Freedom's Just Another Word For Pigouvian Taxation

By Robert H.

For confusing reasons, the government taking away more of your freedom does not always mean you are less free.  Here's why:

If you are worried about human freedom, I think the right way to look at the growth of government is in absolute terms, not relative terms.  A government that devotes 1 percent of a trillion dollar GDP to the police state can simply do things a government that devotes 2 percent of a billion dollar GDP cannot.  10 billion dollars buys you lots more coercion than 20 million.  Just so, if the government takes a thousand dollars from you it has constrained what you can do significantly more than if it takes one dollar, regardless of your overall income.  You may lose less marginal utility, but you definitely lose more freedom.

So it should follow that personal freedom is also best measured in absolute terms, not relative terms.    If we pretend government does not exist, it's obvious that I am free to do things a medieval peasant is not purely because I (along with most everyone else) have a higher income.  Even if my government is "bigger," I am still free to go on plane rides to parts of the world he doesn't know exist.

Oh, you are engaging in subsistence farming?  That's cool.  Yeah, I am in Maui drinking mixed drinks that would be as  nectar to you, but subsistence farming is good.  

So it is possible, if incomes climb, both for government opression and personal freedom to meaningfully grow.  The net result could be freedom enhancing even if government is more tyranical.  

The first infrence we can draw from that is that no one should assume we are less free than in the past merely because government is bigger.

The other inference is that  libertarians should, in some circumstances, embrace growth enhancing redistrubituon. Unless you've fallen into the "public choice theory means government can do nothing good ever" trap a libertarian might look favorably at government programs meant to redress market failures in the economics sense (regulating pollution, funding basic research, etc) or to policies meant to help with agency problems (for example, kids aren't rational enough to make schooling decisions but their agents, parents, have different lifetime goals and preferences from their kids and might make choices that their kids, if they were rational, would not).  Even though the government program will hurt freedom and be bad, the net growth it creates will be freedom enhancing and make the policy worthwhile.

I bring it up because Matt Yglesias thinks it is illogical for Greg Mankiw to 1. reject utilitarian arguments for redistribution, but to 2. support regulating market failures on what Matt assumes are utilititarian grounds.  The solution might be that he thinks policing market failures will lead to higher growth and be freedom, not utility maximizing.

Fascist Libertarians

by Robert H.

I continue to be worried by the trend of libertarians dismissing the idea that democracy might be, you know, good.  From Arnold Kling:

Lindberg also notices the hard-line stance of today’s left. This may be the key quote of the essay:

The notion of an invincibly center-right electorate was anathema to the emerging Left 3.0. A key moment in its reconciliation with the Democratic Party was the latter’s abandonment of policies designed with a center-right electorate in mind. For the foreseeable future, the party would lay claim to the center not on the basis of adopting positions to appease moderates and independents, but on the basis of winning more than 50 percent of the vote on election day for candidates congenial to Left 3.0 and garnering majority public support for positions congenial to Left 3.0.

I see this hard-line stance evident in the progressive’s resistance to any suggestion for reducing government spending. You cannot suggest cuts in the short run, because that would mean austerity. You cannot suggest trimming entitlement promises, because Social Security is sacred and control over health care spending is a job for technocrats.

The radical hardliners!  Claiming they should get to enact policies just because they win elections and have policies most people support!  What is this, some sort of representative democracy?

To be fair, this is really common in the "explain why the people who won the last election have novel strategies, an unstoppable political coalition, and will dominate politics forever" genre of writing.  "Unlike in the past, the people who won the last election have hit on the crazy idea of seeking majority support for their policies and candidates, then pushing those policies through while conceding as little as possible to the other side!"  Back under Bush, liberals were all complaining about how divisive Carl Rove's "50 percent plus 1" strategy was.  That was basically the same thing, "These mean old republicans are just trying to win elections and then pass the policies they like.  If they really cared about America they would make huge concessions to our policy positions for the sake of national unity."  Maybe!  Or, you know, we could let the majority rule so long as it respects human rights and our governmental institutions.

I'll let pass Kling's claim that Social Security is sacred to the new left, unfortunately made at the same time the President is calling for chained CPI as a policy concession democrats are willing to make for Republicans.

And my usual caveat: Arnold Kling is the person with whom I most disagree while still enjoying his writing, so I critically comment on his posts a lot.  I'm not trying to stir up some weird internet grudge or something.  Indeed, you can generally assume that if I *don't* write about one of his posts, I basically agreed with it.

Working for the Mandarin

By Robert H.

Oh boy, more misuse of historical analogy:

But I think that we are looking at something even deeper than that: the Mandarinization of America.  The Chinese imperial bureaucracy was immensely powerful. Entrance was theoretically open to anyone, from any walk of society—as long as they could pass a very tough examination. The number of passes was tightly restricted to keep the bureaucracy at optimal size.  Passing the tests and becoming a “scholar official” was a ticket to a very good, very secure life. And there is something to like about a system like this ... especially if you happen to be good at exams. Of course, once you gave the imperial bureaucracy a lot of power, and made entrance into said bureaucracy conditional on passing a tough exam, what you have is ... a country run by people who think that being good at exams is the most important thing on earth. Sound familiar?The people who pass these sorts of admissions tests are very clever. But they're also, as time goes on, increasingly narrow. The way to pass a series of highly competitive exams is to focus every fiber of your being on learning what the authorities want, and giving it to them. To the extent that the "Tiger Mom" phenomenon is actually real, it's arguably the cultural legacy of the Mandarin system.

To the state the obvious, there is a big difference between the ancient Chinese system, where the government selects elites by examination, and the American system, where the government and free market actors select elites by examination.  Most journalists are employeed by for profit organizations.  If all those organizations are hiring driven, smart grads from top universities, maybe those people make good employees.

Two caveats:

1.  Yes, via occupational licensing the government often requires that people have certain educational requirements, and that probably leads to over investment in education.  Maybe less than you would think, though: even in states that offer the traditional "go get on the job training" route to becoming a lawyer (California, for example), top law jobs are still staffed by top graduates from top schools.

2.  The basic point of that article is right, it *is* a real concern that low income children have difficulty cultivating the habits and resources needed to excel at these institutions.  But the solution is to subsidize and help them, not rail against institutions that seem to be providing an important market service.    Investing in future generations based on which children rich people love is a market failure, hiring Harvard grads is not.  Articles like this, which pretend that elite education is a scam foisted on America to create a ruling class, are stupid.

P.S.  Hat tip to Arnold Kling for the links.
P.P.S. Note that the second article exists firmly in the "we are obviously right, but we keep losing elections, therefor democracy is flawed" school of libertarian discourse.  It rails against one man one vote and, at the same time claims, our system is too oligarchic.  Awesome!  Fascist libertarians for the win!

Why I Think About Libertarianism So Much

By Robert H.

I am not a Libertarian, but I devote a lot of time to thinking about libertarianism and reading libertarians.  Why?  Well, the answer to that question depends a lot on the libertarians I am thinking or reading about.  I divide libertarians into three sorts:

1. Marginal Libertarians: For most policies, these people think the next policy step should be in a libertarian direction, but they don't necessarily want a libertarian state.  So of all the realistic policies we might adopt towards health care, the marginal libertarian wants the one that has less government intervention in the  marketplace, less government subsidies, etc.  Maybe he likes Paul Ryan's plan.  But, unlike a traditional libertarian, he doesn't necessarily want government OUT of healthcare.  At the margin he prefers libertarian policies, but going all the way to a minimalist state scares him.

Obviously more people are *mostly* marginal libertarians, than are *completely* marginal libertarians, since it is more a coincidental or attitudinal thing ("hey, look at that!  Most of the policies I like involve less government!") than a real ideology.  Greg Mankiw is an example of a marginal libertarian.  Or Tyler Cowen.

2. Consequentialist Libertarians: Consequentialist libertarians think the marginal policy move should be in a more libertarian direction, but they also think that those policy moves should go all the way, and we should have a night-watchman state, or anarcho-syndicalism, or whatever.  They want this because they think those kind of states are simply the best way to arrange public affairs, IE that adopting a minarchy has better consequences than adopting other forms of government.  They aren't much interested in libertarianism as a philosphy, they see it as a practical and superior form of government.

I tend to think of Scott Sumner as a consequentialist Libertarian, though he may be more of a marginal libertarian. In general I think very few people fall into this category, and I don't spend much time thinking about it.

3. Philosophical Libertarians: Philosophical libertarians think a libertarian state would have good consequences, but they also think it is philosophically mandatory.  They think government simply has no right to engage in redistribution, for example, and that this is as much a moral evil as theft.  Or maybe they don't go that far, but on some level they think there is a *moral*, as well as a practical case to be made for minimal government.

I am just going to pick the obvious example and say Robert Nozick was this kind of libertarian.  Or at least, was when he wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia.  But this category obviously includes people with muddier thinking. Ron Paul, say.

***

So why do I care about libertarianism?  Because I am close to 1 and detest 3.  In terms of category 1, I've been convinced on the merits that a lot of policy should move in a more libertarian direction.  I am for free trade, open borders, less local regulation of property (IE, "zoning," height restrictions, etc), less incarceration  etc.  I still have big soft fuzzy liberal notions that keep me from identifying as a libertarian (hooray obamacare!), but I can read Tyler Cowen's blog and "right on" more than I "tsk tsk."  So I tend to enjoy reading and thinking about consequentialist libertarians, even when they disagree with me.

In terms of category 3, I pay attention because a lot of philosophical libertarians are, to me, terrifyingly counter-majoritarian , rejecting the basic

Democratic Focused, Rights Focused, Rule of Law Focused Cultural Norms + Democracy + Rights as Side Constraints = Sound Government 

formula that worked increasingly well over the 20th century.  So, for example, here's a law profesor, Glenn Reynolds, who came on Russ Robert's show to talk about all the ways he would like to change the constitution in order to ensure that his policies always win.  His proposals run the gamut of ways you can fail to respect modern democracy,  from changing long established process rules to make the outcomes you want more likely (IE, fiddling with term limits, which he wants to do), to constitutionally forbidding democratic outcomes simply because you don't like them on policy grounds (IE, instituting a balanced budget amendment, which he does not oppose and only does not support because he thinks it won't be stringent enough), to undermining human rights when you find them inconvenient (IE, he wants a constitutionally mandatory poll tax, currently forbidden by the 24th amendment and probably by Article 25 of the ICCPR, an international human rights treaty we have ratified).

That's modern philosophical libertarianism: "We are clearly right as a philosophical and policy matter, but modern democratic government keeps not doing what we want.  Therefor, democracy is flawed and the government is only failing to recognize our obvious rightness because it is in thrall to special interests.  Therefor, we should limit democracy not just when it steps on human rights, but more generally whenever it fails to enact the policies we want.  Convincing people to vote libertarian is all well and good, but most important is to take away or limit their ability to vote for non-libertarian outcomes."  The US constitution's model, limited powers for federal government to guard against tyranny, but broad powers for state government to empower the people, has been turned into a radical new model: limited power for all government, not for the purpose of preserving democracy, but in order to make sure all our preferred policies win.  It's a sickening rejection of majoritarian rule.

Add the distrust of democracy in with the utopianism, the blind conviction in an over-simplified philosophical position, the bad economics, the confident predictions of imminent doom for western democracies (doom that will conveniently reveal the status quo to have been flawed and libertarians right all along), the revolutionary rhetoric, and the on-campus appeal and you get a movement that reminds me uncomfortably of American communism in the 20th century.  I'm not sure if movement libertarianism has the potential to actually be as dangerous or global as communism was, but I don't think it's worth finding out.  Philosophical libertarians, from Ron Paul to law professors on Econtalk, have terrible ideas.  Those ideas have to be engaged.  Doubly so since so many of their policy positions coincide with my own, and since it worries me when my beliefs about, say, ending the drug war get lumped in with the beliefs of someone who wants a constitutionally mandated gold standard, or something.

So, that's why I spend a lot of time thinking about philosophical libertarianism.

Obviously, not all philosophical libertarians fit the description I just painted (most don't, probably.  The most wrong voices are probably the ones I am most likely to remember), and I try to be charitable to the best arguments philosophical libertarianism can present (which are pretty good!).  Just as obviously, plenty of people who hold a few views I find objectionable are probably smart people with lots of other good views (I am sure Reynolds, the law professor I talked about above, is smarter than me and has better ideas than me about most things, he just has really bad ideas about whether the constitution should be amended).  I am trying to demonize ideas, not people.

Debaters of the Lost Minarchs

Arnold Kling has capped off a great conversation with Michael Humer and Bryan Caplan about why non-libertarians reject libertarianism (you can follow links back through Kling's various posts). Kling ultimately comes to the conclusion that the moral case for libertarianism isn't appealing to lots of people and the consequentialist case should be emphasized. As someone who has rejected the moral case for libertarianism but been persuaded to support a lot of libertarian policies on consequentialist grounds, that sounds about right to me.

But that still leaves the question, why *do* people reject the moral case for libertarianism, rooted in freedom and the harm principle? I've been thinking about why I reject it, and this is what I've come up with:

1. It doesn't accord with my every-day reality. In our society, only bad people live according to the harm principle (IE, the ability to use force to defend yourself and your property is heavily limited.  You can't use force to retrieve stolen property or property owed to you, can't use lethal force to protect property, can't use force to protect yourself from a non-imminent but very real threat, etc.  The state can do all these things).  It seems weird to take behavior that is illegal and immoral in the context of our society and then say everyone has a natural right to do it.

2. It's not simple. Take a basic statement of the harm principle, "the only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." That is, on its face, not a libertarian statement. Taking money from person A and giving it to starving person B arguably prevents harm from happening to B.  

To get to libertarianism, you have to start with a more complex harm principle, something like, "the only justifiable use of force is to protect people and their property from the force of others."  But now we have to come up with an argument for how materials in nature can morally be converted to property, what other ways I can morally acquire property, the extent of my property rights, define "uses of force" (IE, is a harmless trespass on your property really a use of force?  Is conversion by fraud?  Many thieves do not use coercion or the threat of coercion, they are just sneaky), explain how we can enforce contracts (are contracts really just a subset of property rights?), etc.  Nozick got this: it is hard to prove that people should adopt a minarchy from first principles.  He was constantly being forced to make subtle distinctions, to paper over whole genres of argument, to say "we need to think harder about this," etc.  I'll keep re-reading Nozick and keep reading others, but the moral argument for libertarianism is complex, has to answer lots of questions, and, to my mind, has not done so satisfactorily in a number of instances.  I suppose I'll keep blogging about what all those are in future posts.

3.  Libertarians seem to miss a lot of basic moral impulses.  People like fair shakes, like equality of opportunity,  dislike gross inequality in results, abhor human suffering, and are willing to tolerate, praise, and even force redistribution as a result.  There are a lot of contradictory impulses that animate our intuitive moral senses, and "enforce the harm principle" is only one of them. Robin Hood isn't a hero because he fights taxes, he's a hero because he fights unjust taxes and because he redistributes wealth. 

4. Once you get away from talking about the harm principle and start talking about maximizing freedom and minimizing coercion, it's not clear to me from first principles that libertarian states do that.  On the one hand, "freedom" and "coercion" have dimensions beyond "freedom from state coercion." On the other, it's not clear to me that a minarchy would actually coerce people less than a state with more powers.

5. Libertarians don't seem to pay much attention to culture and how government interacts with culture.  I once said on this blog that when a big man with a club meets a little man with a prosperous farm in the state of nature, a conservative worries the barbaric big man will kill and loot the little man, the liberal worries the brutish big man will enslave and rule over the little man, and the libertarian thinks they'll work out a contract by which the little man pays the big man for defense.  In point of fact we don't know what would happen, because it would depend entirely on the cultures, dispositions, and circumstances of the two dudes.  Same tribe?  Different tribes?  Warring tribes?  No tribes?  Ingrained cultural norms about hospitality?  Etc.  Libertarians seem to me to have a one-size-fits-all solution, when it seems to me that a minarchy (and certainly anarcho-syndicalism) could only work under a limited, some-what fantastical and a-historical set of cultural norms.  To a large extent this is a consequentialist critique, but it bleeds over into a philosophical one -- the philosophical libertarian argument would be stronger if it addressed a variety of societies full of a variety of people, rather than limiting itself (mostly) to state-of-nature societies full of pretty rational people.  

6. While we are on the subject, it is not obvious to me that state of nature analysis beats veil of ignorance analysis, or why either is better than using the real world as a starting point.

7. To be clear, I don't think anyone has made a first-principles case for why the state should have lots of power either.  Again, to me it comes down to consequentialism. 

8. My consequentialist analysis heavily tinges all this.  I think a minarchy, much less anarcho-syndicalism, would suck.  

Minarchy Is Coercive

For some bizarre reason, ideological libertarians make arguments like this:

Instead, suppose you try to convince people of the similarity between government and organized crime. You say that both provide “protection” backed by coercion. The advantage of this is that if you can get someone to shift to looking at issues along the freedom-coercion axis, that person will be less receptive across the board to arguments for state intervention based on the oppressor-oppressed axis or the civilization-barbarian axis.

Just a reminder that minarchy is coercive.  Libertarian government will coerce me if I try to tort you, rob you, break our contract, tack a nap in your bed, walk through your yard, whatever.

The scale of coercion isn't even necessarily smaller in a libertarian state.  You could imagine a state where social norms are breaking down -- maybe there is a bad recession or a war of self defense or a disruptive technological change afoot -- and *lots* of people *really* want to steal or break and enter or tort or assault.   The threat or use of force is actually having to be invoked super often to change people's behavior.   Just so, you can imagine (and might be living in) a state where most people don't particularly mind paying their taxes, and the threat of and actual use of force is less necessary to get them to comply with tax law than it is to get our people in the first state to respect property law.  Even more important, you can imagine (though it may be unlikely) taxation and redistribution transforming the first state into the second state -- maybe the state taxes people and subsidizes public education, giving people a road out of poverty and, over time, making the masses less grumpy.  Maybe it's a social insurance program.  Whatevs.  Point is I can imagine a welfare state ultimately coercing less than a libertarian state would, with coercion defined as using force or the threat of force to change behavior.

Now you may think it is extremely unlikely that welfare-state policies will have that outcome, but that's an empirical and economics question more than it is a philosophical one.  To the extent it is true based on empirical observation that libertarian states coerce less, we are making a pragmatic or consequentialist argument,  not an ex-ante ideological argument.  And pragmatic libertarians are all right in my book.

Which isn't to say ideological libertarians are clearly wrong.  Ideological libertarians like minarchy because they think it coerces for the morally right reasons, IE to enforce the harm principle.  But they should argue that.  This whole "its all about coercion vs. freedom" thing is either a wrong or a pragmatic argument, it isn't a self evident philosophical truth.  The argument they want to make is "it is about justified coercion vs. unjustified coercion."  The state isn't the mafia because it is possible for the state to coerce you for justified reasons, but it *can* *be* like the mafia if it goes too far.