Competition Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word

Paul Krugman, a defunct Keynesian, certainly isn’t the first person to decry competition. Krugman’s motive is somewhat different than the motives of others who think of competition as a dirty word, so let’s get Krugman out of the way.

Krugman’s ideal world is one in which the great socialist collective operates under the guidance and tutelage of his omniscience, which extends beyond his former discipline of economics into all aspects of human endeavor and the psychological underpinnings thereof. How else could he know, for example, that Republicans are unremittingly evil and the cause of all evil, not excluding the acts of mad men. Krugman’s problem, of course, is his heavy emotional investment in statism, which leads him to respond like Pavlov’s dog (slobbering and all) whenever anyone says an unkind or even doubtful word about the state’s wisdom or beneficence.

Enough of Krugman, as I once said, prematurely. Onward to competition, that dirty word.

Why is it dirty? First, thanks to “thinkers” of Krugman’s ilk, the word has acquired an adjective, which one hears in one’s mind even when it isn’t attached to the word by the person who uses it. The adjective is cut-throat. Cut-throat competition

refers to situations when competition results in prices that do not chronically or for extended periods of time cover costs of production, particularly fixed costs. This may arise in secularly declining or “sick” industries with high levels of excess capacity or where frequent cyclical or random demand downturns are experienced.

In other words, the term cut-throat competition has nothing to do with rapacious behavior. It is simply a picturesque description of a situation in which some firms are bound to fail, leaving survivors whose behavior should be characterized as persevering, not cut-throat. “Cut-throat” has nevertheless become ineradicably associated with “competition,” which has thereby acquired a strongly negative connotation among “average” persons, defunct Keynesians, the mainstream media, and “liberals” in general.

The other negative connotation of competition is its association with zero-sum games. In the extreme, there is gladiatorial, death-to-the-loser combat. In the somewhat less violent entertainments of the present epoch there are season-ending, winner-takes-trophy events: the Stanley Cup playoffs of ice hockey, the World Series of baseball, the Super Bowl of football, and so on, unto the Little League World Series and who knows what else.

The “average” person (Average Joe) enjoys winner-takes-trophy events and movies that employ death-to-the-loser plot devices, even as he deplores economic competition. That is so because competition as entertainment reinforces the view that competition inevitably generates losers. And yet, the competition of the arena — in its modern, non-lethal incarnations — isn’t really about the winner taking all. The winner takes a trophy and some extra moolah, but the losers — even the members of the teams that finish last and never get to post-season play — don’t lose. In fact, they earn rather nice salaries (often stupendous ones), usually for many years before their declining skills cause them to yield (gracefully or otherwise) to younger players.

Average Joe — unlike the athlete, aspiring performer, or trial lawyer — doesn’t like to think that he is in some kind of competition when he goes to work every day. But he is, even if his work doesn’t involve an explicit contest with, say, a co-worker to see who can throw a football more accurately in the face of charging defensive players, write the best computer program, serve the most customers, turn out the most readable technical manuals, and so on.

The element of competition in the workaday world is unavoidable, not only for the workers on the front lines but also for those in the back room. It is also inevitable for bosses all the way up the chain of command, and for financial backers (whose ownership shares and and loans are on the line).

The element of competition arises because of consumer sovereignty. In the final analysis, it is up to producers (workers, bosses, and business owners) to satisfy consumers — who are also producers. Every instant of every day there are changes in tastes, preferences, technologies, production methods, and other factors that determine the characteristics, quantities, and prices of goods and services that are bought and sold, and thus the rewards to those who are engaged in the production and financing of those goods and services. All of that constant change takes place in an economy that is generally growing, and some sectors of which grow even as others sink into recession or depression. Growth does not eliminate or soften competition because, when the veil of money is stripped away, growth depends heavily on the addition of resources (labor and capital of various kinds), which must be rewarded in accordance with the value of their contributions to economic output. Whether or not the economy is growing, the earnings of producers (and, therefore, their opportunities to consume) depend on their ability to satisfy consumers, who have myriad choices about how to allocate their incomes. In turn, the incomes of every economic actor, from janitor to chairman of the board to multi-billionaire shareholder, are determined by their respective contributions to consumer satisfaction.

The outcome of competition, contrary to the connotations of the word, isn’t a tally of winners and losers. Every “player” is a winner because he is rewarded, to some degree, for his efforts. The notion that there are winners and losers arises, wrongly, from the assumption that everyone is entitled to the same reward, regardless of how valuable his contribution is to others. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs” is a long-discredited economic philosophy that leads to less for everyone (politicians, bureaucrats, and their favorites excepted). A low-income wage-earner may envy a Warren Buffet or Bill Gates (though that envy seems not to extend to the wage-earner’s favorite, highly paid athletes), but envy is in such ample supply that it is worthless, except when politicians decide to reward it, in the name of (cheap) compassion.

Which brings me to the political side of the story. It is the inevitability of competition — and the unwonted fear of it — that leads individuals and groups to seek shelter from it. Moreover, the general perception of competition as “bad” makes it easier for government to usurp private functions and set up in their place nearly impregnable bureaucracies. As a result of these impulses and perceptions, almost every product and service is made more costly by regulatory restrictions, licensing laws, import restrictions, tariffs, pro-union legislation, affirmative-action laws (which raise production costs by forcing employers to hire and promote second-best employees), and so on. At the same, the ability of consumers (as voters) to remove the politicians and bureaucrats responsible for such depredations is inhibited by civil-service regulations (which protect incompetent bureaucrats from more than mere changes of administration) and campaign-finance laws (which were designed by incumbents to protect their incumbencies).

All of this comes at a high cost to those Americans who must actually compete in the real economy. Average Joe doesn’t lose because of competition, he loses because so many of his fellow Americans have succeeded in insulating themselves from it. Therein lies true greed.

In summary, competition is a great thing. By rewarding invention, innovation, risk-taking, education and training, hard work, and all of the other things that contribute to economic growth. competition enables us — all of us — to enjoy a higher standard of living. And we would be much better off they we are if there were fewer individuals sitting on the sidelines, watching the competitors and taking an unearned cut of their earnings.

There’s nothing wrong with competition but the connotations it has acquired. It shouldn’t be a dirty word.

Points of Agreement and Reinforcement

Scott Lincicome, Don Boudreaux, and Mark Perry continue their stalwart defense of free trade (latest entries here, here, and here). The controversy revolves around the notion prevalent in “liberal” circles that exports are “good” and imports are “bad.” This is an old view, which Henry Hazlitt addressed in Economics in One Lesson:

(From the 1952 edition. Originally published in 1946).

I couldn’t agree more with Lincicome, Boudreaux, Perry, and Hazlitt — as you will see if you go here, here, and here.

John Goodman keeps tabs on the abomination known as Obamacare. His many post-enactment observations about Obamacare include these:

Docs Declare “No Confidence” in AMA, Exercise as Anger Management, and the Upcoming Nursing Shortage
Doctors are Leaving Medicare
Who is Going to Provide the Extra Care?
Selling Health Reform to the Victims
The Coming Doctor Shortage
Victims of Health Care Reform

None of this comes as a surprise to me. I warned against Obamacare in several pre-enactment posts:

Rationing and Health Care
The Perils of Nannyism: The Case of Obamacare
More about the Perils of Obamacare
Health-Care Reform: The Short of It

Goodman also offers a tantalizing post about the idea of testing public policies before they are fully implemented. The idea of testing public policies is one of the arguments for true federalism, where the central government has a hands-off policy on economic and social matters (but not civil rights). Only true federalism — which this nation enjoyed (more or less) until the subversion of the Commerce Clause by the Interstate Commerce Act — will dispel the “anger” toward the central government that deeply, and justly, animates a large number of Americans.

Big-government advocate Linda Greenhouse now opposes broadly worded delegations of power to subordinate authorities, because the broadly worded power, in the present instance, would

authoriz[e] the secretary of Homeland Security to “waive all legal requirements” that the secretary, in his or her “sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads [comprising the border fence project].”

The writer of the quoted article notes the irony in Greenhouse’s present position. It puts her on the side of Judge Douglas Ginsburg, who argued against broad delegations of congressional authority in “Delegation Running Riot” (Regulation, 1995, no. 1), where he coined the term “the Constitution-in-exile”:

So for 60 years the nondelegation doctrine has existed only as part of the Constitution-in-exile, along with the doctrines of enumerated powers, unconstitutional conditions, and substantive due process, and their textual cousins, the Necessary and Proper, Contracts, Takings, and Commerce Clauses. The memory of these ancient exiles, banished for standing in opposition to unlimited government, is kept alive by a few scholars who labor on in the hope of a restoration, a second coming of the Constitution of liberty-even if perhaps not in their own lifetimes.

All of which reminds me of an old post of mine about the Constitution in exile.

Is the Constitution True? An Addendum

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Obama’s New Regulatory Regime

Eric Posner, writing in The New Republic (“Obama’s Cost-Benefit Revolution“), comments on Obama’s new executive order about cost-benefit analysis and regulation. Posner offers some background:

Long ago, cost-benefit analysis was a rallying cry for conservatives. It was brought to government by none other than Ronald Reagan, in Executive Order 12291 of 1981. Reagan was riding the wave of the deregulatory movement, which held that regulation of industry was excessive and stunted economic growth. His order stipulated that agencies should issue regulations only after finding that the benefits exceeded the costs.

Outraged liberals charged that cost-benefit analysis was a pretext to stifle regulation, and that it was arbitrary because of the difficulty of attaching dollar values to lives, environmental goods, and other regulatory benefits. Conservatives replied that cost-benefit analysis blocks bad regulations: Why would one support a regulation that produces higher costs than benefits? At the time, the alternative was regulation that seemed to reflect no more than the instincts of bureaucrats (or the agendas of interest groups), accompanied by impenetrable bureaucratese. The debate continued in this vein for decades, but over time, positions shifted. Some liberals came to see cost-benefit analysis as a good-government tool that promotes transparency and accountability, while some conservatives began to wonder whether it confers legitimacy on the New Deal state.

Cost-benefit analysis — even when it is done well — is a sham. But Obama’s approach (an extension of Clinton’s) reveals it as a scam:

Now, the press has reported that Obama’s executive order, which explicitly renews Clinton’s, signals victory for business. But the executive order also provides plenty of wiggle room that can be exploited by pro-regulatory forces, as indeed did Clinton’s before it. Unlike Reagan’s original order, which simply asked agencies to perform cost-benefit analysis, Clinton’s allowed agencies also to take account of “equity.” Obama’s adds that agencies should take account of “human dignity” and “fairness,” values, it helpfully notes, that are “difficult or impossible to quantify.” This is problematic because quantification is the point of cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis works in the first place only because it imposes mathematical discipline on agencies. They must supply evidence that a proposed regulation has certain benefits and costs, monetize those benefits and costs, and report a number. If the number is greater than zero, then the agency may regulate. If agencies can instead point to unquantifiable benefits such as the promotion of human dignity, they can do whatever they want, and the main selling point of cost-benefit analysis—government transparency—is eliminated.

The sham to which I refer above is this:

One person’s benefit cannot be compared with another person’s cost. Suppose, for example, the City of Los Angeles were to conduct a cost-benefit analysis that “proved” the wisdom of constructing yet another freeway through the city in order to reduce the commuting time of workers who drive into the city from the suburbs. In order to construct the freeway, the city must exercise its power of eminent domain and take residential and commercial property, paying “just compensation,” of course. But “just compensation” for a forced taking cannot be “just” — not when property is being wrenched from often-unwilling “sellers” at prices they would not accept voluntarily. Not when those “sellers” (or their lessees) must face the additional financial and psychic costs of relocating their homes and businesses, of losing (in some cases) decades-old connections with friends, neighbors, customers, and suppliers. (This is from “Greed, Cosmic Justice, and Social Welfare“; see also “Modern Utilitarianism.”)

Throwing “equity,” “human dignity,” and “fairness” into the equation takes us from sham to scam. As Posner says,  “[t]hese wiggle words … might be licenses to agencies to regulate however they want to.” There’s no “might” about it.

Well, there is a kind of “might” about it. The might of government regulators to force their preferences on us.

Libertarian Conservative or Conservative Libertarian?

Are they the same thing? No, they are not, as I will try to explain.

A prominent libertarian of my acquaintance once said to me that a libertarian may be a person of conservative mien. His implication was that a libertarian — one who favors (at most) a minimal, night-watchman state — might be conservative in his personal views about, say, the kinds of behavior in which he would engage, even while tolerating behavior, by others, in which he would not engage. A person of such character might be considered a conservative libertarian.  Such a libertarian would not, for example, take a homosexual “marriage” partner or abet an abortion, even though he would (in all likelihood) insist that such things should be allowed by the state (as long as the state is in the business of allowing or disallowing such things).

What, then, is a libertarian conservative? Is he, in effect, the “conservative” libertarian of the preceding paragraph — unwilling to invoke the power of the state against acts in which he would not engage? Is that all there is to it?

Hardly. I have played fast and loose with the idea of conservatism by portraying it as a kind of prudishness or finickiness. Conservatism, properly understood, is not those things.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let us begin with libertarianism. It is a “big tent” that accommodates anarchists and minarchists. Minarchists believe that government, being inevitable if not necessary, must be kept within strict bounds. Given the inevitabliity of government, it is better to control it than to be controlled by it. It is therefore better to design an accountable one that can be kept within its bounds (or so minarchists hope) than to suffer an imposed regime, most likely an oppressive one.

Why do minarchists prefer strictly limited government? There are two reasons. The first reason is a desire to be left alone, or more elegantly, a deontological belief in the right to be left alone. The second, consequentalist, reason is that voluntary social and economic transactions yield better results than government-directed ones. Friedrich Hayek makes that argument in his essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

Whether deontological or consequentialist, minarchism holds that the central role of government is to protect citizens from foreign and domestic predators. This protection cannot be absolute, but government’s evident ability and willingness to dispense justice and defend the nation are meant, in part, to deter predators.

More generally, the ideal government is restricted to the protection of negative rights. Such rights, as opposed to positive rights, do not involve claims against others; instead, they involve the right to be left alone by others. Negative rights include the right to conduct one’s affairs without being killed, maimed, or forced or tricked into doing something against one’s will; the right to own property, as against the right of others to abscond with property or claim it as their own; the right to work for a wage and not as a slave to an “owner” who claims the product of one’s labor (e.g., a government that does more than protect life, liberty, and property); and the right to move and transact business freely within government’s sphere of sovereignty (which can include overseas movements and transactions, given a government strong enough to protect them).

To a minarchist, then, rights are limited to those that can be exercised without requiring something of others (e.g., transfers of income and property). The one necessary exception is the cost of providing a government to ensure the exercise of rights. That cost must be borne, in some arbitrary way, by citizens who, on the one hand, see no need for government (i.e., anarchists) and by citizens who, on the other hand, have differing views about how the cost of protecting rights should be shared.

Does minarchism square with conservatism? It all depends on what one means by conservatism, and on the brand of minarchism one has in mind.

There is, in my view, a “core” conservatism, which Russell Kirk articulates in his “Six Canons of Conservative Thought“:

(1) …Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems… (2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equilitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems. (3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes…. Society longs for leadership…. (4) Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic levelling is not economic progress…. (5) Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters and calculators.” Man must put a control upon his will and his appetite…. Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man’s anarchic impulse. (6) Recognition that change and reform are not identical….

Kirk’s canons, at first glance, seem orthogonal to minarchism, if not opposed to it.  But they are compatible with right-minarchism (as defined here):

1. Political problems are moral problems. A right-minarchist would say that it is immoral to take from others what they have rightly earned what they possess. There are, of course, persons who profess to be religious and yet believe that it is right for government to take from the “rich” and give to the poor (or whatever group happens to find favor with those who control government at a particular time). But a truly conservative view of the matter is found in the Seventh Commandment: You shall not steal. A Christian is exhorted to do good with his income, sharing with others and being as open-handed as possible toward employees, while meeting his family’s needs and maintaining a viable business. The sharing of one’s income and the property that derives from it is a matter of conscience, not a matter for government to decide.

2. Right-minarchism is not in any way a “radical system.” The only kind of “equalitarianism” to be found in right-minarchism is the equality of rights, which are the same for all. Right-minarchists reject utilitarianism — the belief in a transcendent welfare function — as nothing more than an excuse for dictatorship in the name of “society”. Right-minarchists may even believe that tradition is essential to social cohesion, without which violence and suspicion would displace mutually beneficial coexistence and cooperation.

3. Orders and classes result naturally from spontaneous order,

those ‘natural processes’ which are not the product of reason or intention. The classic example is the free market economy in which the co-ordination of the aims and purposes of countless actors, who cannot know the aims and purposes of more than a handful of their fellow citizens, is achieved by the mechanism of prices. A change in the price of a commodity is simply a signal which feeds back information into the system enabling actors to ‘automatically’ produce that spontaneous co-ordination which appears to be the product of an omniscient mind. The repeated crises in dirigiste systems are in essence crises of information since the abolition of the market leaves the central planner bereft of that economic knowledge which is required for harmony. There is no greater example of the hubris of the constructivist than in this failure to envisage order in a natural process (which is not of a directly physical kind). As Hayek says in “Principles of a Liberal Social Order”:

Much of the opposition to a system of freedom under general laws arises from the inability to conceive of an effective co-ordination of human activities without deliberate organization by a commanding intelligence. One of the achievements of economic theory has been to explain how such a mutual adjustment of the spontaneous activities of individuals is brought about by the market, provided that there is a known delimitation of the sphere of control of each individual.

Right-minarchism fosters spontaneous order, which benefits not only the form of social behavior known as economic activity but all forms of social behavior. Right-minarchism, in short, enables the cream to rise to the top, as the old (pre-homgenization) saying goes. This is true in the economic sphere, where rewards are in keeping with the value that willing buyers place on the products and services of sellers. It is true, also, in the social sphere, where institutions and persons are honored and respected for the value they add to the lives they touch. There are natural “orders and classes”, and they are preferable to the arbitrary ones that are imposed by dirigiste systems.

4. Right-minarchism is founded on the intimate connection of freedom and property. There is no freedom without the right to acquire property, that is, to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. Leveling amounts to theft, and it removes a vital incentive to act in economically and, therefore, socially beneficial ways.

5. Right-minarchists agree that civil order is an essential condition for productive economic and social intercourse. It therefore follows that free civil institutions — family, church, club, and so on — yield traditions that conduce to civil order. Those traditions may evolve with time, but only as their evolution is found to be beneficial.

6. Right-minarchism rules out change for the sake of a politician’s perceived need for change. It allows changes only where such change is beneficial to the parties affected by it, and voluntarily accepted by them.

In sum, there is no essential conflict between Kirk’s brand of Burkean conservatism and the right-minarchistic branch of libertarianism.

This brings me to Friedrich Hayek — a right-minarchist, in my view — who argued as persuasively as anyone against an intrusive state (though he was not averse to a “social safety net”), but who seemingly rejected conservatism. The famous postscript to Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty is called “Why I Am Not a Conservative”. In the following excerpts, Hayek’s use of “liberal” should be understood as a reference to classical liberalism, the anti-statist position which is the antithesis of modern “liberalism” or “progressivism”:

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt [by William F. Buckley Jr. et al.] to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character….

… [The European type of conservatism] by its very nature … cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving [i.e., toward socialism]. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments….

… Before I consider the main points on which the liberal attitude is sharply opposed to the conservative one, I ought to stress that there is much that the liberal might with advantage have learned from the work of some conservative thinkers…. However reactionary in politics such figures as Coleridge, Bonald, De Maistre, Justus Möser, or Donoso Cortès may have been, they did show an understanding of the meaning of spontaneously grown institutions such as language, law, morals, and conventions that anticipated modern scientific approaches and from which the liberals might have profited. But the admiration of the conservatives for free growth generally applies only to the past. They typically lack the courage to welcome the same undesigned change from which new tools of human endeavors will emerge….

This fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces is closely related to two other characteristics of conservatism: its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of economic forces. Since it distrusts both abstract theories and general principles, it neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy. Order appears to the conservative as the result of the continuous attention of authority, which, for this purpose, must be allowed to do what is required by the particular circumstances and not be tied to rigid rule. A commitment to principles presupposes an understanding of the general forces by which the efforts of society are co-ordinated, but it is such a theory of society and especially of the economic mechanism that conservatism conspicuously lacks….

[T]he main point … is the characteristic complacency of the conservative toward the action of established authority and his prime concern that this authority be not weakened rather than that its power be kept within bounds. This is difficult to reconcile with the preservation of liberty. In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules….

Hayek’s mentor and colleague, Ludwig von Mises, immediately expressed his agreement with Hayek’s rejection of conservatism:

I completely agree with your rejection of conservatism. In his book Up from Liberalism, Buckley — as a person a fine and educated man — has clearly defined his standpoint: “Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before.” [p. 154]

I quite agree with Hayek and Mises, to the extent that their target is Buckley and his adherents, in whose “conservatism” I could never find a coherent principle, except the one identified by Mises. Buckley’s program, it seems to me, was always one of opposition, expressed so reconditely that it almost defies analysis and refutation. For example, Buckley rightly excoriates the infantile posturing of Murray Rothbard and his anarchistic ilk (here, at “The Right Anarchists”), while at the same time demonstrating the truth of Hayek’s charge that “the characteristic complacency of the conservative toward the action of established authority and his prime concern that this authority be not weakened rather than that its power be kept within bounds”; thus Buckley writes:

… The American conservative believes that the state is as often as not [emphasis added] an instrument of mischief as of good….

But no, children, one does not therefore argue against the existence of the state. The conservative harbors the presumption against any growth in state power.

But apparently not a presumption for the reduction of state power.

Returning to Kirk, we find an affirmation of liberty in his essay, “The Best Form of Government”, which he penned in the year that Hayek rejected conservatism (as he understood it). Kirk applies the idea of spontaneous order, of which Hayek was a leading exponent. But Kirk’s understanding of spontaneous order goes deeper than Hayek’s:

Good government is not of uniform design. Order and justice and freedom are found in diverse ways, and any government which intends to shelter the happiness of its people must be founded upon the moral convictions, the cultural inheritance, and the historic experience of that people. Theory divorced from experience is infinitely dangerous, the plaything of the ideologue….

I am saying this: governments are the offspring of religion and morals and philosophy and social experience; governments are not the source of civilization, nor the manufacturers of happiness. As Christianity embraces no especial scheme of politics, so various forms of government are best—under certain circumstances, in certain times and certain nations. And, far from being right to revolt against small imperfections in government, a people are fortunate if their political order maintains a tolerable degree of freedom and justice for the different interests in society. We are not made for perfect things, and if ever we found ourselves under the domination of the perfect government, we would make mincemeat of it, from pure boredom.

Where does that leave the relationship between conservatism and the right-minarchistic branch of libertarianism? It is superficial to proclaim the virtues of individualism and spontaneous order while rejecting the indispensable, civilizing role of tradition. A libertarian who is not also a Burkean conservative is on a par with his ostensible opponent, the rationalist of the left:

How deeply the rationalist disposition of mind has invaded our political thought and practice is illustrated by the extent to which traditions of behaviour have given place to ideologies, the extent to which the politics of destruction and creation have been substituted for the politics of repair, the consciously planned and deliberately executed being considered (for that reason) better than what has grown up and established itself unselfconsciously over a period of time…. This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom — not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine. A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics. And only in a society already deeply infected with Rationalism will the conversion of the traditional resources of resistance to the tyranny of Rationalism into a self-conscious ideology be considered a strengthening of those resources. [Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded edition, pp. 26-7]

What conclusions do I draw from the preceding tour of libertarianism and conservatism? These:

It is entirely possible to be a libertarian conservative, that is, a conservative (of Burkean stripe) who believes that humane values are most likely to survive and thrive under the aegis of a minimal state.  This kind of conservative is an adherent of right-minarchism, which is a species of libertarianism. And, in my view, right-minarchism is the only kind of libertarianism that is both coherent and viable.

A libertarian of conservative mien — a so-called conservative libertarian — will favor a minimal state (if any), by definition. But such a person may be “conservative” only in matters of personal taste, and not because he subscribes to the conservatism of Burke and Kirk. He may in fact be in favor of governmental efforts to demolish long-standing social norms. He will give his support to such efforts in the name of liberty and without regard for the true bulwark of liberty: the restraining influence of voluntarily evolved norms of behavior.

In short, a “conservative” libertarian is in all likelihood a left-minarchist. Left-minarchists — who support state action to impose “equality” of various kinds — dismiss (or are ignorant of) the importance of social norms in binding a people together in mutual respect, trust, and forbearance. And it is that bond — far more than the threat of state action — which allows us to go about our daily lives in the peaceful pursuit of happiness.

That said, libertarians (of all stripes) and conservatives (“conservative” yahoos excepted) have a common political enemy: the over-reaching state. Libertarians who are tempted to make cause with “liberals” because they happen to agree with “liberals” about the permissibility of certain kinds of behavior should resist the temptation. There is nothing to be gained from an alliance with “liberals”, who will only use libertarian arguments cynically to advance measures that suppress liberty.

And what is liberty? It is not “do as you will as long as you don’t harm others”. That definition, adapted from John Stuart Mill’s oft-invoked “harm principle,” is an empty concept unless it rests on a specific, agreed definition of harm. Liberty — the absence of harm — is therefore a social construct. That is to say, liberty is a modus vivendi for a group of individuals. It comes down to this:

peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior.

What could be more conservative?

Related reading:
Carson Holloway, “Conservatism and Freedom”, Public Discourse, November 8, 2013
Jonathan Neumann, “God, Hayek, and the Conceit of Reason”, Standpoint, January/February 2014 (This is generally applicable to libertarians, though it misses Hayek’s defense of tradition; see this post, for example.)
Claude S. Fischer, “Libertarianism Is Very Strange”, Boston Review, January 27, 2014
Glenn Fairman, “Libertarianism and the Public Good”, American Thinker, January 29, 2014
Scott Yenor, “The Problem with the ‘Simple Principle’ of Liberty“, Law and Liberty, March 19, 2018

Related posts:
On Liberty
What Is Conservatism?
Line-Drawing and Liberty
Pseudo-Libertarian Sophistry vs. True Libertarianism
Intellectuals and Society: A Review
The Golden Rule and the State
Government vs. Community
Bounded Liberty: A Thought Experiment
Evolution, Human Nature, and “Natural Rights”
More Pseudo-Libertarianism
More about Conservative Governance
The Meaning of Liberty
Understanding Hayek
The Golden Rule as Beneficial Learning
Facets of Liberty
Burkean Libertarianism
What Is Libertarianism?
True Libertarianism, One More Time
Human Nature, Liberty, and Rationalism
Utilitarianism and Psychopathy
The Libertarian-Conservative Fusion Is Alive and Well
Why Conservatism Works
Liberty and Society
The Eclipse of “Old America”
Genetic Kinship and Society
Liberty as a Social Construct: Moral Relativism?
Defending Liberty against (Pseudo) Libertarians
Defining Liberty
Conservatism as Right-Minarchism
The Pseudo-Libertarian Temperament
Parsing Political Philosophy (II)
Modern Liberalism as Wishful Thinking
Romanticizing the State
Governmental Perversity
Libertarianism and the State
“Liberalism” and Personal Responsibility
My View of Libertarianism
More About Social Norms and Liberty
The Authoritarianism of Modern Liberalism, and the Conservative Antidote
Another Look at Political Labels
Individualism, Society, and Liberty
Social Justice vs. Liberty
Economically Liberal, Socially Conservative
The Harm Principle Revisited: Mill Conflates Society and State
Liberty and Social Norms Re-examined
Natural Law, Natural Rights, and the Real World
Natural Law and Natural Rights Revisited
Rescuing Conservatism
Disposition and Ideology

Government vs. Community

Tibor Machan reminds us that, contra Paul Krugman, government is not community:

Finally Paul Krugman, Princeton University Nobel Laureate in economic science and columnist for The New York Times, has come clean about his “moral” position (TNYT, January 14, 2011). He has admitted that he doesn’t believe that when you earn something, you own it….

If my life doesn’t belong to me–if the norm the Declaration of Independence identifies as universal, namely, that every human being has a right to his or her life, is false–then what is true? Does my life belong to the government? If we recall that government is a group of individuals to whom a certain social role has been delegated–namely, the role of securing the rights of the citizenry–the claim that government owns our lives and resources means nothing else but that these individuals in government own our lives and resources.

But that is very odd–why would those people be in the privileged position of owning us and what to all appearances belongs to us while we, also human beings and with equal rights, do not own our lives and resources? This makes no sense….

The idea that we belong to government is obscene and harks back to an age when Caesars, monarchs, tsars, Pharaohs and such were believed to have been given their realm by God and everything within that realm, including all the human beings, therefore belonged to them. Later these slaves and serfs began to be called subjects, implying that they were all subject to the will of the government. This is were serfdom and even taxation have their origin….

An essential aspect of any bona fide moral position is that it must be practiced voluntarily, not because someone–e. g., government–holds a gun to one’s head and coerces one to do what is right. That doesn’t count as doing the right thing, so any such policy is literally demoralizing. It robs people of the opportunity to be morally good (or bad, of course).

A society that’s fit for human habitation must not have policies that prevent citizens from exercising moral judgment. So, OK, assume for a moment that we should devote ourselves entirely to serving other people, to serving the public good. If, however, all of this is accomplished through governmental coercion like taxation, regulation, regimentation, and so forth, there can’t be anything moral about it. So Dr. Krugman’s so called moral stance isn’t one at all. It leaves no room for morality because it makes all purportedly moral conduct involuntary, imposed by rulers and not a matter of one’s own free will.

Sharing at the point of a gun is not sharing, it is theft. When government forces “sharing,” it removes opportunities for true acts of kindness and charity. It is such acts that help to foster a sense of community. And a sense of community is essential to civility.

Government interventions in economic affairs are therefore destructive of the social bonds that inhibit anti-social and criminal conduct. It follows that government interventions in economic affairs lead to increasingly expensive and oppressive efforts by government to regulate social conduct.

Related posts:
Enough of Krugman
Rights, Liberty, the Golden Rule, and the Legitimate State
An Encounter with a Marxist
The Golden Rule and the State

Is the Anger Gone?

That’s the question Matt Bai asks in yesterday’s NYT (“After Tuscon, Is the Anger Gone?”). His answer, if there is one in his assumption- and error-laden piece, is irrelevant. Bai’s article deserves a good “fisking,” which I may yet deliver. For now, I will content myself with the following observations.

“After Tuscon…” offers a strong (if unwitting) argument for reducing the footprint of the central government, which is a leading source of the division and anger evoked by the tragedy in Tuscon. Of course, those who favor a strong central government would then be angrier than they already are — and they are angry, as evidenced by the rhetoric of Krugman, Olbermann, and their ilk.

True federalism — where the central government has a hands-off policy on economic and social matters (but not civil rights) — would allow those who favor heavy-handed government to live in States that offer such government. The problem is that the people who would be (and are) attracted to such States aren’t content to endure heavy-handed government by themselves; they wish to bestow its “blessings” with everyone else. And they have succeeded in very great measure.

Most commentators, it seems to me, proceed from the assumption that those who oppose heavy-handed government have no rational basis for their “anger.” They do, but those who are wedded to heavy-handed government — most politicians and pundits, and the sheep-like majority of Americans — cannot see it. And, being unable to see it, they view anti-government rhetoric as a manifestation of psychological disturbance, when it should be viewed as a manifestation of righteous resentment at being over-taxed and over-regulated.

No amount of “dialogue” or “shared experience” can bridge the gap between statists and anti-statists. Thomas Sowell explains this well in A Conflict of Visions — a sometimes maddeningly balanced analysis of the contrasting world views that shape the divide between statists and anti-statists.

Related posts:
Libertarian-Conservatives Are from the Earth, Liberals Are from the Moon
A Dissonant Vision
Freedom of Will and Political Action
Intellectuals and Society: A Review
(Jared) Lee Harvey Loughner?

(Jared) Lee Harvey Loughner?

The rush to ascribe Jared Lee Loughner‘s despicable acts of murder and attempted murder to a right-wing “climate of hate” reminds me of the immediate reaction to the shooting of JFK in Dallas.

Because Dallas was, at that time, a media-designated hot-bed of right-wing extremism (anti-Catholic, anti-civil rights, pro-John Birch Society), the murder of JFK was immediately ascribed to the “climate of hate” which, one gathered, hung over Dallas like a miasma. It was ironic to learn, fairly quickly, that the apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a communist who had lived in the USSR, supported Castro’s regime in Cuba, and tried to assassinate retired Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, a noted right-winger of the time.

History repeats itself as farce. And the present farce is the rush of the usual suspects on the left to pin Jared Lee Loughner’s acts on the “hate” that oozes (so it would seem) from the pores of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others on the right. (Whereas Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, and their ilk speak only sweet reason.) It is evident that Jared Lee Loughner does not possess a coherent political view of any kind, and that if he has been influenced by anyone it is extraterrestrial beings.

Even if Loughner were a certified right-winger of some kind, would that make Palin et al. accessories to his crime? And if so, wouldn’t that pin the assassination of JFK on Nikita Khrushchev and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan on Jodie Foster? Or perhaps everything is the fault of “society,” as the left likes to say when it comes to criminals.

Facts and logic will not keep the left and its allies in the media from spewing and spreading hateful rhetoric aimed at discrediting their political enemies. Nor will it keep them from trying, again, to use the power of government to disarm Americans and stifle speech of which they disapprove, speech that threatens their agenda of regimentation.

When a leftist cries “hate” and “fascism” he should be looking in a mirror.

Related posts:
Fascism with a “Friendly” Face
Parsing Political Philosophy
Fascism and the Future of America
Clinton the Conspirator
The Psychologist Who Played God

Giving Back, Again

This question appears on the website of an alumni organization to which I belong:

If the __________ were to ask all current members to give back to their community as part of their [membership] requirements, how would you like to see that play out? For example, what kind of service or citizenship activities and programs would have been useful or enriching for you, as an __________ member?

I will play the devil’s advocate by asking why a person should “give back” to his or her community. To “give back” suggests, to me, that the “giver” hasn’t been giving all along. For example, a person who earns $1 million a year (unless it’s obtained through theft, fraud, or the use of state power) hasn’t stolen anything from anyone else. Rather, that person has given $1 million worth of value to others, for which those others have paid voluntarily.

I don’t mean to disparage acts of voluntarism and charity; such acts are laudable. But they are laudable because they are voluntary, not because they signify a debt that must be repaid by “giving back.” And they are laudable only if they are undertaken in a way that doesn’t draw attention to the “giver.”

But “giving back” — in this instance, as in most others — smacks of bragging and condescension. A mind reader would find something like this among the “giver’s” thoughts:

Oh, how fortunate I am or you/we are to be blessed with brains/looks/money. It is therefore incumbent on me to make a point of my superiority by doing something gracious for less fortunate persons in whose company I otherwise wouldn’t be caught dead.

I would like not to read about a rich alumnus who has given his alma mater millions of dollars, with the understanding or in the expectation that an endowment fund or campus building will bear his name in perpetuity. I would like not to read about a movie star who has scoured third world for orphans worthy of adoption. I would like not to see TV coverage of star athletes who prance about on a field with children of many hues for the few minutes that it takes to film said coverage.

Were I not to read and see such things, I would know that voluntarism and charity don’t warrant special attention because they are unexceptional acts.

Related post: Giving Back

Is The Constitution True?

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Wrong Again

Steven Landsburg, who is supposedly a “hardcore libertarian,” is on the verge of surpassing Bryan Caplan as the most wrong-headed libertarian economist on my RSS reading list. Landsburg’s upside-down view of the world has led me to issue the following posts:

Now comes Landsburg with yet another tour through the land of tortured logic: “Another Rationality Test.” There, Landsburg sets out the following problem:

Suppose you’ve somehow found yourself in a game of Russian Roulette. Russian roulette is not, perhaps, the most rational of games to be playing in the first place, so let’s suppose you’ve been forced to play.

Question 1: At the moment, there are two bullets in the six-shooter pointed at your head. How much would you pay to remove both bullets and play with an empty chamber?

Question 2: At the moment, there are four bullets in the six-shooter. How much would you pay to remove one of them and play with a half-full chamber?

In case it’s hard for you to come up with specific numbers, let’s ask a simpler question:

The Big Question: Which would you pay more for — the right to remove two bullets out of two, or the right to remove one bullet out of four?

The question is to be answered on the assumption that you have no heirs you care about, so money has no value to you after you’re dead.

If you think the right answer is to pay more for the right to remove two bullets out of two, you’re wrong, according to Landsburg. Why? Well, Landsburg — with a train of “logic” that reminds me of Lou Costello’s “proof” that 7 x 13 = 28 — “proves” that removing two of four bullets has the same value as removing two of two bullets. Here’s how Landsburg does it:

[T]hink about four questions:

Question A: You’re playing with a six-shooter that contains two bullets. How much would you pay to remove them both? (This is the same as Question 1.)

Question B: You’re playing with a three-shooter that contains one bullet. How much would you pay to remove that bullet?

Question C: There’s a 50% chance you’ll be summarily executed and a 50% chance you’ll be forced to play Russian roulette with a three-shooter containing one bullet. How much would you pay to remove that bullet?

Question D: You’re playing with a six-shooter that contains four bullets. How much would you pay to remove one of them? (This is the same as Question 2.)

Now here comes the argument:

  • In Questions A and B you are facing a 1/3 chance of death, and in each case you are offered the opportunity to escape that chance of death completely. Therefore they’re really the same question and they should have the same answer.
  • In Question C, half the time you’re dead anyway. The other half the time you’re right back in Question B. So surely questions C and B should have the same answer.
  • In Question D, there are three bullets that aren’t for sale. 50% of the time, one of those bullets will come up and you’re dead. The other 50% of the time, you’re playing Russian roulette with the three remaining chambers, one of which contains a bullet. Therefore Question D is exactly like Question C, and these questions should have the same answer.

Okay, then. If Questions A and B should have the same answer, and Questions B and C should have the same answer, and Questions C and D should have the same answer — then surely Questions A and D should have the same answer! But these, of course, are exactly the two questions we started with.

In case the trick isn’t obvious on first reading — and it wasn’t to me — here’s what Landsburg does.

He starts by positing a situation in which removing two of two bullets (Question A/Question 1) and removing one of one bullet (Question B) have the same value, and therefore should be worth the same amount to the hypothetical, involuntary player of Russian Roulette. Why should they have the same value? Because, given the player’s unstated but implicit objective — which is to survive Russian Roulette, and nothing else — he stands to improve his chance of surviving by 1/3 in both cases. Probabilistically, removing two of two bullets from a six-chamber gun is the same as removing one of one bullet from a three-chamber gun. In both instances, the chance of being shot goes from one-third to zero.

The point of the preceding exercise isn’t to get the reader to think about probabilities; it’s to get the reader (a) to assume that Landsburg’s “proof” is on the up-and-up, while (b) planting the idea that removing one of one bullets from three chambers is just as good as removing two of two bullets from six chambers. The reader is being set up to fall for a real whopper, to which I’ll come.

The next step (Question C) is to juxtapose the threat of dying by three-shooter with an irrelevant but equally probable threat. The 50% probability of summary execution is irrelevant, in the context of the problem at hand, because there’s nothing the player can do about it. What the player can do is to influence his probability of surviving Russian Roulette, which increases by one-third if he buys the single bullet that’s in the three-shooter.

The point of the preceding exercise is to reinforce further the reader’s confidence in Landsburg’s “proof,” while planting the idea that it’s legitimate to ignore a 50% threat of certain extinction. I use the word “confidence” because the setup of this “proof” is like the setup of a confidence game. The reader, like the victim of a con game, is now ripe for plucking.

Landsburg’s answer to Question D (Question 2) does the trick. It parallels Question C, but it doesn’t have the same import with respect to the player’s objective: surviving a game of Russian Roulette. Landsburg waves away 50% of the threat to the player’s existence (the three bullets that the player can’t buy), even though the three bullets (one of which may come up 50% of the time) are part of the game of Russian Roulette, unlike the summary execution of Question C.  Landsburg, having dismissed the threat posed by the three bullets as somehow irrelevant, then focuses on the remaining bullet. Because this bullet can be in one of three chambers (the three not occupied by the other bullets), it seems that the player can increase by one-third his chance of surviving Russian Roulette if he buys one bullet. Thus, by Landburg’s “logic,” buying one of four bullets has the same value to the player as buying two of two bullets.

If you swallow that one, I’d like to sell you a bridge.

The fact that the player can’t buy three of the four bullets posited in Question D/Question 2, has no bearing on the probability that he survives Russian Roulette, which is his objective. With four bullets in the gun, his chance of survival is one-third. If he pays to have one bullet removed, the gun still has three bullets in it. Thus his chance of survival increases by one-sixth (3/6 [1/2] – 2/6 [1/3] = 1/6). Clearly, the value of removing one of four bullets isn’t the same as the value of removing two of two bullets, which increases his chance of survival by 1/3.

If you’re not convinced, let’s return to the original problem and restate it in a way that doesn’t distort the essential question: If the player’s objective is to survive a game of Russian Roulette, would he pay more for a six-gun with no bullets in it (Question 1) or a six-gun with three bullets in it (Question 2)? If you say that he’d pay the same amount for either gun, your name is Steven Landsburg.

Build It and They Will Pay

Michael Messner, an investment-fund manager, writes:

More than 150 years ago, America’s greatest landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, created Central Park and changed New York forever. He went on to transform dozens more cities, leaving a priceless legacy of vibrant, beautiful cityscapes. And, in the process, he increased property values.

Olmsted discovered this himself when he tracked the value of land around Central Park and found that the city’s $13 million investment had led to an astounding $209 million increase in just 17 years. The architect recognized what many planners still fail to grasp: Parks and managed green space are vital pieces of urban infrastructure that not only improve the quality of life for millions of people but also drive economic growth….

We don’t have the luxury of vacant land that Olmsted often started with, so we must bulldoze underperforming and underused property, put people to work creating parks on some of the land and “bank” the rest until the economy recovers.

Beginning with Atlanta, Georgia Tech is researching what is needed to accomplish this in 12 major cities. The project is known as Red Fields to Green Fields. Under this plan, some of the abandoned or underutilized property would be acquired by a parks agency or by public-private partnerships, which would then begin demolition, park design and construction, putting people to work immediately. More jobs would come as the improved areas attracted development….

The banking system and the federal government could play an important role in this effort. Rather than backstop bad real estate paper, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Treasury Department could help finance the acquisition of excess commercial real estate through a land bank fund. Instead of buying mortgage-backed securities, why couldn’t the Fed buy excess developed real estate to be held as green space through “land-backed securities”? Why couldn’t the FDIC give some of the useless properties it obtains through bank closures to land banks or nonprofit organizations? With the right financing structure, philanthropic entrepreneurs could use leverage to remake America just as some of our bad developers used easy bank financing to help create the excesses. (“Olmsted’s ideas could help solve our real estate mess,” The Washington Post, January 6, 2011)

In other words, why not bestow parks and green spaces on selected urban areas at the expense of every taxpayer in the United States?

What’s wrong with that idea? Plenty. Let’s start with Messner’s financing scheme. The money for a land bank fund has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere, when you get down to it, is taxpayers’ pockets. The Fed’s purchase of “excess” real estate probably would be accomplished by, in effect, printing money, thus burdening taxpayers (and others) with the hidden tax of inflation. Regarding the idea of an FDIC giveaway, it’s evident that Messner thinks that developed properties have no market value just because they’ve been abandoned. But that’s not so, and any market value that they do have is owed to the taxpayers of the United States, for which the FDIC is merely an agent. I don’t know how the Treasury could help to finance the purchase of “excess commercial real estate” (whatever that is) without imposing a tax burden (or its Ricardian equivalent) on Americans. (Perhaps Messner believes that the money in the Treasury is a gift from the Tooth Fairy.) Finally, Messner’s superficially reasonable proposal is bound to be used as justification for efforts to spend tax dollars, at the State and local levels, if not at the federal level.

Let’s turn to the supposed benefits of Messner’s proposal. His essential claim is that the cost of beautification is returned many-fold in the form of higher property values (for the owners of neighboring properties) and vague promises of economic growth and a better quality of life. I’ve blogged elsewhere (here and here) about the fundamental flaw of cost-benefit analysis, as it is applied to government projects. The flaw is this: Most of the benefits don’t accrue to those who bear the costs. So the creation of a park causes a rise in the value of the land around it? So what? If I don’t own some of that land, all I get out of it, except for an occasional visit to the park if it’s close to me, is a higher tax bill.

Messner’s proposal, if adopted, would be a classic case of collusion between “bootleggers and Baptists.” How does that work? The bootleggers (those with a vested financial interest) are the owners of properties near the proposed site of a park or green space. The Baptists (the do-gooders) are the politicians, planners, and others who think it would be nice if the people of city X have access to a new park or green space. (Messner, in this instance, may be a bootlegger and a Baptist.)

In the case of Messner’s scheme the bootleggers and Baptists would be getting richer and feeling better about themselves, while they victimize the vast majority of individuals who would (a) pay for the creation of parks and green spaces but (b) derive little or no benefit from them. There’s an exact analogy with tax-funded venues for professional sports teams. Such venues benefit owners and bring satisfaction to “civic minded” leaders, the small minority of citizens who actually attend games, and the somewhat larger minority of citizens who gain psychic income from having (or retaining) a local team. But, as many studies have shown, tax-funded sports venues don’t create jobs or spur economic growth (for reasons I discuss below).

It may be true, as Messner asserts, that the creation of parks and green spaces would “improve the quality of life for millions.” But it would be true only for those millions who are getting more than their tax-money’s worth of enjoyment from the parks and green spaces that they helped to pay for. Many more millions would not get their tax-money’s worth of enjoyment from those parks and green spaces. Moreover, taking money from me to improve my “quality of life” signifies rank presumption about my values and preferences.

What about economic growth, which Messner also invokes? Well, the creation of parks and green spaces, in addition to requiring land, also requires the use of various types and quantities of labor and capital. If Messner is implying that economic growth would result from the use of unemployed labor and capital, he’s relying on a discredited Keynesian theory. A piece of land is removed from a potentially productive use; the associated labor and capital are devoted to the creation of something (a park or green space) that doesn’t result in greater productive capacity. And as the economy recovers while the land, labor, and capital are diverted to the creation of parks and green spaces, the land, labor, and capital are unavailable for use in the production of consumer goods and productivity-enhancing capital goods. I’m at a loss to understand how the creation of a park or green space contributes more to economic growth than the alternative uses of the same resources by the private sector. It seems to me that the tax-subsidized creation of parks and green spaces can only reduce the rate of economic growth. (Perhaps the productivity of workers is enhanced greatly, and magically, by the knowledge that there is now a part or green space to which they can repair for rest and relaxation. Hah!)

In summary, there’s no free lunch. When tax money is used to raise property values and improve the “quality of life” in one place (or a bunch of places), those higher property values and improved lives are paid for by lower property values and economic deprivations elsewhere — and by reduced economic growth for almost everyone, except the “bootleggers.”

Intelligence, Personality, Politics, and Happiness

Web pages that link to this post usually consist of a discussion thread whose participants’ views of the post vary from “I told you so” to “that doesn’t square with me/my experience” or “MBTI is all wet because…”.  Those who take the former position tend to be persons of above-average intelligence whose MBTI types correlate well with high intelligence. Those who take the latter two positions tend to be persons who are defensive about their personality types, which do not correlate well with high intelligence. Such persons should take a deep breath and remember that high intelligence (of the abstract-reasoning-book-learning kind measured by IQ tests) is widely distributed throughout the population. As I say below, ” I am not claiming that a small subset of MBTI types accounts for all high-IQ persons, nor am I claiming that a small subset of MBTI types is populated entirely by high-IQ persons.” All I am saying is that the bits of evidence which I have compiled suggest that high intelligence is more likely — but far from exclusively — to be found among persons with certain MBTI types.

The correlations between intelligence, political leanings, and happiness are admittedly more tenuous. But they are plausible.

Leftists who proclaim themselves to be more intelligent than persons of the right do so, in my observation, as a way of reassuring themselves of the superiority of their views. They have no legitimate basis for claiming that the ranks of highly intelligent persons are dominated by the left. Leftist “intellectuals” in academia, journalism, the “arts”, and other traditional haunts of leftism are prominent because they are vocal. But they comprise a small minority of the population and should not be mistaken for typical leftists, who seem mainly to populate the ranks of the civil service, labor unions, public-school “educators”, and the unemployed. (It is worth noting that public-school teachers, on the whole, are notoriously dumber than most other college graduates.)

Again, I am talking about general relationships, to which there are many exceptions. If you happen to be an exception, don’t take this post personally. You’re probably an exceptional person.

IQ AND PERSONALITY

Some years ago I found statistics about the personality traits of high-IQ persons (those who are in the top 2 percent of the population).* The statistics pertain to a widely used personality test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which I have taken twice. In the MBTI there are four pairs of complementary personality traits, called preferences: Extraverted/Introverted, Sensing/iNtuitive, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. Thus, there are 16 possible personality types in the MBTI: ESTJ, ENTJ, ESFJ, ESFP, and so on. (For an introduction to MBTI, summaries of types, criticisms of MBTI, and links to other sources, see this article at Wikipedia. A straightforward description of the theory of MBTI and the personality traits can be found here. Detailed descriptions of the 16 types are given here.)

In summary, here is what the statistics indicate about the correlation between personality traits and IQ:

  • Other personality traits being the same, an iNtuitive person (one who grasps patterns and seeks possibilities) is 25 times more likely to have a high IQ than a Sensing person (one who focuses on sensory details and the here-and-now).
  • Again, other traits being the same, an Introverted person is 2.6 times more likely to have a high IQ than one who is Extraverted; a Thinking (logic-oriented) person is 4.5 times more likely to have a high IQ than a Feeling (people-oriented) person; and a Judging person (one who seeks closure) is 1.6 times as likely to have a high IQ than a Perceiving person (one who likes to keep his options open).
  • Moreover, if you encounter an INTJ, there is a 22% probability that his IQ places him in the top 2 percent of the population. (Disclosure: I am an INTJ.) Next are INTP, at 14%; ENTJ, 8%; ENTP, 5%; and INFJ, 5%. (The next highest type is the INFP at 3%.) The  five types (INTJ, INTP, ENTJ, ENTP, and INFJ) account for 78% of the high-IQ population but only 15% of the total population.**
  • Four of the five most-intelligent types are NTs, as one would expect, given the probabilities cited above. Those same probabilities lead to the dominance of INTJs and INTPs, which account for 49% of the Mensa membership but only 5% of the general population.**
  • Persons with the S preference bring up the rear, when it comes to taking IQ tests.**

A person who read an earlier version of this post claims that “one would expect to see the whole spectrum of intelligences within each personality type.” Well, one does see just that, but high intelligence is skewed toward the five types listed above. I am not claiming that a small subset of MBTI types accounts for all high-IQ persons, nor am I claiming that a small subset of MBTI types is populated entirely by high-IQ persons.

I acknowledge reservations about MBTI, such as those discussed in the Wikipedia article. An inherent shortcoming of psychological tests (as opposed to intelligence tests) is that they rely on subjective responses (e.g., my favorite color might be black today and blue tomorrow). But I do not accept this criticism:

[S]ome researchers expected that scores would show a bimodal distribution with peaks near the ends of the scales, but found that scores on the individual subscales were actually distributed in a centrally peaked manner similar to a normal distribution. A cut-off exists at the center of the subscale such that a score on one side is classified as one type, and a score on the other side as the opposite type. This fails to support the concept of type: the norm is for people to lie near the middle of the subscale.

Why was it expected that scores on a subscale (E/I, S/N, T/F, J/P) would show a bimodal distribution? How often does one encounter a person who is at the extreme end of any subscale? Not often, I wager, except in places where such extremes are likely to be clustered (e.g., Extraverts in politics, Introverts in monasteries). The cut-off at the center of each subscale is arbitrary; it simply affords a shorthand characterization of a person’s dominant traits. But anyone who takes an MBTI (or equivalent instrument) is given his scores on each of the subscales, so that he knows the strength (or weakness) of his tendencies.

Regarding other points of criticism: It is possible, of course, that a person who is familiar with MBTI tends to see in others the characteristics of their known MBTI types (i.e., confirmation bias). But has that tendency been confirmed by rigorous testing? Such testing would examine the contrary case, that is, the ability of a person to predict the type of a person whom he knows well (e.g., a co-worker or relative).

The supposed vagueness of the descriptions of the 16 types arises from the complexity of human personality; but there are differences among the descriptions, just as there are differences among individuals. According to a footnote to an earlier version of the Wikipedia article about MBTI, half of the persons who take the MBTI are able to guess their types before taking it. Does that invalidate MBTI or does it point to a more likely phenomenon, namely, that introspection is a personality-related trait, one that is more common among Introverts than Extraverts? A good MBTI instrument cuts through self-deception and self-flattery by asking the same set of questions in many different ways, and in ways that do not make any particular answer seem like the “right” one.

IQ AND POLITICS

It is hard to find clear, concise analyses of the relationship between IQ and political leanings. I offer the following in evidence that very high-IQ individuals lean strongly toward libertarian positions.

The Triple Nine Society (TNS) limits its membership to persons with IQs in the top 0.1% of the population. In an undated survey (probably conducted in 2000, given the questions about the perceived intelligence of certain presidential candidates), members of TNS gave their views on several topics (in addition to speculating about the candidates’ intelligence): subsidies, taxation, civil regulation, business regulation, health care, regulation of genetic engineering, data privacy, death penalty, and use of military force.

The results speak for themselves. Those members of TNS who took the survey clearly have strong (if not unanimous) libertarian leanings.

THE RIGHT IS SMARTER THAN THE LEFT

I count libertarians as part of the right because libertarians’ anti-statist views are aligned with the views of the traditional (small-government) conservatives who are usually Republicans. Having said that, the results reported in “IQ and Politics” lead me to suspect that the right is smarter than the left, left-wing propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. There is additional evidence for my view.

A site called Personality Page offers some data about personality type and political affiliation. The sample is not representative of the population as a whole; the average age of respondents is 25, and introverted personalities are over-represented (as you might expect for a test that is apparently self-administered through a website). On the other hand, the results are probably unbiased with respect to intelligence because the data about personality type were not collected as part of a study that attempts to relate political views and intelligence, and there is nothing on the site to indicate a left-wing bias. (Psychologists, who tend toward leftism, have a knack for making conservatives look bad, as discussed here, here, and here. If there is a strong association between political views and intelligence, it is found among so-called intellectuals, where the herd mentality reigns supreme.)

The data provided by Personality Page are based on the responses of 1,222 individuals who took a 60-question personality test that determined their MBTI types (see “IQ and Personality”). The test takers were asked to state their political preferences, given these choices: Democrat, Republican, middle of the road, liberal, conservative, libertarian, not political, and other. Political self-labelling is an exercise in subjectivity. Nevertheless, individuals who call themselves Democrats or liberals (the left) are almost certainly distinct, politically, from individuals who call themselves Republicans, conservatives, or libertarians (the right).

Now, to the money question: Given the distribution of personality types on the left and right, which distribution is more likely to produce members of Mensa? The answer: Those who self-identify as persons of the right are 15 percent more likely to qualify for membership in Mensa than those who self-identify as persons of the left. This result is plausible because it is consistent with the pronounced anti-government tendencies of the very-high-IQ members of the Triple Nine Society (see “IQ and Politics”).

REPUBLICANS (AND LIBERTARIANS) ARE HAPPIER THAN DEMOCRATS

That statement follows from research by the Pew Research Center (“Are We Happy Yet?”, February 13, 2006) and Gallup (“Republicans Report Much Better Health Than Others”, November 30, 2007).

Pew reports:

Some 45% of all Republicans report being very happy, compared with just 30% of Democrats and 29% of independents. This finding has also been around a long time; Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the General Social Survey began taking its measurements in 1972….

Of course, there’s a more obvious explanation for the Republicans’ happiness edge. Republicans tend to have more money than Democrats, and — as we’ve already discovered — people who have more money tend to be happier.

But even this explanation only goes so far. If one controls for household income, Republicans still hold a significant edge: that is, poor Republicans are happier than poor Democrats; middle-income Republicans are happier than middle-income Democrats, and rich Republicans are happier than rich Democrats.

Gallup adds this:

Republicans are significantly more likely to report excellent mental health than are independents or Democrats among those making less than $50,000 a year, and among those making at least $50,000 a year. Republicans are also more likely than independents and Democrats to report excellent mental health within all four categories of educational attainment.

There is a lot more in both sources. Read them for yourself.

Why would Republicans be happier than Democrats? Here’s my thought, Republicans tend to be conservative or libertarian (at least with respect to minimizing government’s role in economic affairs). Consider Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions:

He posits two opposing visions: the unconstrained vision (I would call it the idealistic vision) and the constrained vision (which I would call the realistic vision). As Sowell explains, at the end of chapter 2:

The dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions is based on whether or not inherent limitations of man are among the key elements included in each vision…. These different ways of conceiving man and the world lead not merely to different conclusions but to sharply divergent, often diametrically opposed, conclusions on issues ranging from justice to war.

Idealists (“liberals”) are bound to be less happy than realists (conservatives and libertarians) because idealists’ expectations about human accomplishments (aided by government) are higher than those of realists, and so idealists are doomed to disappointment.

All of this is consistent with findings reported by law professor James Lindgren:

[C]ompared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework. [Northwestern Law and Economics Research Paper 06-29, “What Drives Views on Government Redistribution and Anti-Capitalism: Envy or a Desire for Social Dominance?”, March 15, 2011]

THE BOTTOM LINE

If you are very intelligent — with an IQ that puts you in the top 2 percent of the population — you are most likely to be an INTJ, INTP, ENTJ, ENTP, or INFJ, in that order. Your politics will lean heavily toward libertarianism or small-government conservatism. You probably vote Republican most of the time because, even if you are not a card-carrying Republican, you are a staunch anti-Democrat. And you are a happy person because your expectations are not constantly defeated by reality.

Related reading (listed chronologically):
Jeff Allen, “Conservatives: The Smartest (and Happiest) People in the Room“, Barbed Wire, February 20, 2014
James Thompson, “Election Special: Are Republicans Smarter than Democrats?”, The Unz Review, November 3, 2016
Dennis Prager, “Liberals and Conservatives are Unhappy for Different Reasons“, Townhall, February 13, 2018
John J. Ray, “Leftists Are Born Unhappy“, Dissecting Leftism, February 14, 2018

Related posts:
Intelligence and Intuition
Intelligence As a Dirty Word

Footnotes:

* I apologize for not having documented the source of the statistics that I cite here. I dimly recall finding them on or via the website of American Mensa, but I am not certain of that. And I can no longer find the source by searching the web. I did transcribe the statistics to a spreadsheet, which I still have. So, the numbers are real, even if their source is now lost to me.

** Estimates of the distribution of  MBTI types  in the U.S. population are given in two tables on page 4 of “Estimated Frequencies of the Types in the United States Population”, published by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type. One table gives estimates of the distribution of the population by preference (E, I, N, S, etc.). The other table give estimates of the distribution of the population among all 16 MBTI types. The statistics for members of Mensa were broken down by preferences, not by types; therefore I had to use the values for preferences to estimate the frequencies of the 16 types among members of Mensa. For consistency, I used the distribution of the preferences among the U.S. population to estimate the frequencies of the 16 types among the population, rather than use the frequencies provided for each type. For example, the fraction of the population that is INTJ comes to 0.029 (2.9 percent) when the values for I (0.507), N (0.267), T (0.402), and J (0.541) are multiplied. But the detailed table has INTJs as 2.1 percent of the population. In sum, there are discrepancies between the computed and given values of the 16 types in the population. The most striking discrepancy is for the INFJ type. When estimated from the frequencies of the four preferences, INFJs are 4.4 percent of the population; the table of values for all 16 types gives the percentage of INFJs as 1.5 percent.

Using the distribution given for the 16 types leads to somewhat different results:

  • There is a 31-percent probability that an INTJ’s IQ places him in the top 2 percent of the population. Next are INFJ, at 14 percent; ENTJ, 13 percent; and INTP, 10 percent. (The next highest type is the ENTP at 4 percent.) The  four types (INTJ, INFJ, ENTJ, AND INTP) account for 72 percent of the high-IQ population but only 9 percent of the total population. The top five types (including ENTPs) account for 78 percent of the high-IQ population but only 12 percent of the total population.
  • Four of the five most-intelligent types are NTs, as one would expect, given the probabilities cited earlier. But, in terms of the likelihood of having an IQ, this method moves INFJs into second place, a percentage point ahead of ENTJs.
  • In any event, the same five types dominate, and all five types have a preference for iNtuitive thinking.
  • As before, persons with the S preference generally lag their peers when it comes to IQ tests.

Take Landsburg’s Money, Revised

This is to let you know that if you’ve read “Take Landsburg’s Money,” you should take another look at it. I’ve added some material.

That’s all I’ll say here. Go there and see for yourself.

Take Landsburg’s Money

REVISED 01/01/11 and 01/02/11, with the addition of new material (clearly indicated).

Economist-mathematician Steven Landsburg recently offered a problem and later posted a purported solution to it. Landsburg is so confident that his solution is the correct one that he has offered to bet significant sums of money that it’s the correct one. And, as of this morning, Landsburg still insists that he has the right answer.

The problem is one (among many) that Google has posed to candidates for employment. Landsburg states it as follows:

There’s a certain country where everybody wants to have a son. Therefore each couple keeps having children until they have a boy; then they stop. What fraction of the population is female? [The actual wording of the question, according to this source, is slightly different, but Landsburg’s paraphrase is faithful to the meaning.]

He adds:

Well, of course, you can’t know for sure, because, by some extraordinary coincidence, the last 100,000 families in a row might have gotten boys on the first try. But in expectation, what fraction of the population is female? In other words, if there were many such countries, what fraction would you expect to observe on average?

I first heard this problem decades ago, and so, perhaps, did you. It comes up in job interviews at places like Google. The answer they expect is simple, definitive and wrong.

And no, it’s not wrong because of small discrepancies between the number of male and female births, or because of anything else that’s extraneous to the spirit of the problem. It’s just really wrong. The correct answer, unlike the expected one, is not simple.

According to Landsburg, the “obvious” — but wrong — answer is that one-half of the children are boys and one-half of the children are girls. Landsburg rejects the “obvious” answer, with this explanation:

I’ll start with the case where there’s just one couple. Here are some possible family configurations, with their probabilities:

From this we see that the expected number of boys is

which adds to 1. And the expected number of girls is

which also adds to 1. Sure enough, the expected number of girls is equal to the expected number of boys.

But the expected fraction of girls is

which adds to 1-log(2), or about 30.6%.

For a population of k families, a similar calculation gives an answer of approximately (but not exactly) (1/2) – (1/4k), which, when k is large, is approximately (but not exactly) 1/2.

Elsewhere, Landsburg offers to make bets with readers who disagree with his analysis, and to settle matters through the use of simulation. But (a) I’m not interested in betting and (b) I prefer to treat the problem as one of mathematical expectation, which Landsburg also (rightly) prefers. He suggests the use of simulation only as a way of convincing some skeptics of the correctness of his analysis.

Interestingly, Landsburg’s “solution” — an expected girl fraction of 0.3068 for one family and, presumably, not quite 0.5 for the entire country — is at odds another person’s solution (girl fraction ~0.61),to which Landsburg points favorably. This discrepancy suggests some confusion on Landsburg’s part, which is evident in his depiction of the possible configurations of a single family (the children in the family, actually). He takes a special case — which omits the possibility of a first-born girl. He then generalizes from that special case.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

This section added 01/01/11 and revised slightly for clarity on 01/02/11:

What I took for an omission on Landburg’s part (the possibility of a first-born girl), isn’t an omission — in Landsburg’s view. His estimate of the girl fraction for a family is for a completed family (his term, not mine). Thus the configurations B, GB, GGB, GGGB, etc.

But there’s no such thing (in the context of a single family) as a completed family. (In a large number of families, there may be a completed families, but every one of them will be matched by an equal number of uncompleted families. More about that below.)  No particular couple ever has a boy with an a priori probability = 1, which is what Landsburg implies (inadvertently, I’m sure) when he focuses on B, GB, GGB, GGGB, etc., where the B in each case signifies the end of a possible sequence of children.

On the contrary, if PB = 1/2 at all times (and not 1 at arbitrary times) every boy must be accompanied by a girl, with equal probability. (Alternatively, shades of Schrödinger’s cat, the probability wave collapses to PB =1 when Landsburg decides that  enough kids are enough.) Here’s a schematic depiction of what happens when Landsburg doesn’t play with the probabilities:

On the left side of the vertical line, the probable first-born boy, being only probable, is followed by a probable boy or girl, and so on. On the right side, the probable first-born girl is followed by a probable boy or girl, and so on. On both sides, the possible configurations take the form Child 1, Child 1 + Child 2, Child 1 + Child 2 + Child 3, etc.

Landburg, in effect, has restricted his view of the possible  configurations to the left side of the diagram.With the whole diagram in view, it’s obvious that the fraction of girls in each stage, and through each stage, is always 1/2.

End of section. Original post continues below the line.

________________________________________________________________________________________

To analyze the problem correctly it’s helpful to spell out all of its conditions and (sometimes implicit) assumptions:

  • The basic rule — couples have children until a boy is born, but not after that — means that no couple in country X will have more than 1 boy, but the number of girls is limited only to the number of children that a couple generates before having a boy.
  • A couple can generate children endlessly, if necessary. That is to say, there’s no limit on the number of children a couple may produce and no limit on the time in which they may produce them.
  • The probability that any given birth will result in a boy (B) or girl (G)  is 1/2 for each; that is PB = PG = 1/2. (The actual fractions, I gather, are about 0.52 boys and 0.48 girls per birth.) These probabilities never vary, and are always the same for every couple.
  • Given the open-ended nature of the problem, it’s possible that some couples will have an infinite number of children without producing a boy. But, given the preceding statement, the first-born of half the couples will be a boy; those couples will have no more children.
  • The situation begins at a finite time (t = 0) and only those children born to the couples in country X after t = 0 are counted.
  • Children are born at a uniform rate, so that all the first-borns are born at  t = 1; all the second-borns at  t = 2; and so on. (This assumption and the preceding one don’t affect the results, but they allow for a simple illustration of the problem.)
  • In computing the fraction of boys and girls in the population, it’s assumed that there are no abortions or miscarriages, and that no children die at birth or later.

Perhaps the solution to the problem will be easier to see if the problem is recast, so that B = blue ball, G = green ball, and “couple” becomes “player”:

  • There’s a large but finite number of urns. Each is full of colored balls. Half of them are blue (B); half of them are green (G).
  • Positioned at each urn is a player whose job it is to make a blind draw of one ball from his urn at a regular interval (say, 1 minute). Each ball is kept by the player who draws it.
  • As each ball is drawn, the keeper of the urn from which it is drawn replaces it with a new ball of the same color, and mixes the balls thoroughly to ensure the randomness of the next draw.
  • When a player draws a B, he keeps it but doesn’t draw any more balls.
  • When a player draws a G, he keeps it and draws another ball (from the replenished urn) a minute later. This continues until the player draws a B.
  • It’s possible that some players will never draw a B.

All of the other assumptions stated earlier apply in this case (e.g., PB = PG = 1/2, PB and PG never vary and are always the same for every player).

Consider the following illustration of the results of the first four rounds of play:

Illustration of the General Case ( with 10,000 urns)
B G Total G fraction
Minute 1 5,000 5,000 10,000 1/2
Total 5,000 5,000 10,000 1/2
Minute 2 2,500 2,500 5,000 1/2
Total 7,500 7,500 15,000 1/2
Minute 3 1,250 1,250 2,500 1/2
Total 8,750 8,750 17,500 1/2
Minute 4 625 625 1,250 1/2
Total 9,375 9,375 18,750 1/2

The 5,000 players who draw a B at minute 1 stop drawing, but they keep the Bs that they draw. The 5,000 players who draw a G at minute 1 keep their Gs and make another draw at minute 2. That draw results in the selection of 2,500 Bs and 2,500 Gs, which are kept by the players who draw them. The 2,500 players who draw a G at minute 2 make another draw at minute 3, which results in the selection of 1,250 Bs and 1,250 Gs, and so on.

At this point, it’s important to note that the stopping rule has no effect on the fractions of B and G drawn in any round of play. Given that PB and PG are always the same for each and every player, as stated in the list of assumptions, it doesn’t matter whether or when players drop out of the game or join the game, or under what conditions they drop out or join, as long as PB = PG = 1/2, always and for every player. Given those conditions — which are central (implicit) assumptions of the original Google problem — every round of play, from the first one onward, results in equal (expected) numbers of B and G.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

This section added and revised 01/02/11.

In the example of 10,000 players with 10,000 urns, the number of players at minute 5 would be an odd number, and the number of players at minute 6 and beyond wouldn’t be an integer. But the example is about expected values (as it should be), so the lack of an even, whole number of players after minute 4 wouldn’t affect the import of the example.

To show what happens in the “end game,” I turn to a slightly different example, which begins with a number of players such that there can be exactly two left in the penultimate round, after all others have drawn a B. What happens when one of the two players draws a B while the other draws a G? Good question. First of all, the draws to and including that round will have resulted in an equal number of B and G. What happens next is a matter of pure chance. The final player — the one whose penultimate draw is a G — has an equal chance of drawing a G or a B on his next and final draw. The chance of drawing a B doesn’t suddenly jump to 1, nor does the chance of drawing a G suddenly jump to 1. The game could end there, with equal numbers of B and G having been drawn and a final draw to be made with PB = PG = 1/2. But there’s no reason to expect that the final draw will be a B, to the exclusion of a G, or vice versa.

Schematically:

(The Gs drawn by players 8191 and 8192 in rounds 1-11 would have been matched, in each round, by other players who draw Bs in those rounds. Players 8191 and 8192, in this example, would be the only players left for round 12.)

End of section. Original post continues below the line.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Mathematically, the expected numbers of B and G (EB and EG) drawn by a single player are as follows:

EB = (1)(1/2) + (1/2)(1/2) + (1/4)(1/2)  + (1/8)(1/2) + … = 1

EG = (1)(1/2) + (1/2)(1/2) + (1/4)(1/2)  + (1/8)(1/2) + … = 1

The expected fraction of G is:

EG/(EG + EB) = (1/2)(1/2) + (1/4)(1/2) + (1/8)(1/2) + … = 1/2,

which reduces to PG/(PG + PB) = 1/2

Given N players, the expected numbers of B and G are:

EB = (N)(1/2) + (N/2)(1/2) + (N/4)(1/2)  + (N/8)(1/2) + … = N

EG = (N)(1/2) + (N/2)(1/2) + (N/4)(1/2)  + (N/8)(1/2) + … = N

Again, given the “rules” of the game (i.e., of the original Google problem), the expected fraction of G is always 1/2, at every point in the game and in its expected (but never reached) outcome.

The stopping rule is a red herring, intended (I suspect) to draw attention from the essential fact that EB = EG, always and for everyone, no matter how many players (couples) there are or when and under what conditions they join or leave the game (start or stop having children).

*     *     *

To Prof. Landsburg, should he read this post:

If you don’t immediately spot a fatal flaw in my analysis, why not have some members of U of R’s stat department check it out? That seems to me to be the best way to settle the issue.

If you conclude that my analysis is correct (in the essentials, at least), you won’t owe me any money because we haven’t made a bet. (You couldn’t send me money, anyway, unless you are able to penetrate my anonymity.) Just acknowledge my contribution prominently in a post on your blog and add a link to my blog in your sidebar (perhaps under the heading “Unclassified Blogs”).

*     *     *

This isn’t the first time that Landsburg has attracted my attention:
Landsburg Is Half-Right
Rawls Meets Bentham
The Case of the Purblind Economist

Does Congress Have the Power to Regulate Inactivity?

Regarding the constitutionality of the individual mandate, Orin Kerr poses the following hypothetical:

If a person comes into innocent possession of child pornography — for example, if you receive an unsolicited book in the mail, or an e-mail with an attachment, that contains child pornography — the law requires you to act to avoid criminal liability. Specifically, the person must:

promptly and in good faith, and without retaining or allowing any person, other than a law enforcement agency, to access any visual depiction or copy thereof—
(A) [take] reasonable steps to destroy each such visual depiction; or
(B) report[] the matter to a law enforcement agency and afford[] that agency access to each such visual depiction.

18 U.S.C. 2252(c). If a person does not do this, then he or she is guilty of a federal felony crime that has quite severe sentences.

I have two questions for proponents of the activity/inactivity distinction. First, in your view, does this law extend beyond Congress’s power by regulating inactivity?

Second, if you think that this mandate exceeds the Commerce Clause power, what law must be struck down? The quoted statute, 18 U.S.C. 2252(c), is a statutory exemption to liability in the child pornography law. It is a “mandate” in the sense that it gives people a way to avoid going to jail. If the child pornography laws are an unconstitutional mandate, must the child pornography laws be struck down at least as applied to innocent possession? In other words, is it beyond the reach of Congress to require those who come into innocent possession of child pornography to take reasonable steps to destroy it or report the matter to law enforcement?

My response:

First, in your view, does this law extend beyond Congress’s power by regulating inactivity?

The law exceeds Congress’s power by attempting to reach beyond interstate commerce. The transmission of pornography across state lines may be within Congress’s reach. What happens to pornography when it reaches a destination is not within Congress’s reach, unless that destination is merely a node in the chain of interstate commerce.

Second, if you think that this mandate exceeds the Commerce Clause power, what law must be struck down?

The law that requires one to act to avoid criminal liability. The possession of pornography (where possession is not for the purpose of interstate transmission) should be covered (or not) by state law.

In sum, the hypothetical doesn’t really address the activity/inactivity issue. A relevant hypothetical: Congress passes a law that requires every household to buy a subscription to a news magazine (Time, Newsweek, etc.) because (a) such magazines are distributed across state lines, (b) there is a compelling interest in their survival, and (c) because of (a) and (b) Congress has the power to regulate inactivity in the market for news magazines by compelling every household to subscribe to at least one of them.

In other words, the purpose of the individual mandate is not to help Congress enforce a legitimate regulation of interstate commerce. The purpose of the individual mandate is to help Congress regulate an entire market, known broadly as “health care,” on the excuse that some of the things involved in that market happen to be transported across state lines. Moreover, the “high costs” that have been used as an excuse for (further) meddling in the market are largely the result of artificially high demand for medical services — encouraged by “free” and “cheap” access via Medicare and Medicaid — combined with the suppression of supply by arbitrarily low reimbursement rates and red tape.

Related posts:
The Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate
Does the Power to Tax Give Congress Unlimited Power?

See also “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

The Golden Rule and the State

To suggest, as I have in the preceding post and many others, that positive rights are inimical to liberty, is to imply that liberty is an entirely negative thing: the absence of interference in one’s life, except as one interferes in the lives of others. There’s a persistent and often persuasive counter-argument, which says that liberty is hollow if a person lacks the wherewithal to pursue its fruits. That argument for positive rights can be met with three counter-arguments:

  • The use of state power to grant positive rights diminishes the charitable impulse, along with the ability to indulge it.
  • Redistribution of income — which supports positive rights like welfare and results from positive rights like affirmative action — leads to a slower rate of economic growth because (a) it takes money from those most able to fund capital investments and gives it to those who simply consume it and (b) requires firms to employ less-productive workers in favor of more-productive ones. Two key results, which obtain in the  not-very-long run, are (a) fewer and less remunerative jobs for groups that positive rights are meant to help and (b), as noted above, less money for private acts of charity.
  • It’s presumptuous of a third party to decide who deserves more and who deserves less. Any claim that redistributive acts foster “social welfare” rests on the erroneous view that the well-being of individuals can be added, in some fashion, to derive an aggregate measure of well-being. In fact, the harm that’s done to A by giving some of his income to B cannot be undone by whatever enjoyment B derives from the additional income.

At which point, obdurate proponents of positive rights (i.e., left-statists, bleeding hearts, and do-gooders) will say something like this: “Well, it’s only fair/just to help those who are in need/born in poverty/born with the wrong skin color/unlucky in life/etc., etc.” The arguments against positive rights, no matter how well stated or supported, will simply roll off most proponents of such rights because it’s in their nature to want “fairness”/”justice” — and damn the consequences. It’s also in the nature of left-statists to relish the power of controlling others, against which there is no counter-argument but defeat at the polls, civil disobedience, or secession.

The argument about rights, in other words, is a futile one that ought to be abandoned in favor of one that might have more appeal to those who favor positive rights. The alternative — which, I admit, is a long shot — is a very old concept, about which I’ve written before (here and here, for example). The very old concept is the Golden Rule: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself. It’s a truly natural law, for reasons I give below.

The Golden Rule can be expanded into two, complementary sub-rules:

  • Do no harm to others, lest they do harm to you.
  • Be kind and charitable to others, and they will be kind and charitable to you.

The first sub-rule — the negative one — is compatible with the idea of negative rights, but it doesn’t demand them. The second sub-rule — the positive one — doesn’t yield positive rights because it’s a counsel to kindness and charity, not a command.

I call the Golden Rule a natural law because it’s neither a logical construct (e.g., the “given-if-then” formulation discussed in the preceding post) nor a state-imposed one. Its long history and widespread observance (if only vestigial) suggest that it embodies an understanding that arises from the similar experiences of human beings across time and place. The resulting behavioral convention, the ethic of reciprocity, arises from observations about the effects of one’s behavior on that of others and mutual agreement (tacit or otherwise) to reciprocate preferred behavior, in the service of self-interest and empathy. That is to say, the convention is a consequence of the observed and anticipated benefits of adhering to it.

I must qualify the term “convention,” to say that the Golden Rule will be widely observed within any group only if the members of that group are generally agreed about the definition of harm, value kindness and charity (in the main), and (perhaps most importantly) see that their acts have consequences. If those conditions are not met, the Golden Rule descends from convention to admonition.

Is the Golden Rule susceptible of varying interpretations across groups, and is it therefore a vehicle for moral relativism? I say “yes,” with qualifications. It’s true that groups vary in their conceptions of permissible behavior. For example, the idea of allowing, encouraging, or aiding the death of old persons is not everywhere condemned, and many recognize it as an inevitable consequence of a health-care “system” that is government-controlled (even indirectly) and treats the delivery of medical services as a matter of rationing. (I am willing to bet that the affluent left-statists who strongly support nationalized medical care would find ways to avoid the verdicts of “death panels,” when it comes to them and their families.)  Infanticide has a long history in many cultures; modern, “enlightened” cultures have simply replaced it with abortion. Slavery is still an acceptable practice in some places, though those enslaved (as in the past) usually are outsiders. Homosexuality has a long history of condemnation and occasional acceptance. To be pro-homosexual — and especially to favor homosexual “marriage” — has joined the litany of “causes” that signal leftist “enlightenment,” along with being for abortion and against the consumption of fossil fuels (except for one’s SUV, of course).

The foregoing recitation suggests a mixture of reasons for favoring or disfavoring certain behaviors. Those reasons range from purely utilitarian ones (agreeable or not) to status-signaling. In between, there are religious and consequentialist reasons, which are sometimes related. Consequentialist reasoning goes like this: Behavior X can be indulged responsibly and without harm to others, but there lurks the danger that it will not be, or that it will lead to behavior Y, which has repercussions for others. Therefore, it’s better to put X off-limits or to severely restrict and monitor it. Consequentialist reasoning applies to euthanasia (it’s easy to slide from voluntary to involuntary acts, especially when the state controls the delivery of medical care), infanticide and abortion (forms of involuntary euthanasia and signs of disdain for life), homosexuality (a depraved, risky practice that can ensnare impressionable young persons who see it as an “easy” way to satisfy sexual urges), alcohol and drugs (addiction carries a high cost, for the addict, the addict’s family, and sometimes for innocent bystanders). A taste or tolerance for destructive behavior identifies a person as an untrustworthy social partner.

It seems to me that the exceptions listed above are just that. There’s a mainstream interpretation of the Golden Rule — one that still holds in many places — which rules out certain kinds of behavior, except in extreme situations, and permits certain other kinds of behavior. There is, in other words, a “core” Golden Rule that comes down to this:

  • Killing is wrong, except in self-defense. (Capital punishment is just that: punishment. It’s also a deterrent to murder. It isn’t “murder,” muddle-headed defenders of baby-murder to the contrary notwithstanding.)
  • Various kinds of unauthorized “taking” are wrong, including theft (outright and through deception). (This explains popular resistance to government “taking,” especially when it’s done on behalf of private parties. The view that it’s all right to borrow money from a bank and not repay it arises from the mistaken beliefs that (a) it’s not tantamount to theft and (b) it harms no one because banks can “afford it.”)
  • Libel and slander are wrong because they are “takings” by word instead of deed.
  • It is wrong to turn spouse against spouse, child against parent, or friend against friend. (And yet, such things are commonly portrayed in books, films, and plays as if they are normal occurrences, often desirable ones. And it seems to me that reality increasingly mimics “art.”)
  • It is right to be pleasant and kind to others, even under provocation, because “a mild answer breaks wrath: but a harsh word stirs up fury” (Proverbs 15:1).
  • Charity is a virtue, but it should begin at home, where the need is most certain and the good deed is most likely to have its intended effect.

None of these observations would be surprising to a person raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even in the less vengeful branches of Islam. The observations would be especially unsurprising to an American who was raised in a rural, small-town, or small-city setting, well removed from a major metropolis, or who was raised in an ethnic enclave in a major metropolis. For it is such persons and, to some extent, their offspring who are the principal heirs and keepers of the Golden Rule in America.

An ardent individualist — particularly an anarcho-capitalist — might insist that social comity can be based on the negative sub-rule, which is represented by the first five items in the “core” list. I doubt it. There’s but a short psychological distance from mean-spiritedness — failing to be kind and charitable — to sociopathy, a preference for harmful acts. Ardent individualists will disagree with me because they view kindness and charity as their business, and no one else’s. They’re right about that, as far as I’m concerned, but I’m talking about proclivities, not rights. But kindness and charity are indispensable to the development of mutual trust among people who live in close proximity, without the protective cover of an external agency (e.g., the state). Without mutual trust, mutual restraint becomes problematic and co-existence becomes a matter of “getting the other guy before he gets you” — a convention that I hereby dub the Radioactive Rule.

Nevertheless, the positive sub-rule, which is represented by the final two items in the “core” list, can be optional for the occasional maverick. An extreme individualist (or introvert or grouch) could be a member in good standing of a society that lives by the Golden Rule. He would be a punctilious practitioner of the negative rule, and would not care that his unwillingness to offer kindness and charity resulted in coldness toward him. Coldness is all he would receive (and want) because, as a punctilious practitioner of the negative rule; his actions wouldn’t necessarily invite harm.

But too many extreme individualists would threaten the delicate balance of self-interested and voluntarily beneficial behavior that’s implied in the Golden Rule. Even if lives and livelihoods did not depend on acts of kindness and charity — and they probably would — mistrust would set it in. And from there, it would be a short distance to the Radioactive Rule.

Of course, the delicate balance would be upset if the Golden Rule were violated with impunity. For that reason, the it must be backed by sanctions. Non-physical sanctions would range from reprimands to ostracism. For violations of the negative sub-rule, imprisonment and corporal punishment would not be out of the question.

Now comes a dose of reality. 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. 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 loathe 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 aren’t involved.  More generally, it’s a human tendency to treat acquaintances differently than strangers; the former are accorded more trust, more cooperation, and more kindness than the latter. Why? Because there’s usually a difference between the consequences of behavior that’s directed toward strangers and the consequences of behavior that’s 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 to establish a central power (a state) to establish and enforce 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; 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).

In a future post, I will address the challenge of re-forming the state to reinvigorate the Golden Rule.

What Are “Natural Rights”?

Readers who are coming here from Timothy Sandefur’s “Teleology Without God” should read my post, “Evolution, Human Nature, and ‘Natural Rights’,” after reading this post.

I have written several times about rights and their source:

The last item includes some comments about Timothy Sandefur’s views on the subject of “natural rights.” Sandefur has responded to those comments. In this post, I take Sandefur’s response as a starting point for a further examination of “natural rights.”

To begin with, I’m pleased that  Sandefur seems to agree with my observation that

rights can’t be rights if they can’t be held universally, without cost to others. The right not to be murdered is such a right; the right to live on the public dole is not. We can, in theory, forbear from murdering each other, but we cannot all be on the public dole except (possibly) at different times. And even then we must impose on others (including those who would prefer to be on the public dole at the same time).

All of this is a way of stating  the doctrine of negative rights, which is the basis of libertarianism. But negative rights can’t be applied universally if there are some holdouts who want others to give to them without having to give to others.

But the doctrine of negative rights  is simply a logical consequence of a definition of rights: they “can’t be rights if they can’t be held universally, without cost to others.” There’s nothing in that definition to suggest that it’s the only possible definition of rights.

In fact, there are many who would disagree that negative rights are the only rights. Leftists, for example, would assert various positive rights: to a “living wage,” to “decent housing,” and the like. (See, for example, the UN Declaration of Human Rights,) Such positive rights, a leftist would say, are universal, in that they could be enjoyed by everyone at one time or another. Furthermore, the fact that their enjoyment would impose a cost on others (those not then enjoying them) should be of no consequence. A right is a right, after all. Moreover, as I will show, the argument for “natural rights” advanced by Sandefur (and many others) lends itself to the recognition of positive rights as “natural” ones.

What are “natural rights,” as Sandefur understands them? A search of his blog yields some evidence of his views. There’s a post in which he quotes approvingly the following statement:

[E]ach person should be free to do as they please so long as their actions do not harm another person against their will, take away their equal liberties, or rob them of the fruits of their labors. There is no right to murder or to steal within the natural rights framework for the obvious reason that it deprives the rights of others.

In another post, Sandefur makes a similar statement:

[T]he natural rule against taking the “goods of another” is not an arbitrary postulate…. [T]he basis of the right against deprivation is equality—that is, the fact that no person is naturally justified to rule over another.

These are restatements of the doctrine of negative rights, which — as I’ve pointed out — is a matter of definition, not necessity. Sandefur would disagree, of course, because he sees “natural (negative) rights” as an inherent feature of the human condition:

[W]hat the word “natural” means is simply that these rights are not merely conventional. They do not exist just because we have agreed to them; they are not simply a matter of agreement or habit. Their existence is on account of something outside of, or prior to, mere convention, in the way that, say, the human capacity for language, or sexual desire, or the law of supply and demand, are not simply products of convention, but arise from the nature of the people or the things involved.

I find this unenlightening, because it is teleological. Sandefur might as well say that it is in the “nature” of a baseball to be

a sphere formed by yarn wound around a small core of cork, rubber or similar material, covered with two strips of white horsehide or cowhide, tightly stitched together. It shall weigh not less than five nor more than 5¼ ounces avoirdupois and measure not less than nine nor more than 9¼ inches in circumference.

However, the “nature” of a baseball, as I’ve just defined it, is a matter of human design. It doesn’t arise “naturally” from the baseball.

Perhaps, then, Sandefur would say that it’s in the “nature” of a baseball to be thrown, hit, and caught, just as it’s in the nature of humans to have certain rights. But, again, the nature of a baseball to be thrown, hit, and caught is a matter of human design — of convention, if you will.

Sandefur, I’m confident, would reject the premise that humans and their “natural rights” are designed, but (as far as I know) he is loathe to explain how humans have come to possess a “nature” that incorporates certain rights. Perhaps those rights arose spontaneously, as humans evolved from primordial ooze to homo sapiens. But that leaves me wondering where they’re located. As far as I know, they’re not in any part of the body or brain that’s been identified by medical science. Perhaps they’re just floating around us, like souls.

The latter notion is consistent with an earlier post by Sandefur, where he states the following: “Our natural rights and our liberty derive from nature, more specifically, from our nature as human beings.” The link leads to a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, which contains this famous phrase:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Does Sandefur, an avowed atheist, believe that “natural rights” are endowed by a Creator? I doubt it.

Sandefur would reject such a notion because it smacks of a supernatural explanation. Rights, according to him, are natural; that is, it is in the nature of humans to have rights. But that strikes me as a circular argument, which can be stated as follows:

  • All humans possess certain rights by virtue of their nature as humans.
  • It is inherent in those rights that no person is naturally justified to rule over another person.
  • Therefore, all humans, by their nature, have the right to be left alone by others, which implies a reciprocal obligation to leave others alone, except in the defense of life, liberty, and property.

The conclusion simply restates and elaborates the assumptions contained in the major and minor  premises. I am looking for something like this:

  • Einstein’s special theory of relativity states that when two bodies move at different speeds, time passes more slowly for the faster of the two bodies.
  • Many experiments have confirmed the theory; none has refuted it.
  • Therefore, it’s very likely true that time slows as velocity increases.

That is, I’m looking for evidence, not supposition.

Perhaps there’s something in Sandefur’s reference to “the human capacity for language.” It’s true that humans have a capacity for language, but language doesn’t simply emerge spontaneously from that capacity. Sounds do, but language doesn’t. Language is a convention, shaped by eons of application and evolution. Two facts attest to the conventional nature of language: (a) there are so many languages, each of them originally developed in a circumscribed geographical area, and (b) there is so much hue and cry (in some quarters) about the violation of “rules” and the coinage of new words and phrases. In other words, the human capacity for language doesn’t give rise to a single, “natural” language that flows automatically from the brains and tongues of all humans.

What about the human capacity for sexual desire? There’s nothing mysterious about it; it has a physiological explanation. In that sense, it’s entirely natural. The problem is that sexual desire is an active consequence of physiology, whereas “natural rights” — in Sandefur’s accounting — are simply there. They just exist, in the same way that human physiology exists. But human physiology can be explained in physical (natural) terms, whereas there is no similar explanation for the mysterious thing known as “natural rights.”

Turning to the “law of supply and demand,” Sandefur says:

The nature of scarcity is such that when something is in demand, and there isn’t enough of that thing, its price will go up—whether we want it to, or not.

I don’t know what it means to say “the nature of scarcity.” Scarcity isn’t an entity with a “nature” of its own. Scarcity is a condition that can be characterized by saying that “there isn’t enough of [a] thing.”  Defining it doesn’t give it an independent existence and a “nature.”

Similarly, the “law of supply and demand” isn’t really a “law,” it’s a description of the willingness of buyers to buy and sellers to sell particular goods and services under a variety of conditions, price, quantity, marginal cost, and marginal utility being among them. There’s no freestanding “law of supply and demand,” there’s simply what we observe of human behavior and its (relative) predictability under certain, specified conditions. The “law of supply” and demand — like “scarcity” — is the description of particular aspects of human behavior, not an antecedent of human behavior with a “nature” of its own.

What does it mean, then, to say that it’s in the nature of humans to have “natural (negative) rights”? It means that Sandefur begs the question of the source of rights. I want answers, not circular statements. If rights are innate in humans, which is another way of saying that they arise from the nature of humans, I want to know how they get there.

I’m not asking what humans want, because Sandefur would spot the trap in that. When humans want things, they bargain with each other in an effort to get them. But Sandefur insists that rights — “natural” ones, at least — don’t arise in that way. They just “are.”

Having failed to find a natural explanation of “natural rights” in my gleanings of Sandefur’s blog, I must turn to other sources. Sandefur points the way, in this passage from his response to my earlier post:

What natural law or natural rights theories actually do (or attempt to do) is to explain political society in terms of nature—that is, by avoiding the ipse dixit argument that rights exist because Somebody says so, or because that’s our tradition, or our social consensus, but by instead saying that these rights or these principles are implied by human nature and the nature of the world in which we live. As [Randy] Barnett writes, “natural law describes a method of analysis of the following type: ‘given that the nature of human beings and the world in which they live is X, if we want to achieve Y, then we ought to do Z.’” Natural law or natural rights theory simply holds that the political society is bounded by pre-political principles, logical, normative, physical, and so forth. One need not agree with such a method of reasoning to admit that there is nothing mystical or arbitrary about it.

We shall see whether it is mystical (my characterization) or arbitrary.

I don’t possess a copy of the book by Barnett to which Sandefur links. But the relevant discussion is found, verbatim, in Barnett’s article, “A Law Professor’s Guide to Natural Law and Natural Rights.” Here’s a helpful passage, which comes soon after the one quoted by Sandefur:

Defining justice in terms of rights, especially natural rights, will invite confusion, however, unless we are clearer about what it means to call something a right. A nice description is provided by Allen Buchanan:

[A]ssertions of rights are essentially conclusory and hence argumentative. An assertion of right is a conclusion about what the moral priorities are. At the same time, because it is a conclusion, it is an admission that it is appropriate to demand support for this conclusion, reasons why such priority ought to be recognized. And it is vital to recognize that there is a plurality of different kinds of considerations that can count as moral reasons to support a conclusion of this sort and that the conclusion that an assertion of a right expresses will usually be an all-things-considered judgment, the result of a balancing of conflicting considerations.

Thus, to call something a natural right is to assert one’s conclusion; it is no substitute for presenting the reasons why this conclusion is justified. What makes natural rights natural is the type of given-if-then reasons that are offered in support of its conclusions, based as they are on the “givens” of human nature and the nature of the world in which humans live. What makes such concepts rights is the “natural necessity,” to use H.L.A. Hart’s felicitous term, of adhering to them if we are to solve certain pervasive social problems that must be solved somehow if persons are to achieve their objectives.

There’s more in Barnett’s working paper, “The Imperative of Natural Rights in Today’s World“:

So natural rights addresses the question: given the nature of human beings and the world in which we live, if you want a society in which persons may pursue happiness while living in close proximity to others, then you ought to do Z. What you ought to do (Z) is properly define and respect the natural rights or liberties that enable persons to pursue happiness without interfering with the like pursuit of others with whom they interact. What you ought not do is violate these properly defined rights.

Later in the same paper, Barnett says:

[T]he whole point of a natural rights analysis is to address the problem of human vulnerability and interconnectedness. No one person is strong or independent enough to pursue happiness in the face of concerted opposition from the masses or from a concerted handful of other people—or from even a single obsessed or evil individual. Natural rights attempts to identify conceptually the space within which vulnerable people need to be free to make their own choices about the directions of their lives, which includes crucially the choices of how to acquire, use, and dispose of scarce physical resources. Once these rights are identified, it a somewhat but not entirely separate matter of institutional design to see how they can best be protected in a world in which others are more than willing, if given half a chance, to interfere with the well being of others.

Natural rights, therefore, do not enforce themselves. They are rather a mode of normative analysis used to evaluate and critique the positive law that is needed to reinforce them. But nevertheless, if they are correctly formulated, there are real world consequences for violating these rights. Human wellbeing will suffer and die. No society will survive as a society if these principles are disregarded completely….

Natural rights attempts to identify conceptually the space within which vulnerable people need to be free to make their own choices about the directions of their lives, which includes crucially the choices of how to acquire, use, and dispose of scarce physical resources. Once these rights are identified, it a somewhat but not entirely separate matter of institutional design to see how they can best be protected in a world in which others are more than willing, if given half a chance, to interfere with the well being of others.

Natural rights analysis can identify the fundamental liberties that all human beings require to pursue happiness while living in close proximity to others—the rights of several property, freedom of contract, first possession, self defense, and restitution.

Natural rights, then, are not “natural” in the sense that they inhere in humans. Rather, they are “natural” in the sense that they are the rights that humans ought to possess if they are “to be free to make their own choices about the directions of their lives,” that is, “to pursue happiness while living in close proximity to others.”

Moreover, as Barnett says in his “Guide,” natural rights do not proscribe how rights-holders ought to act towards others. Rather they describe how others ought to act towards rights-holders.” That is to say, in a regime of “natural rights,” (quoting Barnett’s “Imperative” again) each person would accord all others “the rights of several [private] property, freedom of contract, first possession, self defense, and restitution.” Such rights — as I understand them — are necessary complements to the essential “natural right”: the right to be left alone as one leaves others alone. That right, when you think about it, must flow toward its holder, not from its holder.

At this point, let us turn to Objectivism, of which Sandefur is (or was) an adherent. According to the article, “Ayn Rand,” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, these are Rand’s views on the subject:

The concept of rights, says Rand, “provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others… Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law” These natural rights are basically rights to action, not to things or outcomes, and can be violated only through the initiation of force or fraud. Hence, all natural rights are negative, that is, claims on others’ non-interference, and not claims on them to provide one with certain goods or outcomes.The fundamental right is the right to life: the right to take the actions necessary for sustaining the life proper to a human being. All other rights follow from this right. Thus, the right to liberty is the right to act (including to write and speak) on one’s judgment; the right to the pursuit of happiness is the right to pursue goals for one’s own fulfillment; the right to property is “the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values”

“Claims on others’ non-interference” equals “natural rights do not proscribe how rights-holders ought to act towards others. Rather they describe how others ought to act towards rights-holders.”

I must now admit that there’s nothing mystical about such reasoning. But I must say that it’s arbitrary, for reasons I’m about to adduce.

At the risk of associating myself with utilitarianism, which I reject, I find Jeremy Bentham apt:

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense–nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense: for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle.

…What is the language of reason and plain sense upon this same subject? That in proportion as it is right or proper, i.e. advantageous to the society in question, that this or that right–a right to this or that effect–should be established and maintained, in that same proportion it is wrong that it should be abrogated: but that as there is no right, which ought not to be maintained so long as it is upon the whole advantageous to the society that it should be maintained, so there is no right which, when the abolition of it is advantageous to society, should not be abolished. To know whether it would be more for the advantage of society that this or that right should be maintained or abolished, the time at which the question about maintaining or abolishing is proposed, must be given, and the circumstances under which it is proposed to maintain or abolish it; the right itself must be specifically described, not jumbled with an undistinguisable heap of others, under any such vague general terms as property, liberty, and the like.  (“Anarchical Fallacies: Being an examination of the Declaration of Rights issued during the French Revolution“)

Bentham’s intemperate language aside, there is truth in what he says. The truth is that the language of “natural rights” obfuscates their essential arbitrariness, which is revealed by looking more closely at Barnett’s formulation:

[G]iven the nature of human beings and the world in which we live, if you want a society in which persons may pursue happiness while living in close proximity to others, then you ought to do Z. What you ought to do (Z) is properly define and respect the natural rights or liberties that enable persons to pursue happiness without interfering with the like pursuit of others with whom they interact.

What aspects of “the nature of human beings” are relevant to the inquiry? Human beings are complex organisms with many needs and desires, the most basic of which (survival) requires food (everywhere) and clothing and shelter (in most places). Those things may not be attainable “without interfering with the like pursuit of others with whom they interact.” If I have a “natural right” to survive, because the instinct of survival is in my “nature,” why do others have the “natural right” to withhold from me that which I need to survive just because those others claim a “natural right,” as Barnett puts it, to “fundamental liberties … require[d] to pursue happiness while living in close proximity to others—the rights of several property, freedom of contract, first possession, self defense, and restitution”?

And what about my health? Don’t I have a “natural right” to the enjoyment of good health? Otherwise, how can I pursue happiness to the extent of my innate ability? If I’m unable to afford medical attention, others are obliged to pay on my behalf. Likewise, I’m obliged to pay for the health care of others when I’m able to do so.

My ability to deduce positive rights by applying the  “given-if-then” formulation leads me to suspect that the formulation can be (and is) used to deduce a long list of positive rights. The UN Declaration of Human Rights includes at least a dozen statements of positive rights, including some open-ended ones. Another example is found in the writings of a philosopher, Mortimer Adler:

… What is not the product of legal or social conventions must be a creation of nature, or to state the matter more precisely, it must have its being in the nature of men. Moral rights are natural rights, rights inherent in man’s common or specific nature, just as his natural desires or needs are. Such rights, being antecedent to society and government, may be recognized and enforced by society or they may be transgressed and violated, but they are inalienable in the sense that, not being the gift of legal enactment, they cannot be taken away or annulled by acts of government.

The critical point to observe is that natural rights are correlative with natural needs….

For example, if I have a moral — or natural — right to a decent livelihood, that can be the case only because wealth, to a degree that includes amenities as well as bare necessities, is a real good … and thus indispensable to a good life. The fact that it is a real good, together with the fact that I am morally obliged to seek it as part of my moral obligation to make a good life for myself, is inseparable from the fact that I have a natural right to a decent livelihood….

Our basic natural right to the pursuit of happiness, and all the subsidiary rights that it encompasses, impose moral obligations on organized society and its institutions as well as upon other individuals. If another individual is unjust when he does not respect our rights, and so injures us by interfering with or impeding our pursuit of happiness, the institutions of organized society, its laws, and its government, are similarly unjust when they deprive individuals of their natural rights.

Just governments, it has been correctly declared, are instituted to secure these rights. I interpret that statement as going further than the negative injunction not to violate the natural rights of the individual, or deprive him of the things he needs to make a good life for himself. It imposes upon organized society and its government the positive obligation to secure the natural rights of its individuals by doing everything it can to aid and abet them in their efforts to make good lives for themselves – especially helping them to get things they need that are not within their power to get for themselves [emphasis added]. (“Natural Needs = Natural Rights“)

In other words, the identification of “natural rights” with negative rights is entirely arbitrary. Those who prefer a regime of negative rights can use the “given-if’-then” formulation to find them “natural”; those who prefer a regime of positive rights can use the “given-if-then” formulation to find them “natural.” I can only conclude that the identification of anything as a “natural right” is arbitrary, or — as Bentham says — nonsense upon stilts.

Contrary to Sandefur’s assertion, “natural rights” are the result of an “ipse dixit argument that rights exist because Somebody says so.” The Somebody is whoever happens to assert that a “given-if-then” analysis happens to produce a certain “natural right.”

If the identification of “natural rights” weren’t an arbitrary exercise, there would be no concern about the consequences of such rights. But there is, as Barnett admits in his “Guide”:

Is a natural rights analysis utilitarian? Although I do not have a strong view on this question, for what it is worth, my answer depends on how the term “utilitarian” is used. If utilitarian is viewed as a consequentialist approach that evaluates practices by their consequences, then the conception of natural rights sketched here appears to be consequentialist, though only indirectly….

If utilitarianism is viewed as a general theory of ethics or morality, however, then the natural-rights approach presented here, though consequentialist, is not utilitarian….

…For the indirect consequentialist analysis presented here suggests that respecting natural rights, not the calculation and aggregation of subjective preferences, promotes the common good. And the common good is viewed, not as a sum of preference satisfaction, but as the ability of each person to pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity while in acting in close proximity to others.

Barnett has more to say about consequences in “Foreword: Of Chickens and Eggs — The Compatibility of Moral Rights and Consequentialist Analysis“; for example:

A natural rights analysis does not rest content with generat­ing a set of substantive and procedural precepts of justice and the rule of law from general observations about the nature of the human condition. It also “tests” the conclusions such an analysis provides by examining the consequences of adhering to these precepts. This may be done hypothetically or empiri­cally. If it is revealed that a particular form of jurisdiction actu­ally retards rather than enhances the ability of persons to pursue happiness in society, this showing does not automati­cally refute the rights being scrutinized. Instead, the analysis must return to the legal precepts used to elaborate moral rights to see if the original precept can be refined to better deal with the problem or if an entirely different precept would be better.

In short, a supposed “natural right” can lend itself to many instrumental interpretations. When the consequences of a particular interpretation are tested and found to be wanting, by some criterion that is thought to be relevant to the “natural right,” it’s back to the drawing board. The example subsequently offered by Barnett suggests that it’s merely a matter of attuning the law to enforce negative “natural rights.” But that’s because his preconception of “natural rights” is that they are of the negative variety. And, as I’ve discussed, it’s just as easy to arrive at “natural rights” of the positive variety.

All of this leaves me standing precisely where I stood before — entirely unsympathetic to the notion of “natural rights” — even though I now agree that “natural rights” needn’t be the product of mysticism. The latter fact, however, doesn’t prevent leftists, bleeding hearts, and do-gooders from conjuring positive rights and arguing for their imposition because it’s the “right thing to do,” as if the resulting curtailments of liberty and economic growth were of no consequence.

In any event, philosophical arguments will not persuade the proponents of positive rights and their enablers (including much of the voting public) to abandon their quest for Nirvana on Earth through statism. If liberty (negative) rights are to be defended, the only hope of defending them effectively is a double-barreled appeal to

  • liberty as an end in itself, which — on the evidence of the popular response to Obamacare and “stimulus” — hasn’t lost its appeal to a large fraction of Americans, and
  • the dire consequences of positive rights, even for the intended beneficiaries of such rights.

I am tempted, at this point, to drop the subject of “natural rights” and take up concrete issues. But my ruminations on “natural rights” have led me to revisit a related subject: the Golden Rule. I take it up in the next post.

Does the Power to Tax Give Congress Unlimited Power?

Some commentators have suggested that the law requiring individuals to buy health insurance (the individual mandate) would be upheld if it had been cast from the beginning as a tax rather than a penalty for failing to participate in commerce. A tax, according to the commentators, need not be tethered to the Commerce Clause because the power to tax is separate and distinct from the power to regulate commerce. The implication of that argument is that the power to tax is unlimited in its scope and purpose.

This is just another way of trying to grant unlimited power to the federal government. And yet, the Constitution specifically limits and enumerates the powers of the federal government — specifically, the subjects upon which Congress may legislate. (The “living Constitution,” government by executive order, and legislation by judicial fiat are “liberal” ways of getting around the limitations of the Constitution.) If follows that the power to tax is limited to taxation for the affirmative purposes enumerated in Article I, Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;–And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

As I have shown (“The Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate“), Obamacare (along with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and much else) is not comprehended in the power to regulate interstate commerce, from which it follows that the individual mandate is not a necessary and proper law.

What about the “general Welfare”? May not Congress levy taxes for the purpose of promoting it? That power seems to be unrestricted, or so “liberals” would have it.

But the admonition to “provide for … the general Welfare,” is not a license to do anything and everything within the imagination of congressional majorities. It is in fact a further limitation on the enumerated powers of Congress.

The General Welfare Clause, as it is known, means that when Congress executes any of its enumerated powers, it is supposed to execute them in a way that is beneficial for the whole of the United States, as opposed to favoring particular States or regions. Were Congress to take the Constitution seriously, American taxpayers would not suffer the abominations known as “earmarks” and “pork barrel” legislation.

My view is that of James Madison, who explained the General Welfare Clause in the course of the debate about the ratification of the Constitution:

Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction.

Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution, than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it; though it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases. A power to destroy the freedom of the press, the trial by jury, or even to regulate the course of descents, or the forms of conveyances, must be very singularly expressed by the terms “to raise money for the general welfare.

But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded, as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same sentence be excluded altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall the more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied any signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity, which, as we are reduced to the dilemma of charging either on the authors of the objection or on the authors of the Constitution, we must take the liberty of supposing, had not its origin with the latter. (Federalist No. 41)

The more expansive view — of an unlimited power to tax (and spend) for any purpose — did not prevail until the New Deal era, when the U.S. Supreme Court lost its way.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

The Fall and Rise (and Fall?) of Obamacare

There are portents (aside from Judge Hudson’s timely ruling against the individual mandate):


Derived from this article and its predecessors at Rasmussen Reports. Poll results before passage of Obamacare represent strong approval minus strong disapproval. Poll results after passage of Obamacare represent strong approval of repeal minus strong disapproval of repeal.