Burkean Libertarianism

This post rounds off the preceding one and (possibly) puts and end to my discussion of conservatism and libertarianism. I have argued in many posts that true libertarianism is to be found in conservatism — Burkean conservatism, in particular. (The preceding post is a good case in point, as are many of the posts linked at the bottom of that post.)

Roger Scruton writes:

…A small dose of philosophy will persuade us that people have always been wrong to look to the future for the test of legitimacy, rather than to the past. For the future, unlike the past, is unknown and untried. A host of respectable modern thinkers were aware of this fact and tried (against the pressure of half-educated enthusiasm) to remind their contemporaries of it: Burke, for example…. The modernist adulation of the future should be seen as an expression of despair, not of hope… (An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, p. 163)

That brief passage exposes “mainstream” libertarianism — contractarian, utilitarian, economistic — for the sham that it is. In its various forms, it assumes a world that ought to be and might be (if only people behaved like automata), instead of looking to a world that can be, as revealed by the past.

Where is libertarianism to be found? In conservatism, of all places, because it is a reality-based political philosophy.

But what does conservatism have to do with libertarianism? Instead of quoting myself, I yield to John 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 favors 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.

It is fitting and proper to close this post with my version of Russel Kirk’s six “canons” of conservatism (summarized here):

Belief that political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.
Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and egalitarian and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
Conviction that civilized society requires order.
Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic leveling is not economic progress.
Faith in traditional mores and distrust of “sophisters and calculators.” Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man’s anarchic impulse.
Recognition that change and reform are not identical.

I will now turn my attention to other matters.* High on my list of things to do is to contribute, in some small way, to the rejection of Obama and his party in next year’s election. They are all-but-declared enemies of a truly free society — one whose members shape their own rules by trial and error, in the process forging the social bonds that foster liberty, which is peaceful, willing coexistence and beneficially cooperative behavior.
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* My resolve weakens in the face of provocation. Thus “What Is Libertarianism?” (09/06/11), and probably more in that vein.

Facets of Liberty

Liberty is not a “thing” or a kind of Platonic ideal; it is a modus vivendi. Roger Scruton captures its essence in this pithy paragraph:

People are bound by moral laws, which articulate the idea of a community of rational beings, living in mutual respect, and resolving their disputes by negotiation and agreement. (An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, p. 112)

Fittingly, Scruton’s observation comes at the beginning of the chapter on “Morality.” I say fittingly because liberty depends on morality — properly understood as a canon of ethical behavior — and morality, as I argue below, depends very much on religion.

Where is libertarianism in all of this? Read on:

LIBERTY: ITS MEANING AND PREREQUISITES

Liberty can be thought of as freedom, when freedom is understood as permission to act within agreed limits on behavior.

Liberty, in other words, is not the absence of constraints on action. In a political context (i.e., where two or more persons coexist), there are always constraints on the behavior of at least one person, even in the absence of coercion or force. Coexistence requires compromise because (I daresay) no two humans are alike in their abilities, tastes, and preferences. And compromise necessitates constraints on behavior; compromise means that the parties involved do not do what they would do if they were isolated from each other or of a like mind about everything. Compromise is found in marriage, in friendships, in social circles, in neighborhoods, in workplaces, as well as the formal institutions (e.g., Congress) that one usually thinks of as “political.”

Where there is liberty, social norms are not shaped by the power of the state (though they may be enforced by the state). Rather, where there is liberty, social norms consist solely of the ever-evolving constellation of the voluntary compromises that arise from “non-political” institutions (i.e., marriage, etc.). It is the observance of social norms that enables a people to enjoy liberty: peaceful, willing coexistence and beneficially cooperative behavior.

Self-styled libertarians (about whom, more below) seem to reject this reasonable definition of liberty, and its antecedent conditions. They can do so, however, only by envisioning a Utopian polity that comprises like-minded persons who are for abortion, same-sex “marriage,” and open borders, and against war (except, possibly, as a last-ditch defense against invading hoards). They are practically indistinguishable from “liberals,” except in their adamant defense of property rights and free markets. (And some of them are lukewarm about property rights, if the enforcement of those rights allows discrimination based on personal characteristics.)

In summary, only where voluntarily evolved social norms are untrammeled by the state can individuals possibly live in peaceful, willing coexistence and engage in beneficially cooperative behavior — that is to say, live according to the Golden Rule.

What are the key attributes of those norms? Jennifer Roback Morse says, in “Marriage and the Limits of Contract” (Policy Review, No. 130, April 1, 2005):

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

But whence “a culture of law-abidingness, promise-keeping, and respect for contracts”? Friedrich Hayek knew the answer to that question. According to Edward Feser (“The Trouble with Libertarianism,” TCS Daily, July 20, 2004), Hayek was firmly committed

to the proposition that market society has certain moral presuppositions that can only be preserved through the power of social stigma. In his later work especially, he made it clear that these presuppositions concern the sanctity of property and of the family, protected by traditional moral rules which restrain our natural impulses and tell us that “you must neither wish to possess any woman you see, nor wish to possess any material goods you see.”[1]

“[T]he great moral conflict… which has been taking place over the last hundred years or even the last three hundred years,” according to Hayek, “is essentially a conflict between the defenders of property and the family and the critics of property and the family,”[2] with the latter comprising an alliance of socialists and libertines committed to “a planned economy with a just distribution, a freeing of ourselves from repressions and conventional morals, of permissive education as a way to freedom, and the replacement of the market by a rational arrangement of a body with coercive powers.”[3] The former, by contrast, comprise an alliance of those committed to the more conservative form of classical liberalism represented by writers like Smith and Hayek himself with those committed to traditional forms of religious belief. Among the benefits of such religious belief in Hayek’s view is its “strengthening [of] respect for marriage,” its enforcement of “stricter observance of rules of sexual morality among both married and unmarried,” and its creation of a socially beneficial “taboo” against the taking of another’s property.[4] Indeed, though he was personally an agnostic, Hayek held that the value of religion for shoring up the moral presuppositions of a free society cannot be overestimated:

“We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted… If we bear these things in mind, we can better understand and appreciate those clerics who are said to have become somewhat sceptical of the validity of some of their teachings and who yet continued to teach them because they feared that a loss of faith would lead to a decline in morals. No doubt they were right…”[5]

LIBERTY IN TODAY’S WORLD

Social norms and socializing influences (like religion) are essential to self-governance, but self-governance by mutual consent and mutual restraint — by adherence to the Golden Rule — is possible only for a group of about 25 to 150 persons: the size of a hunter-gatherer band or Hutterite colony. It seems that self-governance breaks down when a group is larger than 150 persons. Why should that happen? Because mutual trust, mutual restraint, and mutual aid — the things implied in the Golden Rule — depend very much on personal connections. A person who is loath to say a harsh word to an acquaintance, friend, or family member — even when provoked — often waxes abusive toward strangers, especially in this era of e-mail and comment threads, where face-to-face encounters are not involved.

More generally, there is a human tendency to treat friends differently than acquaintances, acquaintances differently than strangers, and so on. The closer one is to a person, the more likely one is to accord that person trust, cooperation, and kindness. Why? Because there usually is a difference between the consequences of behavior that is directed toward strangers and the consequences of behavior that is directed toward persons one knows, lives among, and depends upon for restraint, cooperation, and help. The allure of doing harm without penalty (“getting away with something”) or receiving without giving (“getting something for nothing”) becomes harder to resist as one’s social distance from others increases.

When self-governance breaks down, it becomes necessary to spin off a new group or establish a central power (a state), which codifies and enforces rules of behavior (negative and positive). The problem, of course, is that those vested with the power of the state quickly learn to use it to advance their own preferences and interests, and to perpetuate their power by granting favors to those who can keep them in office. It is a rare state that is created for the sole purpose of protecting its citizens from one another and from outsiders, and rarer still is the state that remains true to such purposes.

In sum, the Golden Rule — as a uniting way of life — is quite unlikely to survive the passage of a group from community to state. Nor does the Golden Rule as a uniting way of life have much chance of revival or survival where the state already dominates. The Golden Rule may have limited effect within well-defined groups (e.g., parishes, clubs, urban enclaves, rural communities), by regulating the interactions among the members of such groups. It may have a vestigial effect on face-to-face interactions between stranger and stranger, but that effect arises mainly from the fear that offense or harm will be met with the same, not from a communal bond.

In any event, the dominance of the state distorts behavior. For example, the state may enable and encourage acts (e.g., abortion, homosexuality) that had been discouraged as harmful by group norms, and the ability of members of the group to bestow charity on one another may be diminished by the loss of income to taxes and discouraged by the establishment of state-run schemes that mimic the effects of charity (e.g., Social Security).

LIBERTY VS. “LIBERALISM”

The dominance of the state is the essential creed of modern “liberalism,” which has been diagnosed, quite rightly, as superficially benign fascism.

What about the “liberal” agenda, which proclaims the virtues of social liberty even as it destroys economic liberty. This is a convenient fiction; the two are indivisible. There is no economic liberty without social liberty, and vice versa:

[W]hen the state taxes or regulates “economic” activity, it shapes and channels related “social” activity. For example, the family that pays 25 percent of its income in taxes is that much less able to join and support organizations of its choice, to own and exhibit tokens of its socioeconomic status, to afford better education for its children, and so on. The immediate rejoinder will be that nothing has been changed if everyone is affected equally. But because of the complexity of tax laws and regulations, everyone is not affected equally. Moreover, even if everyone were deprived equally of the same kind of thing — a superior education, say — everyone would be that much worse off by having been deprived of opportunities to acquire remunerative knowledge and skills, productive relationships, and mental stimulation. Similarly, everyone would be that much worse off by being less well clothed, less well housed, and so on. Taxes and regulations, even if they could be applied in some absolutely neutral way (which they can’t be), have an inevitably deleterious effect on individuals.

In sum, there is no dividing line between economic and social behavior. What we call social and economic behavior are indivisible aspects of human striving to fulfill wants, both material and spiritual. The attempt to isolate and restrict one type of behavior is futile. It is all social behavior.

If markets are not free neither are people free to act within the bounds of voluntarily evolved social norms.

LIBERTARIANS AND LIBERTY

Although most of today’s libertarians (rightly) pay homage to Hayek’s penetrating dismissal of big government, his cultural views (noted earlier) are beneath their notice. And no wonder, for it is hard these days to find a self-styled libertarian who shares Hayek’s cultural views. What now passes for libertarianism, as I see it, is strictly secular and even stridently atheistic. As Feser puts it in “The Trouble with Libertarianism,” these

versions of libertarianism … do not treat conservative views as truly moral views at all; they treat them instead as mere prejudices: at best matters of taste, like one’s preference for this or that flavor of ice cream, and at worst rank superstitions that pose a constant danger of leading those holding them to try to restrict the freedoms of those practicing non-traditional lifestyles. Libertarians of the contractarian, utilitarian, or “economistic” bent must therefore treat the conservative the way the egalitarian liberal treats the racist, i.e. as someone who can be permitted to hold and practice his views, but only provided he and his views are widely regarded as of the crackpot variety….

[T]here are also bound to be differences in the public policy recommendations made by the different versions of libertarianism. Take, for example, the issue of abortion. Those whose libertarianism is grounded in … Hayekian thinking are far more likely to take a conservative line on the matter. To be sure, there are plenty of “pro-choice” libertarians influenced by Hayek. But by far most of these libertarians are (certainly in my experience anyway) inclined to accept Hayek’s economic views while soft-pedaling or even dismissing the Burkean traditionalist foundations he gave for his overall social theory. Those who endorse the latter, however, are going to be hard-pressed not to be at least suspicious of the standard moral and legal arguments offered in defense of abortion….

By contrast, libertarians influenced by contractarianism are very unlikely to oppose abortion, because fetuses cannot plausibly be counted as parties to the social contract that could provide the only grounds for a prohibition on killing them. Utilitarianism and “economism” too would provide no plausible grounds for a prohibition on abortion, since fetuses would seem to have no preferences or desires which could be factored into our calculations of how best to maximize preference- or desire-satisfaction.

There are also bound to be differences over the question of “same-sex marriage.”… [A] Hayekian analysis of social institutions fail to imply anything but skepticism about the case for same-sex marriage. Hayek’s position was that traditional moral rules, especially when connected to institutions as fundamental as the family and found nearly universally in human cultures, should be tampered with only with the most extreme caution. The burden of proof is always on the innovator rather than the traditionalist, whether or not the traditionalist can justify his conservatism to the innovator’s satisfaction; and change can be justified only by showing that the rule the innovator wants to abandon is in outright contradiction to some other fundamental traditional rule. But that there is any contradiction in this case is simply implausible, especially when one considers the traditional natural law understanding of marriage sketched above.

On the other hand, it is easy to see how contractarianism, utilitarianism, and “economism” might be thought to justify same-sex marriage. If the actual desires or preferences of individuals are all that matter, and some of those individuals desire or prefer to set up a partnership with someone of the same sex and call it “marriage,” then there can be no moral objection to their doing so.

I do not mean to belabor the issues of abortion and same-sex “marriage,” about which I have written at length (e.g., here and here). But, like war, they are “wedge” issues among libertarians. And most (perhaps all) libertarians whose writings I encounter on the internet — Feser’s contractarian, utilitarian, and economistic types — are on the libertine side of the issues: pro-abortion and pro-same-sex “marriage.” A contractarian, utilitarian, economistic libertarian will condone practices that even “liberals” would not (e.g., blackmail).

RELIGION AND LIBERTY

The libertine stance of “mainstream” libertarians points to moral rootlessness. Such libertarians like to say that libertarianism is a moral code, when — as Feser rightly argues — it is destructive of the kind of morality that binds a people in mutual trust and mutual forbearance. These depend on the observance of actual codes of conduct, not the rote repetition of John Stuart Mill’s empty “harm principle.”

It is my view that libertarians who behave morally toward others do so not because they are libertarians but because their cultural inheritance includes traces of Judeo-Christian ethics. For example, the non-aggression principle — a foundation of libertarian philosophy — is but a dim reflection of the Ten Commandments.

As Roback Morse and Hayek rightly argue, a libertarian order can be sustained only if it is built on deeply ingrained morality. But that morality can only operate if it is not circumscribed and undermined by the edicts of the state. The less intrusive the state, the more essential are social norms to the conditions of liberty. If those norms wither away, the results — more rapaciousness, heedlessness, and indolence — invite the the growth of the state and its adoption of repressive policies.

The flimsy morality of today’s libertarianism will not do. Neither the minimal state of “mainstream” libertarians nor the stateless Utopia of extreme libertarians can ensure a moral society, that is, one in which there is mutual trust, mutual forbearance, and promise-keeping.

Where, then, is moral education to be had? In the public schools, whose unionized teachers preach the virtues of moral relativism, big government, income redistribution, and non-judgmentalism (i.e., lack of personal responsibility)? I hardly think so.

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

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

His life is the object of the Fifth;

the honour of his body as well as the source of life, of the Sixth;

his lawful possessions, of the Seventh;

his good name, of the Eighth;

And in order to make him still more secure in the enjoyment of his rights, it is declared an offense against God to desire to wrong him, in his family rights by the Ninth;

and in his property rights by the Tenth.

Though I am a deist, and neither a person of faith nor a natural-rights libertarian, I would gladly live in a society in which the majority of my fellow citizens believed in and adhered to the Ten Commandments, especially the last six of them. I reject the currently fashionable notion that religion per se breeds violence. In fact, a scholarly, non-sectarian meta-study, “Religion and its effects on crime and delinquency” (Medical Science Monitor, 2003; 9(8):SR79-82), offers good evidence that religiosity leads to good behavior:

[N]early all [reports] found that that there was a significant negative correlation between religiosity and delinquency. This was further substantiated by studies using longitudinal and operationally reliable definitions. Of the early reports which were either inconclusive or found no statistical correlation, not one utilized a multidimensional definition or any sort of reliability factor. We maintain that the cause of this difference in findings stemmed from methodological factors as well as different and perhaps flawed research strategies that were employed by early sociological and criminological researchers.The studies that we reviewed were of high research caliber and showed that the inverse relationship [between religiosity and delinquency] does in fact exist. It therefore appears that religion is both a short term and long term mitigat[o]r of delinquency.

But a society in which behavior is guided by the Ten Commandments seems to be receding into the past. Consider the following statistics, from the 2011 Statistical Abstract, Table 75. Self-Described Religious Identification of Adult Population: 1990, 2001 and 2008.
Between 1990 and 2008

the percentage of American adults claiming to be Christian dropped from 86 to 76,

the percentage of American adults claiming to be Jewish dropped from 1.8 to 1.2 percent, and

the percentage of American adults professing no religion rose from 8 to 15 percent.

What is noteworthy about those figures is the degree of slippage in a span of 18 years. And the degree of religious belief probably is overstated because respondents tend to say the “right” thing, which (oddly enough) continues to be a profession of religious faith.

Moreover, claiming adherence to a religion and receiving religious “booster shots” through regular church attendance are two entirely different things. Consider this excerpt of “In Search of the Spiritual” (Newsweek, August 28, 2005):

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

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

Historian Niall Ferguson, a Briton, writes about the importance of religiosity in “Heaven knows how we’ll rekindle our religion, but I believe we must” (July 31, 2005):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot resist adding one more quotation in the same vein as those from Hayek and Ferguson. This comes from Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), a no-nonsense psychiatrist who, among his many intellectual accomplishments, has thoroughly skewered John Stuart Mill’s fatuous essay, On Liberty. Without further ado, here is Dalrymple on religion:

I remember the day I stopped believing in God. I was ten years old and it was in school assembly. It was generally acknowledged that if you opened your eyes while praying, God flew out of the nearest window. That was why it was so important that everyone should shut his eyes. If I opened my eyes suddenly, I thought, I might just be quick enough to catch a glimpse of the departing deity….

Over the years, my attitude to religion has changed, without my having recovered any kind of belief in God. The best and most devoted people I have ever met were Catholic nuns. Religious belief is seldom accompanied by the inflamed egotism that is so marked and deeply unattractive a phenomenon in our post-religious society. Although the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are said to have given man a more accurate appreciation of his true place in nature, in fact they have rendered him not so much anthropocentric as individually self-centred….

[T]he religious idea of compassion is greatly superior, both morally and practically, to the secular one. The secular person believes that compassion is due to the victim by virtue of what he has suffered; the religious person believes that compassion is due to everyone, by virtue of his humanity. For the secular person, man is born good and is made bad by his circumstances. The religious person believes man is born with original sin, and is therefore imperfectible on this earth; he can nevertheless strive for the good by obedience to God.

The secularist divides humanity into two: the victims and the victimisers. The religious person sees mankind as fundamentally one.

And why not? If this life is all that you have, why let anything stand in the way of its enjoyment? Most of us self-importantly imagine that the world and all its contrivances were made expressly for us and our convenience….

The secularist de-moralises the world, thus increasing the vulnerability of potential victims and, not coincidentally, their need for a professional apparatus of protection, which is and always will be ineffective, and is therefore fundamentally corrupt and corrupting.

If a person is not a victim pure and simple, the secularist feels he is owed no compassion. A person who is to blame for his own situation should not darken the secularist’s door again: therefore, the secularist is obliged to pretend, with all the rationalisation available to modern intellectuals, that people who get themselves into a terrible mess – for example, drug addicts – are not to blame for their situation. But this does them no good at all; in fact it is a great disservice to them.

The religious person, by contrast, is unembarrassed by the moral failings that lead people to act self-destructively because that is precisely what he knows man has been like since the expulsion from Eden. Because he knows that man is weak, and has no need to disguise his failings, either from himself or from others, he can be honest in a way that the secularist finds impossible.

Though I am not religious, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible for us to live decently without the aid of religion. That is the ambiguity of the Enlightenment. (“Why Religion Is Good for Us,” NewStatesman, April 21, 2003)

The weakening of the Judeo-Christian tradition in America is owed to enemies within (established religions trying in vain to be “relevant”) and to enemies without (leftists and nihilistic libertarians who seek every opportunity to denigrate religion). Thus the opponents of religiosity seized on the homosexual scandals in the Catholic Church not to attack homosexuality (which would go against the attackers’ party line) but to attack the Church, which teaches the immorality of the acts that were in fact committed by a relatively small number of priests. (See “Priests, Abuse, and the Meltdown of a Culture,” National Review Online, May 19, 2011.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humans need no education in aggression and meddling; those come to us naturally. But we do need to learn to take responsibility for our actions and to leave others alone — and we need to learn those things when we are young. Such things will not be taught in public schools. They could be taught in homes, but are less likely to be taught there as Americans drift further from their religious roots.

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

Rather than join the left in attacking religion and striving to eradicate all traces of it from public discourse, libertarians ought to accommodate themselves to it and even encourage its acceptance — for liberty’s sake.

America, Love It or Leave It?

In a truly consensual society, where everyone must agree beforehand to rules that can affect everyone, even a (potential) offender can agree beforehand to punishment for certain acts. Take reckless driving, for instance. Even a person who becomes reckless behind the wheel can agree that recklessness endangers lives (including his own) and ought to be deterred by non-trivial punishment of some kind (a steep fine, some jail time, etc.) The person who is prone to be reckless driving may be chagrined and angry at being caught and punished, but he cannot say that he didn’t consent to the punishment.

The problem is that a truly consensual society is unlikely to be very large. Quoting from “The Golden Rule and the State”:

Self-governance by mutual consent and mutual restraint — by voluntary adherence to the Golden Rule — is possible only for a group of about 25 to 150 persons: the size of a hunter-gatherer band or Hutterite colony. It seems that self-governance breaks down when a group is larger than 150 persons.

That observation suggests an experiment in government (one that is unlikely to be allowed), which I discuss in “Zones of Liberty”:

A zone of liberty would be something like a “new city” — with a big difference. Uninhabited land would be acquired by a wealthy lover (or lovers) of liberty, who would establish a development authority for the sole purpose of selling the land in the zone. The zone would be populated initially by immigrants from other parts of the United States. [This is followed by a detailed description of political arrangements in zones of liberty, and arrangements with federal, State, and local governments.]

A person’s ability to opt out of undesirable governance was much greater when the federal government remained (somewhat) within its constitutional bounds, back in the 19th century. The open frontier also helped, because a person or group could simply pack up and go in search of a more congenial place — often one without a pre-existing government or a with a government that was distant and inattentive to remote goings-on.

America today is not a voluntary community by any stretch of the imagination. Given the vast, unconstitutional powers assumed by the federal government in the past 100 years (it all goes back to Teddy Roosevelt) — and the mimicking of those powers by most State and large municipal governments (often coerced mimicry, but mimicry nonetheless) — most Americans who oppose overwhelming government have no place to go, because the cost of going is extremely high, in terms of income and ties of family and friendship.

In effect, we Americans have become hostages in our own land. (On that point, see “Law and Liberty,” and a follow-up post, “The Real Constitution and Civil Disobedience.”) Why? Because the Constitution, which was designed (in part) to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, has been perverted to enable coalitions of minorities to run roughshod over the “silent majority” and, ironically, each other to some extent. (See “The Interest-Group Paradox.”)

Government in the U.S. now resembles the gangster who makes an offer that his victim can’t refuse. American’s can’t refuse government’s “offer” for the reason that the gangster’s victim can’t: the vastly superior firepower of the government/gangster. Some might say that the gangster’s victim tacitly agrees to pay for “protection.” I wouldn’t say that. I’d say that he’s been extorted. Similarly, Americans have been extorted by gangster governments that have, for practical purposes, cut off all but a few escape routes, and those are open only to the relatively small number of persons who can afford to traverse them.

I agree tacitly and explicitly to the Constitution. I disagree explicitly with what it has become in the hands of rapacious interest groups and power-hungry politicians.

It seems that most Americans agree with me: “New Low: 17% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed” (from Rasmussen Reports). But many (most?) of them are hypocrites whose idea of “consent” is that others should “consent” to their power- and money-lust.

So, What Now?

The title of this post echoes the title of a post by Victor Davis Hanson. I don’t agree entirely with Hanson’s diagnosis of America’s economic woes and prescription for curing them, but he points in the right general direction. If I were king, this is what I would do to put the U.S. back on the track to long-term economic health:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid (and the expansions known as Obamacare) would be phased out. By the time today’s youngest workers are ready for retirement, those programs would no longer exist. The ability of individuals to enjoy comfortable, healthy retirement years would depend on their assiduous prudence, financially and physically. (I am not a stranger’s keeper, and vice versa.) Private financial institutions and insurers would be allowed to compete across State lines for the savings and premiums of newly empowered individuals. States and municipalities would maintain any “safety net” for the truly needy (including those who cannot afford the care associated with serious illnesses and disabilities). Profligate grants of aid, leading to higher State and local taxes, would be punished at the ballot box and by emigration to locales where income and property are not targets of opportunity for demagogic politicians.

All other activities of the federal government that are not authorized by the Constitution would be phased out within ten years. That is to say, all “independent” agencies (especially including the Federal Reserve) would be abolished, along with every department but Defense, Justice, State, and Treasury. Any legitimate functions of the other departments and agencies would be folded into the four that remain, and those four would be thoroughly cleansed of illegitimate functions.

The preceding actions would negate most regulatory authority. That which remains would revert to Congress, which would no longer be able to delegate law-making to the executive branch, and which would have to make law strictly within the four corners of the Constitution. Specific targets for termination: regulation of resource extraction, “anti-discrimination” programs that in fact discriminate in favor of certain classes of individuals, environmental regulation (except for truly major environmental threats, and only then as authorized by an amendment to the Constitution), anything having to do with “global warming.” the Food and Drug Administration, and federal involvement in occupational licensing.

The streamlining of the federal government would be accompanied by a sale of all assets not required for the execution of constitutional functions. Thus would land and buildings become available for private use, personal and commercial.

The federal budget would be in balance — at a much lower level — within a decade. A tough balanced-budget amendment would keep it there. Such an amendment would cap federal spending at 10 percent of GDP, with a minimum of 6 percent of GDP going to defense. There would be an exception for a war (or wars) authorized by Congress, if the combat deployment of more than one-fourth of the personnel of the U.S. armed forces. Then, federal spending could exceed 10 percent of GDP, but only to the extent of the additional costs of the authorized war (or wars). Federal revenues would have to match spending in every 10-year period, plus or minus 1 percent of GDP.

These actions would tell Americans — individuals and businesspersons — two important things. First, they are at long last free in their “pursuit of Happiness.” Second, because they are free, they do not have to worry about government changing the “rules of the game” capriciously or swooping in to take away what they’ve earned.

Only with such freedom and certainty can Americans, once again, confidently strive to make better lives for themselves and, in so doing, help their compatriots to make better lives.

This — not speeches, laws, regulations, taxes, spending, debt-ceiling compromises, etc. — is the stuff of a brighter future, a future that fulfills the promise of the Declaration of Independence.

In Defense of Subjectivism

Andrew Cohen’s latest post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (“Against Subjectivism“) left me scratching my head, for a while. After a bit of pondering, I was able to sort it out. Here’s the gist of Cohen’s argument:

“Many people seem to think that whether a particular act is wrong cannot be determined objectively. Many, indeed, seem to think it is a purely subjective matter….”

“[T]he truth of a claim does not depend on my opinion, your opinion, or even our opinion.”

“[D]oes the fact—and I now assume we all agree it is a fact—that people have different opinions about whether God exists matter to the objectivity (or lack thereof) of the claim that God exists?”

“[T]he answer is obvious: none whatsoever. It is either the case that God exists or it is the case that he does not. One of those is the objective truth.”

Therefore, “why should morality … be any different? “

The only logically valid conclusion that one can draw from this disjointed argument is that there is or is not an objective morality: one that holds at all times, in all places, regardless of the varied and differing opinions of individuals. If that is Cohen’s point, I cannot disagree with him.

But Cohen seems to be defending the proposition that there is an objective morality. Consider the title of his post, and consider the following statement from the post:

Others think [morality] is a cultural matter: our society thinks the act is wrong so it is wrong for us; yours does not, so it is not for you. Obviously, I think this is misguided. Indeed, I think we should be seeking truth, where that should be read as “objective truth.”

Regarding morality, I fear that the only objective truths are these:

There are differing opinions about the source of morality.

There are varying, group-dependent conceptions of morality.

Despite the differing opinions and conceptions, moral codes may have key features in common (e.g., the prevalence of the Golden Rule across religions and even among irreligious people).

The commonality of key features proves nothing about the source of morality or its objective existence. It may be God-given; it may reflect an eternal Platonic form, which has an existence of its own; or it may be an culturally transmitted phenomenon that reflects certain “constants” human nature, namely, empathy and self-interest.

Somewhere in there lies an objective truth. My money is on human nature.

Who Won the “Debt Debate”?

The first match in the current showdown over government spending goes to the GOP. Not that all Republicans favor the deal that has now been approved by the House and Senate, but it’s clear that Republicans are generally happier than Democrats about the deal.

The votes of House Republicans split 174-66 (for-against), while House Democrats voted 95-95. Senate Republicans voted 28-19; Senate Democrats 46-7 (counting Lieberman and Sanders as Democrats). Senate Republicans who voted against the deal had the comfort of knowing that (a) it had been approved by the House and (b) it was widely expected to be approved by the Senate.

On the whole, Republicans in Congress gave the deal far more support than Democrats:

Republican votes in favor — 72 percent of House Republicans, 60 percent of Senate Republicans, and 69 percent of Republicans in the two chambers.

Democrat votes in favor — 50 percent of House Democrats; 87 percent of Senate Democrats, and 58 percent of Democrats in the two chambers.

The overall results, I think, are a good gauge of the attitudes in the parties. Republicans have good reason to be happier than Democrats. Obama had to pay a price for getting the debt ceiling raised, and that price (at least for now) consists entirely of spending cuts (inasmuch as reductions in planned spending increases can be called cuts).

Chalk up a victory for Republicans, especially the Tea Party kind. Yes, Tea Partiers would have preferred real spending cuts, but without the pressure they brought to bear on Republican leaders, the outcome would have been far worse — perhaps even Obama’s preferred “clean” increase in the debt ceiling, without any strings attached.

Another thing Tea Partiers should be proud of is that “liberal” Democrats are enraged by the debt deal. (Jonah Goldberg’s take is here.) Their rage is the clearest indication of a Tea-Party-inspired Republican victory.

There are several matches yet to come in this running “debate” about the size of government and its role in the lives of Americans. The most important match will conclude on November 6, 2012, with the election of a president, 435 U.S. representatives, and one-third of U.S. senators. The replacement of Obama by a Republican, coupled with the GOP’s retention of the House and capture of the Senate, would put an end to the “gridlock” in Washington and put the U.S.

Creative Destruction, Reification, and Social Welfare

I was prompted to write this post by Mark Perry’s reprise of Walter Williams’s post about creative destruction.

Joseph Schumpeter used the term creative destruction

to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation. In Schumpeter’s vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies and laborers that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power derived from previous technological, organizational, regulatory, and economic paradigms.

The Wikipedia article about creative destruction (just quoted) offers an elaboration:

Companies that once revolutionized and dominated new industries – for example, Xerox in copiers or Polaroid in instant photography have seen their profits fall and their dominance vanish as rivals launched improved designs or cut manufacturing costs. Wal-Mart is a recent example of a company that has achieved a strong position in many markets, through its use of new inventory-management, marketing, and personnel-management techniques, using its resulting lower prices to compete with older or smaller companies in the offering of retail consumer products. Just as older behemoths perceived to be juggernauts by their contemporaries (e.g., Montgomery Ward, FedMart, Woolworths) were eventually undone by nimbler and more innovative competitors, Wal-Mart faces the same threat. Just as the cassette tape replaced the 8-track, only to be replaced in turn by the compact disc, itself being undercut by MP3 players, the seemingly dominant Wal-Mart may well find itself an antiquated company of the past. This is the process of creative destruction in its technological manifestation.

Other examples are the way in which online free newspaper sites such as The Huffington Post and the National Review Online are leading to creative destruction of the traditional paper newspaper. The Christian Science Monitor announced in January 2009 that it would no longer continue to publish a daily paper edition, but would be available online daily and provide a weekly print edition. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer became online-only in March 2009. Traditional French alumni networks, which typically charge their students to network online or through paper directories, are in danger of creative destruction from free social networking sites such as Linkedin and Viadeo.

In fact, successful innovation is normally a source of temporary market power, eroding the profits and position of old firms, yet ultimately succumbing to the pressure of new inventions commercialised by competing entrants. Creative destruction is a powerful economic concept because it can explain many of the dynamics or kinetics of industrial change: the transition from a competitive to a monopolistic market, and back again….

So far, so good. But then the article implicitly adopts the reification (or hypstatization) fallacy and explicitly endorses the idea of a social-welfare function:

Creative destruction can cause temporary economic distress. Layoffs of workers with obsolete working skills can be one price of new innovations valued by consumers. Though a continually innovating economy generates new opportunities for workers to participate in more creative and productive enterprises (provided they can acquire the necessary skills), creative destruction can cause severe hardship in the short term, and in the long term for those who cannot acquire the skills and work experience.

However, some believe that in the long-term society as a whole (including the descendants of those that experienced short-term hardship) enjoys a rise in overall quality of life due to the accumulation of innovation – for example, 90% of Americans were farmers in 1790, while 2.6% of Americans were farmers in 1990. Over those 200 years farm jobs were destroyed by exponential productivity gains in agricultural technology and replaced by jobs in new industries. Present day farmers and non-farmers alike enjoy much more prosperous lifestyles than their counterparts in 1790.

The reification (or hypostatization) fallacy, which is implicit in the first paragraph of the preceding quotation, is that creative destruction is an actual force which is responsible for good and bad things: better jobs for some workers, worse jobs or none for other workers. But creative destruction is merely a term that refers to the consequences of innovation and entrepreneurship. And these are merely labels for types of activity that are as old as mankind — normal, non-pathological behavior. The results may seem “good” or “bad” to particular individuals, but creative destruction is neither “good” nor “bad.” To evaluate creative destruction in such terms makes no more sense than calling the results of evolution “good” or “bad.” The results of creative destruction, like the results of evolution, are what they are — nothing more, nothing less.

Which points to the second fallacy, which is explicit in the second paragraph of the preceding quotation. The writer attempts to reconcile the “good” and “bad” results of creative destruction by appealing to the net effect of those results on social welfare (“quality of life”). On that subject, I borrow from myself:

How can a supposedly rational [commentator] imagine that the benefits accruing to some persons … somehow cancel the losses of other persons … ? There is no valid mathematics in which A’s greater happiness cancels B’s greater unhappiness.

By the same token, there is no valid mathematics by which the happiness of a group, or nation, can be summed over time, to justify past hardships in terms of present comforts. Individuals can, and do, make such calculations for themselves when they decide whether or not to postpone current consumption for the sake of obtaining a future goal (a house, retirement, etc.). But those individual calculations cannot be summed, because each individual is making decisions for the sake of his or her unique vision of happiness.

The farm laborers of the past, whose jobs went a-glimmering with the rise of mechanization and other agricultural advances, cannot be compensated by the consumers of today. Those jobs went a-glimmering, in the way that species go extinct, and that is that.

If you (or I) choose to think privately of such outcomes in terms of “bad” and “good,” and react accordingly (e.g., with charitable contributions to help the jobless), the thought and action are legitimate, but personal. “Bad” and “good” have no place in characterizations of unintentional phenomena, such as (the badly named) creative destruction.

Compromise, Democrat Style

David P. Barash — a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the co-author of Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression and Seek Revenge — unwittingly reveals his psyche in a NYT op-ed, “Washington’s Rogue Elephants.” In Barash’s unsubtle symbolism, “rogue elephants” refers to Republicans, as he views their role in the present debate (if you can call it that) about the debt ceiling and how to avoid a default by the federal government.

Barash seems, not unsurprisingly given his profession and political leanings, to be plagued by prolonged adolescent rebellion. The rebellion, in this case, is against fiscally responsible authority figures in the Republican Party. The giveaway is Barash’s concluding comments:

[G]iven the Republicans’ continued insistence on an unobtainable wish list of spending cuts and constitutional amendments, it’s fair to conclude that Mr. Obama is facing the political equivalent of an elephant in must — a player who simply won’t play the game.

In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” an errant military supercomputer has a final moment of lucidity in which it notes, “The only winning move is not to play.” The president is best advised to do the same: declare that the other side has foregone all pretense at rational legitimacy, and simply proceed to govern as best he can for the good of the country.

This is leftist fantasizing. Obama can’t simply “govern” without Congress; it’s not up to him to decide how much to spend, nor can he constitutionally ignore the debt ceiling.

More generally, Barash hews to the typical leftist view that it’s up to Republicans to compromise; thus “the Republicans’ continued insistence on an unobtainable wish list of spending cuts and constitutional amendments.” But those things aren’t unobtainable or mere wishes; Democrats simply refuse to agree to them.

The current crisis is a spending problem. Republicans helped to create the problem, but most of them are adult enough to face up to it and offer ways to deal with it. Democrats seem unable to detach themselves from their vision of government as Santa Claus.

Democrats are suffering from a delusional disorder, but it’s evident that Barash doesn’t have the psychological chops to cure them of it.

The Golden Rule as Beneficial Learning

I have argued that cooperative behavior and mutual restraint — the bulwarks of civil society and liberty — arise from observance of the Golden Rule. (See this, this, and this, for example.) There is some new evidence for the importance of the Golden Rule as a regulatory mechanism:

Despite the fact that cooperation in one-shot interactions is viewed as both biologically maladaptive and economically irrational, it is nonetheless behaviorally widespread in our species. This apparent anomaly has posed a challenge to well-established theories in biology and economics, and it has motivated the development of a diverse array of alternatives—alternatives that seem to either conflict with known selection pressures or sensitively depend on extensive sets of untested assumptions.

These alternatives all assume that one-shot cooperation is an anomaly that cannot be explained by the existence of cooperative architectures that evolved for direct reciprocity. Our main results show that this assumption is false: organisms undergoing nothing but a selective regime for direct reciprocity typically evolved to cooperate even in the presence of strong evidence that they were in one-shot interactions. Indeed, our simulated organisms can form explicit beliefs that their interactions are one-shot and, nonetheless, be very likely to cooperate. By explicitly modeling the informational ecology of cooperation, the decision-making steps involved in operating in this ecology, and selection for efficiently balancing the asymmetric costs of different decision errors, we show that one-shot cooperation is the expected expression of evolutionarily well-engineered decision-making circuitry specialized for effective reciprocity.

This cooperation-elevating effect is strong across broad regions of parameter space. Although it is difficult to precisely map parameters in simplified models to real-world conditions, we suspect that selection producing one-shot generosity is likely
to be especially strong for our species. The human social world—ancestrally and currently—involves an abundance of high-iteration repeat interactions and high-benefit exchanges. Indeed, when repeated interactions are at least moderately long, even modest returns to cooperation seem to select for decision architectures designed to cooperate even when they believe that their interaction will be one-shot. We think that this effect would be even stronger had our model included the effects of forming reputations among third parties. If defection damages one’s reputation among third parties, thereby precluding cooperation with others aside from one’s current partner, defection would be selected against far more strongly (44). Therefore, it is noteworthy that cooperation given a one-shot belief evolves even in the simple case where selection for reputation enhancement cannot help it along. It is also worth noting that a related selection pressure—defecting when you believe your partner will not observe you—should be subject to analogous selection pressures. Uncertainty and error attach to judgments that one’s actions will not be observed, and the asymmetric consequences of false positives and misses should shape the attractiveness of defection in this domain as well.

In short, the conditions that promote the evolution of reciprocity—numerous repeat interactions and high-benefit exchanges—tend to promote one-shot generosity as well. Consequently, one-shot generosity should commonly coevolve with reciprocity. This statement is not a claim that direct reciprocity is the only force shaping human cooperation—only that if reciprocity is selected for (as it obviously was in humans), its existence casts a halo of generosity across a broad
variety of circumstances.

According to this analysis, generosity evolves because, at the ultimate level, it is a high-return cooperative strategy. Yet to implement this strategy at the proximate level, motivational and representational systems may have been selected to cause generosity even in the absence of any apparent potential for gain.Human generosity, far from being a thin veneer of cultural conditioning atop a Machiavellian core, may turn out to be a bedrock feature of human nature. (Andrew W. Delton, Max M. Krasnow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, “Evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can
explain human generosity in one-shot encounters,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Early Edition, July 25, 2011.)

The authors assume but offer no evidence that one-shot cooperation is an evolutionarily acquired trait. A stronger position is that one-shot cooperation is a culturally transmitted trait. In any event, the authors’ findings underscore the importance of the Golden Rule to liberty. As I say in ““Evolution, Human Nature, and ‘Natural Rights,”

the Golden Rule represents a social compromise that reconciles the various natural imperatives of human behavior (envy, combativeness, meddlesomeness, etc.). Even though human beings have truly natural proclivities, those proclivities do not dictate the existence of “natural rights.” They certainly do not dictate “natural rights” that are solely the negative rights of libertarian doctrine. To the extent that negative rights prevail, it is as part and parcel of the “bargain” that is embedded in the Golden Rule; that is, they are honored not because of their innateness in humans but because of their beneficial consequences.

Miss Brooks’s “Grand Bargain”

The idiot known as David Brooks — The New York Times‘s idea of a conservative — is true to form today:

Imagine you’re a member of Congress. You have your own preferred way to reduce debt. If you’re a Democrat, it probably involves protecting Medicare and raising taxes. If you’re a Republican, it probably involves cutting spending, reforming Medicare and keeping taxes low.

Your plan is going nowhere. There just aren’t the votes. Meanwhile, the debt ceiling is fast approaching and a national catastrophe could be just weeks away.

At the last minute, two bipartisan approaches heave into view. In the Senate, the “Gang of Six” produces one Grand Bargain. Meanwhile, President Obama and John Boehner, the House speaker, have been quietly working on another. They suddenly seem close to a deal.

There’s a lot you don’t know about these two Grand Bargains….

You are being asked to support a foggy approach, not a specific plan. You are being asked to do this even though you have no faith in the other party and limited faith in the leadership of your own. You are being asked to risk your political life for an approach that bears little resemblance to what you would ideally prefer.

Do you do this? I think you do….

You do it because while the Grand Bargains won’t solve most of our fiscal problems. They will produce some incremental progress. We won’t fundamentally address the debt until we control health care inflation….

Both Grand Bargains produce real fiscal progress. They aim for $3 trillion or $4 trillion in debt reduction. Boehner and Obama have talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age and reducing Social Security benefit increases. The White House is offering big cuts in exchange for some revenue increases, or small cuts in exchange for few or none. The Gang of Six has a less-compelling blend of cuts, but it would repeal the Class Act, a health care Ponzi scheme. It would force committees across Congress to cut spending, and it would introduce an enforcement mechanism if they don’t. Sure there’s chicanery, but compared with any recent real-life budget, from Republican or Democratic administrations, these approaches are models of fiscal rectitude.

You do it because both bargains would boost growth. The tax code really is a travesty and a drag on the country’s economic dynamism. Any serious effort to simplify the code, strip out tax expenditures and reduce rates would have significant positive effects — even if it raised some tax revenues along the way….

In other words, Republicans should simply give in, on Miss Brooks’s say-so.

But Miss Brooks doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

First, with respect to “health care inflation,” government is the problem, not the solution. There are two key reasons for rising health-care prices, aside from innovation that yields expensive but effective drugs, procedures, and equipment. They are (a) the tax break that enables employers to subsidize employees’ health plans and (b) the subsidization of old folks’ health care via Medicare and (indirectly) SS. Those two interventions result in the overuse of health-care products and services. (There’s a 25-year old but still valid RAND study on the subject.) A far better system — if one insists on government involvement — would be to provide means-tested vouchers that can be redeemed for a limited menu of vital medical products and services (e.g., critical surgeries, cardiovascular medications, chemotherapy). That’s it — no more Medicare, Medicaid, or their expansion via Obamacare.

Second, with respect to “tax expenditures” — there ain’t no such thing. Any action that results in higher taxes is a tax increase, no matter what Miss Brooks and his fellow Democrats choose to call it. And tax increases are growth inhibitors, not growth stimulators.

So much for the wisdom of The New York Times‘s pet “conservative.”

My Negotiating Position on the Federal Debt

Democrats’ insistence on ramming Obamacare through Congress is a key ingredient of the dire long-term fiscal outlook. The supposed 10-year “savings” from Obamacare are phony — a matter of timing and “cuts” that will never happen.

Therefore, if I were at the negotiating table, I would insist on rescinding the O-bomanation or taking the equivalent in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and/or Social Security. My argument would run like this: Obamacare cost Democrats the House and it has yet to kick in, except in small ways. So, if you Democrats agree to rescind Obamacare — or, to save face, agree to cuts of equal magnitude in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — we Republicans will allow you to take credit for averting a default while undoing a politically poisonous act.

With that out of the way, we can talk about the rest of the deficit-reduction package. I am open to changes in the tax code (e.g. elimination of certain deductions and loopholes), as long as long as total tax revenues do not exceed 19 percent of GDP. You Democrats can choose ways to meet that target with cuts in addition to those I’ve already discussed. Defense is off-limits, but everything else is on the table, including farm subsidies and corporate welfare.

Finally, as a bonus, I’m giving you a chance to sign on to a balanced-budge amendment. You don’t have to campaign in support of it when it goes to the States for ratification, but most of you would reap a political dividend by voting for its passage by Congress.

Don’t say I never did you a favor.

“Intellectuals and Society” in Brief

From Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

[I]t was one of Papa’s guests, at the dinner party yesterday, who said: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach teach the teachers; and those who cant’ teach the teachers go into politics.”…

…What his sentence means isn’t that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.

Liberty Is Dead, Just Not Buried Yet

UPDATED 07/13/11

Quoted in “DC Park Police Gestapo Violate First Amendment”

“On June 22, 2011, I attended a meeting of the D.C. Taxi Commission for a story I’m currently working on about a proposed medallion system in the district. About half-an-hour into the meeting, I witnessed journalist Pete Tucker snap a still photo of the proceedings on his camera phone. A few minutes later, two police officers arrested Tucker. I filmed Tucker’s arrest and the audience’s subsequent outrage using my iphone.

A few minutes later, as I was attempting to leave the building, I overheard the female officer who had arrested Tucker promise a woman, who I presumed to be an employee of the Taxi Commission, that she would confiscate my phone. Reason intern Kyle Blaine, overheard her say, “Do you want his phone? I can get his phone.” (The woman who was given assurances by the officer that she could have my phone can be seen at the end of the video telling me, “You do not have permission to record this!”)

As I tried to leave, I was told by the same blond female officer to “stay put.” I told her I was leaving and attempted to exit the building. I was then surrounded by officers, and told to remain still or I would be arrested. I didn’t move, but I tried to get the attention of a group of cab drivers who were standing nearby. At this point I was arrested. I spent the remainder of the day in a cell in the basement of the building. I was released at about 4PM.”

Items from “Are We Seeing More Moves to Muzzle Free Speech in America?”

A woman was kicked off a U.S. Airways flight after being deemed a “security risk,” purportedly because she took a photograph of the name tag of an airline employee she felt was being rude. (Did the employee or the airline really expect this “muzzling” incident to go away quietly?)

Drivers in Tennessee must now be extra cautious about the content of their bumper stickers. According to WKRN in Nashville, “Drivers caught with obscene or patently offensive bumper stickers, window signs or other markings on their vehicle visible to other drivers face an automatic $50 fine.” And exactly who will be the judge regarding what stupid couplet is “patently offensive”? (And what do the offended do? Tail the tasteless offenders so closely—just so all the words/images are properly catalogued or photographed—that an accident ensues?)

One can‘t be completely sure what political camp was more pleased by MSNBC’s decision to indefinitely suspend Time editor Mark Halperin for calling President Obama a nasty name during a broadcast of “Morning Joe”—-left-wingers upset at the insult…or right-wingers upset by the word choice itself. Wherever you stand on that continuum, the incident should stoke free-speech debate and get at the heart of whether or not the cable network is muzzling one of its own, rightly or wrongly.

Quoted in “A Permanent Threat to Religious Freedom“:

Same-sex marriage does not simply include more people in the definition of civil marriage; it labels the natural understanding of marriage as a form of irrational prejudice, ignorance, bigotry, and even hatred. In other words, same-sex-marriage laws teach the public that people who view marriage in the natural way are morally equivalent to racists.

Once this idea is embedded in the law, there will be enormous pressure to take it to its logical conclusion by marginalizing and penalizing people who continue to think marriage is one man and one woman. Some of this pressure will come from state sources and some will come from private sources, but in both cases it will find ways through whatever cracks might exist in protections for religious and moral conscience.

These stories just happened to catch my eye today. I’ve been seeing a lot of stories like theme of late — and with increasing frequency, it seems to me.

What does it all mean? It means that the delicate balance between liberty and order may have tipped decisively in the direction of order. But it is not the voluntary order that arises from civil society’s observance of shared norms. It is the oppressive order that comes when the state usurps the role of civil society, and the minions of the state are licensed to impose their will on the details of our lives.

UPDATE: The readiness of “do gooders” to propose new impositions testifies to the state’s vast power:

As the Western world gets fatter and fatter, the solutions to slimming it down get ever more draconian. In Britain yesterday, the government issued guidelines saying “children under the age of 5, including babies who can’t walk yet, should exercise every day.” Today, in the States, a pair of Harvard scholars writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association advocate stripping away the custody rights of parents of super obese children. They’re for real!

The Destruction of Society in the Name of “Society”

Society cannot exist where the state interferes with and usurps societal functions.

What is society? In an earlier post, I quoted Roger Scruton’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture:

…Ferdinand Tönnies … formulated a distinction between two kinds of society — Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft — the first based in affection, kinship and historic attachment, the second in division of labour, self-interest and free association by contract and exchange. Traditional societies, he argued, are of the first kind, and construe obligations and loyalties in terms of a non-negotiable destiny. Modern societies are of the second kind, and therefore regard all institutions and practices as provisional, to be revised in the light of our changing requirements. The transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft is part of what happened at the Enlightenment, and one explanation for the vast cultural changes, as people learned to view their obligations in contractual terms, and so envisage a way to escape them.

Max Weber wrote, in the same connection, of a transition from traditional to “legal-rational” forms of authority, the first sanctioned by immemorial usage, the second by impartial law. To these two distinctions can be added yet another, du to Ser Henry Maine, who described the transition from traditional to modern societies as a shift from status to contract — i.e., a shift from inherited social position, to a position conferred by, and earned through, consent. (p. 24)

Note the important qualifiers that attach to modern, contractarian societies: free association by contract and exchange; impartial law. What we have in the United States — and in most Western nations — is not society, not even Gesellschaft. That is because

Religion, community, and common culture have been displaced by the regulatory-welfare state, anthropogenic global warming, feminism, “choice,” and myriad other totems, beliefs, “movements,” and “leaders,” both religious and secular.

Freedom of association and impartial law, to the extent that they once existed in the United States, have been in decline for more than a century. Yes, yes, I know about the better lot of blacks and women, but those have been achieved to a large extent by forced association and partial law, which — in the long run — do more harm than good because they break the bonds of mutual trust and respect upon which civil society depends for self-enforcing, mutually beneficial behavior. Even a contractarian society cannot function effectively without bonds of trust and respect, lacking as it does the bonds of religion, community, and common culture.

Despite the almost complete destruction of society by the state, there are those who believe that society survives because it is embodied in the state. For such believers, society is not a network of personal associations built upon religion, community, and common culture. Rather, it is an abstraction of their imagining, and it consists of classes of individuals toward whom something is “owed”: the aged, the infirm, persons of color, Latinos, women, homosexuals, and — above all — the “poor,” who are always with us because poverty (in the mind of the “socially conscious”) is a relative thing.

It is this very urge to burden everyone with responsibility for everyone else that led to the growth of the state and the virtual destruction of society. The urge manifests itself, time and again, when the political classes (in and out of government) — claiming to act on behalf of “society’s victims” — invoke “social justice” as they make the case for the expansion of the state. The ultimate irony is that the expansion of the state commits injustice, undermines society, and creates more victims for whom the political classes can shed more crocodile tears.

The Next Civil War

It begins with the general election of 2012. The GOP retains its majority in the House and gains a majority in the Senate. But the presidential election is too close to call, as the outcome in several, deciding States depends on the outcome of hotly contested recounts.

The outcome of the presidential election remains important because the GOP’s majorities in the House and Senate are not large enough to override vetoes. If the presidential election goes to Barack Obama, Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, curtail entitlement programs, curb the regulatory agencies, recommit to the war on terror, and rebuild national defense will be thwarted. Democrats, hoping to thwart those GOP initiatives, dispatch armies of lawyers to the States where the presidential election hangs in the balance.

In the end, there is a replay of Bush v. Gore, but on a grander scale. The U.S. Supreme Court effectively decides the election for the Republican candidate, by a vote of 5-4. Democrats are outraged. The governors and legislatures of the solidly Democrat States, in a series of coordinated actions, enact resolutions to the effect that their States will not recognize the authority of the federal government, and will bar federal agencies from operating within their States. The governors of the rebelling States order their States’ police and National Guard forces to seize all civilian federal offices (IRS, Social Security, etc.), the functions of which will be assumed by the rebelling States.

What would you do? Take the following poll, leave a comment, or do both.

Corporations, Unions, and the State

When left-libertarians discuss right-to-work laws they claim to discern a pro-employer — specifically, pro-corporation — tilt on the part of government. I will not play the futile and foolish game of trying to disentangle the effects of decades’ worth of pro/anti/corporation/union enactments. My modest objective is to ask whether the corporation or the union (or both or neither) is inherently antilibertarian.

The question that libertarians (and pseudo–libertarians) ought to address are these:

Does corporate status per se enable an employer to coerce employees or prospective employees?

Does state-enforced recognition of labor unions by employers amount to coercion?

The obvious answer to the second question is “yes.” Apologists for labor unions will nevertheless assert that coercion by the state, which enables coercion by labor unions, is necessary to offset an “unnatural” advantage that accrues to an employer if the employer is a corporation?

What is that “unnatural” advantage? What power is bestowed by corporate status that is lacking in a sole proprietorship, partnership, or other non-corporate form of organization? It is said that corporate status involves two unique characteristics: perpetual existence and limited liability. Non-corporate organizations can enjoy the former easily enough, through bequests, property transfers, agreements that allow for the admission of new and/or replacement partners, and so on. These are simply contractual arrangements that do not require the state’s existence, except as a neutral enforcer of voluntary, non-fraudulent contracts between compos mentis adults. In sum, perpetual existence does not confer upon the corporation an “unnatural” advantage when it comes to dealing with employees and prospective employees.

What about limited liability? The key artificiality of limited liability is that it shifts the responsibility for debts from the directors, officers, and owners of the corporation to the corporation itself. But I fail to see how that artificiality plays into dealings with employees and prospective employees. In fact, the artificiality lends stability to the corporation, which is advantageous to employees and attractive to prospective employees.

Nor is it clear to me that the corporation could not exist in the absence of statutory approval. The corporation is usually considered a creature of the state — as if it could not exist absent statutory authority — simply because the earliest corporations were creatures of the state and often were instruments of state power. But there are other beneficial and “artificial” commercial arrangements (e.g., banking and credit) that began and thrived before the state injected itself into such arrangements. The advantages of corporate status — as a way of fostering commercial expansion — would, I think, be recognized in a common-law regime.

The bottom line on the corporation: It would exist in the absence of the state (or recognition by the state), and its essential features do not give it an “unnatural” advantage in dealings with employees and prospective employees.

I cannot say the same for the labor union, which exists by and for coercion. A union can exist without coercion, in certain limited circumstances, for example, an unskilled, fungible labor force whose members lack the means to uproot themselves from a relatively isolated location. (Think “Welsh coal miners,” for instance.)

But where there is a diverse labor force and diverse employment opportunities, it is not in the interest of the more skilled (or independent-minded) workers to cast their lot with their less-skilled brethren. Their interest is served by the ability to bargain for the best available combination of compensation and working conditions. The submission of highly skilled workers to unionization comes about mainly because (a) they have no legal option (in jurisdictions that back the union shop) and/or (b) “scabs” face threats ranging from harassment to ostracism to violence, directed not only at “scabs” but also at their families.

Employers, for the most part, view unionization as coercion. Yes, there is the occasional business that chooses to recognize a union, even if the business is not compelled to do so by statute. But recognition, in such cases, is the the free choice of the businesses in question. Most other businesses make the opposite choice, where they are allowed to do so. Nothing more need be said on that point.

In summary: The corporation is not a coercive institution; the labor union is. Right-to-work laws are justified on libertarian grounds because they eliminate the coercion of workers and employers.

In Defense of Wal-Mart

The U.S. Supreme Court’s finding for Wal-Mart in the case of Wal-Mart v. Dukes predictably set off a storm of criticism by Wal-Mart’s critics, who are legion. Those critics, predictably, are mainly upper-middle class professionals who do not shop at Wal-Mart, would not work at Wal-Mart, and fastidiously scorn the politics and religion of those who do shop and work at Wal-Mart.

But the Yuppie crowd nevertheless sympathizes with the employees of Wal-Mart because it represents an evil corporation — as corporations are, in the Yuppie worldview. Why is Wal-Mart evil? Well, it doesn’t treat its employees well. How do Yuppies know that? They just do, that’s how. It’s an article of faith among Yuppies, who tend to take their cues from left-wing pundits and academicians. Yuppies are too busy making money to support their SUVs and McMansions to do their own thinking, you see.

I have news for Yuppies and other critics of Wal-Mart. There are no goon squads dragging unwilling people in from the streets to work in Wal-Mart stores. There are no Wal-Mart employees caged in their work areas. There are secret prisons in Arkansas where they send Wal-Mart employees who elect to move on to more highly compensated jobs at other companies.

People work at Wal-Mart because it offers them the best combination of pay, benefits, and working conditions available to them. In other words, employment at Wal-Mart usually is a step up, not a step down.

But Yuppies and their leaders on the left don’t understand such things because they hold the strange view that there is a “just” level of compensation, which is always more than that paid by a villainous corporation like Wal-Mart. I wonder what those big-hearted Yuppies and lefties would say to a “just” compensation or $100 an hour for maids and yard men? I can say that $100 is “just” because — unlike Yuppies and lefties who don’t shop at Wal-Mart and wouldn’t care if it charged higher prices to cover higher compensation — I don’t have a maid or a yard man.

How to Save the Postal Service

I do not favor the salvation of the U.S. Postal Service. (See this, this, and this). But it seems unlikely that USPS will go the way of the buggy whip.

The best I can hope for is a serious effort to make USPS more efficient and less needful of tax subsidies. To that end, I offer the following modest proposal:

1. Set up a “branch” closure commission, on the model of the base-closure commissions that succeeded in closing many military bases that otherwise would have been protected by their patrons in Congress.

2. Eliminate window service on Mondays.

3. Subcontract package deliveries to outfits like UPS and FedEx, and others that would arise, through regional (not national) competitions conducted at regular intervals (e.g., every three years).

4. Make regular deliveries only five days a week.

5. Consolidate routes so that every carrier is fully occupied for a full, eight-hour day (lunch breaks would not count as work time). Cover vacations and illnesses with part-timers who would be paid only for time actually performing work (i.e., eliminate featherbedding).

6. As a more drastic alternative to #5, subcontract regular deliveries through regional competitions. These would coincide with competitions for package delivery, to entice bundled offers reflecting potential efficiencies from combined package-mail delivery services. (Under this option, USPS would continue to operate regional and branch offices, and the movement of mail between them, but contractors would handle deliveries.)

7. Even more drastically, the USPS or its contractors should be allowed to establish zoned rates for the delivery of first-class mail within the United States — the farther a piece of mail must travel, the higher the postage for a given weight and shape. The rate structure should be simple (e.g., add $0.25 to send a letter across the Mississippi, across the Rockies, and across the Mason-Dixon line) and well-publicized (e.g., through notices placed in mailboxes at regular intervals).

Union-Busting

Some not-so-random thoughts about unions.

Allowing public-sector unions is like allowing thieves to enter your home, knowing that they intend to rob you.

* * *

Hell hath no fury like a labor union scorned — or like a consumer or taxpayer who has had enough! Public- and private-sector unions, beware. Your days of wage-and-benefit-gouging — enabled by your pet legislators, governors, and presidents — are coming to an end. Let the downfall of Detroit and Michigan be a lesson to you. Accept what customers and taxpayers are willing to pay for your products and services, or do without a job. The choice is yours.

* * *

Pro-union rallies are a heaven-sent opportunity for the GOP to stand up to mobs demanding tribute from taxpayers. The GOP has little to lose by standing up to unions, and much to gain. Most union members — public and private — vote Democrat, anyway. And a relatively small fraction of Americans owe allegiance to unions, which in the private sector have been losing members, and clout, for decades. A strong anti-union stand will put the GOP in good stead with over-taxed, non-union, independent voters. So, here’s my advice to the GOP: Hold your ground and you will garner support that will enable you hold the House, retake the Senate, and retake the White House in 2012. You can then repeal Obamacare; roll back Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to true “safety net” status; whip the regulatory agencies into submission; and kill unionism with a national right-to-work law based on liberty of contract, as guaranteed by the Constitution.

* * *

~~Legalized extortionists~~ Union leaders foresee a backlash against the GOP for the courageous actions of Wisconsin’s Republican lawmakers. I foresee a “frontlash,” as beleaguered taxpayers in other States demand the same degree of courage from their legislatures.

* * *

The American Revolution-in-progress is a movement by and on behalf of oppressed taxpayers. It is opposed by big-government’s wards and apologists — the welfare class, unionists, government employees, crony capitalists, and emotional, fact-challenged leftists.

* * *

If I were a taxpayer in a State with strong public-sector unions, I’d feel like a condemned man who was forced to pay for his own execution.

* * *

Civil servants and union members are drones to politicians, senior bureaucrats, public-school administrators, and union bosses — the “queen bees” whose luxurious salaries and perks the drones make possible simply by virtue of their existence. Private-sector “drones” have the satisfaction of producing real goods and services, and the “queen bees” (for the most part) deserve what they earn because of their managerial and financial contributions to the output of real goods and services.

* * *

The First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Upon removing the superfluous 18th-century comma from the final clause, the Amendment’s correct meaning becomes evident:

Congress (and through incorporation, the States and their political subdivisions), shall make no law restricting the right of the people to assemble peaceably for the purpose of addressing government.

In sum, peaceable assembly may be restricted when it is for a purpose other than to address government. Protests and picket lines that deprive private persons and businesses of peaceful enjoyment and the lawful conduct of their affairs are affronts to the Fourteenth Amendment‘s guarantees of due process and equal protection. Further, disruptive actions, such as the ones earlier this year in Madison, are not peaceable and should not be tolerated.

* * *

From the Austin American-Statesman:

Significant changes to pay and benefits for Texas’ employees, if enacted by legislators, could drive thousands of workers into retirement or jobs outside state government, survey results released Monday show.

About 20,500 state workers — or 14 percent of the workforce outside higher education — responded to the online survey, conducted by the Texas Public Employees Association.

About 57 percent of the respondents eligible for retirement said they would jump ship in the wake of pay cuts, increases in health insurance costs and other benefit changes now under consideration by lawmakers.

Among those respondents not of retirement age, nearly one-third said they would look for work outside of state government. Another 28 percent would wait until the economy improves and then bolt.

Four comments:

1. There’s usually a big gap between survey responses and actual behavior. It’s easy to give a “brave” response, but when the chips are down…

2. Good luck finding a private-sector job that will compensate you as well as your public-sector job.

3. If you do bail for the private sector, thank you. That’s one less “public servant” I have to support.

4. If a “public servant” finds the foregoing comments “hateful,” that’s too bad. I have to support you; I don’t have to love you.

Confusion on the Budget Front

When budget-cutting is discussed, the so-called entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) are called “mandatory,” whereas defense is lumped with the rest of the budget as a “discretionary” item. It should be the other way around; defense is a mandatory item (though reasonable non-leftists and non-pacifists can differ about the details), whereas entitlements are discretionary (“optional frills” is a better term).

Getting rid of government is the only way to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. Some parts of government — those which protect Americans from domestic and foreign predators — can’t be got rid of. But that doesn’t exempt them from vigilant efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

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