Go here.
“Jane Galt” of Asymmetrical Information proposes an alternative to the estate tax:
Why don’t we just get rid of the estate tax entirely, and set the basis on anything one inherits to $0? That way, if you sell whatever it is you inherited, you have to pay 20 percent or so of its value to the taxman, while if you just use it (i.e. a family small business) you pay no inheritance tax.
To which I say: What’s the purpose of the tax? To penalize those who choose to work hard and invest prudently in order to leave something to their children? “Counterproductive” is the mildest epithet that comes to mind.
But “Jane” seems bent on proving that she’s “not against taxing people; [but] against the special, complicated, economic-value-destroying structure of the estate tax.” So, she’d rather have an economic-value-destroying capital-gains tax. Same thing.
The Volokh Conspiracy has a flock of posts about the so-called Constitution-in-Exile movement. The thrust of the posts is to downplay the notion, current in left-wing circles, that there is such a movement. Orin Kerr said this in December:
In a book review in the latest issue of The New Republic, Cass Sunstein renews his claims that “[t]here is increasing talk [among conservatives] of what is being called the Constitution in Exile the Constitution of 1932, Herbert Hoover’s Constitution before Roosevelt’s New Deal.” Sunstein has suggested this a number of times before (see, e.g., here and here), and the claim has been repeated recently by The New York Times and by my colleague Jeffrey Rosen. The suggestion is that influential conservative lawyers express their goal for the courts as being the restoration of “the Constitution in Exile.”
The odd thing is, I can’t recall ever hearing a conservative use the phrase “the Constitution in Exile.” I asked a couple of prominent conservatives if they had ever heard the phrase, and they had the same reaction: they had never heard the phrase used by anyone except Cass Sunstein and those discussing Sunstein’s claims.
As best I can tell, the phrase “Constitution in Exile” originally appeared in a book review by D.C. Circuit Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg in 1995 in the course of discussing the nondelegation doctrine in the journal Regulation.
Today David Bernstein adds:
Im sure the legal blogosphere will be abuzz with discussions of Jeff Rosens N.Y. Times magazine piece on the purported “Constitution in Exile” movement….
First, I take issue with the whole idea that there is a “Constitution in Exile movement,” as such. [UPDATE: co-blogger Orin makes similar points here.] “Constitution in Exile” is a phrase used by Judge Douglas Ginsburg in an obscure article in Regulation magazine in 1995. From then until 2001, I, as someone who knows probably just about every libertarian and most Federalist Society law professors in the United States (there aren’t that many of us), and who teaches on the most libertarian law faculty in the nation, never heard the phrase. Instead, the phrase was pretty much ignored until 2001, when it was picked up and publicized by liberals. In October 2001, the Duke Law Journal, at the behest of some liberal law professors assumedly worried about what would happen to constitutional law under Bush appointees, published a symposium on the Constitution in Exile. Thereafter, other left-wingers, such as Doug Kendall of the Community Rights Council and Professor Cass Sunstein, began to write about some dark conspiracy among right-wingers to restore something called “the Constitution in Exile.”
Ginsburg’s coinage, regardless of its modest provenance, appears in a paragraph in which he neatly encapsulates what many conservatives and libertarians have said on countless occasions about the subversion of original meaning. Here’s the paragraph (source):
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.
That presages Ginsburg’s 2003 speech, entitled “On Constitutionalism,” in which he elaborates on that paragraph, without using the phrase “Constitution in exile.”
In any event, dedication to the real Constitution of original meaning — the “Constitution in exile” — seems to be alive and well in The Federalist Society, in a few law schools, and in many places on the web, notably at The Volokh Conspiracy. If that isn’t a movement, it has all the makings of one.
This epitaph:
He knew what he wanted from life; what he wanted was within his reach; he took it and was content.
Sir Ernest Gowers, writing of H.W. Fowler in the preface to the revised edition of Fowler’s masterful and indispensible A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
UPDATED BELOW
Edward Feser, writing at Right Reason, says this:
If “libertarianism” is merely another way of describing the classical liberal presumption in favor of free markets and limited government, then it is a healthy tendency which conservatives ought to welcome. But if libertarianism entails also that government can and must be neutral between views about the moral legitimacy of abortion, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia; that we can have no enforceable positive obligations to other human beings other than those we explicitly consent to take on; and that a society can be perfectly just as long as property titles are respected, no matter how morally depraved that society might otherwise become, then it is a view that is in my estimation false and dangerous, and ought to be opposed by every conservative.
The launching point for Feser’s post is an article by Jennifer Roback Morse in the latest Policy Review, from which I quoted from in a recent post.
My agreement with Feser on the social issues doesn’t make me a conservative. Morse has a compelling argument for the essential libertarianism of social conservatism:
It is simply not possible to have a minimum government in a society with no social or legal norms about family structure, sexual behavior, and childrearing. The state will have to provide support for people with loose or nonexistent ties to their families. The state will have to sanction truly destructive behavior, as always. But destructive behavior will be more common because the culture of impartiality destroys the informal system of enforcing social norms.
It is high time libertarians object when their rhetoric is hijacked by the advocates of big government. Fairness and freedom do not demand sexual and parental license. Minimum-government libertarianism needs a robust set of social institutions.
Perhaps there’s still some hope for a conservative-libertarian fusion, or at least a fusion of limited-government conservatives and neolibertarians.
UPDATE: I have reread a post of mine from August 10, 2004, in which I took issue with a pair of Tech Central Station columns by Feser. I ended my commentary on Feser’s TCS pieces by saying this:
I accept that not all libertarians think alike about all issues, but neither do all conservatives, liberals, Democrats, or Republicans think alike about all issues. The important thing, to me, about conservatives, liberals, Democrats, and Republicans is that they don’t share my commitment to what Feser describes so well
as the view in political philosophy that the only legitimate function of a government is to protect its citizens from force, fraud, theft, and breach of contract, and that it otherwise ought not to interfere with its citizens’ dealings with one another, either to make them more economically equal or to make them more morally virtuous.
I therefore ally myself with those who share that view. If that isn’t moral neutrality, what is?
It is now clear to me, in light of my recent agreement with Jennifer Roback Morse’s position on the issue of marriage, that I am sliding away from what might called a position of “moral neutrality.” But perhaps a better way of putting is that I have, since last August, clarified my own thinking about the justification for libertarianism.
Libertarianism cannot be justified on either of these bases, which are the tenets of what I call fundamentalist libertarianism:
Libertarianism cannot rest on such assertions because they have three fatal flaws:
As I wrote here:
Fundamentalist libertarians argue that the only right is liberty — the right to be left alone as long as one leaves others alone — and that it is a natural right with which human beings are endowed a priori. In one rendition, liberty is immanent — something that simply is in human nature, perhaps as a gift from God. In another rendition, humans are endowed with liberty as a logical necessity, because humans own themselves.
But appeals to immanence and self-ownership are no more meaningful than appeals to faith. Such appeals fail because they take liberty as a first principle. Liberty, which is a condition of existence, cannot be a first principle, it can only serve the first principle of existence, which is self-interest. Only experience (of the right kind) and reason can show that liberty serves self-interest.
The appeal to liberty as a first principle is unconvincing, except to those who already want to believe in the immanence of liberty because they understand that liberty serves their self-interest. A belief in the immanence of liberty — whether it is God-given or simply axiomatic — is a skyhook: “a materially unsupported (and thus implausible) entity or process.”
The concept of self-ownership as the basis of liberty is simply another skyhook. Yes, “I” am “me” and not “you,” but what gives me the right to be left alone by you, without sharing your burdens? Where does my self-ownership come from? Who or what imprinted it on me? And there we are, searching for a skyhook.
Rights — though they can exist without the sanction of government and the protection of a state — are political. That is, although rights may arise from human nature, they have no essence until they are recognized through interpersonal bargaining (politics), in the service of self-interest. It is bargaining that determines whether we recognize only the negative right of liberty, or the positive right of privilege as well. The preference of human beings — revealed over eons of coexistence — is to recognize both liberty (usually constrained to some degree) and privilege (which necessitates constraints on liberty).
The problem for libertarians, therefore, is to convince the body politic of two complementary truths: Self-interest dictates that liberty should be the paramount right. The recognition of privilege as a co-equal right undermines the benefits that flow from liberty.
In the same post I went on, at length, to show the logical absurdity of appeals to immanence and self-ownership as the basis of libertarianism. I came down on the side of consequentialism:
The virtue of libertarianism is not that it must be taken on faith but that, in practice, it yields superior consequences. Superior consequences for whom, you may ask. And I will answer: for all but those who don’t wish to play by the rules of libertarianism; that is, for all but predators and parasites.
In later posts I explicated those superior consequences. (See here, here, here, and here.)
Does my consequentialism — which has led me to support traditional marriage, oppose abortion and euthanasia, and support preemptive war — somehow make me a conservative? I think not. My support for those positions isn’t a priori, as it would be if I were a conservative. Rather, my support for those positions comes from my considered judgment that they will have superior consequences for the general welfare. Among those consequences, they will advance liberty and the blessings that flow from it.
Libertarians should value liberty not because it is “good” per se but because it has good consequences. As I wrote here:
Fundamentalist libertarianism reduces liberty to a matter of faith. If libertarianism cannot stand on more than faith, what makes it any better than, say, socialism or the divine right of kings?
I therefore reserve the right to agree with conservative positions. And I shall, when the consequences serve the general welfare. I also reserve the right to differ with conservative positions. And I shall, when the consequences disserve the general welfare.
In either case, I am confident that the general welfare is served best by liberty, and that liberty is not served when the state recklessly subverts socially evolved standards of behavior in the name of license masquerading as liberty.
Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution points to a presentation in which this graphic appears:
Standard deviations from mean income on the X-axis, probability of voting Republican on the Y-axis. Data plotted here are for counties in Mississippi, Ohio, and Connecticut (being “poor,” “average,” and “rich” States, respectively).
That graphic is supposed to clinch this point (Tabarrok is writing):
We all know that in the recent election poorer states tended to vote Republican while richer states tended to vote Democrat. On the basis of the famous maps many people jumped to the conclusion that poorer individuals were voting Republican (Nascar Republicans) while richer individuals were voting Democrat (trust fund Democrats). But the inference is a fallacy, the ecological fallacy. In fact, high-income individuals, as opposed to high-income states, vote Republican with greater likelihood than low-income individuals (the effect is not huge and it may be declining but it is significant). It’s even true that rich counties tend to vote Republican with greater likelihood than poorer counties. Gelman links to this graph which nicely illustrates the ecological fallacy. The three lines show that within each state higher-income counties are more likely to vote Republican but when you look between states the correlation between income and voting Republican is negative.
Actually, when I saw the geographic distribution of votes in the 2004 election, by State and county, I didn’t “jump[ ] to the conclusion that poorer individuals were voting Republican (Nascar Republicans) while richer individuals were voting Democrat (trust fund Democrats).” I drew the more reasonable inference that there is a strong geographic correlation between values and voting preferences; that is, adherence to the tenets of the regulatory-welfare state is stronger in richer States, at every income level. And that’s precisely what the graphic indicates: Where you live does make a difference in how you vote.
It may be true that the higher your income in a rich State, the more likely you are to vote Republican. But for any given level of income, a person who lives in a rich State you is less likely to vote Republican than a person who lives in a poor State.
Why? Here’s my take: The “rich” in the rich States — as is obvious from casual reading about limousine liberals and wannabe limousine liberals in New York and California — have by and large bought into the regulatory-welfare state, which is mainly a creation of the Democrat Party. So, the rich-State rich vote their “consciences” or, rather, they tend to vote Democrat because the think they can
At the other end of the scale, low-income NASCAR fans who live in rich States are more likely to vote Democrat than low-income NASCAR fans who live in poor States.
Why does it work like that? Because where you live has a lot to do with your values. People tend to adapt (“go along and get along”) or migrate.
The same principle applies to academia. Conservative and libertarian intellectuals tend to avoid academic careers (call it pre-emptive migration) because they don’t want to adapt their thinking to fit in with the liberal supermajority on most campuses. Thank goodness there are some campuses (such as George Mason University) that are friendly havens for libertarian-conservative academics like Tabarrok and his blogging partner, Tyler Cowen.
Milton Friedman explains it in a few sentences:
Q: If the federal government does move to private accounts, does the $3 trillion that President Bush says he would have to borrow to get that moving cause a greater stress on the American economy?
A: No, because we already have that obligation. What we are talking about is replacing an unfunded debt with funded debt. We already have an obligation to all the people like myself who are currently on Social Security. The difference is it is not written out as funded debt. So when you talk about borrowing, they are not really changing the total government debt, they are only changing how much they recognize, and what is open and above board and how much of it is hidden in other funding.
From an interview with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman in the Jackson (Tennessee) Sun. (Thanks to Donald Luskin for the pointer.) Read the whole interview if you’re unfamiliar with Friedman’s incisive analysis of matters economic.
I have posted at Liberty Corner II “The Broken Promise of Liberty,” which is Part VI of my series “Practical Libertarianism for Americans.” Here are excerpts of Part VI:
If liberty is so wonderful, why don’t we enjoy it in full? Why are our lives so heavily regulated and legislated by so many federal, State, and local agencies at such a high cost? What happened to the promise of liberty given in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution? The answers to those questions are bound up in human nature and the nature of governance in a democracy….
In sum, it’s all about trust. You can trust in people to do the right thing because it’s to their benefit to do so, as it is in free markets and free societies. Or you can tie people down, economically and socially, in a morass of statutes and regulations….
Trust doesn’t mean an absence of rules, but the rules have only to be minimal, socially evolved rules of acceptable conduct, such as the Golden Rule or the last six of the Ten Commandments. The clearer and more intuitive the rules, the more likely they are to be enforced by self-interest, by fear of social opprobrium, and by pride in reputation — with swift, sure, and hard justice as a backup.
But none of that goes down well with the untrusting, who think that the road to happiness must be paved with hard-and-fast rules for everything and everyone (except those who break the rules, if they have certain racial, sexual, and socio-economic characteristics). Otherwise, how would people know what to do?…
What happens, then, is a ratcheting of government power, in response to demands for government to “do something,” and in furtherance of the ambitions of power-seeking politicians. There is no in-between solution. There is either a government of strictly limited powers — such as the one envisioned by the Framers — or there is, inevitably, socialism or something very close to it….
We have been following the piecemeal route to serfdom — adding link to link and chain to chain — in spite of the Framers’ best intentions and careful drafting. Why? Because the governed — or dominant coalitions of them — have donned willingly the chains that they have implored their governors to forge. Their bondage is voluntary, though certainly not informed. But their bondage is everyone’s bondage….
Unchecked democracy undermines liberty and its blessings. Unchecked democracy imposes on everyone the mistakes and mistaken beliefs of the controlling faction. It defeats learning. It undoes the social fabric that underlies civility. It defeats the sublime rationality of free markets, which enable independent individuals to benefit each other through the pursuit of self-interest. As “anonymous” says, with brutal accuracy, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.”…
The Framers understood human nature as a natural enemy of liberty. That is why they strove to check the passions of the mob and the power of government….
Human nature has overcome constitutional obstacles. The governed and their governors — locked in a symbiotic relationship that is built on a mistrustful worldview, economic illiteracy, and baser instincts — have conspired to undermine the Constitution’s checks and balances. People, given their mistrustful and ignorant nature, have turned to government for “solutions” to their “problems.” Government, in its turn, has seized whatever power is necessary to go through the motions of providing “solutions.” For rare is the legislator who doesn’t want to legislate, the executive who doesn’t want to act, and the judge who doesn’t want to exercise his judgment by interpreting the law rather than simply apply it….
The authors of the Declaration of Independence, were they writing it today, would be able to list “a long train of abuses and usurpations” by the federal government against the States and the people. Their list would rightly include these charges, once levelled against the British monarch:
…erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harrass our people and eat out their substance….
…combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws….
…[took] away our [State] charters…and alter[ed] fundamentally the forms of our governments….
[L]iberty has been vanquished in the mistaken belief (or hope) that government can effectively and efficiently make us better off, salve our woes, and put an end to social and racial divisions. To those ends, the governed and their governors, walking hand in hand, have taken liberty for a stroll down a slippery slope. Every step they have taken down that slope has made more problematic our journey back up the slope.
For earlier entries in the series, follow these links:
Addendum to Part II: Notes on the State of Liberty in American Law
III. The Origin and Essence of Rights
IV. Liberty and Its Prerequisites
Addendum to Part IV: More Hayek
V. The Economic Consequences of Liberty
Addendum to Part V: The Destruction of Income and Wealth by the State
In Part III of my series “Practical Libertarianism for Americans,” I wrote:
Fundamentalist [natural rights] libertarians argue that the only right is liberty — the right to be left alone as long as one leaves others alone — and that it is a natural right with which human beings are endowed a priori. In one rendition, liberty is immanent — something that simply is in human nature, perhaps as a gift from God. In another rendition, humans are endowed with liberty as a logical necessity, because humans own themselves.
But appeals to immanence and self-ownership are no more meaningful than appeals to faith. Such appeals fail because they take liberty as a first principle. Liberty, which is a condition of existence, cannot be a first principle, it can only serve the first principle of existence, which is self-interest. Only experience (of the right kind) and reason can show that liberty serves self-interest….
I say, therefore, that rights arise from human desires (yearnings) and are agreed through political bargaining among humans (either before or after the creation of a state). Then, to be realized (given effect), those rights must be enforced by someone or something: individuals acting in self-defense, by stateless groups (e.g., bands of hunter-gatherers), and even by the state, if it happens to be the right kind of state (e.g., the one envisioned by the Founders of the United States).
I say that rights do not necessarily depend on the existence of a state, but do arise from politics because politics “is the process and method of decision-making for groups of human beings…[which] also observed in all human group interactions….” And those “group interactions” began long before the creation of a state. As Wikipedia puts it, “rights must be understood by somebody in order to have legal existence, so the understanding of rights is a social prerequisite for the existence of rights.”…
Now, I have explained how I think rights come into being, but until a fundamentalist libertarian explains how he thinks the liberty right comes into being I can only conclude that he must think that (a) everyone has the same conception of rights — a proposition that seems to defy experience — or (b) everyone is somehow (mystically) endowed with the same right to liberty.
Perhaps the answer to my challenge lies in the self-ownership argument. That argument, as forumalated by Robert Nozick, goes like this (according to R.N. Johnson’s summary of the political philosophy of Robert Nozick):
The self-ownership argument is based on the idea that human beings are of unique value. It is one way of construing the fundamental idea that people must be treated as equals. People are “ends in themselves”. To say that a person is an end in herself is to say that she cannot be treated merely as a means to some other end. What makes a person an end is the fact that she has the capacity to choose rationally what she does. This makes people quite different from anything else, such as commodities or animals. The latter can be used by us as mere means to our ends without doing anything morally untoward, since they lack the ability to choose for themselves how they will act or be used. Human beings, having the ability to direct their own behavior by rational decision and choice, can only be used in a way that respects this capacity. And this means that people can’t be used by us unless they consent.
The paradigm of violating this requirement to treat people as ends in themselves is thus slavery. A slave is a person who is used as a mere means, that is, without her consent. That is, a slave is someone who is owned by another person. And quite obviously the reverse of slavery is self-ownership. If no one is a slave, then no one owns another person, and if no one owns another person, then each person is only owned by herself. Hence, we get the idea that treating people as ends in themselves is treating them as owning themselves.
…Nozick’s proposition amounts to nothing more than the assertion that everyone must act from the same principle. Immanuel Kant made essentially the same assertion in his categorical imperative:
Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.
Well, what if the person making that statement believes that his end is to be a slave-owner — and he has the power to make me a slave?
The fact is that people, all too often, do not act according to Nozick’s or Kant’s imperatives. As Dr. Johnson said, I refute it thus: Look around you….
Am I suggesting that might makes “right”? No! It’s just that the right to liberty can’t be pulled out of the air in the form of propositions about immanence and self-ownership. Those are philosophical “oughts” that cannot, in themselves, dictate the “is” of human behavior. It is the actuality of human behavior that matters. To influence that, we must turn to reason — for the acceptance of the proposition that liberty serves self-interest — and (as necessary) to the use of force to compel adherence to the dictates of reason.
For, the logic of liberty, as I have said, lies in its superior consequences. Liberty can prevail through mutual assent. But it will not always prevail through mutual assent, because the yearning for liberty competes with other aspects of human nature. The upshot is that humans, for the most part, fail to comprehend that unalloyed liberty is the best servant of self-interest.
I like the way Anthony de Jasay puts it:
The “rights-based” defence of the free market has a startling element in its very foundation which most academic opinion… seems never to question, let alone reproach. In its starkest form, it appears in the famous first sentence of the Preface of Robert Nozick’s [Anarchy, State, Utopia]: “Individuals have rights, and (etc)”. Alternatives might have read “Individuals ought to have rights, and…” or perhaps “If individuals had rights, and…”and would have been unobjectionable, though they might not have conveyed the same message. As it is, this starting point devalues much that follows it and makes Nozick’s defence of the free market wide open to a flank attack. The fault is important because Nozick is probably the most influential libertarian defender of feasible freedom….
We do not in fact know that “individuals have rights” and nothing entitles us to pretend that we do. Characteristically, authors now frequently refer to rights “we have assigned”, from which one could infer that rights are created by somebody somewhere and are then conferred upon individuals (while the correlative obligations are imposed in some unspecified distribution). Nozick tells us that the rights he asserts individuals to have are boundaries that segregate their person, property and contracts. Once again, we wonder how he knows. However, if these particular rights have somehow been “assigned” to them, what is to stop an anti-Nozick, moved by moral concern for the wellbeing of individuals and for what is due to them in respect of their dignity and autonomy, from assigning additional rights to them—rights that are rights-of-way, easements cutting through the Nozickian boundaries? Is this not the rights-based model of “social market economy” or some other hybrid?
Anti-Tax Group Hires Paroled Sex Offender
Followed by this:
A man who spent 18 years in jail after being convicted of raping eight children at a day care where he worked has been hired by an anti-tax group.
Gerald Amirault was convicted in 1986 of molesting and raping 3- and 4-year-old children at the Fells Acres day care center he and his family ran in Malden, a city north of Boston. Amirault, who maintains his innocence, was released on parole last year.
Citizens for Limited Taxation has hired Amirault as a researcher at its Marblehead office. Barbara Anderson, the anti-tax group’s executive director, said she believes Amirault was unjustly convicted and will be an enthusiastic employee.
But here’s the real story, from WSJ.com:
Friday, April 30, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
At 10 o’clock this morning, Gerald Amirault will walk out of his Massachusetts jail, a free man.
It is a joyous day for this prisoner, behind bars for 18 years after his 1986 conviction on charges of child sex abuse based on fantastical testimony dragged from pre-schoolers. Gerald’s mother Violet and his sister Cheryl served eight years before their convictions were overturned in 1995.
It is also a happy day for The Wall Street Journal. Readers of this page will be familiar with Dorothy Rabinowitz’s accounts of judicial abuse of the Amirault family and others falsely convicted of child sex abuse during a wave of irrational cases that swept the courts in the 1980s….
One of the reasons behind the district attorney’s decision last week not to oppose Mr. Amirault’s release on parole was that in order to have him classified as a “sexually dangerous person” there would have had to be a virtual re-trial of the entire Amirault case. The DA had to have been deterred by the prospect of parading into a courtroom with the incredible fantasies extracted from Mr. Amirault’s alleged victims–about secret rooms, magic drinks, animal butchery, assaults by a bad clown. Then-District Attorney Scott Harshbarger had offered them as “proof” of the Amiraults’ guilt.
No liberal bias at the Associated Press, right?
UPDATED BELOW (04/17/05)
Is there such a thing as free will, or is our every choice predetermined? Here’s a thought experiment:
Suppose I think that I might want to eat some ice cream. I go to the freezer compartment and pull out an unopened half-gallon of vanilla ice cream and an unopened half-gallon of chocolate ice cream. I can’t decide between vanilla, chocolate, some of each, or none. I ask a friend to decide for me by using his random-number generator, according to rules of his creation. He chooses the following rules:
- If the random number begins in an odd digit and ends in an odd digit, I will eat vanilla.
- If the random number begins in an even digit and ends in an even digit, I will eat chocolate.
- If the random number begins in an odd digit and ends in an even digit, I will eat some of each flavor.
- If the random number begins in an even digit and ends in an odd digit, I will not eat ice cream.
Suppose that the number generated by my friend begins in an even digit and ends in an even digit: the choice is chocolate. I act accordingly.
I didn’t inevitably choose chocolate because of events that led to the present state of my body’s chemistry, which might otherwise have dictated my choice. That is, I broke any link between my past and my choice about a future action.
I call that free will.
I suspect that our brains are constructed in such a way as to produce the same kind of result in many situations, though certainly not in all situations. That is, we have within us the equivalent of an impartial friend and an (informed) decision-making routine, which together enable us to exercise something we can call free will.
UPDATE: Sir James Jeans, near the end of Physics and Philosphy (1943), says this:
The classical physics seemed to bolt and bar the door leading to any sort of freedom of the will; the new [quantum] physics hardly does this; it almost seems to suggest that the door may be unlocked — if only we could find the handle. The old physics showed us a universe which looked more like a prison than a dwelling-place. The new physics shows us a universe which looks as though it might conceivably form a suitable dwelling-place for free men, and not a mere shelter for brutes — a home in which it may at least be possible for us to mould events to our deires and live lives of endeavour and achievement. (Dover edition, p. 216)
Even if our future behavior is tightly linked to our past and present states of being — and to events outside of us that have their roots in the past and present — those linkages are so complex that they are safely beyond our comprehension and control.
If nothing else, we know that purposive human behavior can make a difference in the course of human events. Given that, and given how little we know about the complexities of existence, we might as well have free will.
A few weeks ago, I noted the passing of several famous (or once-famous) persons aged 90 and older, as recorded at Dead or Alive? (one of my favorite reads). I noted also the survival of 80 percent of the oldsters whom I had mentioned almost a year earlier. Kent, the proprietor of Dead or Alive?, graciously sent me the following statistics about survival rates for the older persons in his database:
|
|
|
Number of persons |
|
|
|
Period |
Age bracket |
Beginning |
End |
Survival rate |
|
1/1/2004 – 12/31/2004 |
80-89 |
392 |
362 |
92% |
|
|
90-99 |
84 |
71 |
85% |
|
|
100+ |
3 |
3 |
100% |
The most recent mortality statistics for the United States (from the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) indicate annual survival rates of 94 percent for persons aged 75-84 and 85 percent for persons aged 85 and older. By inspection, it seems that the old and famous have higher survival rates than the general population, which is what you’d expect: Fame generally yields greater wealth, and greater wealth generally yields better health.
If this is true:
Sources told CNN that investigators were still trying to confirm whether Jessica Marie Lunsford was buried alive as well as other information John Evander Couey provided. Results of the full autopsy are expected in about a month.
Do you lefties out there still want to give people like Couey “another chance”? Hasn’t he — haven’t they — had more than enough chances? Here’s Couey’s rap sheet, and related thoughts, courtesy GenerationWhy?:
A search of PublicData.com reveals his convictions and the address in Homosassa, FL (listed as Marie Dixon’s address) where he was released as an “inactive offender” on May 6, 1997. Other tidbits from his rapsheet include:
Burglary/Forced Entry – residence – July 30, 1977 – sentenced to 10 years
Burglary/Forced Entry – residence – July 31, 1977 – adjudication withheld
Burglary – February 28, 1981 – sentenced to 7 years
Lewd/Lascivious conduct with child under 16 – April 8, 1991 – sentenced to 5 years
Forgery – April 9, 1995 – adjudication withheld
Hot checks – February 22, 2001 – sentence unknown
This says alot about our system. A man can harm a child in the most disgusting way and get a sentence less than he would if he broke into a house. It also shows a spotty history of parole/probation supervision:
Supervision start-end dates:
Dec 07, 1977 to Jan 19, 1978
Jul 22, 1980 to Jul 21, 1982 – during this time he committed his 3rd burglary
Jul 16, 1993 to Apr 5, 1996 – during this time he committed forgery
May 6, 1997 to Dec 07, 1998
Apr 24, 2001 to Apr 23, 2003
Basta!
Q. What do left-winger Christopher Hitchens and libertarian-Objectivist Timothy Sandefur have in common?
A. Some sort of “thing” about the late Pope John Paul II.
Here’s Hitchens:
Unbelievers are more merciful and understanding than believers, as well as more rational. We do not believe that the pope will face judgment or eternal punishment for the millions who will die needlessly from AIDS [presumably because of the Church’s teaching about the use of condoms: ED]….For us, this day is only the interment of an elderly and querulous celibate, who came too late and who stayed too long, and whose primitive ideology did not permit him the true self-criticism that could have saved him, and others less innocent, from so many errors and crimes.
And here’s Sandefur, who at least doesn’t lay a hypocritical claim to forgivingness:
This morning, I woke up and I thought, Oh no! I need to know whats going on with the dead body of an old Polish priest whos spent the last quarter century telling people theyre going to hell for using condoms! Fortunately, every single television channel and every single radio news report was available to give me that information. Yes, this just inthe Pope is still dead.
There’s a notion that Sandefur certainly subscribes to — one that Hitchens might also subscribe to when he’s sober enough to subscribe to anything — and that notion is personal responsibility. If you don’t agree with the teachings of the Roman Catholic faith, you can violate those teachings (with or without a clear conscience) or you can reject those teachings entirely and leave the Church. The choice is yours, not the Church’s.
I say that as someone who left the Church 70 percent of a lifetime ago. No one held a gun to my head and said “You must believe in and practice everything the Church teaches; you must remain in the Church.” No one is holding a gun to anyone else’s head either. People are taking — or failing to take — responsibility for themselves when they commit acts that cause them to die of a horrible disease. Those deaths are tragic, but they are not the Church’s fault.
But writers like Hitchens and Sandefur really have a different problem, I think, which comes across as “zero tolerance” for religiosity. As an agnostic, I find that kind of arrogance unseemly because it is an intellectually bankrupt position, as I have discussed in these posts:
FOLLOWUP POST HERE
My final comment about the state-assisted murder of Terri Schiavo was to ask “Are You Next?” We now know who is next:
85 year-old Mae Margouirk of LaGrange, Georgia, is currently being deprived of nutrition and hydration at the request of her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy. Mrs. Margouirk suffered an aortic dissection 2 weeks ago and was hospitalized. Though her doctors have said that she is not terminally ill, Ms. Gaddy declared that she held medical power of attorney for Mae, and had her transferred to the LaGrange Hospice. Later investigation revealed that Ms. Gaddy did not in fact have such power of attorney. Furthermore, Mae’s Living Will provides that nutrition and hydration are to be withheld only if she is comatose or vegetative. Mae is in neither condition. Neither is her condition terminal.
Read all about it at Thrown Back (quoted above) and WorldNetDaily, which has more:
“Grandmama is old and I think it is time she went home to Jesus,” Gaddy told Magouirk’s brother and nephew, McLeod and Ken Mullinax. “She has glaucoma and now this heart problem, and who would want to live with disabilities like these?”…
Ron Panzer, president and founder of Hospice Patients Alliance, a patients’ rights advocacy group based in Michigan, told WND that what is happening to Magouirk is not at all unusual.
“This is happening in hospices all over the country,” he said. “Patients who are not dying – are not terminal – are admitted [to hospice] and the hospice will say they are terminally ill even if they’re not. There are thousands of cases like this. Patients are given morphine and ativan to sedate them. If feeding is withheld, they die within 10 days to two weeks. It’s really just a form of euthanasia.”
But some people don’t understand slippery slopes.
(Thanks to The Corner‘s K.J. Lopez for the lead, via Verity at Southern Appeal.)
In the preceding post (full version here) I quoted Jennifer Roback Morse’s Policy Review article, “Marriage and the Limits of Contract.” In that article, Morse makes a telling point about the limits of compromise in politics:
No one disputes the free speech rights of socialists to distribute the Daily Worker. It does not follow that impartiality requires the economy to reflect socialism and capitalism equally. It simply cant be done. An economy built on the ideas in The Communist Manifesto will necessarily look quite different from an economy built on the ideas in The Wealth of Nations. The debate between socialism and capitalism is not a debate over how to accommodate different opinions, but over how the economy actually works. Everything from the law of contracts to antitrust law to commercial law will be a reflection of some basic understanding of how the economy works in fact. Somebody in this debate is correct, and somebody is mistaken. We can figure out which view is more nearly correct by comparing the prosperity of societies that have implemented capitalist principles with the prosperity of those that have implemented socialist principles….
There is enormous room for debate, but there ultimately is no room for compromise….We will be happier if we try to discover the truth and accommodate ourselves to it, rather than try to recreate the world according to our wishes.
Every serious comparison of welfare-statism with free-market capitalism gives the advantage to free-market capitalism. (See here and here, for example.)
It is time to stop debating the matter and follow the truth where it leads us. It is long past time to reduce the state to its proper role: defending us from foreign enemies and protecting us from force and fraud. And when the state won’t do its job, the people will have to do it for themselves.
I commend to you the Declaration of Independence.
Regarding the debate about homosexual marriage, a common libertarian position — which I have shared — is that marriage should be taken out of the hands of the state and made a private, contractual relationship. Christopher Tozzo (a.k.a. KipEsquire) of A Stitch in Haste argues against that stance and for legal recognition of the homosexual union as a form of marriage:
As for the hyper-anarcho-libertarians [and many minarchists as well: ED] who try to short-circuit the entire gay marriage debate by moaning that “government should get of the marriage business altogether,” well, even if such a lament somehow helped the real-world quest for equal treatment of gays (I don’t see how it does), it’s also, quite frankly, an unacceptably naive and simplistic worldview.
The great thing about marriage, qua legal status, is that it eliminates the need for the (extremely complicated) “bundle of strictly private contracts” that radical libertarians and defenders of theoretical polygamy…seem to think is such a “neat-o!” idea. Ask any gay couple who has actually tried to do it — I guarantee you they’ll say it’s not so “neat-o.”
Stated differently, marriage, qua legal status, is extremely efficient economically. It saves time. It saves resources (e.g., lawyers drafting documents). It saves money. It saves grief over lost, destroyed or badly-drafted contracts. In an (admittedly Rawlsian) sense, the shortcut of marriage, qua legal status, does the greatest good for the greatest number. It’s simply a smart idea in a modern society.
Tinker around the edges all you want. Should there be a “marriage penalty” within the federal income tax? I doubt it. Should there be a spousal benefit under Social Security? I seriously doubt it. But these are overlays that don’t go to the core of marriage qua legal status. The real meaning of marriage in modern society — automatic property rights, automatic inheritance rights, automatic child custody rights, automatic healthcare rights, automatic decision-making rights of all kinds, these all derive not from some abstract “bundle of contracts” concept of marriage, but from the legal status concept.
But…polygamists need not apply:
And they [“automatic rights”] require that marriage be limited to two people.
If consensual polygamists want to try to build a bird’s nest from the individual twigs and strings of contractual arrangements, then by all means they have a right to do so (assuming no externalities, especially to the children of such arrangements). But the assertion that to draw the line at two-person marriage is “arbitrary” is nonsense.
Well, it’s no more “nonsense” than the assertion that marriage — as recognized by the state — should be limited to the union of a man and a woman. If KipEsquire were truly interested in the equal treatment of citizens, it seems to me that he would could suggest a way to extend the same “automatic rights” to polygamists that he would extend to homosexual partners. (Or is he prejudiced against polygamists? Heaven forbid!) For example, the law would merely have to specify that, in the absence of valid documentation to the contrary, all survivors of a polygamous relationship share-and-share-alike in the property of a deceased member of that relationship.
As for the “efficiency” argument — which is really about cost-avoidance for homosexual partners — the “automatic rights” that legally married heterosexuals “enjoy” aren’t all that “neat-o.” Many, many heterosexual couples must spend lots of money on lawyers to carve out exceptions to those “automatic rights” bestowed so sweepingly by the state. Where’s the “efficiency” for those heterosexuals? And where’s the “efficiency” for not-legally-married heterosexuals, whom KipEsquire seems to have overlooked? Or are they, like polygamists, to be left entirely to their own devices?
KipEsquire seems to be more interested in the legalization of homosexual marriage than he is in the real effects of legalization on society’s well-being. To put it in the form of a question: What’s really at risk if society — acting through the state — undermines the privileged status of heterosexual marriage by bestowing equal benefits on other forms of marriage, and even on temporary relationships?
Well, Megan McArdle (a.k.a. Jane Galt) of Asymmetrical Information tried to address that question, at length, and for all her trouble KipEsquire misunderstood her point:
Jane cites four mini-case-studies — income taxation, public housing, welfare benefits and liberalized divorce — to argue what we all know already: that changing government policies changes people’s behaviors at the margin.
Um, so what?
The mile-wide blindspot in Jane’s tome is that all her examples are non-discriminatory.
The mile-wide blindspot in KipEsquire’s response is that Jane’s examples aren’t meant to be about discrimination. Nor is their effect on “marginal” behavior to be dismissed simply because KipEsquire wants to dismiss it. The examples illustrate the danger of the slippery slope: that many bad things that can happen when standards are relaxed — just a “bit” — for the sake of attaining a particular objective that seems “good” or “decent” or “fair” or simply attainable through raw political power.
So let’s return to the real issue, which isn’t — or shouldn’t be — cost-avoidance for homosexual partners, or fairness or decency or other such easily deployed phrases. The real issue is whether or not the state, by recognizing homosexual marriage, will undermine heterosexual marriage, with generally bad consequences for society. For I am a consequentialist libertarian:
Fundamentalist (or “natural right“) libertarians say that humans inherently possess the right of liberty. Consequentialists say that humans ought to enjoy liberty because, through liberty, humans are happier and more prosperous than they would be in its absence….(For more about this debate, read the online symposium, The Transformation of Libertarianism?.)
I stand with the consequentialists. Fundamentalist libertarianism reduces liberty to a matter of faith. If libertarianism cannot stand on more than faith, what makes it any better than, say, socialism or the divine right of kings?
The virtue of libertarianism, [which I explicate here, here, here, and here], is not that it must be taken on faith but that, in practice, it yields superior consequences. Superior consequences for whom, you may ask. And I will answer: for all but those who don’t wish to play by the rules of libertarianism; that is, for all but predators and parasites.
For the sake of argument, I will accept a point on which Jane Galt and KipEsquire agree, which is that, in KipEsquire’s words,
the hyper-anarcho-libertarians who try to short-circuit the entire gay marriage debate by moaning that “government should get of the marriage business altogether”…[offer], quite frankly, an unacceptably naive and simplistic worldview.
Or as Jane puts it:
There are a lot of libertarians who dismiss arguments about gay marriage with the declaration that the state shouldn’t be in the business of sanctifying marriage anyway. I don’t find that a particularly satisfying argument. It’s quite possibly true that in some ideal libertarian state, the government would not be in the business of defining marriages, or would merely enforce whatever creative contracts people chose to draw up. That’s a lovely discussion for a libertarian forum. However, we are confronting a major legal change that is actually happening in the country we live in, where marriage is, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, an institution in which the government is intimately involved.
Okay, now that the state is a central player in this drama, let’s see where that takes us.
Enter libertarian Jennifer Roback Morse (no pseudonym), writing in “Marriage and the Limits of Contract” (Policy Review Online, April-May 2005):
Marriage is a naturally occurring, pre-political institution that emerges spontaneously from society. Western society is drifting toward a redefinition of marriage as a bundle of legally defined benefits bestowed by the state. As a libertarian, I find this trend regrettable. The organic view of marriage is more consistent with the libertarian vision of a society of free and responsible individuals, governed by a constitutionally limited state…..
My central argument is that a society will be able to govern itself with a smaller, less intrusive government if that society supports organic marriage rather than the legalistic understanding of marriage….
The new idea about marriage claims that no structure should be privileged over any other. The supposedly libertarian subtext of this idea is that people should be as free as possible to make their personal choices. But the very nonlibertarian consequence of this new idea is that it creates a culture that obliterates the informal methods of enforcement. Parents can’’t raise their eyebrows and expect children to conform to the socially accepted norms of behavior, because there are no socially accepted norms of behavior. Raised eyebrows and dirty looks no longer operate as sanctions on behavior slightly or even grossly outside the norm. The modern culture of sexual and parental tolerance ruthlessly enforces a code of silence, banishing anything remotely critical of personal choice. A parent, or even a peer, who tries to tell a young person that he or she is about to do something incredibly stupid runs into the brick wall of the non-judgmental social norm….
No libertarian would claim that the presumption of economic laissez-faire means that the government can ignore people who violate the norms of property rights, contracts, and fair exchange. Apart from the occasional anarcho-capitalist, all libertarians agree that enforcing these rules is one of the most basic functions of government. With these standards for economic behavior in place, individuals can create wealth and pursue their own interests with little or no additional assistance from the state. Likewise, formal and informal standards and sanctions create the context in which couples can create marriage with minimal assistance from the state….
One side in this dispute is mistaken. There is enormous room for debate, but there ultimately is no room for compromise….We will be happier if we try to discover the truth and accommodate ourselves to it, rather than try to recreate the world according to our wishes….
Being free does not demand that everyone act impulsively rather than deliberately. Libertarian freedom is the modest demand to be left alone by the coercive apparatus of the government. Economic liberty, and libertarian freedom more broadly, is certainly consistent with living with a great many informal social and cultural constraints….
We now live in an intellectual, social, and legal environment in which the laissez-faire idea has been mechanically applied to sexual conduct and married life. But Rousseau-style state-of-nature couplings are inconsistent with a libertarian society of minimal government. In real, actually occurring societies, noncommittal sexual activity results in mothers and children who require massive expenditures and interventions by a powerful government….
But for this minimal government approach to work, there has to be a family in the first place. The family must sustain itself over the course of the life cycle of its members. If too many members spin off into complete isolation, if too many members are unwilling to cooperate with others, the family will not be able to support itself. A woman trying to raise children without their father is unlikely to contribute much to the care of her parents. In fact, unmarried parents are more likely to need help from their parents than to provide it….
Marriage is the socially preferred institution for sexual activity and childrearing in every known human society. The modern claim that there need not be and should not be any social or legal preference among sexual or childrearing contexts is, by definition, the abolition of marriage as an institution. This will be a disaster for the cause of limited government. Disputes that could be settled by custom will have to be settled in court. Support that could be provided by a stable family must be provided by taxpayers. Standards of good conduct that could be enforced informally must be enforced by law….
The advocates of the deconstruction of marriage into a series of temporary couplings with unspecified numbers and genders of people have used the language of choice and individual rights to advance their cause. This rhetoric has a powerful hold over the American mind. It is doubtful that the deconstruction of the family could have proceeded as far as it has without the use of this language of personal freedom.
Moreover, it is clear that the kind of marriage a free society needs is heterosexual marriage, which — a Morse explains — is a primary civilizing force. I now therefore reject the unrealistic (perhaps even ill-considered) position that the state ought to keep its mitts off marriage. I embrace, instead, the realistic, consequentialist position that society — acting through the state — ought to uphold the special status of heterosexual marriage by refusing legal recognition to other forms of marriage. That is, the state should refuse to treat marriage as if it were mainly (or nothing but) an arrangement to acquire certain economic advantages or to legitimate relationships that society, in the main, finds illegitimate.
The alternative is to advance further down the slippery slope toward societal disintegration and into the morass of ills which accompany that disintegration. (We’ve seen enough societal disintegration and costly consequences since the advent of the welfare state to know that the two go hand in hand.) The recognition of homosexual marriage by the state — though innocuous to many, and an article of faith among most libertarians and liberals — is another step down that slope. When the state, through its power to recognize marriage, bestows equal benefits on homosexual marriage, it will next bestow equal benefits on other domestic arrangements that fall short of traditional, heterosexual marriage. And that surely will weaken heterosexual marriage, which is the axis around which the family revolves. The state will be saying, in effect, “Anything goes. Do your thing. The courts, the welfare system, and the taxpayer — above all — will pick up the pieces.” And so it will go.
But many — KipEsquire among them — will say that the state’s refusal to legitimate homosexual marriage simply isn’t “fair.” And I will ask, “unfair to whom, to the relatively small number of persons who seek to assuage their pride or avoid paying a lawyer to document the terms of their relationship, or generally unfair to members of society (of all sexual proclivities), whose well-being is bound to suffer for the sake of homosexual pride or cost-avoidance?”
I’d rather maintain my stance that the government ought to keep its mitts off marriage. But Megan McArdle, Christopher Tozzo, and Jennifer Roback Morse have convinced me that I oughtn’t to do so. So I won’t.
Faced with a choice between libertarian shibboleth and libertarian substance, I have chosen substance. I now say: Ban homosexual marriage and avoid another step down the slippery slope toward incivility and bigger government.
(Thanks to my son for pointing me to Morse’s article.)
Regarding the debate about homosexual marriage, a common libertarian position — which I have shared — is that marriage should be taken out of the hands of the state and made a private, contractual relationship. Christopher Tozzo (a.k.a. KipEsquire) of A Stitch in Haste argues against that stance and for legal recognition of the homosexual union as a form of marriage….
KipEsquire seems to be more interested in the legalization of homosexual marriage than he is in the real effects of legalization on society’s well-being. To put it in the form of a question: What’s really at risk if society — acting through the state — undermines the privileged status of heterosexual marriage by bestowing equal benefits on other forms of marriage, and even on temporary relationships?….
The recognition of homosexual marriage by the state — though innocuous to many, and an article of faith among most libertarians and liberals — is another step down [a slippery] slope. When the state, through its power to recognize marriage, bestows equal benefits on homosexual marriage, it will next bestow equal benefits on other domestic arrangements that fall short of traditional, heterosexual marriage. And that surely will weaken heterosexual marriage, which is the axis around which the family revolves. The state will be saying, in effect, “Anything goes. Do your thing. The courts, the welfare system, and the taxpayer — above all — will pick up the pieces.” And so it will go….
Faced with a choice between libertarian shibboleth and libertarian substance, I have chosen substance. I now say: Ban homosexual marriage and avoid another step down the slippery slope toward incivility and bigger government.
Roger Kimball at Right Reason asks “Is Altruism an Illusion?” He answers in the negative. Here’s the core of his argument:
One proposition is that we cannot knowingly act except from a desire or interest which is our own. Not only is this true: it is what philosophers call a necessary truth — it could not be otherwise.
The other proposition is that all of our actions are self-interested. But this proposition, far from being self-evidently true, is a scandalous falsehood.
It is a tautology that any interest we have is an interest of our own: whose else could it be? But the objects of our interest are as various as the world is wide. No doubt much of what we do we do from motives of self-interest. But we might also do things for the sake of flag and country; for the love of a good woman; for the love of God; to discover a new country; to benefit a friend; to harm an enemy; to make a fortune; to spend a fortune.
“It is not,” Butler notes, “because we love ourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we have particular affections towards them.”
Indeed, it often happens that in pursuit of some object — through “fancy, inquisitiveness, love, or hatred, any vagrant inclination” — we harm our self-interest. Think of the scientist who ruins his health in single-minded pursuit of the truth about some problem, or a soldier who gives his life for his country.
Those examples simply prove the proposition that Kimball seeks to disprove. Take the scientist who ruins his health in a single-minded pursuit of the truth. That scientist has simply chosen between health and truth, and truth has won out. That is to say, he revealed through his actions that his self-interest was more bound up in the pursuit of truth than in his own health.
All of our actions are self-interested, to the extent that they are taken with a good understanding of their consequences. An action that seems “unselfish” — that is, directed toward the benefit of others — must necessarily arise out of self-interest. It may simply be that the satisfaction gained from, say, a relentless pursuit of truth outweighs the resulting ill-health.
The problem, as I see it, is merely definitional. Altruism is defined as “the quality of unselfish concern for the welfare of others.” (Other sources also invoke “unselfishness.”) A better definition of altruism would go like this:
Altruism is the quality of concern for the welfare of others, as evidenced by action. An altruistic act is intended, necessarily, to satisfy the moral imperatives of the person performing the act, otherwise it would not be performed. The self-interestedness of an act altruism does not, however, detract in the least from the value of such an act to its beneficiary or beneficiaries. By the same token, an act that may not seem to arise from a concern for the welfare of others may nevertheless have as much beneficial effect as a purposely altruistic act.
Adam Smith said it thus:
As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can…to direct [his] industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it….[B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
…By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.
As for “altruistic” scientists, only a few days ago I quoted the great mathematician, G.H. Hardy:
There are many highly respectable motives which may lead men to prosecute research, but three which are much more important than the rest. The first (without which the rest must come to nothing) is intellectual curiosity, desire to know the truth. Then, professional pride, anxiety to be satisfied with one’s performance, the shame that overcomes any self-respecting craftsman when his work is unworthy of his talent. Finally, ambition, desire for reputation, and the position, even the power or the money, which it brings. It may be fine to feel, when you have done your work, that you have added to the happiness or alleviated the sufferings of others, but that will not be why you did it. So if a mathematician, or a chemist, or even a physiologist, were to tell me that the driving force in his work had been the desire to benefit humanity, then I should not believe him (nor should I think any better of him if I did). His dominant motives have been those which I have stated and in which, surely, there is nothing of which any decent man need be ashamed. [A Mathematician’s Apology, 1979 edition, p. 79]
There is no essential difference between altruism, defined properly, and the pursuit of self-interest, even if that pursuit does not “seem” altruistic. In fact, the common belief that there is a difference between altruism and the pursuit of self-interest is one cause of (excuse for) purportedly compassionate but actually destructive government intervention in human affairs.
William A. Galston issues a challenge to liberals to retake the political high ground by coming out in favor of individual freedom (“Taking Liberty,” Washington Monthly, April 2005). But Galston’s notion of freedom is the usual, redistributional, ignore-the-consequences, liberal version; for example:
“A system of universal health care would allow all Americans to pursue their dreams and take more risks.” But who pays? And what happens to the quality and quantity of available health care when government takes the inevitable next step of controlling supply as well as demand?
“And it means getting serious about the millions of talented poor and minority kids who don’t continue their education after high school because no responsible adult ever told them that they couldand should.” Oh, really? No one? Never? Of such bombastic assertions is liberal policy made.
“[I]ndividual choice, while not always synonymous with liberty, and sometimes contrary to it….” Examples, please, of lawless forms of individual choice that are contrary to liberty?
“[T]here is plenty of room short of vouchers for more personal choice in K-through-12 education. Minnesota, for instance, has long permitted its families to choose among public schools across district lines; Britain does much the same.” And when “failing schools” must scale back, do the “gaining schools” get to hire teachers who know what they’re teaching, or must they hire the same sub-educated “professional educators” who caused the failing schools to fail?
“[F]reedom is seldom without cost. It usually requires sacrifice.” Yes, but the kind of sacrifice required — the willingness to go in harm’s way — isn’t the kind of redistributional sacrifice liberals have in mind when they talk about sacrifice. Nor is it reinstatement of the draft, which Galston invokes in so many words.
“We must love not another country’s dream, but our ownthe American Dreamand we must work to make it real for every American who reaches for it.” As long as the “rich” (that is, everyone who makes an above-average income) pays for it. Of course, there would then be far fewer rich and far more poor among us, but Galston and his ilk neither know that nor care much about it.
The liberal agenda already has exacted an immense cost, a cost that will continue to mount as the liberal agenda advances. Equality in squalor is the name of the liberals’ game.
Politics and Prosperity 