S. Supreme Court, for it may be our last line of defense against total statism.

Common Ground for Conservatives and Libertarians?

I am interested here in addressing Burkean conservatives — as opposed to yahoos, opportunistic Republicans, neoconservatives, protectionists, and isolationists, for example. Wikipedia says this about Burkean conservatism:

Edmund Burke [link added: ED] developed his ideas in reaction to the Enlightenment, and the idea of a society guided by abstract “Reason.” . . .

Some men, argued Burke, have more reason than others, and thus some men will make worse governments if they rely upon reason than others. To Burke, the proper formulation of government came not from abstractions such as “Reason,” but from time-honoured development of the state and of other important societal institutions such as the family and the Church. . . .

Burke argued that tradition is a much sounder foundation than “reason”. The conservative paradigm he established emphasises the futility of attempting to ground human society based on pure abstractions (such as “reason,” “equality,” or, more recently, “diversity”), and the necessity of humility in the face of the unknowable. Existing institutions have virtues that cannot be fully grasped by any single person or interest group or, in Burke’s view, even any single generation. . . .

Tradition draws on the wisdom of many generations and the tests of time, while “reason” may be a mask for the preferences of one man, and at best represents only the untested wisdom of one generation. In the conservative view, an attempt to modify the complex web of human interactions that form human society for the sake of some doctrine or theory runs the risk of running afoul of the iron law of unintended consequences. Burke advocates vigilance against the possibility of moral hazards. For Burkean conservatives, human society is something rooted and organic; to try to prune and shape it according to the plans of an ideologue is to invite unforeseen disaster.

Burkean conservatives are inherently skeptical of plans to re-model human society after an ideological model. They emphasise ‘continuity with tradition, which does [not] exclude changes within the framework of that tradition. They insist that political change should come about through legitimate political process, and oppose interference with that process, including extra-constitutional reactionary changes. So long as rule of law is upheld, and so long as change is effected gradually and constitutionally rather than [through] revolution, they are, in theory, content. Burkean conservatism is in principle neither revolutionary nor counter-revolutionary.

Now, if this seems familiar to libertarians, it should. Friedrich Hayek takes much the same tack in many of his writings. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), Hayek says:

If it is fashionable today to minimize the importance of the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place, this is closely connected with the smaller importance which is now attached to change as such. Indeed, there are few points on which the assumptions made (usually only implicitly) by the “planners” differ from those of their opponents as much as with regard to the significance and frequency of changes which will make substantial alterations of production plans necessary. Of course, if detailed economic plans could be laid down for fairly long periods in advance and then closely adhered to, so that no further economic decisions of importance would be required, the task of drawing up a comprehensive plan governing all economic activity would be much less formidable. . . .

If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. . . .

The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.

Hayek sums it up in The Constitution of Liberty (1960):

[B]efore we can try to remould society intelligently, we must understand its functioning; we must realise that, even when we believe that we understand it, we may be mistaken. What we must learn to understand is that human civilisation has a life of its own, that all our efforts to improve things must operate within a working whole which we cannot entirely control, and the operation of whose forces we can hope merely to facilitate and assist so far as we can understand them. [Chapter 4, pp. 69-70]

In a postcript to The Constitution of Liberty (“Why I Am Not a Conservative“), Hayek tries to distinguish his brand of liberalism (that is, classical liberalism or what is now minimal-state libertarianism) from conservatism:

This difference between liberalism and conservatism must not be obscured by the fact that in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions. To the liberal they are valuable not mainly because they are long established or because they are American but because they correspond to the ideals which he cherishes. . . .

In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others. The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people – he is not an egalitarian – bet he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are. . . .

Closely connected with this is the usual attitude of the conservative to democracy. I have made it clear earlier that I do not regard majority rule as an end but merely as a means, or perhaps even as the least evil of those forms of government from which we have to choose. But I believe that the conservatives deceive themselves when they blame the evils of our time on democracy. The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power. . . . The powers which modern democracy possesses would be even more intolerable in the hands of some small elite.

Admittedly, it was only when power came into the hands of the majority that further limitations of the power of government was thought unnecessary. In this sense democracy and unlimited government are connected. But it is not democracy but unlimited government that is objectionable, and I do not see why the people should not learn to limit the scope of majority rule as well as that of any other form of government. At any rate, the advantages of democracy as a method of peaceful change and of political education seem to be so great compared with those of any other system that I can have no sympathy with the antidemocratic strain of conservatism. It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem.

I must point out that Hayek’s disparagement of conservatism is not aimed at Burkean conservatism. One account of Hayek’s life and thought explains that his criticism of conservatism

was aimed primarily at the European-style conservatism, which has often opposed capitalism as a threat to social stability and traditional values. Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal, but noted that in the United States it had become almost impossible to use “liberal” in the older sense that he gave to the term. In the U.S., Hayek is usually described as a “libertarian“, but the denomination that he preferred was “Old Whig” (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke).

Burkean conservatism, contra other forms of conservatism, doesn’t insist on the political dominance of a certain class. It insists on a rule of law that doesn’t allow the state to impose change on society but, rather, allows change to come from within society. (A quaint notion that held sway in the United States until the advent of the New Deal.)

Having apologized for Hayek’s position on conservatism, I must object to Hayek’s defense of democracy, which is now quaint. Hayek was writing 45 years ago, when it still seemed possible that we might return to the limited government of the written Constitution. But the forces of democracy-for-its-own-sake have since prevailed. Democracy and unlimited government are now bound together so tightly that Hayek’s fine distinction between the two is no longer valid, if ever it was. With unlimited government now in the saddle, the affairs of Americans are run by inferior men and women who are able — through demagoguery, bread, and circuses — to capture the allegiance of the inferior masses.

The limited government designed by the Framers was conservative, in a Burkean way. It was meant to enable superior persons to thrive — for the benefit of all — not through political dominance so much as through social and economic leadership. That design has long since given way, through extra-constitutional legislation and adjudication, to unlimited government, which disables superiority — to the detriment of all.

Is there not now a viable conservative movement in the United States? How else could Republicans have won seven of the last ten presidential elections and prevailed in the last six congressional elections? The problem is that Republicanism, which was more or less Burkean until the middle of the 20th century, sold its soul when it chose Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon as its standard-bearers in 1952. From that point on, the GOP began to attract more than its share of yahoos, other cranks, and opportunists.

Barry Goldwater, the penultimate major politician of Burkean mien, lost resoundingly in the presidential election of 1964. And it has been downhill ever since. Nixon, an opportunist of the first rank, courted yahoos. Ronald Reagan, the last major politician of Burkean mien, was hampered by a Democrat-controlled Congress and his big-tent view of Republicanism. About Bush 41 and Bush 43, perhaps the best thing one can say is that they are not Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, or John Kerry.

The GOP is no longer reliably Burkean, though it certainly must attract far more Burkeans than the Democrat Party. The question is whether there are still enough Burkean conservatives (of any party) to constitute a viable political movement, one which might be influential if allied with those of us who choose to identify ourselves by other term, such as free-market capitalist or minarchist (minimal-state, Hayekian libertarian). As Austin Bramwell argues at The American Conservative,

one would think that [Russell] Kirk, Hayek, and others (including eccentric outsiders such as R.J. Rushdoony, L. Brent Bozell, and Ayn Rand) had left behind a commanding legacy. One would expect that, like Burke, they had articulated ideas so powerful that they can only be contended with, not refuted. . . .

Has conservatism achieved this exalted stature? If we are honest, we must answer no.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, conservatives sought not just to refute modern liberalism but to obliterate it. . . . Each conservative writer claimed to have uncovered the Holy Grail—the argument or principle that would expose the errors of liberalism (and communism, socialism, feminism, etc.) once and for all. . . .

Yet the Holy Grail has not been found. One can still find lapel-grabbing right-wingers who will argue late into the night that their favorite thinker has figured everything out for all time. (My personal favorite: certain libertarians believe that Alan Gewirth, a now forgotten philosopher of the 1970s, showed how the rightness of limited government derives ultimately from Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.) This is not the place to take up the argument with them. I only wish to observe, as an empirical matter, that no one person’s ideas actually define American conservatism. If English conservatism is nothing other than Burkeanism, American conservatism is not Rothbardianism, Randianism, Jaffaism, or Hayekianism.

But Bramwell goes on to say that

[o]n the libertarian side, a small group of academics affiliated with the journal Critical Review [link added: ED] is quietly working a revolution. They forthrightly acknowledge that neither free-market economics nor moral philosophy have produced a comprehensive argument for libertarianism. Nonetheless, they argue, limited government is still preferable because it mitigates the problem of public ignorance.

The majority of voters in a mass democracy, they reason, are stunningly ignorant of even the most basic political information. Moreover, to the extent that their voting behavior can be rationalized, they employ heuristics of the most obtuse sort: “Candidate X cares about people like me.” As for the tiny but relatively well-informed elite, they too have limited intellectual resources for understanding current politics. Hence, they rely on naïve heuristics such as “Republicans are greedy, religious fanatics” or “liberals are hypocrites who only care about making themselves feel better.”

The reliance on such heuristics can perhaps be explained in terms of rational economic decision-making—in that there is not enough time in the day to bother to learn much about politics—but, more deeply, in terms of evolutionary psychology. The human mind is too primitive to understand the complexities of modern politics. Democratic politics thus present a choice between the ideological rigidity of the elites and the sheer incompetence of the masses. We can escape this predicament only by reducing the role of government in our lives.

In sum, if Austin Bramwell is a harbinger, the American conservative movement — the thoughtful branch of that movement, at least — is moving toward its natural ally: minarchist libertarianism. For, as I have tried to show here, Burkean conservatism and minarchism amount to the same thing. Would a working alliance of Burkeans and minarchists constitute an influential critical mass? That remains to be seen, but it’s a possibility to be encouraged.

"The Private Sector Isn’t Perfect"

Stephen Bainbridge (ProfessorBainbridge.com) actually says that in this post. Well, “So what?” you may say: No system for organizing human activity is perfect, except in such dream-worlds as anarcho-capitalism (where market forces defeat bullies by the sheer force of theory), Objectivism (which talks a good game about reality but seems unable to grasp it), and socialism (which promises free lunches and destroys incentives).

What Bainbridge goes on to say is almost right, however:

. . . but we’ve known since Adam Smith that economic incentives work. . . .

We also know that the modern public corporation is the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever seen.[*] In The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge demonstrate that the corporation is “the basis of the prosperity of the West and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world.”

The capital, product, and labor markets give corporate managers directors incentives to produce goods and services efficiently. What defenders of government regulation often overlook is that regulators are also actors with their own self-interested motivations. The trouble is that the incentives to which regulators and legislators respond are often contrary to the public interest. The incentives of legislators and regulators are driven by rent-seeking and interest group politics, which have no necessary correlation to corporate profit-maximization. Accordingly, government preparation for and response to disasters is likely to be driven by the political concerns of the governmental actors rather than the public good.

In sum, it may be time to try Adam Smith’s invisible hand by outsourcing disaster relief.

But the best way to outsource disaster relief isn’t to have government use our tax dollars to hire private disaster-relief specialists. No, the best way to “outsource” disaster relief is this:

  • Leave tax dollars in the hands of the private sector.
  • Tell the private sector that when it comes to disasters it’s your responsibility to plan prudently — and to bear the consequences of your planning.
  • Get government out of the insurance business and let the private sector respond (without restraint) to consumers’ demands for disaster insurance.

The best way to ensure that people make prudent decisions is to let them knowing that they’re responsible for themselves, require them to “play” with their own money, and allow them to spend their money where they think it will do them the most good.

Though it’s meant to bash the Bush administration, this headline (from Slate) captures the essence of the problem:

$41 Billion, and Not a Penny of Foresight
Why is the New Orleans recovery going so badly? Just look at the DHS budget.

As if government could ever take taxpayers’ money away from them and then spend it better than taxpayers could.** So Bush spends the money on the war (according to the Bush-bashers). Well, Clinton would have spent the money on his pet projects. That’s what happens when politicians get into your wallet. They decide what’s most important to you.

The private sector (i.e., free-market capitalism) is less perfect than everything, except all of the alternatives to it.

P.S. Ignoramuses and die-hard statists will say that free-market capitalism leaves everyone on his or her own. (Oh, how I hate the awkwardness that results from gender-correct writing.) In fact, free-market capitalism is the best vehicle for large-scale cooperation that has ever emerged from human endeavor. Free-market capitalism, among many other things, allows for insurance against risk and provides the wherewithal to combat the elements (e.g., plywood for boarding up windows, concrete for deep footings). What it doesn’t do is offer the illusion that “someone else” will protect you from all harm and immediately make you whole when you come to harm.

Related post: Katrina’s Aftermath: Who’s to Blame?
__________
* Apologists for the state like to say that public corporations couldn’t exist without the state’s blessing. Balderdash! Insurance markets would do the job of protecting shareholders quite nicely, thank you.

** I argue in “But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?” that government should take taxpayers’ money in order to provide for criminal justice and national defense. But that’s for the prudential reason suggested by the title of the post, not because government can necessarily provide such services more efficiently than free-market capitalism.

Science, Evolution, Religion, and Liberty

Excerpts of a long post at Liberty Corner II:

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626),
British philosopher, essayist, statesman.
The Advancement of Learning, bk. 1, ch. 5, sct. 8 (1605).
(Source: Bartleby.com)

Science begins with doubts — questions about the workings of the world around us — and moves bit by bit toward greater certainty, without ever reaching complete certainty. Philosophy and religion begin with certainties — a priori explanations about the workings of the world — and end in doubts because the world cannot be explained by pure faith or pure reason. But philosophy and religion can tell us how to live life morally, whereas science can only help us live life more comfortably, if that is what we wish to do.

Scientists — when they are being scientists — begin with questions (doubts), which lead them to make observations, and from those observations they derive theories about the workings of the universe or some aspect of it. Those theories can then be tested to see if they have predictive power, and revised when they are found wanting, that is, when new observations (facts) cast doubt on their validity. Scientific facts may sometimes be beyond doubt (e.g., the temperature at which water freezes under specified conditions), but scientific theories — which are generalizations from facts — are never beyond doubt. Or they never should be. . . .

Einstein stands as a paragon among scientists: unwilling to run with the herd, unwilling to “follow any fad or popular direction,” as Smolin puts it elsewhere in the essay quoted above. Now we seem to have herds of so-called scientists who cling to certain theories because those theories are popular and dominant. They may be great scientists — or hacks — who have come to a certain worldview and are loathe to abandon it, or they may be followers of renowned scientists who lack the imagination to see alternative explanations of phenomena. Whatever the case, a “scientist” who insists on the truth of his worldview has abandoned science for something that might as well be called religion or philosophy.

In the case of global warming, we’ve seen the herd instinct at work for many years. It has become an article of faith among academic and government scientists not only that global warming is due mainly to human activity but also that it is “bad.” . . .

Now we come to evolution. I have written elsewhere about the tendency of evolutionary biologists (and their hangers-on at places like The Panda’s Thumb) to act like priests of a secular religion. . . .

[T]he scientific consensus seems to be that any scientist who even entertains intelligent design (ID) as a supplementary explanation of the development of life forms has somehow become a non-scientist. . . .

I think it really boils down to this: Anti-ID scientists cannot prove that ID is unscientific; pro-ID scientists cannot prove that ID is anything more than a convenient explantion for currently unexplained phenomena. It’s the scientific (or non-scientific) version of a Mexican standoff. . . .

It is impossible to eliminate any explanation of the origin of life or the development of life forms, as long as that explanation doesn’t conflict with facts. Similarly, it is impossible to eliminate any explanation of the origin of the universe, as long as that explanation doesn’t conflict with facts. Staunch evolutionists — those who resist Creationism, intelligent design, or any other unfalsifiable or unfalsified explanation for the origin of the universe, the origin of life, or the development of life forms — are merely invoking their preferred worldview — not facts.

The best that science can do, under any foreseeable circumstances, is to investigate how life developed from the point in the known history of the universe at which there is evidence of life. But many (perhaps most) evolutionists and their hangers-on aren’t content to pursue that scientific agenda. . . .

Scientific elites and their hangers-on, like paternalists of all kinds, would like to tell us how to live our lives — for our own good, of course — because they think they have the answers, or can find them. (They would be benign technocrats, of course, unlike their counterparts in the old USSR.) And when they are thwarted, they get in a snit and issue manifestos.

But, as I said at the outset, science isn’t about how to live morally, it’s about how to live life more comfortably, if that is what we wish to do. To know how to live life morally we must turn to a philosophy that promotes liberty, and we must not reject the moral code of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which one finds much support for liberty.

I’m very much for science, properly understood, which is the increase of knowledge. I’m very much against the misuse of science by scientists (and others) who invoke it to advance an extra-scientific agenda. Science, properly done, begins with doubts and ends in certainties, but those certainties extend only to the realm of observable, documented facts. Science has no claim to superiority over philosophy or religion in the extra-factual realm of morality.

I close by paraphrasing my son’s comment about my post on “Religion and Liberty“:

The basis of liberty is extra-scientific; thus the need for non-scientific moral institutions.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POST.

Science, Evolution, Religion, and Liberty

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626),
British philosopher, essayist, statesman.
The Advancement of Learning, bk. 1, ch. 5, sct. 8 (1605).
(Source: Bartleby.com)

Science begins with doubts — questions about the workings of the world around us — and moves bit by bit toward greater certainty, without ever reaching complete certainty. Philosophy and religion begin with certainties — a priori explanations about the workings of the world — and end in doubts because the world cannot be explained by pure faith or pure reason. But philosophy and religion can tell us how to live life morally, whereas science can only help us live life more comfortably, if that is what we wish to do.

Scientists — when they are being scientists — begin with questions (doubts), which lead them to make observations, and from those observations they derive theories about the workings of the universe or some aspect of it. Those theories can then be tested to see if they have predictive power, and revised when they are found wanting, that is, when new observations (facts) cast doubt on their validity. Scientific facts may sometimes be beyond doubt (e.g., the temperature at which water freezes under specified conditions), but scientific theories — which are generalizations from facts — are never beyond doubt. Or they never should be.

Consider Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest scientist who has yet lived. According to physicist Lee Smolin,

[a]lthough Einstein was . . . the discoverer of quantum phenomena, he became in time the main opponent of the theory of quantum mechanics. By his own account, he spent far more time thinking about quantum theory than he did about relativity. But he never found a theory of quantum physics that satisfied him. . . .

Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein’s insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same, no matter how the source or the observer moves. . . . Special relativity was the result of 10 years of intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong within two years of publishing it. He rejected his theory, even before most physicists had come to accept it, for reasons that only he cared about. For another 10 years, as the world of physics slowly absorbed special relativity, Einstein pursued a lonely path away from it.

Why? The main reason was that he wanted to extend relativity to include all observers, whereas his special theory postulates only an equivalence among a limited class of observers—those who aren’t accelerating. A second reason was to incorporate gravity, making use of a new principle he called the equivalence principle. This postulates that observers can never distinguish the effects of gravity from those of acceleration so long as they observe phenomena only in their immediate neighborhood. By this principle [general relativity] he linked the problem of gravity with the problem of extending relativity to all observers. . . .

[I]n spite of the great triumph general relativity represented, Einstein did not linger long over it. For Einstein, quantum physics was the essential mystery, and nothing could be really fundamental that was not part of the solution to that problem. As general relativity didn’t explain quantum theory, it had to be provisional as well. It could only be a step towards Einstein’s goal, which was to find a theory of quantum phenomena that would agree with all the experiments, but satisfy his demand for clarity and completeness.

Einstein imagined for a time that such a theory could come from an extension of general relativity. Thus he entered into the final period of his scientific life, his search for a unified field theory. He sought an extension of general relativity that would incorporate electromagnetism, thereby wedding the large-scale world where gravity dominates with the small-scale world of quantum physics. . . .

[B]y the end of his life Einstein had to some extent abandoned his search for a unified field theory. He had failed to find a version of the theory that did what was most important to him, which is to explain quantum phenomena in a way that involved neither measurements nor statistics. In his last years he was moving on to something even more radical. He proposed to give up the idea that space and time are continuous. . . .

I think a sober assessment is that up until now, almost all of us who work in theoretical physics have failed to live up to Einstein’s legacy. His demand for a coherent theory of principle was uncompromising. It has not been reached—not by quantum theory, not by special or general relativity, not by anything invented since. Einstein’s moral clarity, his insistence that we should accept nothing less than a theory that gives a completely coherent account of individual phenomena, cannot be followed unless we reject almost all contemporary theoretical physics as insufficient. . . .

In my whole career as a theoretical physicist, I have known only a handful of colleagues of whom it can truly be said have followed Einstein’s path. They are driven, as Einstein was, by a moral need for clear understanding. In everything they do, these few strive continually to invent a new theory of principle that could satisfy the strictest demands of coherence and consistency without regard to fashion or the professional consequences. Most have paid for their independence in a harder career path than equally talented scientists who follow the research agendas of the big professors.

I have quoted Smolin at length because he reveals two key facets of Einstein, the scientist: a willingness to abandon a theory, and a stubbornness about challenging the conventional wisdom, even though its proponents were equally eminent scientists.

Einstein stands as a paragon among scientists: unwilling to run with the herd, unwilling to “follow any fad or popular direction,” as Smolin puts it elsewhere in the essay quoted above. Now we seem to have herds of so-called scientists who cling to certain theories because those theories are popular and dominant. They may be great scientists — or hacks — who have come to a certain worldview and are loathe to abandon it, or they may be followers of renowned scientists who lack the imagination to see alternative explanations of phenomena. Whatever the case, a “scientist” who insists on the truth of his worldview has abandoned science for something that might as well be called religion or philosophy.

In the case of global warming, we’ve seen the herd instinct at work for many years. It has become an article of faith among academic and government scientists not only that global warming is due mainly to human activity but also that it is “bad.” Dr. Roy Spencer, an atmospheric scientist, stands back from the fray in “Let’s Be Honest about the Real Consensus” (link added):

“Consensus” among scientists is not definitive, and some have even argued that in science it is meaningless or counterproductive. After all, even scientific “laws” have been disproved in the past (e.g. the Law of Parity in nuclear physics). Global warming is a process that can not be measured in controlled lab experiments, and so in many respects it can not be tested or falsified in the traditional scientific sense. Nevertheless, I’m willing to admit that in the policymakers’ realm, scientific consensus might have some limited value. But let’s be honest about what that consensus refers to: that “humans influence the climate”. Not that “global warming is a serious threat to mankind”.

Moreover, it’s certainly not clear that the scientific consensus about global warming is correct. (See, for example, this earlier post.)

Now we come to evolution. I have written elsewhere about the tendency of evolutionary biologists (and their hangers-on at places like The Panda’s Thumb) to act like priests of a secular religion. But just how firm is the ground on which their temple is built? Not all that firm, according to a recent report in ScienceDaily:

Contrary to inheritance laws the scientific world has accepted for more than 100 years, some plants revert to normal traits carried by their grandparents, bypassing genetic abnormalities carried by both parents.These mutant parent plants apparently have hidden templates containing genetic information from the preceding generation that can be transferred to their offspring, even though the traits aren’t evident in the parents, according to Purdue University researchers. This discovery flies in the face of the scientific laws of inheritance first described by Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s and still taught in classrooms around the world today.

“This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought in the past,” said Robert Pruitt, a Purdue Department of Botany and Plant Pathology molecular geneticist. “While Mendel’s laws that we learned in high school still are fundamentally correct, they’re not absolute.

“If the inheritance mechanism we found in the research plant Arabidopsis exists in animals, too, it’s possible that it will be an avenue for gene therapy to treat or cure diseases in both plants and animals.”

The study is published in the March 24 issue of the journal Nature. . . .

Editor’s Note: The original news release can be found here.

Such findings don’t discredit evolutionary theory, but they do underscore two points:

  • Evolutionary theory is still very much in flux.
  • Prevailing scientific theories are never as secure as they seem to be — or as many of their adherents would like them to be.

Nevertheless, the scientific consensus seems to be that any scientist who even entertains intelligent design (ID) as a supplementary explanation of the development of life forms has somehow become a non-scientist. Consider the recent controversy surrounding Dr. Richard Sternberg, as described in The Washington Post of August 19:

Evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg made a fateful decision a year ago.

As editor of the hitherto obscure Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Sternberg decided to publish a paper making the case for “intelligent design,” a controversial theory that holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand — subtle or not — of an intelligent creator.

Within hours of publication, senior scientists at the Smithsonian Institution — which has helped fund and run the journal — lashed out at Sternberg as a shoddy scientist and a closet Bible thumper.

“They were saying I accepted money under the table, that I was a crypto-priest, that I was a sleeper cell operative for the creationists,” said Steinberg, 42 , who is a Smithsonian research associate. “I was basically run out of there.”

An independent agency has come to the same conclusion, accusing top scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History of retaliating against Sternberg by investigating his religion and smearing him as a “creationist.”

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which was established to protect federal employees from reprisals, examined e-mail traffic from these scientists and noted that “retaliation came in many forms . . . misinformation was disseminated through the Smithsonian Institution and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false.”

“The rumor mill became so infected,” James McVay, the principal legal adviser in the Office of Special Counsel, wrote to Sternberg, “that one of your colleagues had to circulate [your résumé] simply to dispel the rumor that you were not a scientist.” . . .

A small band of scientists argue for intelligent design, saying evolutionary theory’s path is littered with too many gaps and mysteries, and cannot account for the origin of life.

Most evolutionary biologists, not to mention much of the broader scientific community, dismiss intelligent design as a sophisticated version of creationism. . . .

Sternberg’s case has sent ripples far beyond the Beltway. The special counsel accused the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, Calif.-based think tank that defends the teaching of evolution, of orchestrating attacks on Sternberg.

“The NCSE worked closely with” the Smithsonian “in outlining a strategy to have you investigated and discredited,” McVay wrote to Sternberg. . . .

Sternberg is an unlikely revolutionary. He holds two PhDs in evolutionary biology, his graduate work draws praise from his former professors, and in 2000 he gained a coveted research associate appointment at the Smithsonian Institution.

Not long after that, Smithsonian scientists asked Sternberg to become the unpaid editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a sleepy scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian. Three years later, Sternberg agreed to consider a paper by Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge University-educated philosopher of science who argues that evolutionary theory cannot account for the vast profusion of multicellular species and forms in what is known as the Cambrian “explosion,” which occurred about 530 million years ago.

Scientists still puzzle at this great proliferation of life. But Meyer’s paper went several long steps further, arguing that an intelligent agent — God, according to many who espouse intelligent design — was the best explanation for the rapid appearance of higher life-forms.

Sternberg harbored his own doubts about Darwinian theory. He also acknowledged that this journal had not published such papers in the past and that he wanted to stir the scientific pot.

“I am not convinced by intelligent design but they have brought a lot of difficult questions to the fore,” Sternberg said. “Science only moves forward on controversy.” . . .

When the article appeared, the reaction was near instantaneous and furious. Within days, detailed scientific critiques of Meyer’s article appeared on pro-evolution Web sites. “The origin of genetic information is thoroughly understood,” said Nick Matzke of the NCSE. “If the arguments were coherent this paper would have been revolutionary– but they were bogus.”

A senior Smithsonian scientist wrote in an e-mail: “We are evolutionary biologists and I am sorry to see us made into the laughing stock of the world, even if this kind of rubbish sells well in backwoods USA.”

An e-mail stated, falsely, that Sternberg had “training as an orthodox priest.” Another labeled him a “Young Earth Creationist,” meaning a person who believes God created the world in the past 10,000 years.

This latter accusation is a reference to Sternberg’s service on the board of the Baraminology Study Group, a “young Earth” group. Sternberg insists he does not believe in creationism. “I was rather strong in my criticism of them,” he said. “But I agreed to work as a friendly but critical outsider.” . . .

“I loathe careerism and the herd mentality,” [Sternberg says]. “I really think that objective truth can be discovered and that popular opinion and consensus thinking does more to obscure than to reveal.”

At the core of ID is the hypothesis of irreducible complexity, which is the subject of a Wikipedia article that also provides many links to various aspects of the controversy about irreducible complexity and ID. To quote from that article: “Irreducible complexity is not an argument that evolution does not occur, but rather an argument that it is incomplete.”

Is irreducible complexity an unscientific proposition (an unfalsifiable hypothesis), as many of its critics charge? And if it is a falsifiable hypothesis, where does it stand? The answers to those questions shift so rapidly that the best I can do here is quote from the Wikipedia article:

Some critics [of irreducible complexity], such as Jerry Coyne (professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago) and Eugenie Scott (a physical anthropologist and executive director of the National Center for Science Education) have argued that the concept of irreducible complexity, and more generally, the theory of Intelligent Design is not falsifiable, and therefore, not scientific.

[Michael] Behe [a leading proponent of ID] argues that the theory that irreducibly complex systems could not have been evolved can be falsified by an experiment where such systems are evolved. For example, he posits taking bacteria with no flagella and imposing a selective pressure for mobility. If, after a few thousand generations, the bacteria evolved the bacterial flagellum, then Behe believes that this would refute his theory.

Other critics take a different approach, pointing to experimental evidence that they believe falsifies the argument for Intelligent Design from irreducible complexity. For example, Kenneth Miller cites the lab work of Barry Hall on E. coli, which he asserts is evidence that “Behe is wrong.”

The problem is that as every pro-ID hypothesis is falsified (assuming that it is, eventually), another pro-ID hypothesis can be produced. For, there must be a very large number of biological manifestations that have not yet been explained by documented facts. Until such documented facts are produced, a proper scientist would keep irreducible complexity on the table as a possible explanation of an unexplained manifestation. But I have noticed a tendency among die-hard evolutionists — those for whom evolution is a religion — to resort to the practice of extrapolating from documented facts to argue that evolution could explain such-and-such, if only the necessary facts weren’t inconveniently missing. In a word, they are cheaters. (For more, see this post.)

I think it really boils down to this: Anti-ID scientists cannot prove that ID is unscientific; pro-ID scientists cannot prove that ID is anything more than a convenient explantion for currently unexplained phenomena. It’s the scientific (or non-scientific) version of a Mexican standoff.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us here:

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (“Sherlock Holmes” in The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier)

What are the possibilities with which we must begin? In addition to the evolution of evolutionary biology, there are these alternatives, taken from the Wikipedia article on irreducible complexity:

  • Intelligent Design, the argument that irreducible complexity occurs through the input of some “intelligent designer”. One example of an Intelligent Design theory is Creationism (although it can be argued that this begs the question, as it does not say how or what created the Creator, and, if no creator was necessary to create the Creator, why creators should be needed for all other entities).
  • Francis Crick‘s suggestion that life on Earth may have been seeded by aliens (although it can be argued that this begs the question, as it does not say how the alien life arose).

You may have noticed that the list conflates two entirely different issues. There is the question of how life arose — which, I submit, can only be a matter of faith or conjecture — and there is the question of how life has developed, regardless of how it arose — which can be a matter for scientific investigation. Therein lies the crux of the problem. It is impossible to eliminate any explanation of the origin of life or the development of life forms, as long as that explanation doesn’t conflict with facts. Similarly, it is impossible to eliminate any explanation of the origin of the universe, as long as that explanation doesn’t conflict with facts. Staunch evolutionists — those who resist Creationism, intelligent design, or any other unfalsifiable or unfalsified explanation for the origin of the universe, the origin of life, or the development of life forms — are merely invoking their preferred worldview — not facts.

The best that science can do, under any foreseeable circumstances, is to investigate how life developed from the point in the known history of the universe at which there is evidence of life. But many (perhaps most) evolutionists and their hangers-on aren’t content to pursue that scientific agenda. As Frederick Turner puts it:

In many cases it is clear that the beautiful and hard-won theory of evolution, now proved beyond reasonable doubt, is being cynically used by some — who do not much care about it as such — to support an ulterior purpose: a program of atheist indoctrination, and an assault on the moral and spiritual goals of religion. A truth used for unworthy purposes is quite as bad as a lie used for ends believed to be worthy. If religion can be undermined in the hearts and minds of the people, then the only authority left will be the state, and, not coincidentally, the state’s well-paid academic, legal, therapeutic and caring professions. If creationists cannot be trusted to give a fair hearing to evidence and logic because of their prior commitment to religious doctrine, some evolutionary partisans cannot be trusted because they would use a general social acceptance of the truth of evolution as a way to set in place a system of helpless moral license in the population and an intellectual elite to take care of them.

“Mainstream” evolutionists might be willing to consider alien origins, complexity theory, and quantum evolution, given the provenance of those theories. But those same evolutionists are unlikely to back down from their resistence to intelligent design. Why? Because ID threatens their underlying agenda, which — as Turner suggests — is the ascendancy of scientism, scientific elites, and the strident atheists who support them. Another case in point is the strong vein of resistance to the Big Bang theory, because it’s consistent with a Creation. (Sample the results of this Google search, for example.) The irony of it all is that atheism is an unscientific belief in an unfalsifiable proposition, namely, that there is no God. Moreover, if there is a God, He doesn’t need to rely on Big Bangs or other such pyrotechnics to work His will.

Am I going too far when I join Frederick Turner in his distrust of “evolutionary partisans”? I think not. Peruse The Panda’s Thumb, where, for example, one contributor posted approvingly of an article arguing that the teaching of intelligent design should be ruled unconstitutional because it is unscientific. As I wrote at the time,

[t]hink of the fine mess we’d be in if the courts were to rule against the teaching of intelligent design not because it amounts to an establishment of religion but because it’s unscientific. That would open the door to all sorts of judicial mischief. The precedent could — and would — be pulled out of context and used in limitless ways to justify government interference in matters where government has no right to interfere.

It’s bad enough that government is in the business of funding science — though I can accept such funding wheere it actually aids our defense effort. But, aside from that, government has no business deciding for the rest of us what’s scientific or unscientific. When it gets into that business, you had better be ready for a rerun of the genetic policies of the Third Reich.

Scientific elites and their hangers-on, like paternalists of all kinds, would like to tell us how to live our lives — for our own good, of course — because they think they have the answers, or can find them. (They would be benign technocrats, of course, unlike their counterparts in the old USSR.) And when they are thwarted, they get in a snit and issue manifestos.

But, as I said at the outset, science isn’t about how to live morally, it’s about how to live life more comfortably, if that is what we wish to do. To know how to live life morally we must turn to a philosophy that promotes liberty, and we must not reject the moral code of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which one finds much support for liberty.

I’m very much for science, properly understood, which is the increase of knowledge. I’m very much against the misuse of science by scientists (and others) who invoke it to advance an extra-scientific agenda. Science, properly done, begins with doubts and ends in certainties, but those certainties extend only to the realm of observable, documented facts. Science has no claim to superiority over philosophy or religion in the extra-factual realm of morality.

I close by paraphrasing my son’s comment about my post on “Religion and Liberty“:

The basis of liberty is extra-scientific; thus the need for non-scientific moral institutions.

Further reading:
Evolution (Wikipedia article)
Intelligent Design (Wikipedia article)
Intelligent Design: A Special Report from History Magazine
The Little Engine That Could…Undo Darwinism (The American Spectator article)
Faith-Based Evolution (Tech Central Station article)
Darwin and Design: The Evolution of a Flawed Debate (Tech Central Station article)
Intelligent Decline, Revisited (Tech Central Station article)
The Real Intelligent Designers (Tech Central Station article)
Divine Evolution (Tech Central Station article)
The Case Against Intelligent Design (The New Republic article)
Discovery Institute (the leading proponents of ID)
The Talk.Origins Archive (a collection of articles and essays that explore the creationism/evolution controversy from a mainstream scientific perspective)
Show Me the Science (anti-ID by noted philosopher Daniel C. Dennett)
Intelligent Design Has No Place in the Science Curriculum (The Chronicle of Higher Education article)

Related posts:

Hemibel Thinking (07/16/04)
Climatology (07/16/04)
Global Warming: Realities and Benefits (07/18/04)
Words of Caution for the Cautious (07/21/04)
Scientists in a Snit (08/04/04)
Another Blow to Climatology? (08/21/04)
Bad News for Politically Correct Science (10/18/04)
Another Blow to Chicken-Little Science (10/27/04)
Bad News for Enviro-Nuts (11/27/04)
Going Too Far with the First Amendment (01/01/05)
Atheism, Religion, and Science (01/03/05)
The Limits of Science (01/05/05)
Three Perspectives on Life: A Parable (01/15/05)
Beware of Irrational Atheism (01/22/05)
The Hockey Stick Is Broken (01/31/05)
The Creation Model (02/23/05)
The Thing about Science (03/24/05)
Religion and Personal Responsibility (04/08/05)
Science in Politics, Politics in Science (05/11/05)
Global Warming and Life (07/18/05)
Evolution and Religion (07/25/05)
Speaking of Religion (07/26/05)
Words of Caution for Scientific Dogmatists (08/19/05)
Religion and Liberty (08/25/05)

Religion and Liberty

Excerpts of a long post at Liberty Corner II:

Many libertarians — especially the strident atheists among them — are quick to say that religious morality is unnecessary because morality — standards of right and wrong — can be supplied by other sources: libertarianism, for example. There’s something to that, if you can bring yourself to believe that the gospel of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Hayek could attract a much wider audience than its present, minuscule, market share.

For libertarianism to grow and thrive, it must be planted in fertile ground. As Jennifer Roback Morse wrote in “Marriage and the Limits of Contract,”

[l]ibertarians recognize that a free market needs a culture of law-abidingness, promise-keeping, and respect for contracts. . . . A culture full of people who violate their contracts at every possible opportunity cannot be held together by legal institutions, as the experience of post-communist Russia plainly shows.

Neither the state nor the stateless Utopia of anarcho-capitalist dreams can ensure a moral society, that is, one in which there is law-abidingness, promise-keeping, and respect for contracts. Where, then, do we turn for moral education? To the public schools, whose unionized teachers preach the virtues of moral relativism, big government, income redistribution, and non-judgmentalism (lack of personal repsonsibility)? I hardly think so.

That leaves us with religion, especially religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition. . . .

The weakening of Judeo-Christianity in America is owed to enemies within (established religions trying in vain to be “relevant”) and to enemies without (Leftists and nihilistic libertarians who seek every opportunity to denigrate religion). . . .

I believe that incessant attacks on religion have helped to push people — especially young adults — away from religion, to the detriment of liberty. It’s not surprising that modern liberals tend to be anti-religious, for they disdain the tenets of personal responsibility and liberty that are contained in the last six of the Ten Commandments. It is disheartening, however, when libertarians join the anti-religious chorus. They know not what they do when they join the Left in tearing down a bulwark of civil society, without which liberty cannot prevail.

Humans need no education in aggression and meddling; those come to us naturally. But we do need to learn to take responsibility for our actions and to leave others alone — and we need to learn those things when we are young. Public schools can’t foster that learning, nor can a relative handful of libertarians. Parents can do it, if they have the right background for it; that background is to be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Most importantly, children can learn for themselves, if they are raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition. . . .

Rather than join the Left in attacking the Judeo-Christian tradition, libertarians ought to accommodate themselves to it and even encourage its acceptance — for liberty’s sake. There is much to gain and — given the separation of church and state, which most religionists prefer — almost nothing to lose.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POST.

Religion and Liberty

Before you read the following post, you should know that I am an agnostic, not a person of religion. I was raised in the Roman Catholic faith but abandoned that faith more than two-thirds of a lifetime ago.

Many libertarians — especially the strident atheists among them — are quick to say that religious morality is unnecessary because morality — standards of right and wrong — can be supplied by other sources: libertarianism, for example. There’s something to that, if you can bring yourself to believe that the gospel of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Hayek could attract a much wider audience than its present, minuscule, market share.

For libertarianism to grow and thrive, it must be planted in fertile ground. As Jennifer Roback Morse wrote in “Marriage and the Limits of Contract,”

[l]ibertarians recognize that a free market needs a culture of law-abidingness, promise-keeping, and respect for contracts. . . . A culture full of people who violate their contracts at every possible opportunity cannot be held together by legal institutions, as the experience of post-communist Russia plainly shows.

Neither the state nor the stateless Utopia of anarcho-capitalist dreams can ensure a moral society, that is, one in which there is law-abidingness, promise-keeping, and respect for contracts. Where, then, do we turn for moral education? To the public schools, whose unionized teachers preach the virtues of moral relativism, big government, income redistribution, and non-judgmentalism (lack of personal repsonsibility)? I hardly think so.

That leaves us with religion, especially religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it:

The precepts [of the last six of the Commandments] are meant to protect man in his natural rights against the injustice of his fellows.

  • His life is the object of the Fifth;
  • the honour of his body as well as the source of life, of the Sixth;
  • his lawful possessions, of the Seventh;
  • his good name, of the Eighth;
  • And in order to make him still more secure in the enjoyment of his rights, it is declared an offense against God to desire to wrong him, in his family rights by the Ninth;
  • and in his property rights by the Tenth.

I am neither a person of faith nor a natural-rights libertarian, but I would gladly live in a society in which the majority of my fellow citizens believed in and adhered to the Ten Commandments, especially the last six of them. I reject the currently fashionable notion that religion per se breeds violence. In fact, a scholarly, non-sectarian paper offers good evidence that religiosity leads to good behavior:

. . . We will define religious activities as[:] (1) Attendance to religious activities, (2) Salience or importance of God to one’s self, (3) Denomination, (4) Frequency of prayer, (5) Bible studies, and (6) Religious activities outside of church. . . .

Some of the studies reported in this speculative review used multidimensional means of measuring religiosity with consistency. Of these reports nearly all found that that there was a significant negative correlation between religiosity and delinquency. This was further substantiated by studies using longitudinal and operationally reliable definitions. Of the early reports which were either inconclusive or found no statistical correlation, not one utilized a multidimensional definition or any sort of reliability factor. We maintain that the cause of this difference in findings stemmed from methodological factors as well as different and perhaps flawed research strategies that were employed by early sociological and criminological researchers.

The studies that we reviewed were of high research caliber and showed that the inverse relationship [between religiosity and delinquincy] does in fact exist. It therefore appears that religion is both a short term and long term mitigat[o]r of delinquency.

But a society in which behavior is guided by the Ten Commandments seems to be receding into the past. Consider these statistics, from InfoPlease: Between 1990 and 2001

  • the fraction of American adults claiming to belong to a Christian religion dropped from 86.4 percent to 76.7 percent, and
  • the fraction of American adults claiming to be of the Jewish faith dropped from 1.8 percent to 1.4 percent.

What’s noteworthy about those figures is the degree of slippage in a span of 11 years. The absolute values, of course, overstate the degree of adherence to formal religion because respondents tend to say the “right” thing, which (oddly enough) continues to be a profession of religious faith. If Bill Clinton (among others) can claim to be a “religious” person, who could not?

The good news is that most of the slippage in stated attendance is among the major, old-line denominations: the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church and the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. Those denominations, or large segments of them, have slid away from the Ten Commandments in order to be more “relevant” — thus evidently becoming less “relevant.”

The bad news is that claiming adherence to a religion and receiving religious “booster shots” through regular church attendance are two entirely different things. Consider this excerpt of the cover story (“In Search of the Spiritual“) in the August 29 – September 5 issue of Newsweek:

Of 1,004 respondents to the NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll, 45 percent said they attend worship services weekly, virtually identical to the figure (44 percent) in a Gallup poll cited by Time in 1966. Then as now, however, there is probably a fair amount of wishful thinking in those figures; researchers who have done actual head counts in churches think the figure is probably more like 20 percent [link added: ED]. There has been a particular falloff in attendance by African-Americans, for whom the church is no longer the only respectable avenue of social advancement, according to Darren Sherkat, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University. The fastest-growing category on surveys that ask people to give their religious affiliation, says Patricia O’Connell Killen of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., is “none.” But “spirituality,” the impulse to seek communion with the Divine, is thriving. The NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll found that more Americans, especially those younger than 60, described themselves as “spiritual” (79 percent) than “religious” (64 percent). Almost two thirds of Americans say they pray every day, and nearly a third meditate.

But what does “spirituality” have to do with morality? Prayer and meditation may be useful and even necessary to religion, but they do not teach morality. Substituting “spirituality” for Judeo-Christian religiosity is like watching golf matches on TV instead of playing golf; a watcher can talk a good game but cannot play the game very well, if at all.

Historian Niall Ferguson, a Briton, writes about the importance of religiosity in “A loss of faith fans the fire of fanaticism“:

I am not sure British people are necessarily afraid of religion, but they are certainly not much interested in it these days. Indeed, the decline of Christianity — not just in Britain but across Europe — stands out as one of the most remarkable phenomena of our times.

There was a time when Europe would justly refer to itself as “Christendom.” Europeans built the Continent’s loveliest edifices to accommodate their acts of worship. They quarreled bitterly over the distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. As pilgrims, missionaries and conquistadors, they sailed to the four corners of the Earth, intent on converting the heathen to the true faith.

Now it is Europeans who are the heathens. . . .

The exceptionally low level of British religiosity was perhaps the most striking revelation of a recent ICM poll [link added: ED]. One in five Britons claim to “attend an organized religious service regularly,” less than half the American figure. [In light of the relationship between claimed and actual church attendance, discussed above, the actual figure for Britons is probably about 10 percent: ED.] Little more than a quarter say that they pray regularly, compared with two-thirds of Americans and 95 percent of Nigerians. And barely one in 10 Britons would be willing to die for our God or our beliefs, compared with 71 percent of Americans. . . .

Chesterton feared that if Christianity declined, “superstition” would “drown all your old rationalism and skepticism.” When educated friends tell me that they have invited a shaman to investigate their new house for bad juju, I see what Chesterton meant. Yet it is not the spread of such mumbo-jumbo that concerns me as much as the moral vacuum that de-Christianization has created. Sure, sermons are sometimes dull and congregations often sing out of tune. But, if nothing else, a weekly dose of Christian doctrine helps to provide an ethical framework for life. And it is not clear where else such a thing is available in modern Europe.

Over the last few weeks [since the terrorist attacks of 7/7: ED], Britons have heard a great deal from Tony Blair and others about the threat posed to their “way of life” by Muslim extremists such as Muktar Said Ibrahim. But how far has their own loss of religious faith turned Britain into a soft target — not so much for the superstition Chesterton feared, but for the fanaticism of others?

 

Yes, what “way of life” is being threatened — and is therefore deemed worth defending — when people do not share a strong moral bond?

That the moral bond of Judeo-Christianity also has weakened on this side of the Atlantic is evidenced by the rising tide of “foxhole rats” in our midst: post-patriotic and undoubtedly anti-religious Leftists for whom America is just an arbitrary geopolitical entity.

The weakening of Judeo-Christianity in America is owed to enemies within (established religions trying in vain to be “relevant”) and to enemies without (Leftists and nihilistic libertarians who seek every opportunity to denigrate religion). Thus the opponents of religiosity seized on the homosexual scandals in the Catholic Church not to attack homosexuality (which would go against the attackers’ party line) but to attack the Church, which teaches that acts of the kind that were committed by a relatively small number of priests are, in fact, immoral.

Then there is the relentless depiction of Catholicism as an accomplice to Hitler’s brutality, about which my son writes in his review of Rabbi David G. Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis:

Despite the misleading nature of the controversy — one which Dalin questions from the outset — the first critics of the wartime papacy were not Jews. Among the worst attacks were those of leftist non-Jews, such as Carlo Falconi (author of The Silence of Pius XII), not to mention German liberal Rolf Hochhuth, whose 1963 play, The Deputy, set the tone for subsequent derogatory media portrayals of wartime Catholicism. By contrast, says Dalin, Pope Pius XII “was widely praised [during his lifetime] for having saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust.” He provides an impressive list of Jews who testified on the pope’s behalf, including Albert Einstein, Golda Meir and Chaim Weizmann. Dalin believes that to “deny and delegitimize their collective memory and experience of the Holocaust,” as some have done, “is to engage in a subtle yet profound form of Holocaust denial.”

The most obvious source of the black legend about the papacy emanated from Communist Russia, a point noted by the author. There were others with an axe to grind. As revealed in a recent issue of Sandro Magister’s Chiesa, liberal French Catholic Emmanuel Mounier began implicating Pius XII in “racist” politics as early as 1939. Subsequent detractors have made the same charge, working (presumably) from the same bias.

While the immediate accusations against Pius XII lie at the heart of Dalin’s book, he takes his analysis a step further. The vilification of the pope can only be understood in terms of a political agenda — the “liberal culture war against tradition.” . . .

Rabbi Dalin sums it up best for all people of traditional moral and political beliefs when he urges us to recall the challenges that faced Pius XII in which the “fundamental threats to Jews came not from devoted Christians — they were the prime rescuers of Jewish lives in the Holocaust — but from anti-Catholic Nazis, atheistic Communists, and… Hitler’s mufti in Jerusalem.”

I believe that incessant attacks on religion have helped to push people — especially young adults — away from religion, to the detriment of liberty. It’s not surprising that modern liberals tend to be anti-religious, for they disdain the tenets of personal responsibility and liberty that are contained in the last six of the Ten Commandments. It is disheartening, however, when libertarians join the anti-religious chorus. They know not what they do when they join the Left in tearing down a bulwark of civil society, without which liberty cannot prevail.

Humans need no education in aggression and meddling; those come to us naturally. But we do need to learn to take responsibility for our actions and to leave others alone — and we need to learn those things when we are young. Public schools can’t foster that learning, nor can a relative handful of libertarians. Parents can do it, if they have the right background for it; that background is to be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Most importantly, children can learn for themselves, if they are raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Am I being hypcritical because I am unchurched and my children were not taken to church? Perhaps, but my religious upbringing imbued in me a strong sense of morality, which I tried — successfully, I think — to convey to my children. But as time passes the moral lessons we older Americans learned through religion will attenuate unless those lessons are taught, anew, to younger generations.

Rather than join the Left in attacking the Judeo-Christian tradition, libertarians ought to accommodate themselves to it and even encourage its acceptance — for liberty’s sake. There is much to gain and — given the separation of church and state, which most religionists prefer — almost nothing to lose.

Related posts:

More Things a Libertarian Can Believe In (07/11/04)
Libertarian Conservative or Conservative Libertarian (07/29/04)
Hobbesian Libertarianism (10/08/04)
The State of Nature (12/05/04)
Libertarianism and Conservatism (12/05/04)
Going Too Far with the First Amendment? (01/01/05)
Atheism, Religion, and Science (01/03/05)
The Limits of Science (01/05/05)
Three Perspectives on Life: A Parable (01/15/05)
Beware of Irrational Atheism (01/22/05)
Judeo-Christian Values and Liberty (02/20/05)
The Creation Model (02/23/05)
Libertarianism, Marriage, and the True Meaning of Family Values (04/06/05)
Religion and Personal Responsibility (04/08/05)
Free Will: A Proof by Example? (04/09/05)
Where Conservatism and (Sensible) Libertarianism Come Together (04/19/05)
A Renewed Respect? (04/19/05)
Conservatism, Libertarianism, and Public Morality (04/25/05)
Evolution and Religion (07/25/05)
Moral Issues (07/26/05)
Shall We All Hang Separately? (08/13/05)
Foxhole Rats (08/14/05)
Words of Caution for Scientific Dogmatists (08/19/05)
Foxhole Rats, Redux (08/22/05)

Treasonous Speech?

Eugene Volokh considers treason and speech. He offers several candidate First Amendment rules:

  1. Speech is unprotected whenever the speaker knows that it’s likely to aid the enemy. . . .

  2. Speech is unprotected whenever the speaker has the purpose of aiding the enemy. . . .

  3. Speech is unprotected only when the speaker has the purpose of aiding the enemy, and is paid for such speech. . . .

  4. Speech is unprotected only when the speaker has the purpose of aiding the enemy, and is coordinating his speech with the enemy. . . .

  5. Speech is unprotected only when the speaker has the purpose of aiding the enemy, and is actually employed by the enemy. My friend and fellow lawprof Tom Bell takes this view.

  6. Speech is protected regardless of the speaker’s purpose of aiding the enemy or coordination with the enemy. . . .

I addressed Bell’s view (Volokh’s option 5) several months ago:

If it’s treason, it’s treason. An unpaid traitor can do just as much harm to the nation as can a paid traitor.

It would be better to do away with the law of treasonous expression altogether than to draw an arbitrary line between paid and unpaid traitors. If a person’s treachery goes no further than expressions of hatred for America or sympathy with America’s enemies, let that person suffer the consequences in the forum of public opinion.

I prefer Volokh’s option 2, an option that Volokh doesn’t like because

prohibiting all speech that intentionally helps the enemy risks punishing or deterring even speakers who intend only to protect American interests, but whose intentions are mistaken by prosecutors and juries — a serious risk, especially in wartime.

I suppose. But presumably an intention to aid the enemy would have to be proven in a court of law. I doubt very much that an unsubstantiated intention would survive an appeal. Why not give it a try and see how the Supreme Court rules on the issue — as surely it would be asked to do.

Just to be clear about it, I’m not suggesting charges of treason against those who sympathize with the enemy. The friend of our enemy is not our friend, but neither is he or she necessarily our enemy. Just don’t turn your back.

Related posts:

Getting It Wrong: Civil Libertarians and the War on Terror (A Case Study) (05/18/04)
The Illogic of Knee-Jerk Privacy Adocates (10/06/04)
Treasonous Blogging? (03/05/05)
Absolutism (03/25/05)
Shall We All Hang Separately? (08/13/05)
Foxhole Rats (08/14/05)

Another Thought about Libertarian Paternalism

Every individual possesses a complex and unique, but ever-changing, set of tastes and preferences. The individual seeks to strike a balance among those tastes and preferences in a way that, very roughly, maximizes personal satisfaction (utility). The outcome of the balancing act depends on:

  • ability to acquire and evaluate information
  • cost of making and changing decisions
  • constraints of income and wealth (anticipated as well as current)
  • binding commitments from the past that may limit freedom of action (or which may be changed or abrogated at some psychic or pecuniary cost)
  • laws and social norms that may do the same (or which we may choose to flout, at some cost)

Paternalists — “libertarian” or otherwise — who claim that they want to improve the lot of their fellow humans, choose to do so in a peculiar way. They seek to further constrain personal choice through the adoption of policies that ignore the complex and evolving tastes and preferences of individuals. Those policies focus, instead, on a particular desideratum, such as wealth-maximization or the “well being” that arises from enjoying certain benefits (e.g., 6 weeks of vacation or “free” child care).

I understand why individuals who are deluded by the allure of a “free lunch” (e.g., a mandatory 6-week vacation) will demand paternalistic schemes. But I am here to tell you the following:

Do not presume to know what makes me happy. Do not seek to impose on me your scheme for maximizing my wealth or well-being. You don’t know and can never know what makes me tick. When I was 22 I wasn’t interested in accumulating wealth, I was interested in paying my bills. When I turned 24 I became interested in accumulating wealth, but I didn’t pursue it vigorously until I turned 38. In the meantime, I wasted some wealth in the pursuit of a dream; out of that pursuit came a lesson in how to run a business. But if I had wanted to convert that lesson into wealth maximization, I wouldn’t have chosen to return to the quasi-public sector and, eventually, to retire early. And if I had been forced to take six weeks’ vacation a year, I couldn’t have retired early.

I’m unique only in that my particular story is unique. We are all unique. None of us deserves paternalism — “libertarian” or otherwise.

Related posts:

The Rationality Fallacy (08/16/04)
Socialist Calculation and the Turing Test (02/12/05)
Libertarian Paternalism (04/24/05)
A Libertarian Paternalist’s Dream World (05/23/05)
The Short Answer to Libertarian Paternalism (06/24/05)
Second-Guessing, Paternalism, Parentalism, and Choice (07/13/05)

A Non-Paradox for Libertarians

In “A Paradox for Libertarians” I said:

Some aspects of liberty must be circumscribed in order to preserve most aspects of liberty.

That statement pertains to such matters as freedom of speech (which can’t be absolute if society is to defend itself effectively) and the apparent (but debatable) necessity of taxation to defray the cost of defending liberty.

Glen Whitman, writing at Agoraphilia, raises a parallel issue, which I’ll state after quoting Whitman.

[T]ake Alex [Tabarrok]’s hypothetical, posed to him (and Robin Hanson) by a philosopher:

Suppose that you had a million children and you could give each of them a better life but only if one of them had a very, very terrible life. Would you do it?

Alex and Robin, both economists, said “yes” without hesitation. But to the philosopher who posed the question, the intuitively correct answer was clearly “no.” Who’s right? Alex suggests that we should simply overcome our gut intuitions and think logically here, and the logical answer is to favor the greatest good. Will [Wilkinson of The Fly Bottle] and Carina [Cilluffo of An Inclination to Criticize] both correctly reply that Alex, too, is relying on intuition – the utilitarian intuition that we can (in some rough-and-ready way) compare satisfaction across persons. So we can never fully escape the appeal to intuition.

But does that observation dispose of the matter? Can we just pick out our favorite intuition and run with it? Alex is still right that our intuitions are inconsistent. One intuition tells us that individuals have personal claims that should never be violated. Fine. But another intuition tells us it’s absurd to impose monstrous losses for miniscule gains. The lifeboat situation is a classic example of where this alternative intuition kicks in. . . .

Moreover, it turns out the intuition that answers “no” to Alex’s hypothetical is highly dependent on the frame of reference. . . .

. . . Take Alex’s original hypothetical, but add in some extra context:

The million children who stand to gain are the starving and oppressed people of an African nation. The one child who stands to lose is the son of the local tyrant.

Feel free to modify the context to explain why the tyrant’s son’s life will suck after his dad is dethroned. With the context filled in, I suspect most who said “no” before will say “yes” now. Why? Because we no longer think the status quo creates any rightful claims to its continuation. . . .

The parallel issue raised by Whitman is this: What if a society’s transition from a regulatory-welfare regime to a regime of liberty were to result in losers as well as winners? How could one then justify such a transition? Must the justification rest on an intuitive judgment about the superiority of liberty? Might the prospect of creating losers somehow nullify the promse of creating winners?

I argue here that my justification for libertarianism — although it is of the consequentialist-utilitarian variety — rests on a stronger foundation than an intuitive judgment about the superiority of liberty. As I wrote in Part III of “Practical Libertarianism“:

The virtue of libertarianism, as I will discuss in Parts IV and V [and its addendum], is not that it must be taken on faith but that, in practice, it yields superior consequences. Superior consequences for whom, you may ask. And I will answer: for all but those who don’t wish to play by the rules of libertarianism; that is, for all but predators and parasites.

By predators, I mean those who would take liberty from others, either directly (e.g., through murder and theft) or through the coercive power of the state (e.g., through smoking bans and licensing laws). By parasites, I mean those who seek to advance their self-interest through the coercive power of the state rather than through their own efforts (e.g., through corporate welfare and regulatory protection). There is, of course, a lot of collusion between predators and parasites. (See Bruce Yandle’s “Bootleggers and Baptists – The Education of a Regulatory Economist.”)

To borrow from Glen Whitman, why should we favor the status quo in order to give privileged status to predators and parasites? I dismiss them out of hand.

The only potential losers worth thinking about are those seemingly honest, hard-working individuals who might be made worse off by a transition to liberty. But who are those individuals? They are the unwitting predators and parasites who do not actively seek privilege but who nevertheless enjoy it as “free riders” on welfare programs, compulsory unionism, minimum-wage and “living wage” laws, reverse discrimination, special tax exemptions and deductions, tariff protection, and on and on. I dismiss them out of hand because, unwitting as they may be, they are predators and parasites who take from others. (I do not dismiss them out of hand as human beings. I dismiss out of hand any claim that they are privileged by the status quo, which is the product of overt predators and parasites.)

What about those individuals who are neither predators nor parasites but who might be worse off in a state of liberty, in spite of their diligent efforts not to be worse off? I submit that there could be no such individuals because anyone who isn’t a predator or parasite must, perforce, be a victim of predators and parasites.

A transition to liberty, as it turns out would benefit almost eveyone, including most predators and parasites. I say that because the likely gains from liberty are so great. First, as I said in Part IV of “Practical Libertarianism,”

think of yourself as a business. You are good at producing certain things — as a family member, friend, co-worker, employee, or employer — and you know how to go about producing those things. What you don’t know, you can learn through education, experience, and the voluntary counsel of family, friends, co-workers, and employers. But you are unique — no one but you knows your economic and social preferences. If you are left to your own devices you will make the best decisions about how to run the “business” of getting on with your life. When everyone is similarly empowered, a not-so-miraculous thing happens: As each person gets on with the “business” of his or her own of life, each person tends to make choices that others find congenial. As you reward others with what you produce for them, economically and socially, they reward you in return. If they reward you insufficiently, you can give your “business” to those who will reward you more handsomely. But when government meddles in your affairs — except to protect you from actual harm — it damages the network of voluntary associations upon which you depend in order to run your “business” most beneficially to yourself and others. The state can protect your ability to run the “business” of your life, but once you let it tell you how to run your life, you compromise your ability to make choices that are right for you.

In sum, when people are deprived of incentives through taxation, regulation, and welfare, they are less able and willing to strive for themselves. And it is self-striving that leads people to do things that are valued by others. Regulation and welfare impose costs where there otherwise would be no costs, and distort the free-market signals that tell people how they can do better for themselves by doing better for others.

Now, I suppose there are some persons who couldn’t handle liberty and who would want their lives shaped by others. If that’s the way they want to live, fine, just don’t use the state to impose restrictions on the way the rest of us run our lives. There’s no reason, in a state of liberty, that those who crave direction could not buy it from others. Given the economic gains from liberty (which I’m about to summarize), there would be a booming market in personal agents of various kinds, not to mention vastly improved information sources and decision tools for the rest of us.

In addition to the nonquantifiable psychic benefits of running one’s own life, there are quantifiable economic benefits. Here’s the bottom line, drawn from Part V and the addendum to Part V of “Practical Libertarianism”:

  • In 2004, real GDP (in year 2000 dollars) was about $10.7 trillion.
  • If government had grown no more meddlesome after 1906, real GDP might have been $18.7 trillion.
  • That is, real GDP per American would have been about $63,000 (in year 2000 dollars) instead of $36,000.
  • That’s a loss to the average American of more than 40 percent of the income that he or she might have enjoyed, absent the growth of the regulatory-welfare state in the past 100 years.
  • That loss is in addition to the 40-50 percent of current output which government drains from the productive sectors of the economy.

I submit that only predators and inveterate parasites could possibly be worse off were per capita GDP to rise by 75 percent (the increase from $36,000 to $63,000), and were government to exact a toll of only 10 percent (instead of 40-50 percent) on those who produce. Most of the poor would be rich, by today’s standards. And those who remain relatively poor or otherwise incapable of meeting their own needs — because of age, infirmity, and so on — would reap voluntary charity from their affluent compatriots. There’s a bit of a judgment call in that last statement, but just a bit.

To put it another way, a transition to liberty might not instantly make everyone better off economically, but everyone could be better off. That’s simply not the case with the regulatory-welfare state, which robs some for the benefit of others, and ends up making almost everyone poorer than they would be in a state of liberty.

Liberty is a win-win proposition for everyone except those who deserve to lose.

Conservatism, Libertarianism, Socialism, and Democracy

Libertarians have much company in the struggle against socialism. From Ten Books That Shaped America’s Conservative Renaissance:

George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 is the authoritative study on conservatism’s intellectual renaissance. In it, Nash outlines an American conservative movement that was forged, at times uneasily, from three intellectual groups: libertarians, anti-Communists, and traditionalists. . . .

After the 1964 election, and especially after the implementation of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs, the conservative movement welcomed what was to become the fourth component of its intellectual coalition. Popularly known as “neoconservatives,” this group of disillusioned liberals, claiming, as one of them put it, to have been “mugged by reality,” migrated to the conservative cause. Reacting in part to the social uprisings of the 60s, in part to the isolationism and perceived “anti-Americanism” ofthe New Left, and in part to the consequences of liberal activism in government, these gifted newcomers came to realize that good intentions do not guarantee good or effective government.

Let’s hear it for the libertarians:

Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, conservatives of all stripes have denounced the growth of the American welfare state. After World War II in particular, many conservatives were alarmed at the decrease of economic freedom at home and the rise of collectivism overseas. The growth of the omnipotent state was leading to a degree of cultural deterioration that alarmed many thoughtful people.

It was the so-called “libertarians” who responded first to the unwelcome changes that were wrought by this new American “superstate.” The libertarians were attracted to the economic an political teachings of classical, nineteenth century individualists. The principles libertarians believed should guide government were free markets, private property, individualism, and limited government, in short, laissez-faire. The 1930s, the decade of the New Deal, had been uncongenial years for devotees of economic and personal liberty, and it wasn’t until after the war that these libertarian ideas gained a sympathetic hearing.

As has been suggested by a number of scholars, post-war libertarians were buttressed theoretically and philosophically from their association with members of the Austrian School of economics. Since the late-nineteenth century, economists associated with the Austrian School have been forceful critics of all variants of anti-capitalism and collectivism. The most famous of these Austrian economists is Friedrich von Hayek, whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom was central to the early definition of the conservative movement. It was Hayek’s contention that “[a]lthough we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.” The purpose of his book was to explain “why and how certain kinds of economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society.”. . . For Hayek, the socialists, under the guise of equality, were setting us back on the road to serfdom—that is, back to a condition ofpolitical and economic servitude and away from the ideal of a free society….

[Ludwig von Mises’s] book Socialism, [a] work that considerably influenced early conservative thinking, powerfully challenged socialist economics as being not only inherently flawed because they are unable to allocate scarce resources efficiently, but contrary to the very nature of the individual as well. Collectivist economics does not recognize the central role played by the entrepreneur in ordinary economic and social organization. For Mises, socialism was far from being a humane alternative to the free market. Rather, at bottom, it was contrary to human nature itself. By denying the human aspect—the role each individual plays in communicating vital economic information—socialism, according to Mises, was doomed to fail.

Hayek and Mises were right about the inhumane character of socialism, but Mises was wrong about its inevitable failure. The neoconservative Irving Kristol glimpsed the truth of the matter:

[Kristol’s] book On the Democratic Idea in America helped to direct and shape the conservative movement. The subject of the book, in Kristol’s own words, was “the tendency of democratic republics to depart from…their original, animating principles, and as a consequence precipitate grave crises in the moral and political order.” Kristol condemned moral relativism as vigorously as did the traditionalists. As against the libertarians, however, he only gave “two cheers” for capitalism. He noted that while he did “think that, within limits, the notion of the ‘hidden hand’ has its uses in the market place,” he also believed that “the results are disastrous when it is extended to the polity as a whole….” For Kristol, “[s]elf-government, the basic principle of the republic, is inexorably being eroded in favor of self-seeking, self-indulgence, and just plain aggressive selfishness.”

Kristol misunderstands libertarianism if he thinks that it tolerates a form of government which enables some to steal from others. But Kristol is right that (limited) self-government has been replaced by unconstrained self-indulgence, operating through government.

As I have written elsewhere, democracy is an enemy of liberty. What should be private, such as the voluntary exchange of goods and services for mutual gain, “democracy” has made public. The problem isn’t libertarianism or capitalism, it’s state interference in consensual private matters, which diminshes the general good on the pretext of serving the general good. This passage from Jill Paton Walsh’s A Desert in Bohemia captures the socialist mindset, wherever it prevails:

‘You see,’ said Slavomir, swinging in his chair, and twirling a pencil between finger and thumb, ‘this idea that there is a private sphere which is of no concern to the authorities is a very decadent and dangerous one. No-one has an individuality which is not a construction of society, and no-one can have any right to purse conduct which is not for the general good. What do you say to that?’

‘Who decides what is for the general good?’ said Frantsiek.

‘The party,’ said Slavomir, ‘because they are the most enlightened section of society. . . .’

And there you have it. Our counterpart of “the party” — political “leaders,” abetted by the “intelligentsia,” and goaded by the voting masses — cynically imposes its desires in the name of the general good. Limited government, free people, and free markets be damned.

Related post: A Paradox for Libertarians

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A Paradox for Libertarians

Libertarians, by definition, believe in the superiority of liberty: the negative right to be left alone — in one’s person, pursuits, and property — as long as one leaves others alone. Libertarians therefore believe in the illegitimacy of state-enforced values (e.g., income redistribution, censorship, punishment of “victimless” crimes) because they are inimical to liberty.

Some libertarians (minarchists, such as I) nevertheless believe in the necessity of a state, as long as the state’s role is restricted to the protection of liberty. Other libertarians (anarcho-capitalists) argue that the state itself is illegitimate because the existence of a state necessarily compromises liberty. I have dealt elsewhere with the anarcho-capitalist position, and have found it wanting. (See “But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?” and the posts linked to at the bottom of that post.)

Let’s nevertheless imagine a pure anarcho-capitalist society whose members agree voluntarily to leave each other alone. All social and economic transactions are voluntary. Contracts and disputes are enforced through arbitration, to which all parties agree to submit and by the results of which all parties agree to abide. A private agency enforces contractual obligations and adherence to the outcomes of arbitration. (You know that this anarcho-capitalist society is pure fantasy because a private agency with such power is a de facto state. And competing private agencies, each of which may represent a party to a dispute are de facto warlords. But I digress.)

Now, for the members of this fantasyland to enjoy liberty implies, among other things, absolute freedom of speech, except for speech that amounts to harassment, slander, or libel (which are forms of aggression that deprive others of liberty). But what about speech that would sunder the society into libertarian and non-libertarian factions? Suppose that a persuasive orator were to convince a potentially dominant faction of the society of the following proposition: The older members of society should be supported by the younger members, all of whom must “contribute” to the support of the elders, like it or not. Suppose further that the potentially dominant faction heeds the persuasive orator and forces everyone to “contribute” to the support of elders.

Note that our little society’s prior agreement to let everyone live in peace wouldn’t survive persuasive oratory (just as America’s relatively libertarian economic order didn’t survive FDR, the Constitution notwithstanding). Perhaps our little society should therefore adopt this restraint on liberty: No one may advocate or conspire in the coercion of the populace, for any end other than defense of the society.

Why an exception for defense? Imagine the long-term consequences for our little society if it were to dither as a marauding band approached, or if too few members of the society were to volunteer the resources needed to defeat the marauding band. What’s the good of the society’s commitment to liberty if it leads to the society’s demise?

Now, the restraint on speech and the exception for defense couldn’t be self-enforcing. There would have to a single agency empowered to enforce such things. That agency might as well be called the state.

Here, then, is the paradox for libertarians: Some aspects of liberty must be circumscribed in order to preserve most aspects of liberty.

Note: My free-speech example is just that, an example. I’m not proposing any further restrictions on freedom of speech in the United States, which already has been restricted too much, notably in the realms of commercial and political speech.

This post is also available at Blogger News Network.

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Sorting Out the Libertarian Hawks and Doves

UPDATED TWICE, BELOW

Paleolibertarians adhere to something they call the non-aggression principle. According to Walter Block, writing at LewRockwell.com (a paleo site):

The non-aggression axiom is the lynchpin of the philosophy of libertarianism. It states, simply, that it shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another.

In another post, Block writes:

The libertarian non-aggression axiom is the essence of libertarianism. Take away this axiom, and libertarianism might as well be libraryism, or vegetarianism. Thus, if a person is to be a libertarian, he must, he absolutely must, in my opinion, be able to distinguish aggression from defense.

Here’s a joke. Do you know the difference between a bathroom and a living room? No? Well, don’t come to my house. In this spirit I ask, do you know the difference between offense and defense? Between aggression and defense against aggression? No? Well, then, don’t call yourself a libertarian.

I can’t read anyone out of the libertarian movement. No one appointed me guardian of this honorific. I am just giving my humble opinion. In like manner, if you couldn’t tell the difference between a hammer and a chisel, I wouldn’t consider you a carpenter. If you couldn’t distinguish between a brush and paint, I wouldn’t consider you a painter. In much the same way, if you can’t tell offense and defense apart, that is, if you believe in pre-emptive strikes against those who are not attacking you, then I can’t consider you a libertarian even if you favor free enterprise and oppose criminalizing voluntary adult conduct.

There are areas in which well meaning and knowledgeable libertarians disagree: minarchism vs. anarchism; immigration; abortion; inalienability; punishment theory. Although I have strong views on all of these, I recognize libertarian arguments on the other side. But not on this issue.

You don’t have to wait until I actually punch you in the nose to take violent action against me. You don’t even have to wait until my fist is within a yard of you, moving in your direction. However, if you haul off and punch me in the nose in a preemptive strike, on the ground that I might punch you in the future, then you are an aggressor.

But what about the in-between case, where you haven’t started your swing but I have good reason to believe that you’re about to do so? Consider the following comment that I posted today at Catallarchy:

I know that life’s not black & white, but a black & white case may help us to clarify the principles that we’re trying to apply to rather messy “real world” situations. Consider this hypothetical:

1. In Country A (just as in Country B), the armed forces are controlled by the state. (I don’t want to get off onto the tangent of whether war is more or less likely if defense is provided by private agencies.)

2. The only restriction on the liberty of Country A’s citizens is that they must pay taxes to support their armed forces. Country B’s citizens own no property; their jobs are dictated by the state; their income is dictated by the state; and all aspects of their lives are regimented by state decrees.

3. Though Country A’s armed forces are underwritten by taxes, the members of the armed forces are volunteers. The members of Country B’s armed forces are conscripts, and Country B’s armed forces are, in effect, supplied and equipped by slave labor.

4. Country A would liberate Country B’s citizens, if it could. Country B would subjugate or kill Country A’s citizens, if it could.

What say you, then, to these questions:

1. If Country B attacks Country A, what limits (if any) would you place on the measures Country A might take in its defense? Specifically:

a. Are civilian casualties in Country B acceptable at all?

b. Are civilian casualties in Country B acceptable if they’re the result of mistakes on Country A’s part or the unavoidable result of Country A’s attacks on Country B’s armed forces and infrastructure?

c. Is the deliberate infliction by Country A of civilian casualties in Country B acceptable as long as Country A’s leaders reasonably believe that the infliction of those casualties — and nothing else — will bring about the defeat of Country B? (Assume, here, that Country A’s leaders try to inflict only the number of casualties deemed necessary to the objective.)

(Assume, for purposes of the next 2 questions, that Country A inflicts casualties on Country B’s civilians only to the extent that those casualties are the result of mistakes or unavoidable collateral damage.)

2. Should Country A attack Country B if Country A concludes (rightly or wrongly, but in good faith) that Country B is about to attack, and if Country B strikes first it is likely to:

a. win a quick victory and subjugate Country A?

b. inflict heavy casualties on Country A’s citizens?

3. Should Country A attack Country B if Country A concludes (rightly or wrongly, but in good faith) that Country B is developing the wherewithal to attack, and if Country B strikes first it is likely to

a. win a quick victory and subjugate Country A?

b. inflict heavy casualties on Country A’s citizens?

What I’m trying to get at is whether we should value non-aggression (which I take to be a means to liberty that’s favored by certain libertarians) over liberty itself (the end upon which all libertarians agree). In light of that distinction, my answers are:

1. a. Yes
1. b. Yes
1. c Yes
2. a. Yes
2. b. Yes
3. a. Yes
3. b. Yes

Over to you.

Let me emphasize the essential question: Should libertarians favor non-aggression — which is really a means to liberty — over liberty itself? Paleos like Block have latched onto non-aggression (which Block, at least, cannot define very well), as if non-aggression were the same thing as liberty. They have mixed up ends and means. Aggression may be necessary to the pursuit of liberty; non-aggression may be inimical to liberty.

Of course, the paleos can always argue that my answers are within the (vague) bounds of non-aggression. And that’s okay with me, as long as they also stop harping about American imperialism.

UPDATE (7:26 pm CT): Joe Miller (not a paleo, in my book) has posted a thorough and thoughtful reply to my comment. I will think it through and respond to him here and at Catallarchy.

UPDATE 2 (4:02 pm CT, 07/28/05): I have continued this post at Liberty Corner II.

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But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?

That’s the title of a piece by Robert Murphy at the Mises Economics Blog. Murphy says:

On two separate occasions in the last couple of weeks, people have asked me a familiar question: In a system of anarcho-capitalism or the free-market order, wouldn’t society degenerate into constant battles between private warlords?”…

For the warlord objection to work, the statist [or minarchist: ED] would need to argue that a given community would remain lawful under a government, but that the same community would break down into continuous warfare if all legal and military services were privatized….

Now that we’’ve focused the issue, I think there are strong reasons to suppose that civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly [s]tate. Private agencies own the assets at their disposal, whereas politicians (especially in democracies) merely exercise temporary control over the [s]tate’’s military equipment. Bill Clinton was perfectly willing to fire off dozens of cruise missiles when the Lewinsky scandal was picking up steam. Now regardless of one’s beliefs about Clinton’’s motivations, clearly Slick Willie would have been less likely to launch such an attack if he had been the CEO of a private defense agency that could have sold the missiles on the open market for $569,000 each.

Aside from this brief excursion into Clinton’s use or misuse of national defense assets, Murphy’s argument is focused in the issue of intra-societal violence; viz: “civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly [s]tate. ” Let’s return to Murphy:

We can see this principle [of the profligate use of force] in the case of the United States. In the 1860s, would large scale combat have broken out on anywhere near the same scale if, instead of the two factions controlling hundreds of thousands of conscripts, all military commanders had to hire voluntary mercenaries and pay them a market wage for their services?

Murphy concedes that there might have been combat. He’s merely quibbling about its scale. He continues:

I can imagine a reader generally endorsing the above analysis, yet still resisting my conclusion. He or she might say something like this: “In a state of nature, people initially have different views of justice. Under market anarchy, different consumers would patronize dozens of defense agencies, each of which attempts to use its forces to implement incompatible codes of law. Now it’’s true that these professional gangs might generally avoid conflict out of prudence, but the equilibrium would still be precarious.

To avoid this outcome,” my critic could elaborate, “citizens put aside their petty differences and agree to support a single, monopoly agency, which then has the power to crush all challengers to its authority. This admittedly raises the new problem of controlling the Leviathan, but at least it solves the problem of ceaseless domestic warfare.

There are several problems with this possible approach. First, it assumes that the danger of private warlords is worse than the threat posed by a tyrannical central government. Second, there is the inconvenient fact that no such voluntary formation of a [s]tate ever occurred. Even those citizens who, say, supported the ratification of the U.S. Constitution were never given the option of living in market anarchy; instead they had to choose between government under the Articles of Confederation or government under the Constitution.

Murphy sets up a quasi-straw man — the voluntary formation of a state — then proceeds to blow it down. Big deal. That doesn’t prove that the danger of warlords is less than the threat posed by a central government, which is what Murphy implies. Non sequitur. Moreover, many citizens did support the ratification of the Constitution, and those who didn’t had the option of going to Canada or over the Blue Ridge. Back to Murphy:

But for our purposes, the most interesting problem with this objection is that, were it an accurate description, it would be unnecessary for such a people to form a government. If, by hypothesis, the vast majority of people — —although they have different conceptions of justice — can all agree that it is wrong to use violence to settle their honest disputes, then market forces would lead to peace among the private police agencies.

Murphy’s hypothesis is his undoing. He assumes that if the vast majority of people agree that it’s wrong to use violence to settle disputes, then that won’t happen. Do the vast majority of people believe that it’s wrong to use violence to settle disputes? Perhaps, but it doesn’t take a vast majority to inject violence into a society; it takes only a relatively small number of renegades, who may be then be able to coerce others into condoning or supporting their criminal activities. There’s more:

Yes, it is perfectly true that people have vastly different opinions concerning particular legal issues. Some people favor capital punishment, some consider abortion to be murder, and there would be no consensus on how many guilty people should go free to avoid the false conviction of one innocent defendant. Nonetheless, if the contract theory of government is correct, the vast majority of individuals can agree that they should settle these issues not through force, but rather through an orderly procedure (such as is provided by periodic elections).

Well, Murphy now admits that there’s something to the voluntary formation of a state. But, like most anarcho-capitalists, he doesn’t want to admit to the legitimacy of an institution that he didn’t contract for. Tough. But that still doesn’t have anything to do with the superiority of private defense agencies over state-controlled police forces and courts. Nevertheless, Murphy plows on:

But if this does indeed describe a particular population, why would we expect such virtuous people, as consumers, to patronize defense agencies that routinely used force against weak opponents? Why wouldn’’t the vast bulk of reasonable customers patronize defense agencies that had interlocking arbitration agreements, and submitted their legitimate disputes to reputable, disinterested arbitrators? Why wouldn’t the private, voluntary legal framework function as an orderly mechanism to settle matters of “public policy””?

There sure are a lot of hypotheticals piled on top of one another. What Murphy doesn’t entertain is the possibility that a small but very rich cabal could create a dominant defense agency that simply refuses to recognize other defense agencies, except as enemies. In other words, there’s nothing in Murphy’s loose logic to prove that warlords wouldn’t arise. In fact, he soon gives away the game:

Imagine a bustling city, such as New York, that is initially a free market paradise. Is it really plausible that over time rival gangs would constantly grow, and eventually terrorize the general public? Remember, these would be admittedly criminal organizations; unlike the city government of New York, there would be no ideological support for these gangs.

We must consider that in such an environment, the law-abiding majority would have all sorts of mechanisms at their [sic] disposal, beyond physical confrontation. Once private judges had ruled against a particular rogue agency, the private banks could freeze its assets (up to the amount of fines levied by the arbitrators). In addition, the private utility companies could shut down electricity and water to the agency’’s headquarters, in accordance with standard provisions in their contracts.

Pardon me while I laugh at the notion that lack of “ideological support” for the gangs of New York would make it impossible for gangs to grow and terrorize the general public. That’s precisely what has happened at various times during the history of New York, even though the “law-abiding majority [had] all sorts of mechanisms at [its] disposal.” Murphy insists on hewing to the assumption that the existence of a law-abiding majority somehow prevents the rise a powerful, law-breaking minorities, capable of terrorizing the general public. Wait a minute; now he admits the converse:

Of course, it is theoretically possible that a rogue agency could overcome these obstacles, either through intimidation or division of the spoils, and take over enough banks, power companies, grocery stores, etc. that only full-scale military assault would conquer it. But the point is, from an initial position of market anarchy, these would-be rulers would have to start from scratch. In contrast, under even a limited government, the machinery of mass subjugation is ready and waiting to be seized.

Huh? It’s certainly more than theoretically possible for a “rogue agency” to wreak havoc. A “rogue agency” is nothing more than a fancy term for a street gang, the Mafia, or al Qaeda cells operating in the U.S. A “rogue agency” run by and on behalf of rich and powerful criminals — for their own purposes — would somehow be preferable to police forces and courts operated by a limited government that is accountable to the general public, rich and poor alike? I don’t think so. However much the American state engages in “mass subjugation” — and it does, to a degree — it is also held in check by its accountability to the general public under American law and tradition. A “rogue agency,” by definition, would be unbound by law and tradition.

Murphy’s analysis takes place in a land called “Erewhon.” He chooses to ignore the fact that he lives in the United States because he wasn’t a party to the Constitution. Yet that Constitution provides for a limited government, which in more than 200 years has yet to engage in systematic, mass subjugation of the kind practiced in the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, except in the case of slavery. And guess what? The American state ended slavery. How’s that for mass subjugation?

Anyone can conjure a Utopia, as Murphy has. But no one can guarantee that it will work. Murphy certainly hasn’t made the case that his Utopia would work.

In any event, by focusing on intra-societal violence Murphy ignores completely two crucial questions: (1) Can an anarchistic society effectively defend itself against an outside force? (2) Can it do so better than a society in which the state has a monopoly on the use of force with respect to outside entities? Murphy implies that the answer to both questions is “yes,” though he fails to explore those questions. Here is my brief answer: The cost of mounting a credible defense of the United States from foreign enemies probably would support only one supplier; that is, national defense is a natural monopoly. It is better for the American state — given its accountability to the general public — to be that supplier.

To revert to Murphy’s example of Clinton’s profligate use of expensive missiles, the CEO of a private defense agency might well have an incentive to fire missiles at a bogus target. He might want to demonstrate his apparent “resolve” iprovocation of putative provaction in order to quell unrest among his shareholders or to attract new clients. Murphy’s example suggests only that the state may be wasteful in its expenditure of conscripted dollars. Murphy’s example does not show that the state is necessarily any less effective than would be a private defense agency or defense agencies. In matters of life and death, a wasteful state is preferable to an efficient private defense agency (if there could be such a thing).

A wasteful, accountable, American state is certainly preferable to an efficient, private, defense agency in possession of the same military might. Hitler and Stalin, in effect, ran private defense agencies, and look where that landed the Germans and Russians. Talk about subjugation.

Related posts:

Defense, Anarcho-Capitalist Style (09/26/04)
Fundamentalist Libertarians, Anarcho-Capitalists, and Self-Defense (04/22/05)
The Legitimacy of the Constitution (05/09/05)
Another Thought about Anarchy (05/10/05)
Anarcho-Capitalism vs. the State (05/26/05)
Rights and the State (06/13/05)

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Three Axioms

The state must do three things to ensure liberty and secure its blessings:

  • Protect its citizens from foreign enemies.
  • Otherwise allow individuals freely to pursue happiness in their social endeavors and economic transactions.

The Principle of Actionable Harm

Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia writes about Will Wilkinson’s flaying of Richard Layard, who

has devised a new kind of negative externality argument. He observes that inequality of status makes many people — specifically, envious people — unhappy. As a result, any productive effort to improve one’’s position creates a negative externality by reducing the relative status, and thus happiness, of others. Using standard Pigovian logic, Layard concludes that we ought to discourage (e.g., tax) productive effort in order to correct the externality.

Whitman and Wilkinson spend a lot of words to prove Layard wrong — which he is, of course.

My initial reaction to Layard’s observation that envious people are made unhappy by the relative success of others is this: “That’s tough; get over it.”

I follow that observation with this one: If feelings count, then government’s effort to make the envious happy must make the objects of their envy unhappy, which must — by Layard’s logic — call for a restoration of the status quo ante. In other words, why should government be in the business of kow-towing to envious persons; why should the feelings of the envious be privileged? I would adapt what I wrote here to suggest that it is the envious, not the envied, who do harm:

1. Government should not act or condone action except when it seeks to deter, prevent, or remedy an actionable harm to liberty.

2. An actionable harm to liberty is one that arises or would arise directly from the commission of an overt act or acts by any person or entity, domestic or foreign.

3. An expression of thought cannot be an actionable harm unless it

a. intentionally obstructs or would directly obstruct governmental efforts to deter, prevent, or remedy an actionable harm (e.g., divulging classified defense information, committing perjury),

b. intentionally causes or would directly cause an actionable harm (e.g., plotting to commit an act of terrorism, forming a lynch mob),

c. purposely — through a lie or the withholding of pertinent facts — causes a person to act against self-interest in an economic transaction (e.g., misrepresenting a product, inflating a corporation’s statement of earnings), or

d. purposely — through its intended influence on government — results in what would be an actionable harm if committed by a private entity (e.g., the taking of income from persons who earn it, simply to assuage the envy of those who earn less).

4. Government should act to prevent, deter, or remedy the actionable harms described in 3.a, 3.b, and 3.c. By the same token, government should avert actionable harms of the type described in 3.d. With those exceptions, a mere statement of fact, belief, opinion, or attitude cannot be an actionable harm or indicate the existence of an actionable harm, regardless of the subject of the statement, unless it amounts to slander or libel (both of which are actionable harms). Otherwise, those persons who do not care for the facts, beliefs, opinions, or attitudes expressed by other persons would be able to stifle speech they find offensive merely by claiming to be harmed by it. Similarly, those persons who claim to be offended by the superior income or wealth of other persons would be entitled to recompense from those other persons.

5. An act of omission (e.g., the refusal of social or economic relations because of some form of bias), other than a breach of contract or duty, cannot be an actionable harm. It is incompatible with liberty for government to judge voluntary actions that are not otherwise actionable harms.

Governmental intervention in our affairs — for any reason but to deter, prevent, or remedy an actionable harm to liberty — is harmful in many ways, among them economically. The right to strive uninhibitedly toward economic advancement (without committing actionable harms) has great potential benefits — for the envious as well as the envied. As I have explained here, it is thinkers like Layard who have robbed all of us of a huge share of those benefits.

Second-Guessing, Paternalism, Parentalism, and Choice

You make the best decision you can, at the time you make it, in light of your preferences and knowledge at that time. Then someone (sometimes yourself) comes along to tell you that you would would have made a “more rational” decision if only you had had different knowledge or different preferences at the time you made the decision.

Persons with a compulsion to second-guess the decisions of others are paternalists; they want to use the power of the state to force others to make “rational” (i.e., different) decisions. Persons with a compulsion to second-guess themselves are parentalists; they want the state to make “rational” decisions for them. Paternalism and parentalism have the same effect: loss of liberty.

Glen Whitman explains:

Julian [Sanchez has] written up an excellent piece on “parentalism” – the desire of some people to have their own freedom restricted for their own good. He cites a forthcoming Cato Policy Analysis by yours truly on the subject of “internalities,” a term of art for within-person externalities that people impose on themselves. In so doing, he helpfully saves me the trouble of having to summarize my own argument:

There are plenty of practical problems with the parentalist impulse. As economist Glen Whitman notes in a forthcoming Cato Institute paper, we cannot assume we always help people by giving preference to their “long term” over their “short term” interests. Imagine an aging man in ill-health lamenting his sybaritic youth. We are tempted to say that his younger self, seeing the pleasures immediately available to him and giving short shrift to their long term consequences, exhibited a foolish bias toward the present. But surely it’s also possible that his older self, faced with the proximate pains and inconveniences of poor health, discounts the pleasures past he’d have forsaken had he been more health-conscious. If we’re prone to the first form of cognitive bias, why not the second?

Whitman also argues that, just as simple Pigovian taxes on pollution may be less efficient than allowing market negotiation to determine how much pollution will be produced in what location, sin taxes, smoking bans, and other parentalist attempts to spare our future selves the costs of our present choices may displace a rich variety of mechanisms for self-restraint that would match the rich variety of risk profiles and time-discount rates we find among members of a pluralistic society. And as the young man interviewed by the Village Voice demonstrated, we can be ingenious at outwitting imposed restraints—even those we welcome in principle. We may find ourselves running up bigger credit card bills to buy more sin-taxed Twinkies and cigarettes, or traveling inconvenient distances to find a smoke friendly bar.

So what’s the difference between parentalism and paternalism? Paternalism involves other people favoring restrictions for a person’s own good, whereas parentalism involves people favoring restrictions on themselves. While this distinction is clear in principle, in practice the latter quickly shades into the former. True paternalists will seize upon the (possibly idle) statements of parentalists to justify their favored policies. Indeed, the whole thrust of the “new paternalism” is that restrictions on personal liberty will help people to better achieve their own preferences, not externally imposed preferences. As I put it in my article, “[T]he old paternalism said, ‘We know what’s best for you, and we’ll make you do it.’ The new paternalism says, ‘You know what’s best for you, and we’ll make you do it.’” The problem is that the policymakers, who cannot possibly know the “true” preferences of all those affected by their policies, ultimately have to impose an external set of preferences via their regulatory choices.

Giving the state the power to make your choices for you is like handing the remote control to a stranger who can force you to sit and watch the TV programs he chooses.

Related posts:

The Rationality Fallacy (08/16/04)

Socialist Calculation and the Turing Test (02/13/05)

Libertarian Paternalism (04/24/05)

The Essential Case for Consequentialist Libertarianism

Steven Horowitz, a guest gadfly at Agoraphilia, succinctly makes the case:

It may be that utilitarians don’t believe in natural rights, but one can be a utilitarian, in the broadest sense, and still argue that a particular set/bundle of rights will lead to the greatest good, or put better, will have consequences that (virtually) all will think are good. Or put somewhat differently, it may be that a system in which individuals have very strong rights is a system that generates the best consequences (i.e., is best from a utilitarian point of view).

For an elaboration of this point, see my series on “Practical Libertarianism.” Start with Part VIII. Practical Libertarianism — A Summary. The core of my argument for consequentialism is detailed in these parts:

III. The Origin and Essence of Rights

Addendum to Part V: The Destruction of Income and Wealth by the State

Practical Libertarianism — A Summary

I have posted “Practical Libertarianism — A Summary” at Liberty Corner II. That post completes and summarizes the series of essays entitled “Practical Libertarianism for Americans.” Supporting details and links to additional sources can be found in the preceding posts of the series.

Some of my favorite bits:

My focus is on American libertarianism because the Constitution of the United States of America holds the promise of liberty. Building on that promise, Americans can strive to perfect liberty in the United States. But the rest of the world isn’t bound by our Constitution, and it is foolish to think that the rest of the world prizes America’s liberty. America’s sovereignty and strength is the shield of America’s liberty, imperfect as it may be.

What is libertarianism, and why should you embrace it? Here is a formal definition of libertarianism…:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy which advocates individual rights and a limited government. Libertarians believe that individuals should be free to do anything they want, so long as they do not infringe upon what they believe to be the equal rights of others. In this respect they agree with many other modern political ideologies. The difference arises from the definition of “rights”. For libertarians, there are no “positive rights” (such as to food, shelter, or health care), only “negative rights” (such as to not be assaulted, abused or robbed). Libertarians further believe that the only legitimate use of force, whether public or private, is to protect these rights.

Here’s my rendition:

If you are doing no harm to anyone, no one should harm you physically, coerce you, defraud or deceive you, steal from you, or tell you how to live your life. “No one” includes government, except to the extent that government is empowered — by the people — to defend life, liberty, and property through the circumscribed use of police, courts, and armed forces….

Fundamentalist libertarians argue that the only right is liberty, and that it is a natural right with which human beings are endowed a priori. In one rendition, liberty is immanent — something that simply is in human nature, perhaps as a gift from God. In another rendition, humans are endowed with liberty as a logical necessity, because humans own themselves.

But appeals to immanence and self-ownership are no more meaningful than appeals to faith. Such appeals fail because they take liberty as a first principle. Liberty, which is a condition of existence, cannot be a first principle, it can only serve the first principle of existence, which is self-interest….

Rights — though they can exist without the sanction of government and the protection of a state — are political. That is, although rights may arise from human nature, they have no essence until they are recognized through interpersonal bargaining (politics), in the service of self-interest. It is bargaining that determines whether we recognize only the negative right of liberty, or the positive right of privilege as well. The preference of human beings — revealed over eons of coexistence — is to recognize both liberty (usually constrained to some degree) and privilege (which necessitates constraints on liberty).

The problem for libertarians, therefore, is to convince the body politic of two complementary truths: Self-interest dictates that liberty should be the paramount right. The recognition of privilege as a co-equal right undermines the benefits that flow from liberty….

The logical incompatibility of liberty and privilege doesn’t keep most people from wanting both. People want to be left alone, but it seems that almost everyone also yearns for some version of the welfare-regulatory state. People seem to believe that government does things that are more valuable than the freedom of action they forego because government does things. Most Americans simply don’t understand the true costs and illusory benefits of the welfare-regulatory state.

Absent the welfare-regulatory state, most of the poor would be rich, by today’s standards. And those who remain relatively poor or otherwise incapable of meeting their own needs — because of age, infirmity, and so on — would reap voluntary charity from their affluent compatriots….

[T]he bottom line:

  • Real GDP (in year 2000 dollars) was about $10.7 trillion in 2004.
  • If government had grown no more meddlesome after 1906, real GDP might have been $18.7 trillion (from the chart entitled “Real GDP: 1870-1906, 1907-2004”).
  • That is, real GDP per American would have been about $63,000 (in year 2000 dollars) instead of $36,000.
  • That’s a deadweight loss to the average American of more than 40 percent of the income he or she might have enjoyed, absent the regulatory-welfare state.
  • That loss is in addition to the 40-50 percent of current output which government drains from the productive sectors of the economy.
  • Moreover, the stocks of corporations in the S&P 500 are currently undervalued by one-third because of the depradations of the regulatory-welfare state, which have lowered investors’ expectations for future earnings. (The effect of those lowered expectations is shown in the chart entitled “Real S&P Index vs. Real GDP.”) And that’s only the portion of wealth that’s represented in the S&P 500. Think of all the other forms in which wealth is stored: stocks not included in the S&P 500, corporate bonds, mortgages, home equity, and so on.

That is the measurable price of privilege — of ceding liberty piecemeal in the mistaken belief that one more government program, a bit more income redistribution, or yet another regulation will do little harm to the general welfare, and might even increase it….

When people are deprived of incentives through taxation, regulation, and welfare, they are less able and willing to strive for themselves. And it is self-striving that leads people to do things that are valued by others. Regulation and welfare (the “free lunch”) impose costs (bureaucratic overhead), where there otherwise would be no costs, and distort the free-market signals that tell people how they can do better for themselves by doing better for others….

If liberty is so bounteous, why don’t we enjoy it in full? Why are our lives so heavily regulated and legislated by so many federal, State, and local agencies at such a high cost? What happened to the promise of liberty given in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution? The answers to those questions are bound up in human nature and the nature of governance in a democracy….

It is easy to endorse liberty in principle and yet be its enemy in practice. Our need for control and our baser instincts lead many of us to become politicians and cause most of us to succumb to political rhetoric. Most of us simply lack the requisite temperament, or vision, for libertarianism.

Thomas Sowell, in A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, posits two opposing visions: the unconstrained vision (I would call it the idealistic vision) and the constrained vision (which I would call the realistic vision)….

In sum, it’s all about trust and its opposite: control. You can trust others to do the right thing because it’s to their benefit to do so, as it is in free markets and free societies. Or you can control others, economically and socially, through a morass of statutes, regulations, and judge-made law.

Trust doesn’t mean an absence of rules, but the rules have only to be minimal, socially evolved rules of acceptable conduct, such as the Golden Rule or the last six of the Ten Commandments. The clearer and more intuitive the rules, the more likely they are to be enforced by self-interest, by fear of social opprobrium, and by pride in reputation — with swift, sure, and hard justice as a backup.

But none of that goes down well with those who think that the road to happiness must be paved with hard-and-fast rules for everything and everyone. Otherwise, how would people know what to do?

The demand for control is fed by economic illiteracy, the prevalent failure to grasp such simple principles as these:

  • Incentives matter. Taxation, redistribution, and regulation result in the reduction and misdirection of economic activity and social trust.
  • There’s no free lunch. Government can’t provide something for nothing. It never could, it never will. Every governmental action has an opportunity cost: that which the private sector could do with the same resources. There’s no such thing as “federal money” or “government money”; there’s only “our money.”
  • Government doesn’t add value. At best it protects what we value, by defending us at home and abroad.
  • The economy isn’t a zero-sum game. Bill Gates is immensely wealthy because he has created things that are of value to others. When Indian computer geeks man call centers for lower salaries than those of American computer geeks, it makes both Indians and Americans better off.
  • There’s no such thing as “market failure.” Rather, there is only failure of the market to provide what some people think it should provide. Even defense and justice (both classic examples of a “public good“) could be provided by the market, as anarcho-capitalists aver, but minarchists (as I am) fear the consequences (warlord rivalry) and reluctantly trust in the state for those essential underpinnings of a free society.

Most people simply don’t understand the consequences of the rules that they so fervently seek to impose on others. They have little idea of the measurable costs of intervention — the 40-to-50 percent of GDP that goes into government programs, for instance — and they have no idea of the hidden costs of that intervention — the additionale of an additonal 40 percent of income and untold amounts of wealth. They simply cannot comprehend the indivisibility of economic and social liberty (though the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Raich and Kelo may open some eyes).

Control-seeking politicians — most of whom also suffer from economic illiteracy — are able to draw power from the masses by appealing to the insecurity and economic illiteracy of the masses. Once having drawn that power, they seek always to aggrandize it. What happens, then, is a ratcheting of government power, in response to never-ending demands for government to “do something” — because government’s previous efforts to “do something” have inevitably failed to achieve nirvana.

Thus we have been following a piecemeal route to serfdom — adding link to link and chain to chain — in spite of the Framers’ best intentions and careful drafting. Why? Because the governed — or dominant coalitions of them — have donned willingly the chains that they have implored their governors to forge. Their bondage is voluntary, though certainly not informed. But their bondage is everyone’s bondage….

Unchecked democracy undermines liberty and its blessings. Unchecked democracy imposes on everyone the mistakes and mistaken beliefs of the controlling faction. It defeats learning. It undoes the social fabric that underlies civility. It defeats the sublime rationality of free markets, which enable independent individuals to benefit each other through the pursuit of self-interest. As “anonymous” says, with brutal accuracy, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.”…

[A] not-so-funny thing has happened on the way to the state of liberty foreseen by Madison and the other Framers: Human nature has overcame constitutional obstacles. The governed and their governors have conspired to undermine the Constitution’s checks and balances. People, given their mistrustful and ignorant nature, have turned to government for “solutions” to their “problems.” Government, in its turn, has seized whatever power is necessary to go through the motions of providing “solutions.” For rare is the legislator who doesn’t want to legislate, the executive who doesn’t want to act, and the judge who doesn’t want to exercise his judgment by interpreting the law rather than simply apply it….

[T]he “checks and balances” in the Constitution are there to limit the federal government’s ability to act, even within its sphere of authority. In the legislative branch neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate can pass a law unilaterally. In his sole constitutional role — as head of the executive branch — the President of the United States must sign acts of Congress before they become law, and may veto acts of Congress — which may, in turn, override his vetoes. From its position atop the judicial branch, the Supreme Court is supposed to decide cases “arising under” (within the scope of) the Constitution, not to change the Constitution without benefit of convention or amendment.

The Constitution itself defines the sphere of authority of the federal government and balances that authority against the authority of the States and the rights of citizens. Although the Constitution specifies certain powers of the federal executive and judiciary (e.g., commanding the armed forces and judging cases arising under the Constitution), federal power rests squarely and solely upon the legislative authority of Congress, as defined in Article I, Sections 8, 9, and 10. The intentionally limited scope of federal authority is underscored by Amendments IX and X.

In spite of all that, we now have myriad statutes, regulations, and court rulings through which the federal government — acting at the people’s behest and in their name — has arrogated unconstitutional power to itself (and sometimes to the States). And the people suffer….

At this moment in history, federalism seems the most promising option because the Left is now beginning to understand that the power of the federal government may be used not only to advance its agenda but also to thwart that agenda. Leftists, like conservatives and pragmatic libertarians, may be willing to settle for a “good” solution rather than hold out for the “best” of all possible worlds. But, as I will explain, the way to federalism isn’t through a collaboration between Left and Right….

In summary, the Left’s vision of federalism is to devolve the central government’s acquired anti-libertarian powers to somewhat less remote commissars at the State and local level. The Left simply isn’t to be trusted as a partner in the shaping of a new federalism. A pro-libertarian federalism would not only limit the power of the central government but would also limit the power of State and local governments to advance the Left’s anti-libertarian agenda.

The only way to advance pro-libertarian federalism is to ensure that the Left neither controls the central government nor has little influence over its policies. This is especially true of the U.S. Supreme Court. For the surest way to return to a form of federalism that, in the main, advances liberty and prosperity is through Court rulings of the kind so feared by publius and his ilk: “the overruling of the post-New Deal regulatory state.”

Something resembling pro-libertarian federalism will come about only if a Republican president, aided by a strongly Republican Senate, is able to stock the courts with judges who are committed to the restraint of government power — at all levels of government. (Janice Rogers Brown is that kind of judge.)

Certainly not all decisions by all Republican appointees to the bench will satisfy all libertarians, many of whom seem to focus on narrowly tailored “rights,” such as abortion and gay marriage. But by siding with the Left on such issues, libertarians effectively abjure more basic rights — rights that broadly affect the ability of most Americans to pursue happiness — such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of contract.

In the real world there are real choices. The real choice for libertarians is between what seems “best” for a few and what is actually “better” for the many. I choose the latter, without hesitation.

Pro-libertarian federalism is the best practical way to redeem the promise of liberty. The surest route to pro-libertarian federalism, it seems to me, can be found through the Republican Party. The GOP may not be reliably anti-statist, but it is less statist than the Left. And it is more likely to defend our basic rights — in the courts, in the streets, and in foreign fields.

The Short Answer to Libertarian Paternalism

Here’s the fatal flaw in “libertarian paternalism” and all other forms of statism:

If we are systematically flawed in our efforts to see what is good for ourselves, how much worse must we be at seeing what is good for others, about whom we can know far less and with whose interests we can have at best partial empathy!

— Nick Weininger, writing at Catallarchy