Libertarian Whining about Cell Phones and Driving

Read this bit of whining by Glen Whitman, then this, by me.

I do not want to be on the same road as Glen Whitman (an admitted cell-phone-talking driver) and his ilk. Unfortunately, I haven’t any choice — unless I give up driving.

Liberty is not about doing as one wishes. It is about doing what is responsible. It is irresponsible — plain and simple — to drive while talking on a cell phone. None of the excuses invented by Whitman can change that fact.

I say “excuses,” because Whitman is evidently looking for ways to evade responsibility for the patently deplorable practice of driving while talking on a cell phone — “hands free” or otherwise. I’ve seen more than my share of cell-phone-impaired drivers. I know what I’m talking about.

Some people should just grow up and act responsibly. End of message.

A Critique of Extreme Libertarianism

EXTREME LIBERTARIANISM: MARXISM OF THE RIGHT?

A few years ago I would have joined Daniel McCarthy’s defense of libertarianism (“In Defense of Freedom“) against Robert Locke’s attack on it (“Marxism of the Right“). Upon mature reflection, I find some of Locke’s arguments persuasive; for example:

If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. . . .

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it….

Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill….

Libertarians rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at the point at which it starts to impinge upon another person’s, but they radically underestimate how easily this happens….

[I]f limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow, then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity….If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional liberties.

The extreme libertarian, on the other hand, resorts to intellectual sleight-of-hand by asserting that libertarianism has only to do with the conduct of the state. Here is McCarthy:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a complete system of ethics or metaphysics. Political philosophies address specifically the state and, more generally, justice in human society. The distinguishing characteristic of libertarianism is that it applies to the state the same ethical rules that apply to everyone else….

Yes, the state seizes tax money and jails those who do not pay, actions that would be denounced as gangsterism if undertaken by a private organization. But if the only way life can go on is to have the government provide defense and other necessities, such expropriations might have to be called something other than robbery.

Moderate libertarians say just that. They propose that the state should do those necessary things that it alone can do—and only those things. Radical libertarians contend there is nothing good that only the state can provide—even its seemingly essential functions are better served by the market and voluntary institutions. The differences between thoroughgoing libertarians and moderates are profound, but the immediate prescriptions of each are similar enough: cut taxes, slash spending, no more foreign adventurism.

McCarthy reveals that he is a radical, “thoroughgoing” libertarian when he assails “foreign adventurism” — a cheap rhetorical trick aimed at excluding libertarian hawks from the ranks of libertarianism.

THREE ERRORS OF EXTREME LIBERTARIANISM

I take issue with McCarthy and his fellow travelers on the “right wing” of libertarianism. I argue, specifically, that

libertarianism is more than a “political philosophy” that addresses the state, it is a prescription for how individuals should live their lives;

it is pure sophistry (or naïveté) to assert that “there is nothing good that only the state can provide”; and

the state, properly understood, is not a discrete “thing,” it is simply the inevitable means by which a group or society regulates relations among its members when there are too many of them to act by consensus.

LIBERTARIANISM AS A PRESCRIPTION FOR LIVING ONE’S LIFE

A political philosophy — any political philosophy — has implications for how individuals live their lives. Consider national defense, a subject about which McCarthy evidently has strong views. He calls taxation for the purpose of providing defense a form of robbery; he sees preemptive warfare as foreign adventurism. Libertarians of McCarthy’s ilk argue against preemptive war from the non-aggression principle. The problem with the non-aggression principle in the hands of radical libertarians is that it becomes a non-preemption principle. But preemption may in fact be necessary to the defense of liberty, as I have argued here and here.

A political philosophy that would do away with the state most certainly is a prescription for how people will be forced to live their lives — and it is a poisonous prescription: We can rely on “private defense agencies” to keep the peace, at home and abroad, and we would have fewer enemies abroad if we only “minded our own business.”

THE “GOOD” THAT ONLY A STATE CAN PROVIDE

Before addressing private defense agencies, I must say a thing or two about the notion of “minding our own business,” which is a naïvely dangerous view of the world on two counts. First, it assumes that having and defending overseas economic interests is, somehow, not “our own business.” Second, it entrusts the safekeeping of those interests to the beneficence of others. It is as if Hitler, Stalin, bin Laden, and their ilk did not, do not, and could not exist.

Now, to private defense agencies. I once wrote this about extreme libertarianism (known also as anarcho-capitalism):

Among the important particulars not accounted for by anarcho-capitalists is the method of resolving disputes between those who agree to settle their differences without resorting to violence and those persons (foreign as well as domestic) who simply refuse to be bound by such agreements. Anarcho-capitalists, in their blindness to that bit of reality, insist on applying the non-aggression principle to inter-state relations, thus effectively granting immunity to lawless states simply because they have not yet attacked us.

Anarcho-capitalists, in effect, have created a fantasy world in which the American state is unnecessary because anarcho-capitalists do not like what it sometimes does. Anarcho-capitalists believe that, somehow or other, the absence of the state will culminate in the advent of nirvana.

. . . The real question . . . is how to channel the power of the American state toward the defense of liberty. The Constitution of the United States, in its original meaning, offers the best practical answer to that question. Anarcho-capitalists will object that the original Constitution was imperfect (e.g., it condoned slavery) and that its desirable provisions (e.g., the Bill of Rights) have been implemented imperfectly. Such arguments assume that perfection would have overtaken us in a stateless world.

Anarcho-capitalism, in sum, is a belief in the impossible. It is the wrong standard by which to judge the possible. The right standard, simply stated, is this: When faced with politically feasible policy options, support the ones that advance liberty rather than those which detract from it.

Incremental but real steps toward liberty are infinitely superior to the self-indulgent but politically irrelevant fantasies of anarcho-capitalism.

McCarthy doesn’t go so far as to offer the extreme libertarian’s usual alternative to state power, which is the creation of “private defense agencies,” but I can tell that he is itching to do so. I have addressed that pipe-dream in several posts, including this one, in which I commented on an article by one Robert Murphy, who

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. . . .

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 recongize other defense agences, 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. . . .

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.

THE STATE: AN INEVITABLE CREATURE OF SOCIETY

Contrary to Murphy and his ilk, there is no such thing as statelessness, at least not for groups larger than, say, hunter-gatherer bands or Hutterite colonies. Why? Because it is impossible for a group of more than a few dozen or a dozen-dozen persons to live together in pure consensus. In the end, a faction will dominate the group (a shifting faction, perhaps). And that faction will define harms that may be punished, punish those harms (i.e., administer justice), and take responsibility for the group’s defense.

The state is not a “thing” to be kept at bay; it is the mechanism by which a people enforces justice and defends itself against outsiders.The questions facing a group always are these: Upon what principles shall we found and guide the state, and to whom shall we entrust the the functions of the state?

Consider this:

A group of persons may be said to live in anarchy only if all of the rules that affect everyone in the group (e.g., where to live, how best to defend the group against predators) are made by unanimous, informed consent, which might be tacit. It follows, then, that a group might — by unanimous, informed consent — give a subset of its members the authority to make such decisions. The group’s members might delegate such authority, willingly and unanimously, because each member believes it to be in his or her best interest to do so. (The reasons for that belief might vary, but they probably would include the notion of comparative advantage; that is, those who are not in the governing subset would have time to pursue those activities at which they are most productive.) With a governing subset — or government — the group would no longer live in anarchy, even if the group remains harmonious and membership in it remains voluntary.

The government becomes illegitimate only when it exceeds its grant of authority and resists efforts to curb those excesses or to redefine the grant of authority. The passage of time, during which there are changes in the group’s membership, does not deligitimate the government as long as the group’s new members voluntarily assent to governance. Voluntary assent, as discussed above, may consist simply in choosing to remain a member of the group.

Now, ask yourself how likely it is that a group larger than, say, a nuclear family or a band of hunter-gatherers might choose to go without a government. Self-interest dictates that even relatively small groups will choose — for reasons of economy, if nothing else — to place certain decisions in the hands of a government.

All talk of anarchy as a viable option to limited government is nothing more than talk. Empy talk, at that.

EXTREME LIBERTARIANISM’S FATAL FLAW: THE “ANNE FRANK SYNDROME”

The political view that there should not be a state, if followed to its logical conclusion, would leave most Americans prey to the very real predators who lurk at home and abroad. Those very real predators care not one whit about non-aggression principles and contractual obligations, contrary to the assertions of Gustave de Molinari, a favorite of anarcho-capitalists, who wrote this:

Under a regime of liberty, the natural organization of the security industry would not be different from that of other industries. In small districts a single entrepreneur could suffice. This entrepreneur might leave his business to his son, or sell it to another entrepreneur. In larger districts, one company by itself would bring together enough resources adequately to carry on this important and difficult business. If it were well managed, this company could easily last, and security would last with it. In the security industry, just as in most of the other branches of production, the latter mode of organization will probably replace the former, in the end.

The “customers would not allow themselves to be conquered”? Tell that to those who pay gangsters for “protection,” and to the residents of gang-ridden areas. Molinari conveniently forgets that the ranks of “competitors” are open to those who, in their viciousness, will and do attack the persons and property of their rivals. If not everyone is honorable, as Molinari admits elsewhere in his essay, why would we expect private providers of security be honorable? Why would they not extort their customers while fighting each other? The result is bound to be something worse than life under an accountable state monopoly (such as we have in the U.S.) — something fraught with violence and fear. Think of The Roaring Twenties without the glossy coat of Hollywood glamour.

Molinari and his anarcho-libertarian descendants exhibit the Anne Frank syndrome. About three weeks before Frank and her family were betrayed and arrested, she wrote:

It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

McCarthy, Murphy, Molinari, and their ilk do not proclaim the jejune belief that all “people are truly good at heart,” yet they persist in the belief that the security can be achieved in the absence of an accountable state. That is, like Anne Frank, they assume — contrary to all evidence — that “people are truly good at heart.” But competition, by itself, does not and cannot prevent criminal acts.

Competition, to be beneficial, must be conducted within the framework of a rule of law. That rule of law must be enforced by a state which is accountable to its citizens for the preservation of their liberty. The present rule of law in the United States is far from perfect, but it is far more perfect than the alternative that is dreamt of by extreme libertarians.

THE PROPER LIBERTARIAN AGENDA

As I wrote here, extreme libertarianism

rests on invalid conceptions of human nature and the state. Contrary to the evidence of history, it presumes that no one would or could accrue and exercise enough power to flout the common law and treat other persons coercively. Contrary to the evidence of history — especially American history — it presumes that a properly constituted and governed state cannot increase the quotient of liberty.

There is no choice between anarchy and the state. Anarchy leads inexorably to coercion — except in a dreamworld. The real choice…is between the toughest guy on the block or a state whose actions are capable of redirection through our representative democracy.

The proper task at hand for American libertarians isn’t to do away with the state but to work toward a state that defends free markets, property rights, the common law, and freedom of contract.

Another task for American libertarians is to work toward devolution of power back to the individual States and, within the States, to the lowest possible level. The key to liberty is the ability of the individual to pick and choose among a variety of “experiments” in government. That is true federalism.

A Case in Point

I wrote yesterday about the arrogance that underlies the redistributive urge:

It is liberals who empower the state to dictate the redistribution of income, even though redistribution is a violation of the very autonomy that liberals claim to value. Liberals are willing and ready to draw arbitrary lines between those who (in their view) deserve more income and those who deserve less of it. And liberals are more than willing and ready to use the power of the state to enforce their arbitrariness.

By the same token, liberals are unwilling to allow free institutions to determine who fares well and who fares poorly. And their unwillingness to do so undermines the ability of those free institutions to enable the “cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated” to better their lot by their own efforts, and to care for those who are unable to do so.

My only regret is the exclusive use of “liberals.” The arrogant attitude that “no one deserves to be so rich” extends beyond liberals. A good case in point is Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). According to an article in the current issue of Newsweek, Grassley

has a profound frustration with superrich businesses and corporations that do not pay their fair share of taxes. Now the senior senator from Iowa is fighting to eliminate what he sees as a giant tax loophole by co-sponsoring legislation that would raise the tax rates (from 15 to 35 percent) on publicly traded partnerships like the private-equity giant Blackstone. To Grassley, the bill would help prevent ultrarich financiers from conspiring with their lawyers to “screw the taxpayer.” To his opponents, it’s a wrong-headed means of stunting economic growth.

Wrong-headed is right. (See below for a sample of the consequences of “soaking” the “super rich.”)

The Newsweek piece about Grassley is a sidebar to another article in the same issue of Newsweek, namely, “Taxing the Super Rich.” From the lede:

In Wall Street’s pecking order the partners in private-equity firms are the true aristocrats…Global in reach, able to marshal billions to buy big companies…Private-equity partners are not just in it for the money (though the successful ones make tons of it), but for the power to reshape whole industries. Unlike corporate CEOs, who are shackled by the short-term focus of shareholders, private-equity managers can swoop in and transform a troubled industry to create efficiency and growth. [Emphasis added: ED]

But that isn’t enough for the class-warfare crowd. Returning to the article:

Ever since the rise of the populists in the late 1800s, lawmakers have periodically threatened to soak the rich. Usually, these movements fizzle, partly because Americans hope that they, too, might one day become rich, and partly because there are good economic arguments against discouraging investment and the accumulation of wealth. But from time to time comes a tipping point. In the early 20th century, the Progressive Movement managed to impose a federal income tax, partly in reaction to the vast fortunes made during the late-19th-century Gilded Age.

Those vast fortunes were made because those who made them were responsible for the rapid economic growth of the late 1800s. Productivity rose so rapidly during that era that prices fell, even as the economy grew.

As for the fruits of the Progressive Movement — which imposed a federal income tax and punitive anti-trust and regulatory policies — read this, in which I point out:

Had the economy continued to grow at the rate of 1790-1907 (the era of laissez-faire, more or less), real GDP in 2035 would be $107 trillion (in year 2000 dollars).

If the economy continues to grow at the rate of 1970-2005 (the era of entrenched big government), real GDP in 2035 will be $27 trillion (in year 2000 dollars).

Thus the average American will “enjoy” about one-fourth the real output that would be his absent big government.

We owe the sharp drop in economic growth after 1907 to the Progressive Movement. The great-grandchildren of last century’s “progressives” haven’t seen enough. In their ignorance and arrogance, the wish to redouble our economic pain by “soaking” the “super rich” whose efforts — as even Newsweek admits — create efficiency and growth.

Related post: More Commandments of Economics (see #13)

Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice: Part III

The prologue is here, part I is here, and part II is here. This post focuses on the redistribution of income and wealth, specifically, its counterproductive effects and its roots in class warfare and “liberal” arrogance.

INTRODUCTION

In a libertarian regime, everyone is entitled to negative rights: the free enjoyment of one’s own life, liberty, and property as long as one does no harm to others. With negative rights there is no taking from anyone else, except to underwrite those state functions (justice and defense) that protect negative rights. (An extreme libertarian — i.e., anarcho-capitalist — would say that the functions of justice and defense can be provided through voluntary contractual relationships.)

Positive rights, on the other hand, are assigned selectively by a regime that takes from some and gives to others. How much the “donees” receive from the “donors” depends only on the dictates of those who create and enforce postive rights, namely, paternalists (usually “liberals”) and power-seeking politicians.

Joe Miller (Bellum et Mores) is a liberal who supports positive rights:

…I still hold on to one core insight of liberalism: respect for autonomy means more than just non-interference. I can have all sorts of freedoms from various things, but those freedoms don’t mean a damn thing if I’m too cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated to exercise them. And I remain convinced that, at least for right now, the only way to ensure that everyone has the shelter, medicine, food, education, and access needed to enjoy his/her freedom is through some form of redistribution. Insisting that you redistribute part of your wealth is no more a violation of your autonomy than is insisting that you refrain from hitting me in the nose. Both hitting me in the nose and refusing to help those too poor to exercise their freedoms are violations of autonomy.

(I addressed the argument about autonomy in parts I and II.)

Believers in positive rights seek “cosmic justice” (though they may not realize it). What is cosmic justice? I like this example from Thomas Sowell’s speech, “The Quest for Cosmic Justice“:

A fight in which both boxers observe the Marquis of Queensberry rules would be a fair fight, according to traditional standards of fairness, irrespective of whether the contestants were of equal skill, strength, experience or other factors likely to affect the outcome– and irrespective of whether that outcome was a hard-fought draw or a completely one-sided beating.

This would not, however, be a fair fight within the framework of those seeking “social justice,” if the competing fighters came into the ring with very different prospects of success — especially if these differences were due to factors beyond their control….

In a sense, proponents of “social justice” are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.

In an earlier post, “Rights and Cosmic Justice,” I wrote:

Those who seek cosmic justice are not content to allow individuals to accomplish what they can, given their genes, their acquired traits, their parents’ wealth (or lack of it), where they were born, when they live, and so on. Rather, those who seek cosmic justice cling to the Rawlsian notion that no one “deserves” better “luck” than anyone else. But “deserves” and “luck” are emotive, value-laden terms. Those terms suggest that there is some kind of great lottery in the sky, in which each of us participates, and that some of us hold winning tickets — which equally “deserving” others might just have well held, were it not for “luck.”

That is not what happens, of course. Humankind simply is varied in its genetic composition, personality traits, accumulated wealth, geographical distribution, etc. Consider a person who is born in the United States of brilliant, wealthy parents — and who inherits their brilliance, cultivates his inheritance (mental and monetary), and goes on to live a life of accomplishment and wealth, while doing no harm and great good to others. Such a person is neither “lucky” nor less “deserving” than anyone else. He merely is who he is, and he does what he does. There is no question of desert or luck.

As Anthony de Jasay writes in “Risk, Value, and Externality,”

Stripped of rhetoric, an act of social justice (a) deliberately increases the relative share . . . of the worse-off in total income, and (b) in achieving (a) it redresses part or all of an injustice. . . . This implies that some people being worse off than others is an injustice and that it must be redressed. However, redress can only be effected at the expense of the better-off; but it is not evident that they have committed the injustice in the first place. Consequently, nor is it clear why the better-off should be under an obligation to redress it….

There is the view, acknowledged by de Jasay, that the better-off are better off merely because of luck. But, as he points out,

Nature never stops throwing good luck at some and bad luck at others, no sooner are [social] injustices redressed than some people are again better off than others. An economy of voluntary exchanges is inherently inegalitarian….Striving for social justice, then, turns out to be a ceaseless combat against luck, a striving for the unattainable, sterilized economy that has built-in mechanisms….for offsetting the misdeeds of Nature.

Most seekers of cosmic justice simply claim that they want only what is “fair” for those who “deserve better.” They overlook or simply choose to ignore the evidence that the quest for cosmic justice harms those whom it is intended to benefit. I address that matter in the section “Does Redistribution Work?.”

Then there are those who claim that redistribution can be made to work because it is possible to calibrate well-being across individuals, thereby maximizing “social welfare.” I address that claim in the section “The Roots of Redistribution: Class Warfare and Arrogance.”

DOES REDISTRIBUTION WORK?

The redistribution of income (and thus of wealth) is an integral function of the regulatory-welfare state (i.e., big government). Redistribution not only harms those who are taxed for that purpose but it also does not lastingly help its intended beneficiaries. In fact, it works to their detriment in the long run.

Liberals are unable to grasp that reality because they, more than most Americans, suffer from economic ignorance. Because of economic ignorance, liberals are unable to grasp the subtle, corrosive effects of big government on those things that drive economic progress: invention, innovation, entrepreneurship, the saving that funds those activities, and the hard work that enables the rest.

We Americans are far better off materially than our antecedents of a century ago — but very few of us (especially liberals) understand how much better off we would in the absence of big government. In this post, for example, I assessed how much worse off Americans will be a generation hence because of big government. The bottom line:

Had the economy continued to grow at the rate of 1790-1907 (the era of laissez-faire, more or less), real GDP in 2035 would be $107 trillion (in year 2000 dollars).

If the economy continues to grow at the rate of 1970-2005 (the era of entrenched big government), real GDP in 2035 will be $27 trillion (in year 2000 dollars).

Thus the average American will “enjoy” about one-fourth the real output that would be his absent big government.

And more than 50 percent of that greatly diminished output will be taxed to support the state’s regulatory mechanisms and the growing numbers of persons (especially the elderly) who have become dependent on the state.

In sum, redistribution does not work. As part of liberalism’s “package deal” (tax, regulate, spend, and elect) it harms those whom it is supposed to help by undermining economic growth and thus depriving the “cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated” of jobs and (for those who simply cannot support themselves) vast amounts of voluntary charity.

The astute reader will have noticed that I have not mentioned programs that are designed to favor particular groups. The most intrusive and controversial of such programs is affirmative action, which is simply an indirect form of redistribution. All I need say about affirmative action I have said here, here, here, here, and here. The bottom line: Affirmative action costs us dearly.

The astute reader will have noticed, also, that I have not mentioned the issue of dependency on the welfare state. There is little to say but this: A guarantee of income (or income-in-kind benefits) for not working is a disincentive to better one’s self through work. Dependency on the welfare state is — and has been — so well recognized as a real and destructive force that even Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996). And that law has worked.

THE ROOTS OF REDISTRIBUTION: CLASS WARFARE AND ARROGANCE

Liberals wage class warfare on behalf of the “cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated” and any “oppressed” or “disadvantaged” group (i.e., one that is not white, male, employed without benefit of affirmative action, law-abiding, and heterosexual). It is a wonder that Jews remain, for the most part, in the liberal camp, but that habitual tendency may arise from liberal guilt (see below).

Liberal politicians are abetted in their cause by the votes that they attract from those groups on whose behalf they wage class warfare. Liberals and their constituencies, for the most part, do not understand the undesirable economic consequences of redistribution. There are many, of course, who simply choose not to understand — choosing class warfare over reason.

It is strange that liberals can claim to believe in the benefits of intellectual liberty (the competition of ideas) but not in the benefits of economic liberty. Liberals’ token adherence to intellectual liberty often is hypocritical. (Consider campus speech codes, for example.) In any event:

Liberals prize talk (especially when it is their kind of talk). But talk is cheap. Economic achievement requires action, not talk. The liberal imagination cannot value that which it does not understand.

Rich liberals either don’t understand how they came to be rich (if they did so on their own) and/or they feel guilty about their wealth. They are therefore quite willing to infringe the autonomy of others (through taxation) in the service of their ignorance and their consciences.

Liberals, who claim to prize autonomy, are nevertheless quite willing to tell others how to lead their lives. Witness the decades of regulation and taxation imposed upon Americans by “compassionate” liberals.

Liberals are quite willing to decide precisely who is deserving of “compassion” and who is not. That is, they (and only they) are fit to decide where to draw the dividing lines between those who are “too cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated” and those who are not.

In other words, liberals are strong believers in positive rights and, therefore, dispensers of cosmic justice. It is liberals who empower the state to dictate the redistribution of income, even though redistribution is a violation of the very autonomy that liberals claim to value. Liberals are willing and ready to draw arbitrary lines between those who (in their view) deserve more income and those who deserve less of it. And liberals are more than willing and ready to use the power of the state to enforce their arbitrariness.

By the same token, liberals are unwilling to allow free institutions to determine who fares well and who fares poorly. And their unwillingness to do so undermines the ability of those free institutions to enable the “cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated” to better their lot by their own efforts, and to care for those who are unable to do so.

Some proponents of positive rights (e.g., Joe Miller) nevertheless defend their position by asserting that they are not drawing arbitrary lines between those who deserve more and those who deserve less. For it is possible (according to Joe, among others) to make valid interpersonal comparisons of utility (hereafter interpersonal utility comparisons, or IUCs). The implication is that the ability to make valid IUCs enables someone (them? bureaucrats? politicians?) to make valid judgments about how to redistribute income so as to foster the maximization of a social welfare function (SWF), that is, to exact cosmic justice. (Joe does not refer to the SWF, but there is no point in making IUCs unless it is for the purpose of increasing the value of the SWF.)

The validity of the SWF, then, depends on these assumptions:

It is possible to make interpersonal utility comparisons (IUCs), that is, to determine whether and when it hurts X less than it benefits Y when the state takes a dollar from X and gives it to Y.

Having done that, the seekers of cosmic justice are able to conclude that the Xs should be forced to give certain amounts of their income to the Ys.

Making the Xs worse off doesn’t, in the longer run, also make the Ys worse off than they would have been absent redistribution. (This critical assumption is flat wrong, as discussed above.)

All of this is arrogant moonshine. Yes, one may safely assume that Y will be made happier if you give him more money or the things that money can buy. So what? Almost everyone is happier with more money or the things it can buy. (I except the exceptional: monks and the like.) And those who don’t want the money or the things it can buy can make themselves happier by giving it away.

What one cannot know and can never measure is how much happier more money makes Y and how much less happy less money makes X. Some proponents of IUCs point to the possibility of measuring brain activity, as if such measurement could or should be made — and made in “real time” — and as if such measurements could somehow be quantified. We know that brains differ in systematic ways (as between men and women, for instance), and we know a lot about the ways in which they are different, but we do not know (and cannot know) precisely how much happier or less happy a person is made — or would be made — by a change in his income or wealth. Happiness is a feeling. It varies from person to person, and for a particular person it varies from moment to moment and day to day, even for a given stimulus. (For more about the impossibility of making IUCs, see these posts by Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia. For more about measuring happiness, see these posts by Arnold Kling of EconLog.)

One answer to such objections is that an individual’s utility must diminish at the margin. (After all, diminishing marginal utility, DMU, is a key postulate of microeconomic theory.) Therefore, the Xs of the world must be “sated” by having “so much” money, whereas the Ys remain relatively “unsated.”

If that were true, why would Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and partners in Wall Street investment banks (not to mention most of you who are reading this) seek to make more money and amass more wealth? Perhaps the likes of Gates and Buffet do so because they want to engage in philanthropy on a grand scale. But their happiness is being served by making others happy through philanthropy; the wealthier they are, the happier they can make others and themselves.*

Most of us, I suspect, simply become happier as we accrue wealth because. But how much wealth is “enough” for one person? I cannot answer that question for you; you cannot answer it for me. (I may have a DMU for automobiles, cashew nuts, and movies, but not for wealth, in and of itself.) And that’s the bottom line: However much we humans may have in common, each of is happy (or unhappy) in his own way and for his own peculiar reasons.

In any event, even if individual utilities (states of happiness) could be measured, there is no such thing as the social welfare function: X’s and Y’s utilities are not interchangeable. Taking income from X makes X less happy. Giving some of X’s income to Y may make Y happier (in the short run), but it does not make X happier. It is the height of arrogance for anyone — liberal, fascist, communist, or whatever — to assert that making X less happy is worth it if it makes Y happier.

CONCLUSION

There is a liberal urge to exact cosmic justice through positive rights — primarily redistribution in various forms. But redistribution harms those whom it is intended to help because it curtails economic growth and discourages work.

The urge to exact cosmic justice arises from arrogance, that is, from a penchant for dictating economic outcomes (and social relationships) that cannot be justified by pseudo-scientific appeals to IUCs and the SWF.

If there is anything unjust or unfair in this world, it is the effort to exact cosmic justice. Robert Nozick put it this way in Anarchy, State, and Utopia:

We are not in the position of children who have been given portions of pie by someone who now makes last-minute adjustments to rectify careless cutting. There is no central distribution, no person or group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchanges and actions of persons. (Quoted by Gregory Mankiw in “Fair Taxes? Depends on What You Mean by Fair,” The New York Times, July 15, 2007.)

The urge to exact cosmic justice is more than harmful and arrogant. It is futile, as I will explain in part IV.

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* I want to underscore the essential difference between government-enforced charity and voluntary charity. Government-enforced charity may make liberals happier, and it may make Ys happier (in the short run), but it does not make Xs happier (except for liberal Xs who actually enjoy paying taxes as well as controlling others’ lives). Acts of voluntary charity, on the other hand, make the donors happier. That such acts (might) also make the donees happier is incidental.

It may seem that I am arguing for a position known as psychological egoism (PE), which Joe Miller summarizes (here) thusly: “PE maintains that, as a matter of fact, all human beings are always selfish.” Joe goes on to argue that PE is a false concept. He proffers altruism as the alternative; that is, people actually do unselfish things, things that make them worse off. I will not revisit all of the arguments pro and con PE and altruism, there is plenty of food for thought in Joe’s post, my first comment on the post, and this paper by Keith Burgess-Jackson.

I come down here:

There is no essential difference between altruism, defined properly, and the pursuit of self-interest, even if that pursuit does not “seem” altruistic. In fact, the common belief that there is a difference between altruism and the pursuit of self-interest is one cause of (excuse for) purportedly compassionate but actually destructive government intervention in human affairs.

And here:

The implication of calling another person’s act a “sacrifice” [i.e., altruistic] is that someone can get into that person’s mind and determine whether the act was a gain or a loss for the person. I say that someone must be able to get into the person’s mind because I don’t know how else you one determines whether or not an act is altruistic unless (a) one takes the person’s word for it or (b) one assembles a panel of judges, each of whom holds up a card that says “altruistic” or “selfish” upon the completion of an a particular act.

To illustrate my point I resort to the following bits of caricature:

1. Suppose Mother Teresa’s acts of “self-sacrifice” were born of rebellion against parents who wanted her to take over their business empire. That is, suppose Mother Teresa derived great satisfaction in defying her parents, and it is that which drove her to impoverish herself and suffer many hardships. The more she “suffered” the more her parents suffered and the happier she satisified her personal values.

2. Suppose Bill Gates really wanted to become a male version of Mother Teresa but his grandmother — on her deathbed — said “Billy, I want you to make the world safe from the Apple computer.” So, Billy went out and did that, for his grandmother’s sake, even though he really wanted to be the male Mother Teresa. Then he wound up being immensely wealthy, much to his regret. But “Billy” obviously put his affection for or fear of his grandmother above his desire to become a male version of Mother Teresa. He satisfied his personal values.

Now, tell me, who is the altruist, my fictional Mother Teresa or my fictional Bill Gates? You might now say Bill Gates. I would say neither; each acted in accordance with her and his personal values. One might call the real Mother Teresa altruistic because her actions seem altruistic, in the common meaning of the word. But one can’t say (for sure) why she took those actions. Don’s definition of altruism nevertheless requires such knowledge. Suppose the real Mother Teresa acted as she did not only because she wanted to help the poor but also because she sought spiritual satisfaction or salvation. Would that negate her acts? No, her acts would still be her acts, but we would understand them as acts arising from her values. That’s the best we can do absent the ability to read minds.

My argument rests on the proposition that human actions are, by definition, driven by the service of personal values, which come to us in many and mysterious (but not supernatural) ways. As a consequentialist, I prefer to look at results, not motivations. (“The road to hell,” and all that.) I eschew terms like altruism and egoism because they imply that a given result is somehow better if it’s “properly” motivated. A result is a result.

And redistribution yields very bad results, indeed.

Metaethical Moral Relativism: Is It Valid?

I recently quoted this definition of Methaethical Moral Relativism (MMR):

The truth or falsity of moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons.

“Moral Relativism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I found the definition useful, regardless of the validity of MMR. I now address its validity.

The “traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons” are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are (or were originally) aimed at the attainment of a “greater good” — a moral imperative — which is (or was) served by such traditions, convictions, or practices.

The moral impetus for those traditions, convictions, or practices becomes tenuous with the passage of time. As the generations roll by, the members of a group turn their focus from the original moral imperative to the traditions, convictions, or practices that once served it. That is to say, the group’s morality becomes rote.
Because of this rote morality, the moral framework of the group becomes falsely identified with its particular traditions, convictions, or practices. (A good analogy can be found in the widespread practice of celebrating the Fourth of July without giving more than a moment’s thought — then or during the rest of the year — to the struggle for independence or to the meaning of liberty.)

MMR is valid only to the extent that there is no moral imperative that cuts across groups of persons: nations, races, ethnicities, clans, tribes, religions, political parties, and the like. (I disregard — for the moment — exceptions to the rule, that is, sociopaths, who (a) are likely to be found in any group of more than a few members, (b) quite often force or connive their way into positions of power (it goes with sociopathy), and (c) surround themselves with sociopathic henchmen.)

The crucial issue, then, is the existence (or non-existence) of a universal moral imperative, one that is common to the people (if not to the leaders) of nations, races, ethnicities, clans, tribes, religions, and the like. Kant would say that there is such an imperative, his categorical imperative (in its first formulation): “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” ^[1]

Kant’s categorical imperative, however, is a Platonic universal: something that just is, a deontological duty. Kant, himself, distinguishes it from The Golden Rule, which (because of its commonality to so many forms of religion and philosophy) can be understood as a man-made utilitarian or consequentialist command. The Zoroastorian version, for example goes: “”Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others.”

Why is The Golden Rule utilitarian or consequentialist? Because people have learned — from experience over the eons — that if most everyone follows the command to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” most everyone will benefit from doing so. One’s self-restraint with respect to others encourages (almost all) others to practice self-restraint toward one’s self. The Golden Rule does not apply to rule-breakers, who must face consequences (or one kind or another) for their rule-breaking. (That there are rule-breakers only underscores the humanness of The Golden Rule.)

Now, to answer the question of the title: Metaethical Moral Relativism, as defined above, is neither neither a valid concept nor an invalid one; it is an irrelevant concept. It treats different groups as if they had different moral imperatives. By and large, they do not; most groups (or, more exactly, most of their members) have the same moral imperative: The Golden Rule.

There are, of course, groups that seldom if ever observe The Golden Rule. Such groups are ruled by force and fear, and they deny voice and exit to their members. The rulers of such groups are illegitimate because they systematically try to suppress observance of The Golden Rule, which is deep-seated in human nature. Other groups may therefore justly seek to oust and punish those despotic rulers.

There is a relevant — but logically and factually invalid — form of Metaethical Moral Relativism:

The United States is imperfect. It is, therefore, no better than its enemies.

Such is the relativism we see in those who excuse despotic, murderous regimes and movements because “we asked for it” or “we are no better than they are” or “war is never the answer” or “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” or “terrorists deserve the protections of the Geneva Convention.” That kind of relativism empowers the very despots and terrorists whose existence is an affront to The Golden Rule.

America Has Grown More Libertarian?

It has, according to Cato’s Brink Lindsey:

[G]rading on a global and historical curve, America is a distinctively libertarian country. And despite the best efforts of ideologues on both the left and right, it has grown more libertarian, on the whole, over the past few decades.

Lindsey supports that conclusion by citing (among other things) specific changes in our laws and mores. (Many of those specific changes are signs not of liberty but of license.) Lindsey fails to reckon with the big picture: the ceaselessly growing burden of taxation and regulation that has pushed us further from the degree of health, wealth, and happiness that we would enjoy absent the regulatory-welfare state.

For more about the huge and growing cost of the regulatory-welfare state, see this. Also, go here and here.

The Case against Genetic Engineering

Slate‘s William Saletan, writing at The New York Times, reviews Michael J. Sandel’s The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. I have not read Sandel’s book, nor do I plan to read it. My case against genetic engineering, to which I will come, may bear no resemblance to Sandel’s. But there’s no way of learning what Sandel’s case is, given Saletan’s rather glib criticism of Sandel’s book.

Saletan’s glibness is evident in passages such as these:

[G]enetic engineering is too big for ethics. It changes human nature, and with it, our notions of good and bad.

When norms change, you can always find old fogeys who grouse that things aren’t the way they used to be….But eventually, the old fogeys die out, and the new norms solidify.

Once gene therapy becomes routine, the case against genetic engineering will sound as quaint as the case against running coaches [a practice apparently unknown before the 1924 Olympics].

In a world…controlled by bioengineering, we would dictate our nature as well as our practices and norms. We would gain unprecedented power to redefine the good. In so doing, we would strip perfection of its independence. Its meaning would evolve as our nature and our ideals evolved.

Saletan, in so many words, professes a tautology: The future will bring what it will bring, and whatever it brings will be the future. Saletan might as well write this: If murder is widely accepted in the future, murder will be acceptable in the future. I doubt very much that Saletan would endorse such a statement. I suspect, rather, that an effort to be clever at Sandel’s expense led Saletan down a moral blind alley of his own construction.

What is that moral blind alley? If it is not obvious to you, consider this passage from the entry for moral relativism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Metaethical Moral Relativism (MMR). The truth or falsity of moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons.

The definition of MMR* points to Saletan’s error. He treats the same (or very much the same) group of persons as being a different group because of the passage of time. In other words, the future just “happens” — as if people cannot make judgments in the present about the consequences, for them, of pending or reversible decisions.

To come at it a different way, Saletan conflates what could be with what should be. There could be a market for genetic engineering, but should there be such a market? There are, after all, markets for murder, arson, and the fruits of theft (among other such things), but I doubt that Saletan would condone such markets.

The real issue, then, is whether to allow genetic engineering, in light of its consequences. Saletan finally approaches that question when he says that “self-engineering….seizes control of humanity so radically that humanity can no longer judge it.”

But Saletan waits until the final paragraph of his review to say even that much. He then quickly closes the review with with smart-alecky observations instead of pursuing the consequences of genetic engineering. Perhaps he thinks that he has done so when, earlier in the review, he writes this:

The older half of me shares [Sandel’s] dismay that some parents feel blamed for carrying babies with Down syndrome to term. But my younger half cringes at his flight from the “burden of decision” and “explosion of responsibility” that come with our expanding genetic power. Given a choice between a world of fate and blamelessness [without genetic engineering] and a world of freedom and responsibility [with genetic engineering], I’ll take the latter. Such a world may be, as Sandel says, too daunting for the humans of today. But not for the humans of tomorrow.

There again, Saletan assumes that the future will be what it will be. More importantly, he badly mischaracterizes the world of today. Our present world, contra Saletan, is (relative to the brave new world of genetic engineering) one of freedom and responsibility. To use the example of a baby with Down syndrome (properly Down’s syndrome), parents who choose to abort such a baby (for that is what Saletan means) have every bit as much “freedom” to make that choice (under today’s abortion laws) and are just as responsible (morally) for their decision as they would be if they were to choose bioengineering instead. Genetic engineering simply introduces different “freedoms.”

Thus we come to the real issue, which is the wisdom (or not) of allowing genetic engineering in the first place. For, as we know from our experience with the regulatory-welfare state, once an undesirable practice gains the state’s approbation and encouragement it becomes the norm.

And that is the broad case against allowing genetic engineering: If it gains a government-approved foothold it will become the norm. It will result in foreseeable (and unforeseeable) changes in the human condition. It will cause most of us who are alive today to wish that it had never been allowed in the first place.

How so? Consider the specific case against genetic engineering:

Following upon (but not supplanting) abortion, it would enable humans to retreat further from the acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of the procreative act. The prospective acceptance of responsibility for our actions is a restraining influence upon which civil society depends. That restraining influence has been lessened enough by such elitist initiatives as the legalization of abortion, leniency in the punishment of criminals, and permissiveness in the face of disruptive speech and behavior in public schools.

It would reinforce the attitude — inherent in abortion — that humans are mere machines to be overhauled or junked at will. It would, in other words, take us another giant step down the slippery slope toward state-condoned (if not state-conducted) euthanasia.

From there it would be an easy step for the state (controlled by “liberal” elites) to dictate who may have children, how many children they may have, the gender-mix of the children, the occupations those children may pursue, etc., etc., etc.

Yes, genetic engineering could have some positive consequences (e.g., reducing the number of children born with Down’s syndrome). But the prospect of such consequences should not eclipse the broad, fundamental, negative consequences for human dignity and liberty.
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* The validity of MMR is a matter for another post…sometime, perhaps.

Mindsets

Authoritarian (i.e., “liberal,” fascist, or communist): The greater good (“social welfare”) lies in the conformity of all (elites excepted, of course) to rules set down by elites.

Conservative: The greater good lies in conformity to well-established traditions — modes of living together that have stood the test of time. Such norms must arise from society and not be imposed on it by elites, though leaders will arise whose wisdom and foresight helps to shape constructive changes in social norms.

Libertarian: There is no greater good; the welfare of individuals cannot be summed. Neither elites nor traditions should dictate how individuals choose to live, as long as they do not harm others by their choices. Individuals may choose to adopt broadly accepted social norms, but only insofar as those norms are consistent with their own (harmless) behavioral preferences.

Conservative libertarian: There is no greater good, but individuals are generally better off if they respect social norms that have stood the test of time. To violate those norms willy-nilly (as a libertarian would do) or to efface those norms through fiat (as an authoritarian would do) is to undo the bonds of trust that enable peaceful and prosperous coexistence and mutual self-defense of that modus vivendi.

A Provisional Summing Up

Liberty arises from mutual respect and forbearance. Those who would live in liberty therefore bear a super-contractual obligation — a societal obligation. It is an obligation to treat others as those others would be treated, in the expectation that those others will reciprocate that respect and forbearance.

State power erodes the societal bonds upon which liberty depends. The possibility of attaining gratification through the exercise of state power tempts us to use the power of the state to treat others coercively. As subjects of the state we develop the habit of looking to the state for guidance about proper behavior, instead of consulting our consciences and our fellow men.

One misuse of state power leads to another, eventually destroying the fragile bonds of mutual respect and forbearance that undergird liberty. We have followed this slippery slope in America. Our slide into statism began in earnest with with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” accelerated with Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” and has been compounded since through the steady accretion of power by the central government.

Consent of the Governed, Revisited

In “Consent of the Governed” I say that

one may object to the Constitution, one may refuse to concede its legitimacy, and one may object to being forced by the state to abide by it. But here’s the catch: Such objections and reservations are valid only to the extent that the Constitution actually deprives one of liberty. Inasmuch as it does not do that (except in the fevered minds of anarcho-libertarians), and inasmuch as it fosters liberty, such objections are nothing more than irresponsible tantrums masquerading as a political philosophy.

What I did not know at the time of writing was that Professor Randy Barnett, author of Restoring the Lost Constitution, says much the same thing (in more measured tones) in his reply to a review of his book by J.H. Huebert (Journal of Libertarian Studies, Spring 2005). Specifically, Barnett says:

Among radical libertarians within the modern libertarian intellectual movement, there is a single conception of political legitimacy: consent. This conception has two parts: (a) a legal system that is consented to is legitimate; and (b) a legal system that is not consented to is illegitimate. Because government legal systems lack the consent of the governed, they are necessarily illegitimate. In addition to lacking consent, government legal systems are also illegitimate because they claim a coercive monopoly of power and therefore violate natural rights. So far so good, but here is the problem. Or rather, a symptom indicating an underlying problem: by this theory of legitimacy, all government legal systems are equally illegitimate. Why? Because all government legal systems lack consent; and all modern governments claim a coercive monopoly of power. Because real consent is an all-or- nothing-at-all thing that all government legal systems lack equally, and all governments equally claim a coercive monopoly of power, modern libertarian theory offers no criteria by which to distinguish better from worse governmental legal systems.

But no libertarian really believes that there is no relevant difference on libertarian grounds between the regime of Nazi Germany, the Soviet State, the United States, or (name the country in which you most want to live). Yet their exclusively consent conception of legitimacy, properly understood, offers absolutely no way to conceptually distinguish among these government legal systems. . . .

In response to this challenge, it is not enough for a libertarian to say, as some surely would, that some governments are better than others because they commit more or fewer rights violations. However true this assessment, it misses a crucial issue to which libertarians have paid inadequate attention: the duty to obey the law. This is a complex subject that I address in my book and elsewhere (Barnett 2003), and I simply cannot recreate that analysis here. The conclusion I reach is that there can be a prima facie duty to obey the law if it is made and enforced by procedures that provide sufficient assurance that the laws it imposes on nonconsenting persons are just. In other words, the issue of obedience turns not on whether a particular law is just, but on whether it deserves the benefit of the doubt that it is just. Laws made and enforced the right way are due this deference, unlike laws that are not. So the existence of a prima facie duty to obey the law depends upon the reliability of the procedures in place to assure the justice of laws.

This “gap” between the justice of a law and the prima facie duty to obey a law that is likely to be just because of the way it is made and enforced makes possible a much-needed refinement of basic libertarian theory. In the account of constitutional legitimacy I defend in my book, I continue to insist that consent, if it really exists, can impart legitimacy on a legal system. . . . Instead, I propose that there is a second route to legitimacy besides consent: the degree to which a legal system protects the fundamental natural rights of those upon whom it is nonconsensually imposed. The more effectively a regime protects the rights of those whom it governs, the more legitimate it is.

This move requires that a new distinction be introduced into libertarian theory between “justice” and “legitimacy.” Although I believe that this distinction is implicit in the actual beliefs of libertarians, confusion and error results from its lack of explicit recognition. And regrettably some libertarians try so hard to hew to existing theory based exclusively on consent that they come to believe that all governmental legal systems are equally objectionable.

Huebert concludes a reply to Barnett by saying that

I am not at all opposed to consideration of second-best alternatives to anarcho-capitalism, so I give Professor Barnett credit for searching for realistic means to advance liberty. Unfortunately, because of its support for the centralized state, Mr. Barnett’s system would not give us “second best,” but rather “even worse,” so I must continue to reject it, along with any notion of a duty to obey the state.

Huebert is in thrall to the fiction that anarcho-capitalism is “first best” because it is somehow possible. But it is impossible, for reasons I have given in several posts:
Defense, Anarcho-Capitalist Style
But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?
My View of Warlordism, Seconded
The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism
Anarcho-Libertarian ‘Stretching’
QandO Saved Me the Trouble
Two Views of Liberty
Utopian Schemes

An essential ingredient of anarcho-libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, which I address here:
Libertarian Nay-Saying on Foreign and Defense Policy
Libertarianism and Preemptive War: Part I
Right On! For Libertarian Hawks Only
Understanding Libertarian Hawks
More about Libertarian Hawks and Doves
Sorting Out the Libertarian Hawks and Doves
Libertarianism and Preemptive War: Part II
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Non-Aggression?
More Final(?) Words about Preemption and the Constitution
“Peace for Our Time”
Idiotarian Libertarians and the Non-Aggression Principle

Also relevant:
Varieties of Libertarianism
What Is the American Constitution?
Who Are the Parties to the Constitutional Contract?

Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice: Part II

In Part I, I addressed Joe Miller’s defense of positive rights — or positive freedom, to use Joe’s term for what is really a justification for the redistribution of income and wealth. Joe has since posted another defense of positive freedom, which he sums up thusly:

I might even go so far as to hold that positive freedom is more important than theoretical (or, in philosopher-speak, negative) freedom. This is not to say that I don’t value negative freedom; rather, positive freedom entails negative freedom. After all, I can have X as a member of the set of things I can actually do if and only if no one is using a gun (whether figurative or literal) to prevent me from doing X.

Why positive freedom rather than negative? Or rather, why positive freedom rather than only negative? I’m not sure that I’ve anything more than a deep-seated intuition. It strikes me as somehow empty and hollow to walk up to someone wasting away from disease and say, “Hey, you know, you’re free to do anything you’d like.” . . .

As with any sort of fundamental disagreement over basic terms, this one has serious implications. One of those implications is that liberals and libertarians often talk past one another. In academic philosophy, for example, the term “autonomy” is used to refer to positive freedom. Libertarians, however, frequently use the term, “autonomy” as a synonym for negative freedom. Because we use the term in different ways, liberals and libertarians often end up with the frustrating feeling of having beaten their respective heads against the wall when they interact.

When I say, “Of course redistribution is consistent with autonomy,” I mean that it’s consistent with a notion of positive freedom. Forcing you to give your money to someone else is no different from forcing you to stop hitting the person. Failure to provide certain of his basic needs is exactly as wrong as clubbing him over the head. Both violate his autonomy.

To which the libertarian responds, “Redistribution is obviously a violation of autonomy. After all, you’re using a gun to force someone to give up his money. How could that not be a violation of his autonomy.”

The fact is, both claims are right. But they are both right only because the interlocuters are, in effect, equivocating on the word “autonomy”. If the term means positive freedom, then the liberal is right. If autonomy means only negative freedom, then the libertarian is right.

Joe hasn’t really advanced his earlier argument. Rather, he has restated it, but in a way that better exposes its flaws. Here is Joe’s argument, with all of its assumptions made explicit:

1. Autonomy is necessary in order to do as one will toward one’s ends, though one may not do harm to others in the service of those ends.

2. Autonomy is not possible unless one possesses some minimal degree of health, wealth, income, etc. “Minimal” must be defined by someone, of course, and liberals stand ready to do the job.

3. But autonomy is not served by having too much wealth or income — or the things they can buy, such as health. “Too much” must be defined by someone, of course, and liberals stand ready to do that job, as well. (This is how liberals, in general, square their lip service to the harm principle with the actual doing of harm in the name of autonomy — which is done by taking wealth and income from some persons and giving it to others.)

4. Liberals’ arrogant willingness to play at being gods — by defining “minimal” and “too much,” and by ignoring the harm done to some for the benefit of others — rests on these deeper (and usually unacknowledged) assumptions:

One person’s well-being can be measured against another person’s well-being through interpersonal comparisons of utility.

There is a kind of cosmic justice — or social welfare function — that is advanced by harming some persons for the benefit of other persons. That is, a benefit cancels a harm — at least when the benefit and harm are decided by liberals.

Taking wealth and income from those who have “too much” does not, on balance, harm those who have “too little” by dampening economic growth and voluntary charity. (That it does do those things is a point I will address in a later part of this series.)

(The first and second assumptions enable Joe to assert that “positive freedom entails negative freedom.” To Joe, there is one big “welfare pie” in sky, in which we all somehow share — despite the obvious fact that A is made worse off when some of his wealth or income is confiscated and given to B.)

5. Given the foregoing, liberals see it as necessary and desirable to redistribute wealth and income from persons who have “too much” to persons who have “too little” — or “too little” of the things that wealth and income can buy. Otherwise, those who have “too little” wealth or income (or the things they can buy) would enjoy only “theoretical” freedom. But the use of the word “theoretical” is a rhetorical trick, a bit of verbal sleight-of-hand. It implies, without proof, that anyone who does not enjoy a certain “minimal” state of health, wealth, etc. — as “minimal” is defined by a liberal — simply lacks the wherewithal to strive toward ends that he or she values. And that brings us back to point 1.

The liberal argument for redistribution, therefore, is really a circular argument intended to justify liberals’ particular sense of fitting outcomes. Liberalism is paternalism run rampant, with these implications and consequences:

Everyone is both a potential beneficiary of and contributor to positive freedom. Whether one becomes a beneficiary or contributor depends on liberals’ arbitrary and capricious criteria for deservingness.

Liberal control of the apparatus of the state therefore results in myriad abuses of state power in the name of “compassion” — cheap compassion paid for by taxpayers, to be sure.

On the whole and over the long run — the effect of liberalism is to harm rather than help its intended beneficiaries.

I will say more in later parts of this series about the impossibility of cosmic justice and the harm done by liberalism to those whom it patronizes.

Related post: Rights and “Cosmic Justice”

Terrorists’ "Rights" and the Military Commissions Act of 2006

Cato’s Mark Moller finds that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 “is not patently unconstitutional—but it is hardly on uncontrovertible constitutional footing, either.” That is not a surprising conclusion, coming as it does from a member of the “libertarian” camp that cannot seem to focus on a key purpose of the Constitution: the protection of the liberties of American citizens.

Andrew McCarthy, writing at National Review Online, is well focused — as usual. As McCarthy points out,

Congress has already given al Qaeda detainees the very rights the critics claim have been denied [by the Military Commissions Act of 2006].

Last December, Congress enacted the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA). It requires that the military must grant each detainee a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) at which to challenge his detention. Assuming the military’s CSRT process determines he is properly detained, the detainee then has a right to appeal to our civilian-justice system — specifically, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. And if that appeal is unsuccessful, the terrorist may also seek certiorari review by the Supreme Court.

McCarthy explains that, under the Constitution, terrorists have no habeas corpus rights or treaty rights:

Congress cannot “suspend” habeas corpus by denying it to people who have no right to it in the first place. The right against suspension of habeas corpus is found in the Constitution (art. I, 9). Constitutional rights belong only to Americans — that is, according to the Supreme Court, U.S. citizens and those aliens who, by lawfully weaving themselves into the fabric of our society, have become part of our national community (which is to say, lawful permanent resident aliens). To the contrary, aliens with no immigration status who are captured and held outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and whose only connection to our country is to wage a barbaric war against it, do not have any rights, much less “basic rights,” under our Constitution. . . .

Isn’t habeas corpus necessary so that the terrorists can press the Geneva Convention rights with which the Court most recently vested them in its 2006 Hamdan case? Wrong again.

To begin with, although its reasoning was murky, the Hamdan majority seems technically to have held that Geneva’s Common Article 3 applied to military commissions because of a congressional statute, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Again, if a right is rooted in a statute, not in the Constitution, Congress is at liberty to withdraw or alter the right simply by enacting a new statute. Such a right is not in any sense “basic.”

If the Supreme Court were to decide that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is unconstitutional, it would be high time for President Bush to take a Jacksonian stance: “The Supreme Court has made its decision, now let them enforce it.” I would base that stance on an earlier holding by the Court:

The provisions of the Constitution which confer on the Congress and the President powers to enable this country to wage war are as much part of the Constitution as provisions looking to a nation at peace. And we have had recent occasion to quote approvingly the statement of former Chief Justice Hughes that the war power of the Government is “the power to wage war successfully.” . . . Therefore, the validity of action under the war power must be judged wholly in the context of war. That action is not to be stigmatized as lawless because like action in times of peace would be lawless.

— Justice Felix Frankfurter, concurring in Korematsu v. United States (1944)

Apropos Paternalism

Will Wilkinson, in a TCS Daily review of John Cassidy’s New Yorker article about neuronomics, writes:

Paternalism is the use of coercion to force people to do or refrain from something against their will for their own good. Liberals of all stripes generally reject paternalism for reasons most lucidly laid out in J.S. Mill’s masterpiece On Liberty. First, we assume the individual is the best judge of her own good. Second, whether or not the individual is the best judge of her own good, we rightly doubt that another individual (or assembly thereof) has the legitimate moral authority to substitute their judgment for the individual’s by force — especially in light of widespread disagreement about the nature of a good life. Third, truth is hard to come by, and none of us can be fully certain we’ve pinned it down. Allowing people to act on diverse opinions about morality (or rationality) broadens the search for truth about good lives by setting up a decentralized system of social laboratories where experiments in living succeed or fail in plain view. So, unless an action harms somebody else, people should be at liberty to satisfy their preferences, whether saintly or sinful, coolly rational or impulsively emotional.

The conceit of the new paternalism is that the state isn’t going to be in the business of telling us which beliefs and desires we are allowed to act on, but will simply nudge people into doing what we wanted to do anyway, but couldn’t manage by ourselves. The idea is that there are things we want to do, but, due to some foible of mind, we are unable to do it without a little outside help. . . .

Some of the new so-called “soft” paternalistic measures, such as employers helping workers to increase their rate of savings by requiring them to opt out of, rather than opt into, a retirement plan aren’t paternalistic in any sense; that’s a part of a fully voluntary labor contract. [ED: This is not true when government, through tax incentives, encourages the widespread adoption by employers of such practices.] And policies like increasing the taxes on cigarettes or fatty foods in order to discourage potentially harmful consumption choices, are straightforwardly paternalistic in the old sense, requiring a one-size-fits-all value judgment about how much and for what reason we should consume certain goods.

Those kinds of judgments aren’t the proper work of government. In any case, if you really think people make systematic “mistakes” in judgment and choice, there is no reason to believe that democratic voters — who have less at stake when casting their ballots than when choosing what to have for lunch — will be especially good at populating the government with Spock-like rational legislators interested in tweaking cognition through expertly targeted policy rather than with well-coiffed primates interested in hoarding status and power.

As Michael Munger puts it, in an essay at The Library of Economics and Liberty,

The boundary we fight over today divides what is decided collectively for all of us from what is decided by each of us. You might think of it as a property line, dividing what is mine from what is ours. And all along that property line is a contested frontier in a war of ideas and rhetoric.

For political decisions, “good” simply means what most people think is good, and everyone has to accept the same thing. In markets, the good is decided by individuals, and we each get what we choose. This matters more than you might think. I don’t just mean that in markets you need money and in politics you need good hair and an entourage. Rather, the very nature of choices, and who chooses, is different in the two settings. P.J. O’Rourke has a nice illustration of the way that democracies choose.

Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diets and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And—since women are a majority of the population, we’d all be married to Mel Gibson. (Parliament of Whores, 1991, p. 5).

O’Rourke was writing in 1991. Today, we might all be married to Ashton Kutcher, instead. But you get the idea: Politics makes the middle the master. The average person chooses not just for herself, but for everyone else, too. . . .

The thing to keep in mind is that market processes, working through diverse private choice and individual responsibility, are a social choice process at least as powerful as voting. And markets are often more accurate in delivering not just satisfaction, but safety. We simply don’t recognize the power of the market’s commands on our behalf. As Ludwig von Mises famously said, in Liberty and Property, “The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite, and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of profitable people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given by the public.”

Paternalism — when it is sponsored or enforced by government — deprives us of the ability to think for ourselves, to benefit from our wise decisions, and to learn from our mistakes. It all adds up to regress, not progress.

Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice: Part I

Negative rights — one’s free enjoyment of life, liberty, and property as long as one does no harm to others — are for all, in a regime that honors and protects such rights. With negative rights there is no involuntary taking from some to give to others, except to underwrite those state functions (justice and defense) that protect negative rights. (As for the necessity and inevitability of the state, read this, this, and the posts linked to therein.)

Postive rights, on the other hand, are assigned selectively by a regime that takes from some and gives to others, not just to provide for justice and defense but also to dispense “social justice” to those who are deemed “deserving” of it. How much the “donees” receive from the “donors” depends only on the dictates of those who are in charge of the regime.

Joe Miller (Bellum et Mores) supports positive rights:

. . . I still hold on to one core insight of liberalism: respect for autonomy means more than just non-interference. I can have all sorts of freedoms from various things, but those freedoms don’t mean a damn thing if I’m too cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated to exercise them. And I remain convinced that, at least for right now, the only way to ensure that everyone has the shelter, medicine, food, education, and access needed to enjoy his/her freedom is through some form of redistribution. Insisting that you redistribute part of your wealth is no more a violation of your autonomy than is insisting that you refrain from hitting me in the nose. Both hitting me in the nose and refusing to help those too poor to exercise their freedoms are violations of autonomy.

Joe is far from alone in his views, of course. His co-believers are legion. Consider, for example, George Lakoff (about whom I have written here). Lakoff, too, is a proponent of positive rights, which he propounds in Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea. Anthony Dick, writing at NRO Online, reviews Lakoff’s book:

“Freedom is being able to achieve purposes,” [Lakoff] writes, “either because nothing is stopping you or because you have the requisite capacities, or both.” He elaborates with a barrage of italics: “Freedom is the freedom to go as far as you can in life, to get what you want in life, or to achieve what you can in life.” This, he explains, means that freedom has a significant positive component: “Freedom requires not just the absence of impediments to motion but also the presence of access. . . . Freedom may thus require creating access, which may involve building.” What Lakoff is describing, in other words, is a type of “positive freedom,” in the sense that it requires the provision of certain goods and services to citizens to ensure that they have the capacity to achieve their goals. On this view, you aren’t “free” unless you have been provided with what you need in order to be successful. . . .

Lakoff’s conception of freedom is thus in direct conflict with that of the Founders. When government seeks to provide entitlements for some in the name of “positive freedom,” it must necessarily interfere in the lives of others. This is because all government action is predicated on taxation and coercion, which by definition entail infringements on liberty. The state can’t give a welfare check to one person without taking money from someone else; it can’t fund a Social Security system without forcing people to pay into it.

People who don’t have food or health care or education have not been deprived of freedom. What they lack is not freedom but material goods and services. This is a matter of vocabulary, not ideology. The court of common word usage simply rejects Lakoff’s claim that being free means having the capacity to achieve one’s aims.

Roger Scruton, in the “Philosophical Appendix” of his The Meaning of Conservatism, says this:

What, then, is meant by the ‘freedom of the individual’? I shall distinguish two kinds of liberal answer to this question, which I shall call, respectively, ‘desire based’ and ‘autonomy based’ liberalism. The first argues that people are free to the extent that they can satisfy thier desires. The modality of ths ‘can’ is, of course, a major problem. More importantly, however, such an answer implies nothing about the value of freedom, and to take it as the basis for political theory is to risk the most absurd conclusions. By this criterion the citizens of Huxley’s Brave New World offer a paradigm of freedom: for they live in a world designed expressly for the gratification of their every wish. A desire-based liberalism could justify the most abject slavery — provided only that the slaves are induced, by whatever method, to desire their own condition.

Joe’s formulation could be dismissed simply by noting — as does Anthony Dick — the contradiction inherent in the concept of positive rights. It is simply illogical to say that “Insisting that you redistribute part of your wealth is no . . . violation of your autonomy.” Such insistence, at the behest of the state, can be nothing other than a violation of “your autonomy,” that is, the autonomy of the person whose wealth (or income) is being redistributed. Joe’s formulation also could be dismissed simply by noting — as Roger Scruton suggests — that an agenda of positive rights means that the state can enslave (or at least enthrall) its subjects by dictating the conditions of their existence.

But I will not simply dismiss Joe’s formulation of positive rights with those two observations, acute as they may be. Joe’s formulation demands a more thorough response because it challenges the emotions in its appeal to the “cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated.” I will make that more thorough response in Part II, where I will make the connection between positive rights and “cosmic justice,” upon which I have touched here.

A Further Note about "Libertarian" Paternalism

I last discussed “libertarian” (or “soft”) paternalism here (and posted a related note here). Any single instance of government-sponsored (and therefore government-encouraged) paternalism may seem benign. But it is not.

Take the case of default enrollment in 401(k) plans, which the Pension Protection Act of 2006 further encourages. Default enrollment in 401(k) plans — however benign its intention and however easily overcome by the enrollee who wants out — is a small act of paternalism that opens the door to more intrusive ones. What comes after default enrollment? Mandatory enrollment? Mandatory enrollment in certain types of retirement fund (e.g., government bond funds for the feeble-minded)?

Analagous questions can be asked about any government-sponsored paternalistic scheme. And such questions should be asked, because government-sponsored schemes shift decison-making power from individuals to bureaucrats, with their one-size-fits-all rules.

Moreover, as Peter Van Doren, editor of Regulation,* observes in a post at Cato-at-liberty,

government actors appear to be no more rational than economic actors — and it is quite possible that soft paternalism could be more detrimental to public welfare than the private choices studied by behavioral economics. Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser states this case (pdf) in the summer issue of Regulation.

In a subsequent (and too-optimistic) post, Mark Moller quotes from the conclusion of Stephen Choi and Adam Pritchard’s 2003 article Behavioral Economics and the SEC (Stanford Law Review; working paper version available here):

Regulators are vulnerable to a wide range of behavioral contagion. Regulators may suffer from overconfidence and process information with only bounded rationality. . . .

And in groups the decisionmaking of regulators may decline rather than improve. On the one hand, groups and organizational structures may help alleviate some of the mistakes that derive from individually biased decisions. Studies of group decisionmaking provide evidence that the total can indeed be greater than the sum of individuals in enhancing the accuracy of decisions. But cognitive illusions may grip entire groups. Groupthink may also lead to an uncritical acceptance of regulatory decisions.

Will Wilkinson adds a post in which he observes that

[b]ehavioral economics done right is just good science. The real peril is in the transition over the gap from psychology to policy. Big philosophical and ideological assumptions lurk in the gap.

The biggest assumption is that government can and should steer the lawful behavior of individuals in certain directions, not knowing the specific circumstances that cause individuals to choose particular courses of action.**

We are mired in a tremendously costly regulatory-welfare state that arose from paternalistic concerns. Will we never learn? No, we will not. We will move further and further from realizing our economic potential by depleting individual freedom of choice. The road to dependency on the state is paved with the benign intentions of academics, politiicians, and bureaucrats.

* Full disclosure: I worked for Peter Van Doren in 1999-2000, when I was the managing editor of Regulation.

** A case in point: I did not enroll in my company’s 403(b) plan (the nonprofit equivalent of a 401(k)) when I was 22, because I needed the money to accrue household capital. But by the time I was 24, I could afford to join, and I did.

The Nexus of Conservatism and Libertarianism

I wrote about the theoretical and practical aspects of anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism, and conservatism in several recent posts:

What Is the American Constitution?
Utopian Schemes
Is Exit Unrealistic?
The Source of Rights
A Trichotomy of American Conservatism

In response to a reader’s comment about the second of those posts, I said this about anarcho-capitalism:

How can a political philosophy that assumes peaceful cooperation also assume the possibility of violence and non-cooperation? Anarcho-capitalism assumes the possibility of violence and non-cooperation when it allows for private defense agencies. Given that possibility, it then follows that violence and non-cooperation may arise just as readily from within as from without. Not all members of a community can possibly agree about all issues all of the time. Sometimes those disagreements may turn violent. (To assume perfect agreement and non-violence is utopian.) In the end, a majority or super-majority must be prepared to impose peaceful cooperation within a community by empowering an agency for that purpose. That agency — the state — thereby acquires a status independent of the community because it exists to impose the will of the majority of the moment on the renegades of the moment. There is never a consensus, either at a given time or across time.

Anarcho-capitalists typically object to the Constitution of the United States as an imposition on subsequent generations. But how do they then create a stable, cooperative, enduring community? By revisiting the “contract” that binds every member at every moment? That is the only way to true consensus. And it is nonsense.

The real question that faces the friends of liberty is how to contain the power of the state. The Constitution offers the most realistic answer. Friends of liberty should abandon unrealistic schemes, such as anarcho-capitalism, and focus on the restoration of the Constitution.

I am certain to return to the topic of anarcho-capitalism in future posts, mainly because its adherents like to claim, wrongly, that it is “true” libertarianism. It is not even that, however. It is nothing but a pipe dream. Here is John Kekes in “What Is Conservatism?“:

A common ground among conservatives is that the political arrangements that ought to be conserved are discovered by reflection on why, how, and for what reason they have come to hold. The conse~ative yjew is that history is the best guide to understanding the present and planning for the future because it indicates what political arrangements are likely to make lives good or bad.

The significance of this agreement among conservatives is not merely what it asserts, but also what it denies. It denies that the reasons for or against particular political arrangements are to be derived from a contract that fully rational people might make in a hypothetical situation; or from an imagined ideal society; or from what is supposed to be most beneficial for the whole of humanity; or from the prescriptions of some sacred or secular book. Conservatives, in preference to these alternatives, look then to history. Not, however, to history in general, but to their history, which is theirs because it is a repository of formative influences on how they live now and how it is reasonable for them to want to live in the future. Yet their attitude is not one of unexamined prejudice in favour of political arrangements that have become traditional in their society. They certainly aim to conserve some traditional political arrangements, but only those that reflection shows to be conducive to good lives.

In other words, conservatism is a reality-based political philosophy. But what does conservatism have to do with libertarianism? I have in various posts essayed an answer to that question (here, here, here, and here, for example), but now I turn the floor over to Kekes, who toward the end of “What Is Conservatism?” says this:

The traditionalism of conservatives excludes both the view that political arrangements that foster individual autonomy should take precedence over those that foster social authority and the reverse view that favours arrangements that promote social authority at the expense of individual autonomy. Traditionalists acknowledge the importance of both autonomy and authority, but they regard them as inseparable, interdependent, and equally necessary. The legitimate claims of both may be satisfied by the participation of individuals in the various traditions of their society. Good political arrangements protect these traditions and the freedom to participate in them by limiting the government’s authority to interfere with either.

Therein lies true libertarianism — true because it is attainable.

A Trichotomy of American Conservatism

My reading of Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism (about which more at a later date) prompts me to dash off this trichotomization of American conservatism. Not all of the following types are truly conservative, by Scruton’s lights, but all usually carry the label “conservative” in American discourse.

True-Blue Traditionalist: This type simply loves and revels in family, community, club, church, alma mater, and the idea of America — which includes American government, with all its faults. If government enacts truly popular policies, those policies are (by and large) legitimate in the eyes of a true-blue. Thus a true-blue may be a Democrat or a Republican, though almost certainly not a libertarian. This type comes closest to Scruton’s view of what constitutes conservatism, even though most Americans would not think of it as conservative.

Libertarian of the Classical Liberal School: This type may (or may not) love and revel in most of the institutions revered by a true-blue traditionalist, but takes a different line when it comes to government. Voluntary institutions are good, but government tends to undermine them. Government’s proper role is to protect the citizenry and the citizenry’s voluntary institutions, not to dictate the terms and conditions of their existence. The classical liberal favors government only when it observes its proper role, and not for its own sake.

Rightist: The rightist differs from the true-blue traditionalist and classical liberal in three key respects. First, he is hostile toward those persons and voluntary institutions that are not in the “American tradition” of white, northern Europeanism. Second, his disdain for things outside the “American tradition” is so great that he is likely to be either an “America firster” or a reincarnation of Curtis “bomb them back to the stone age” LeMay. (That is, he would call the troops home and leave the “heathen masses” to fight it out amongst themselves, or he would simply deal with “those ragheads” by “nuking” them.) Third, he is willing to use the power of government to enforce the observance of those values that he favors, and to do other things that he (arbitrarily) sees as necessary.

I have exaggerated the characteristics of the three types to make them recognizable. Certainly, there are blends of and variations on the three types. There is, for example, the rightist who is isolationist without being racist. And I must add that it is not racist or bigoted to believe with good reason that certain cultures and “movements” contain elements that are destructive of civil society, elements which should therefore be resisted and denied legitimacy.

One Small Blow for Freedom of Speech

First, the bad news:

Andy Roth of The Club for Growth posts a roundup of reactions to McCain-Feingold Iron Curtain Day. As David Keating explains in a followup post,

our free speech rights disappeared at 12:00:01 AM this morning.

It is now illegal for virtually all nonprofit groups to run any radio or TV ad that merely mentions the name of a congressman. Even a 10 second spot that simply had a congressman’s photo and no audio could land you in jail.

David goes on to quote “Former FEC Chairman Brad Smith [who] explains the ‘reform’ today and asks”:

In exchange for surrendering our First Amendment rights, what have we gained? Do you feel Congress is more ethical than before? Less attuned to special interests? Do you feel more empowered, or less empowered, than you did four years ago, when the law passed? Can you name any tangible benefit from these prohibitions?

Absolutely none. Not a one. The only benefit accrues to McCain, Feingold, and the other hypocrites on Capitol Hill who have used their power to immunize themselves from criticism and to perpetuate their incumbency.

Well, I’m mad as hell about it, and I’m going to do something about it.

So, here’s the good news:

This is an open invitation to the supporters of any U.S. House or Senate candidate who has opposed McCain-Feingold, and who is running against an incumbent who voted for it. Send me the links to your candidate’s web site and to his or her statements about McCain-Feingold. If your candidate has indeed opposed McCain-Feingold and his or her opponent did indeed vote for it, I will publicize those facts right here on this blog.

UPDATE (12/09/06): No one has yet taken up my offer. Sad.

The Source of Rights

Stephan Kinsella of Mises Economics Blog, in a pugnacious and meandering post, finally gets around to naming the source of rights, as he sees it. That source is empathy, which is:

1. Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives. See Synonyms at pity.

2. The attribution of one’s own feelings to an object.

Empathy has something to do with it. But my view is that rights arise from self-interest, best expressed as the Golden Rule:

“Love your neighbor as yourself” – Moses (ca. 1525-1405 BCE) in the Torah, Leviticus
“What you do not want others to do to you, do not do to others.” – Confucius (ca. 551–479 BCE)
“What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man.” – Hillel (ca. 50 BCE-10 CE)
“Do to others as you would have them do unto to you.” – Jesus (ca. 5 BCE—33 CE) in the Gospels, Luke 6:31; Luke 10:27 (affirming of Moses); Matthew 7:12;
“Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you” — Muhammad (c. 571 – 632 CE) in The Farewell Sermon.

The Golden Rule implies empathy; that is, the validity of the Golden Rule hinges on the view that others have the same feelings as oneself. But the Golden Rule also encapsulates a lesson learned over the eons of human coexistence. That lesson? If I desist from harming others, they (for the most part) will desist from harming me. (There’s the self-interest.) The exceptions usually are dealt with by codifying the myriad instances of the Golden Rule (e.g., do not steal, do not kill) and then enforcing those instances through communal action (i.e., justice and defense).

The lesson here is three-fold:

Rights are “natural,” but not in the sense that they are somehow innate in humans. Rather, rights are natural in the sense that they arise from a nearly universal sense of empathy and an experiential belief in the value of mutual forbearance.

Those “natural rights” have no force or effect unless they are generally recognized and enforced through communal action.

Rights may therefore vary from place to place and time to time, according to the mores of the community in which they are recognized and enforced.

Is Exit Unrealistic?

Joe Miller (Bellum et Mores) writes that “the preferred libertarian solution to political philosophy, namely exit, isn’t a realistic option right now. Voice, however poorly it might work, is an option.” His views seem to parallel mine:

Social norms can and do evolve. Moreover, in a society with voice and exit they will evolve toward greater liberty, rather than less, if exit is not mooted by legislative and judicial imposition of common norms across all segments of society.

Exit remains an option within the United States, because there are significant inter-State differences in tax rates and regulatory burdens, as I discuss here. But it is undeniable that those differences have dwindled as the central government has usurped more and more power from the States and the people.

Which leads to the question whether exit would be a realistic option were the laws of all States to approach oppressive homogeneity. Americans seeking liberty would then have to look elsewhere for it. Exit would then become far less feasible than it is now, given the high emotional and finanical costs of leaving one’s homeland for a foreign land. Consider, for example, the list of nations that rank as high or higher than the United States on the 2006 Index of Economic Freedom:

Hong Kong
Singapore
Ireland
Luxembourg
United Kingdom (?????)
Iceland
Estonia
Denmark
Australia
New Zealand

The looming loss of exit as a realistic option argues for redoubled efforts to resist — and to roll back, as far as possible — the encroaching homogeneity of the laws of the States. It is likely that that homeogeneity will be neither of the “Left” nor of the “Right” (and certainly not libertarian) but a blend of the worst of both possible worlds. There will be no winners under a homogeneously oppressive central government, except those who run it.

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