Month: September 2014

A New Chicago School?

Rick Weber Economics , , , , ,

Consider America’s transportation system. I like to imagine that it ought to be a certain way. I imagine a world where a lot of freight travels competitive rail lines. And occasionally a transport truck traverses the country side, maybe to serve a new or small market without a rail road. I imagine a truck entering a town, passing some sort of device that alerts the local police that a vehicle has entered the town without the appropriate toll-paying transponder. Since this is the first time this has happened, the officer hands the trucker an application and signs him up on the spot. Oh! And there aren’t major freeways all over the place. Just a lattice work of efficient highways skirting the edges of towns and winding byways trailing through the country side. Perfect motorcycling roads and beautiful markets all in one.

My perfect world wouldn’t have much room for the fast modern engines we’re used to cars having. Planes and trains are fast enough for long distances and for shorter distances we simply don’t need to go so fast. The technology in those modern engines is malinvestment. That capital exists because interference with markets has skewed the relative financial benefits of different research (e.g. at the expense of investment in technology necessary for seamless and efficient toll-roads). This skewed capital structure also indirectly subsidizes fast-food while implicitly taxing the experience of traveling through, rather than past, small towns.

But what would actually keep it that way? It’s all a bit too good to be true. Am I being Utopian? Yes, but I think there might be some merit in that. My utopia can be thought of a limiting case; one of many possible best-case scenarios. We might conceive of a yard stick akin to Pareto Optimality but in a dynamic setting.

The world can be dynamically-Pareto optimal and have economic profits, but only those that arise as a result of productive entrepreneurship. Actions that create net value should be the only ones that generate profit. And externalities (whether pollution or politics) should be resolved by property rights and liability law. At least in the long run.

Such a world would serve as a benchmark in exactly the same way as Perfect Competition, and I would name it similarly. Perfect Markets (I’m open to suggestions) would be those that are simply too perfect to exist in the real world, but would offer a limiting case against which differing scenarios might be considered.

I suspect that something like this has already been offered but I’m only slowly working my way through one work and it will be a while before I get to another notable work. That first (from the Austrians) I suspect would be (justifiably) critical of what I’m discussing and perhaps it is a project best suited for applied mathematicians. It would certainly allow a good deal of theorem proving and other apparent mental master–… mastery (yes… mastery…). For some time there might be little apparent use or scientific merit in this. But number theory only became valuable with the advent of computers centuries after mathematicians started thinking about the minutiae of numbers. It’s not always for us to say that something doesn’t have a use just because we don’t see it yet. It’s a good idea to let some curious mathematical tinkerers doddle away at problems; they might turn out to have offered a valuable and useful gift to future generations.

Rent Control: a Case Study

Fred Foldvary Liberty

“Rent control” is better called the “rental-recipient control,” because government cannot directly control housing rentals. We can understand “rent control” by dividing the rental paid to landlords into the rent of the land and the rental of the building and management services.

The rent of a plot of land is an economic fact that cannot be directly changed by a governmental law, just as government cannot change the real price of gold. Suppose the world price of gold is $1200, and a government imposes a gold-price control of $1000. A seller would receive $1000, but the buyer is still getting $1200 worth of gold, so in effect the buyer gets a $200 subsidy.

Similarly, if an apartment would be rented for $2000 per month in an unhampered market, but government decrees a maximum rental of $1500, the tenant is getting $2000 worth of housing, and is implicitly receiving $500 of the rental per month. The law controls who receives the rental, rather than directly setting the rental.

By setting the legal rental below the market rate, the rental-recipient control creates a shortage, as the quantity of housing demanded is greater than the quantity supplied at that legal rental. The shortage then has several economic effects. Landlords do not maintain the property as well, since there is a waiting list for tenants, and the Cambridge Rent Control Board typically did not allow rental increases for property improvements. An underground market arises, with brokers who arrange to provide an apartment for a fee shared with landlords. Property values fall, and the construction of apartments is reduced. If allowed, dwelling units get converted to condominiums, further decreasing the supply of rental housing.

When the rental-recipient control is eliminated, property values rise back up. This was shown empirically in a Cato Institute research report of September 3, 2014, “Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts” [pdf] by David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer and Parag A. Pathak, based on their article of the same title in the Journal of Political Economy 122 (3) (June 2014), pp. 661–717.

From 1970 through 1994, rentals in Cambridge for units built prior to 1969 were price-controlled, and the law restricted the removal of units from the rental market. Controlled units rented for 40 percent lower than non-controlled apartments. In 1994, Massachusetts voters eliminated the rental-recipient control. That change provided a test case for what happens when rental control is abolished.

The termination of rental control raised the property values in Cambridge by $2 billion. Since the wages of labor services of rental management did not decrease, and since the costs of construction did not decrease, the rise of property values constituted an increase in the total land rent received by the landlords of the city. In part, this increase was a shift of the rent distribution from tenants, who had been implicitly receiving some of this rent, back to landlords.

But most of the increase of the land rent was a real rise due to a better market for dwellings. The property owners increased their property maintenance and renovation, and the increase in the quality and appearance of houses and neighborhoods raised both the value of the buildings and also the land rent, as measured by the increase in the land rent of the units that had not been price-controlled. As stated by the authors, the “rent-control removal spurred overall gains in neighborhood desirability.”

The political purpose of rental-recipient control is to make housing more affordable to low-income tenants. But this price control only treats the effects of unafordability, rather than curing the cause. The housing market is distorted by governmental interventions, as taxes on wages, along with other costs imposed on employers, push down the net wage level, while subsidies to real estate get capitalized into higher land rent and purchase prices.

Subsidies to real estate include artificially cheap loan rates, pushed down by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. The fiscal subsidies include depreciation deductions from income taxes, as well as deductions of property taxes and mortgage interest, plus the ability to sell properties with no capital gains tax if a similar property is bought around the same time. The biggest subsidy to land values is the creation of higher rentals and land values from the public goods provided by government, paid for mostly from taxes on, or at the expense of, wages.

So government pushes down wages and pulls up the rental cost of housing. That is why housing is unaffordable. The remedy is the eliminate the cause, to stop the pushing and pulling. Shift all taxes to land values, eliminating taxes on wages, goods, enterprise profits, and interest. With wages high and land values low, dwellings become affordable.

Most advocates of reform call for higher minimum wages, rent controls, and other taxes and subsidies, rather than the fundamental reform that would make these effects treatments unnecessary. The puzzle is why most of the reformers keep seeking to only treat the effects, and seldom seek to cure the causes of our social problems, even when the economics is explained to them. They reply that rental controls and higher minimum wages are politically feasible, while basic reforms are resisted, but that response then become self-reinforcing.

Expanding the Liberty Canon: Seneca on Mercy and on Anger

Barry Stocker History, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , , ,

Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (4-65 CE) was born in the Roman Spanish city of Cordoba. Southern Spain was one of the most Romanised parts of the Roman Empire outside of Italy, so it is not surprising that Seneca made his way to Rome where he became a writer and, it seems, a money lender. He was also tutor to and then adviser to the Emperor Nero. He had previously been in conflict with the Emperor Claudius, for unknown reasons, and was exiled to Corsica for a while as a consequence.

Seneca’s writing career covered philosophical essays, tragedies, and letters which amounted to an exploration of his philosophical interests. He followed the Stoic school of philosophy, which goes back to the Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium (334-226BCE), and was influential on the Roman upper classes. So much so that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180CE) wrote his Meditations with regard to Stoic thinking on character and ways of living. It was written in Greek, indicating how far Roman thought on ethics, politics, and other topics was continuous with, or at least engaged with, ancient Greek thought.

Seneca’s relations with Nero turned out to be even more destructive than those with Claudius. Seneca tried to educate and advise Nero to be honest, just, and restrained in the use of power. However, Nero turned out to be one of the most infamously cruel, paranoiac, and violent Emperors. These negative tendencies were turned on Seneca, so that even after Seneca had retired to the countryside to avoid the bad atmosphere around Nero, he was forced to commit suicide on suspicion of complicity with a conspiracy to assassinate Nero. (Nero himself was overthrown and pressured to commit suicide three years later.) Suicide was a relatively honourable form of death for Romans, and it was a privilege to be allowed to commit suicide rather than face execution, nevertheless Seneca and Nero can be said to have both met sorry ends as a result of political turmoil initiated by Nero.

Nero’s behaviour was really the direct opposite of that recommended to rulers by Seneca’s essays on anger and on mercy, and was a painful failure for Seneca who had tried to educate him from childhood for a moderate self-restrained use of power. Seneca’s approach to politics is to advise an absolute ruler in the use of power, so he might seem a bit paradoxical as part of a series on liberty. However, Seneca was considered as a major supporter of republics, of government based on individual liberty in the early modern period, so that Thomas Hobbes, the authoritarian-minded philosopher and political thinker, considered his thought a danger to sovereign state power.

Seneca’s thought certainly did mark the death of the Roman Republic, which was essentially abolished in substance (after a historical phase of hollowing out) by Julius Caesar in his period of absolute power from 49BCE until his assassination in 44BCE. The failure of the assassins to restore the republic led to the absolute power of Augustus and the inauguration of the autocratic emperor system.

Seneca refers unfavourably to those who use the Greek idea of ‘parrhesia’, that is free and critical public speaking, to excess, going against what had been taken as central to the liberty of citizens. The reason Seneca can be placed in the liberty tradition is that even when criticising excess in free speech, he praises a Macedonian-Greek king on the receiving end for the restraint of his reaction. Living in an age of absolute rulers, Seneca’s main concern is that they rule as the foundation of individual rights rather than as a source of arbitrary power over citizens.

The essays on mercy and anger bring together the fields of personal virtue and the best ways of governing. Virtue for Seneca, as was normal for ancient thinkers, was deeply embedded in ideas of self-restraint and moderation. From this point of view anger damages the angry person, as an example of self-harming extreme behaviour. Anger is a negative painful state of mind and to act under its influence leads to great harm.

Seneca is not simply saying that a ruler should follow general moral virtue in the manner of ruling. He places a particular responsibility on the ruler to resist anger and show mercy. The individual may harbour resentment against some enemy who caused harm, but the ruler must avoid such resentment. The ruler who publishes and executes all those regarded with suspicion as present or future enemies harms the state and the public good. Harsh treatment of individuals by rulers leads to those individuals becoming angry with the ruler so conspiring against that person. Executions will only stimulate further rebellion by those who were closest to the executed and leads to an increasingly violent period of rule. All the violence and revenge has negative consequences for the public good as well as for those persecuted.

The ruler should regard all individuals as part of the state, which he should be trying to manage responsibly. The state is harmed if any individual within the state is harmed, as the state exists to promote the public good. The ruler who cannot restrain desires for cruelty and who ignores the rights of individuals is suffering from a self-harming weakness of character and is likely to suffer violent revenge. Seneca mentions the third Roman Emperor, Caligula, in this context, who was assassinated in 41CE, four years after succeeding Tiberius.

The best thing the ruler can do is show mercy. Those who receive mercy, even after plotting assassination, are likely to start supporting the ruler, and even work for the ruler. It is better to forgive and try to integrate a conspirator than kill the conspirator so that others will wish to avenge that murder. The ruler should obey laws as much as ordinary citizens, and should be mild in applying laws. Everyone is guilty of some fault, of some minor breach of law, at some time, so that punishing all wrong-doers will lead to the destruction of a society, as nearly all inhabitants of the territory of the state disappear.

While Seneca assumes that political power rests with one person, he argues that the continuing exercise of the power rests both on reliable justice with regard to the execution of laws and restraint from the most extreme or obsessive punishment. The powers of the state are understood as different from those of an individual, and as such must be much more limited in use than the power of citizens. The rights and welfare of citizens depend on a ruler who follows law and assumes less power than individuals, which makes a worthy contribution to thought about liberty.

Some ramblings on intellectual diversity (in universities and in libertarianism)

Brandon Christensen Comments, Politics , , , , ,

I’ve been reading through the ‘comments’ threads this weekend and especially my dialogues with Dr Amburgey (he’s at the University of Toronto’s prestigious business school). Amburgey describes himself as a “pragmatist” or a “centrist” but nevertheless has been a fairly stalwart defender of the Obama administration (except on its egregious violations of our civil liberties) and a blistering critic of the GOP’s right-wing. Reading through our dialogues (something I wish more readers would get involved in), I believe I have found the Left’s glaring weakness in today’s world: It’s de facto intellectual monopoly in Western universities today. Aside from wanting to gratefully thank him for his support and encouragement in our project via the ‘comments’ threads, I thought I would elaborate a bit upon this notion of a lack of diversity within academia.

Intellectual diversity is almost entirely absent in the US academy today. A Georgetown University Law Professor, Nick Rosenkrantz, pointed this out as far as law schools go, but is this dearth of diversity a bad thing? I would argue that ‘no’ it’s not if you’re on the Right, and ‘yes’ it is if you’re on the Left.

Universities have long been a bastion of Leftist thought (I note that this is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if diversity is important to you, for reasons I hope to explain below). Universities are also amongst the most conservative organization in societies (think of what it takes to navigate through the labyrinth of requirements in order to become a member of the professoriate). This is not a coincidence. Leftist thought has, since the advent of socialism in the 18th century, been characterized by it’s conservatism (especially its paternalism). It’s rhetoriticians just disguise it as progressive.

At any rate, Rosenkrantz points out that the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) has five conservative judges and four Leftists, which is extremely unreflective of the law school professoriate. The point made by Rosenkrantz is that law students may not be getting an education that accurately reflects how the real world works.

In essence, law students are getting straw man arguments when it comes to conservatives and libertarians instead of actual conservative and libertarian arguments. This is true, and it’s reflective of the social sciences and of business schools as well. Such an arrangement has served the American Right extremely well over the past three decades, too.

Consider this: If your organization is dedicated to teaching students about this or that, and you only give them half the story, who or what is going to explain the other half? What I’ve found is that nonconformist students (conservatives and libertarians) are very good at taking in the lessons that are taught by Leftists (including their straw men) and supplementing them with their own readings on conservative and libertarian thought. Now contrast this with the conforming student. The one who eats up everything the professor teaches and takes it as more or less the Truth.

Outside of academia, where the battlefield of ideas is much less focused, and has much more money at stake, which student do you think is likely to have an edge intellectually-speaking? The student who read all he was supposed to and then some extra to account for different perspectives, or the student who read all he was supposed to and took it as more or less the Truth?

Many universities have been slow to catch up with other organizations that have recognized the benefits of not only cultural diversity but of intellectual diversity as well.  If the Left wants to mount any sort of counter-attack in the near- or medium-term future, it would do well to open up to the idea of having more actual, intellectual diversity on its faculties.

Leftists often claim that they are losing the battle of ideas because of money (or lack thereof) but this is absurd on its face, and the longer Leftists try to win by this line of reasoning, the deeper will be the hole out of which they will inevitably have to climb.

There is also the argument that Leftists don’t really have an argument. They simply have reactions to new ideas being created and put forth by libertarians (and to a lesser extent, conservatives here in the US, who are heavily influenced by libertarian ideas).

While there is no diversity in academia there is obviously plenty of it outside. I think this shows a healthy “macro” picture, to be honest.

Universities were once independent (from state influence) organizations and that independence helped contribute to a culture that has given the West what it has today. If universities – with their rules and regulations and traditions – lose their place as bastions of Left-wing ideology, what would take their place? Think about it: The university, because of its extremely conservative traditions, actually tempers the thought of socialists, and if they come under assault then hardcore Leftism will simply find another way to manifest itself. Left-wing literature professors are one thing. Left-wing demagogues are quite another.

This ties in quite well with my other observation, in ‘comments’ threads not found here at NOL, that libertarians tend to be anti-education. Many of them justify this reactionary stance because of the de facto monopoly the Left has, but I think this reactionary stance has more to with the broader libertarian movement’s own intolerance of intellectual diversity.

The recently launched liberty.me community is a good example of this. I think about libertarianism’s recent reactionary nature in this way: Libertarianism got hot after Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential run. It got so hot that a small but very visible movement was sparked. After the initial success, though, the movement inevitably fell back into one of cliques, clichés, and group-think mentality for a great number of people excited by Paul’s message. Most people who became involved in libertarianism read one or two books recommended Paul and his acolytes. This process further entrenched them, but from there on out this large segment of the libertarian quadrant simply stopped exploring ideas and engaging in dialogue with intellectual adversaries. ‘Statist’ became a derisive term.

These new online communities have been created for the libertarian who seeks comfort in the presence of others like him, whereas consortiums like NOL (and those found on our blog roll) are a place for us to continue the pursuit for truth and the battle for hearts and minds in an open and competitive environment. As a libertarian I think these circle-jerks that crop up serve a useful social function, but I have to wonder aloud how much learning actually occurs in those places.

Part Two of Capitalism for the Intelligent Ignorant: the Actors

Jacques Delacroix Economics, History , ,

Jacques Delacroix's avatarFACTS MATTER

This is a little complicated. Part One of this series listed the main constraints on pure capitalism. Then, I took a detour – which was NOT Part Two – on the subject of money which is a quite specialized topic. Below is Part Two of Capitalism for the Intelligent and Ignorant. It describes the main actors of capitalism, of real capitalism, of capitalism such as it exists. with an emphasis on the American instance.

As have stated forcefully in Part One the government is a the biggest economic actor in all developed countries. Although it’s nowhere constitutionally required, at any one time, the government has most or almost most of the money in its hands. This fact alone requires it to do some investing. It’s also the biggest buyer of many things because of the sheer size of government agencies, including the armed forces. It’s also a major seller of…

View original post 2,932 more words

Local Citizenship

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

In his latest blog over in Openborders.info, my usual stamping grounds, Nathan Smith discusses the need for citizenship to be voluntary. I agree with Nathan Smith wholeheartedly here. What value is citizenship if a man is forced to have it? A fellow citizen is someone you should be willing to share a meal with during the bests of time. A fellow citizen is someone you should be willing to trust in the trenches during times of war. A meal is never pleasant when your company is forced to be there, and I for one wouldn’t want to fight alongside an unwilling ally.

If citizenship is to be voluntary however the offer of citizenship should also be voluntary.  That is to say that a polity should be able to decide who it wishes to offer citizenship to. United States immigration law currently adds new citizens without much consultation to current citizens on whether they wish to accept newcomers. This is a plain violation of the right to free association.

It is for this reason that I disagree on granting US citizenship to its current illegal alien population. It is true that on occasion a majority of the US public favors granting a pathway to citizenship to the illegal alien population, but even during the best of times a substantial portion are opposed to it. I cannot see a justification to force someone to associate with another in political union when alternatives exist. To be fair, I also oppose granting citizenship to newborn babies regardless of whether their parents are recent Pakistani migrants or from Nebraska.

I favor instead replacing national citizenship in the United States with local citizenship. Cities are small enough that disgruntled minorities can easily move to somewhere more favorable to their views. City formation is also fluid enough that they can be broken up much more easily than their larger counterparts.

By no means is my proposal to radically change citizenship. The concept of citizenship was born in the Greek polis, and carried into the modern era through the Italian city-states and, to a lesser extent, the Swiss cantons and the Hanseatic League cities. Movement towards local citizenship would be the return to tradition, not a departure from it.

It was only after the French Revolution that we saw the rise of national citizenship as an idea in the western world. Arguably in the United States local citizenship was important up till the passage of the 14th amendment, which allowed the federal government to effectively nationalize citizenship.

We can already see early signs of local citizenship regaining popularity. In my home city of Los Angeles local citizenship is offered to residents who can prove they have a ‘stake’ in the future of the city. Stakeholder status is independent of migrant status and allows one to both vote and run in local elections. Stakeholder status can be achieved by showing that one lives, works, or owns property in Los Angeles.

Article 9, Section 906 of the Los Angeles City Charter readers:

“(2) neighborhood council membership will be open to everyone who lives, works or owns property in the area (stakeholders);”

In New York State there is a proposed bill, ‘The New York is Home Act’, that would grant New York state citizenship to those who have paid state taxes, have no substantial criminal record, and lived in the state for a certain number of years. This proposal is independent of one’s federal migration status.

The European Union also offers a model on how local citizenship can exist in union with federal citizenship. I favor this model the least as the EU regulates the obligations of member states towards federal citizens so heavily that the difference between local citizenships are becoming increasingly marginal. I fear that the ultimate outcome will be that, as in the United States, federal citizenship in Europe will simply become national citizenship.

My ideal world is composed of three pillars (1) local citizenship, (2) open borders, and (3) a common market. Cities could elect who they wish to grant the privilege of being involved in political life, and individuals themselves would be free to decide which city, if any, they would wish to join. There would still be those who felt they were being forced to politically associate but, an open borders regime coupled with fluid city formation and a common market, should allow this number to be minimized.

In his latest blog post on world government Brandon Christensen implicitly discusses world citizenship. I have previously aired my disagreement with Christensen on the issue of world government, but feel obliged to point out that the matter of citizenship is also one of the areas that leave me skeptical of world government. Namely my concerns are that:

(1) World citizenship would force all of humanity to associate politically, even if we rather not.

(2) World citizenship would create free rider problems among political actors. Why should one forgo the costs of becoming informed on political issues if their marginal effect on world issues is close to nill? Meanwhile larger governments, even if initially federal in nature, have a nasty tendency to increasingly take over local affairs. We need only look at the progression of transportation and education in the United States from being local affairs to federal ones.

On my to do list is to explore what the optimal amount of citizens is and a more detailed response to Christensen on the issue of world government. On the off chance that I should die before I can write the latter response, let me state for the record that I am actually quite supportive of international agreements such as NAFTA that bring us closer to a common market. I am even in favor of formalizing the loose federation that composes the western world. Where I stray is that I prefer an international order where powers like the Chinese and Russian spheres are strong enough to compete with the west.

P.P.S. I offer apologies if I drop off here and there. I lurk the consortium daily, and if I don’t reply it is because I’ve not yet mastered time management as well as others.

Finding Books in Cuba

Brandon Christensen Books , , ,

Guillermo’s recent post has inspired me. Here:

I spent the next couple of days walking the streets of Havana, not only looking for Yoss’ bookseller friend but also finding other antiquarian bookstores and book stands that might have copies of de Rojas’s Espiral, Una leyenda del futuro, and El año 200. I could only put my hands on an old copy of the second one. I called Yoss again and asked for help. I also invited him out again, this time to the hotel’s tourist bar.

Cuba has two economies with their own currencies; one is for its citizens, the majority of whom live quite modestly, and the other is for tourists. Cubans aren’t welcome in the tourist establishments unless someone brings them in.

That was Yoss’s case. The bouncers at the hotel door stopped him flat, saying wearing a vest without a shirt wasn’t appropriate. I needed to go find him and say he was my guest. The bouncers complied.

It was on this occasion when Yoss gave me details about the Cuban Sci-Fi tradition. He told me it dated back to before the Communist regime but that it had flourished in the seventies as a result of the cultural exchange the country had with Russia and the Soviet Bloc.

Read the rest. It’s by Ilan Stavans, a Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. It comes as no surprise to readers here, I’m sure, that books are hard to find in Cuba (and science fiction books at that!). I have just three comments. First, notice that cultural exchange was responsible for the introduction of something new. Second, be sure to check out the photos of Yoss. He sports a t-shirt with the Batman logo in one pic, and a t-shirt with the Punisher logo in another. (The Punisher is a bad ass Marvel Comics character.) Lastly, the author could not help but insult US culture (of which he is a part of).

La escasez habanera

Guillermo Pineda Philosophy , , , , , , , , , , ,

IMG_8648.JPG
La escasez habanera es única en el mundo. Se evidencia en que carecen de la amargura para vivir frustrados llorando la causalidad ante-bajo-de-desde-en-entre-hacia-para-sobre-tras el sistema económico global. Porque la escasez de las conversaciones habaneras carece de la auto complacencia que pulula ante-bajo-con-de-en-entre-por-tras aquellas sociedades donde la moda actúa como el soma en las mentes de la juventud. Porque la escasez de-desde-en-entre-por-según-tras sus cuerpos se expresa en los escasos músculos que no mueven cuando bailan al ritmo de la salsa en las casas, calles y avenidas de la ciudad. Porque la escasez de-desde-en-entre-por-según-sobre-tras sus memorias se refleja en las mentes soñadoras de una juventud que crece sin memorizar historias de treguas y derrotas ante el imperialismo que derrotó a cada uno de los países vecinos.

Y es que, tal parece, solo afuera de La Habana es la escasez definida por los diccionarios como una causa-efecto negativos ante-con-de-desde-en-entre-hacia-por-según-tras las relaciones humanas.

Libertarians and World Government, Part 3

Brandon Christensen Law , , , , , , , ,

I have briefly blogged about the problem libertarians face when confronted with world government and the inherent internationalism of their creed before (here and here), but none of those musings were as deep as I’d have liked them to be. I think I have a better understanding of this puzzle now, and therefore you’re gonna get a longer than usual post.

First up is the task of confronting the skepticism of all government that comes from most American libertarians. This is a skepticism that becomes all the more hostile as the level of government rises. So, for example, many libertarians are contemptuous of local government but don’t mind it all that much. This contemptuousness rises a little when the next level of government is involved: that of the administrative unit (in the US this is known as a “state” for reasons I hope to explain a little further below; elsewhere the administrative unit is usually known as a “province”). When the federal government is involved, in US politics, the libertarian becomes deeply suspicious and hostile to its intents and actions. Much of this is warranted, of course, and the American libertarian usually allows the federal level of government room to maneuver in matters of foreign policy and the courts (the two legitimate functions of the state).

When a level of governance rises up any further than that, though, to the regional level (NAFTA, CAFTA, etc.) or the supranational level (the UN, World Bank, EU, etc.), the animosity displayed towards government is vicious and reactionary rather than thoughtful and penetrating. Again, much of this is warranted, as these levels of governance usually act beyond the scope of democracy and seem only to serve the interests of those who belong to the regional and supranational organizations (unelected – i.e. politically appointed – bureaucrats). The nature of these “higher levels” of government is the main reason the patron saints of modern-day libertarians – the interwar economist Ludwig von Mises and the legal philosopher FA Hayek chief among them – were highly critical of the creation of these organizations (as well as the short-lived League of Nations).

It does not follow, however, that the inter- and post-war libertarians disavowed the earlier writings of classical liberals on world government. Indeed, Ludwig von Mises himself, in his 1927 book Liberalism (pdf), observed:

Just as, in the eyes of the liberal, the state is not the highest ideal, so it is also not the best apparatus of compulsion. The metaphysical theory of the state declares—approaching, in this respect, the vanity and presumption of the absolute monarchs—that each individual state is sovereign, i.e., that it represents the last and highest court of appeals. But, for the liberal, the world does not end at the borders of the state. In his eyes, whatever significance national boundaries have is only incidental and subordinate. His political thinking encompasses the whole of mankind. The starting-point of his entire political philosophy is the conviction that the division of labor is international and not merely national. He realizes from the very first that it is not sufficient to establish peace within each country, that it is much more important that all nations live at peace with one another. The liberal therefore demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis. For this reason he sees the law of each nation as subordinate to international law, and that is why he demands supranational tribunals and administrative authorities to assure peace among nations in the same way that the judicial and executive organs of each country are charged with the maintenance of peace within its own territory.

For a long time the demand for the establishment of such a supranational world organization was confined to a few thinkers who were considered utopians and went unheeded. To be sure, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the world repeatedly witnessed the spectacle of the statesmen of the leading powers gathered around the conference table to arrive at a common accord, and after the middle of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of supranational institutions were established, the most widely noted of which are the Red Cross and the International Postal Union. Yet all of this was still a very far cry from the creation of a genuine supranational organization. Even the Hague Peace Conference signified hardly any progress in this respect. It was only the horrors of the World War that first made it possible to win widespread support for the idea of an organization of all nations that would be in a position to prevent future conflicts. (147-148)

What Mises and other interwar liberals missed in regards to establishing a supranational state is the very nature of the US constitution. Interwar liberals were more interested in pointing out the blatant inconsistencies of the multilateral institutions being erected after the war than they were with elaborating upon the idea of a world state. My guess is that they viewed the world state as too far out of reach for their goals at the time, and thus fell back on the ‘balance of power’ option (pdf) that was still popular among liberals at the time. The US constitution is, at its core, a pact between sovereign states to join together politically for the mutual self-interests of foreign affairs and legal standardization (a standardization that is very minimal, as it allows for plenty of flexibility and competition).

This pact, aside from explaining why US administrative units are known as ‘states’ rather than ‘provinces,’ is the key to slowly building a world state that is both representative and liberal (in that it exists to protect the rights of individuals first and foremost).

One of the biggest weaknesses of the US constitution to date is its inability to expand upon the notion that it is a legal charter outlining the duties of a supranational organization. Creating a mechanism that allows for the recognition of foreign provinces  as US member states by incorporating them into the federal apparatus would be a step in the right direction. This mechanism would obviously have to be slowed down in some way. It would have to be approved, for example, by two-thirds of all state legislatures (Utah and California say ‘Yes’ while Georgia says ‘No’) as well as two-thirds of both legislative bodies in the federal government (67% ‘Yes’ vote from both the House and the Senate).

There would also have to be a mechanism allowing for states in the federal union to exit if they so pleased (again in a way that is slow and deliberate so that as many factions as possible could have their voices heard). Contra to some musings by paleolibertarians here in the US, the constitution and the Bill of Rights actually has a sophisticated method of dealing with intrastate conflict within its sphere of jurisdiction; secession is allowed between states, as is the merging of two or more states, although secession from the federal government is so far prohibited (this failing would also have to be addressed before a world state could be contemplated).

It seems to me that the US has practiced unpolished versions of my argument in the past. Texas, for example, seceded from Mexico before becoming a US “state” through annexation.

Does any of this make sense, or do I just sound like a mad man?

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. The changing face of Chinese advertisements
  2. Paul Krugman’s Philosophy of Economics, and What It Should Be
  3. Impertinent Obstructions, Human Folly, and the Power of the Market
  4. Anthropologist David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years is now available free online (pdf)

Capitalism for the Intelligent but Ignorant – Part One: the Constraints

Jacques Delacroix Economics

Jacques Delacroix's avatarFACTS MATTER

First, the obvious that hardly anyone talks about: If you have not taken at least two good courses in economics, it’s not likely that you understand even the basics of capitalism. If you have, when you were 19 and suffering from severe testosterone poisoning (male or female) it’s still likely that you don’t understand much. There are exceptions: It’s possible to teach oneself through assiduous reading of a good newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal. I don’t know how many people do this although I did, to a large extent. It took me about ten years.

Don’t blame yourself at all. Capitalism is a topic that should be taught every year throughout junior and senior high school. It never is. Also teachers of introductory economics often do a very bad job of it for reasons we need not go into here. A few do more harm than good…

View original post 1,568 more words

Scotland, Nation, and Liberty

Barry Stocker Current Events, History, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

As I start writing voting is coming to an end in Scotland with regard to a referendum on whether Scotland should remain part of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom comprises England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. There are those in Cornwall, a peninsula on the extreme south-west of England who argue that is should be represented as an entity on  level with those four components of the UK, as it was regarded as distinct from England into the sixteenth century, never having being properly incorporated into Roman Britannia or Anglo-Saxon Wessex (the Old English kingdom in the south west, which became the nucleus of the Medieval English state).

From the 10th century onwards Anglo-Saxon kings asserted supremacy over Scotland with varying degrees of success in obtaining some recognition of overlordship from Scottish kings. Wars between Scotland and England led to victory for Scotland in the fourteenth century when the English monarchy ended attempts to use force to demand Scottish subordination, or even incorporation of Scotland, and European states accepted Scotland as a sovereign entity. In the early seventeenth century, Queen Elizabeth I of England died childless so that the heir to the English crown was King James VI of Scotland who became James I of England. He moved his court from Edinburgh to London, and pushed for the union of two kingdoms in his person to become a state union of England and Scotland as Great Britain. (At this time, Wales was treated as a part of England.)

The English Parliament resisted the creation of Great Britain, but by the early eighteenth century there was mutual interest in the trade and economic advantages of state union with accompany reductions on trade barriers, particularly after the failure of a brief attempt at Scottish empire building in Central America.  An Act of Union was passed by the English Parliament in 1707 and then by the Scottish Parliament in 1708, which abolished the Scottish Parliament. It also left in place major differences in laws, the legal system, education, and the state church, which have lasted until the present day.

Before the personal union of Scotland and England under James VI/I, Scotland itself went through a process of internal integration, or colonisation of the peripheral regions by the centre, as all nations have. This included the 1493  abolition of the Lord of the Isles, which indicated sovereignty over an area covering the highland and island areas of Scotland, and which has a complex history in relation to all the neighbouring powers. The incorporation  of that region, what could easily have been a separate sovereign nation if history had gone a bit differently, was not completed until 1745, that is after the Act of Union, when a British army destroyed an attempted restoration of the Stuart family of James VI/I. The attempted restoration is known as the Jacobite Rebellion. Jacobite refers to the latinised form of James, in honour of James II, who was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 due to his Catholic religion, fears that he was attempting to enforce that religion as a state church instead of the existing Protestant established church, and fears that he was creating an absolute monarchy with a decorative role only for Parliament.

The Jacobite Rebellion itself divided Scotland between the traditional semi-feudal highland chiefs and the commercial world of the Lowlands. As a consequence of the failure of the Rebellion, British law was enforced fully for the first time beyond the Highland line, while restrictions were placed of Highland customs, clothing, and language. The language of the Highlands was Gaelic (a Celtic language relate to Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton).   This was the triumph of the Scots (a dialect of English, or a language which is very close to English depending on point of view) and English speaking Lowlanders and the end of the process initiated by the early Stuart overthrow of the Lords of the Isles.

The United Kingdom was formed by the 1800 Act of Union, which abolished the Irish parliament. Most of Ireland left to form what is now the Republic of Ireland in the early 1920s, but Northern Ireland remained, now with its own parliament, which is why there is still a UK, not just Great Britain.

All this history is to indicate the long historical nature and the complexity of the  relations between England and Scotland, with regard to sovereignty, identity, and so on. Scotland like England was itself a work in progress before union, and the integration of Scotland into what might be taken as a single nation, was completed over one hundred years after the Act of Union, over two hundred years after the union of crowns, under the leadership of the British crown, which at that time was unified with the German princedom of Hanover.

Scotland was never assimilated into England, even when there was no parliament, and Scotland has always been distinct from England than Wales in at least two respects:

  1. there is a higher proportion of trade within Scotland than with England, than of internal Welsh trading activity compared with trade with England;
  2. Wales’s contact with urban centres is just as much with the nearby English cities of Bristol, Birmingham, and Liverpool as with its own cities (principally Swansea and Cardiff) while Scotland is very focused on its own cities (principally Edinburgh and Glasgow).

However, Wales is more distinct from England in language since twenty per cent  speak Welsh fluently, everyone studies Welsh at school, and Wales is officially bilingual, even gesturing towards Welsh language priority. Gaelic speakers are about one per cent of the Scottish population.

The Welsh-Scottish comparison serves to show that ways of assessing national identity and distinctness vary and that there is no one way of evaluating this, so there can be no one institutional and political strategy for accommodating national differences within a state. The level and intensity of Scottish distinctness and identity has amounted to a nation now divided almost exactly down the middle about whether it wishes to separate from the UK.

This is not just an issue of identity though, as a large part of the Scottish independence vote is based on a belief that Scotland is egalitarian, welfarist, communal, social democratic, or even socialist, in comparison with England and that the countries are polar opposites on these issues. Another part of support for independence is the hope that North Sea oil will bring more benefit to Scotland if a Scottish government is collecting the tax revenue, accompanied by the belief that taxation at the UK level is some kind of resource theft.

Building on the historical, political, and institutional account above, what conclusions am I drawing? The first thing to state is of course that Scotland has every right to leave the UK if it so wishes, that it is a good thing that a referendum is being held to test what Scots want, and that if independence is what is wanted, then the government of the residual UK use must take a positive and co-operative approach to the departure of Scotland.

However, I certainly don’t believe that Scotland should separate. Part of that is the emotional patriotism of an Englishman, call it nationalism no problem, based on centuries of shared enterprise and struggle, good (the defeat of National Socialist Germany) and bad (imperialism). The Scots took a disproportionately large part in the trading, colonising, and military aspects of that joint history, and during that history many Scots went to England and became part of English society, John Stuart Mill’s father is a notable example. One of the great flourishing moments of that history was the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume, Adam Smith, and others, which always involved education, travel, and interaction in England as well as Scotland.

Why peace behind centuries of joint enterprise in which despite centralising processes, differences of identity and in institutions proved to be compatible with the growth of commercial society, civil society, liberty under law, parliamentary government, science and culture, and the twentieth century struggle against totalitarianism.

There’s  a lot for liberty advocates to admire there, without denying that a lot of worse things happened as well, and surely we should be disposed to favour building on that rather than destroying it. Many liberty advocates have a preference for small nations where maybe there is more chance of intelligent laws and policies, less remote from everyday reality and individual understanding of particular realities.

I can only agree with the provision that such a result can be achieved through forms of federalism which are decentralising rather than centralising so that the federal centre is largely responsible for trade, foreign and defence policy, and the lower region and national levels do everything else in an innovative, flexible, diverse, and competitive way.

There is still some benefit in the UK remaining as a unified power for defence and military purposes. It is would not be good from a liberty point of view for a country that in its military budget and capacities, its diplomatic and transnational weight, is still a match for nearly all the major powers. The UK whatever its faults is one of the more liberty  oriented parts of the world, and no good would come from lessening its strategic and diplomatic weight. Of course those liberty advocates who prefer very neutralist and almost pacifist attitudes to international relations will not be impressed, but we live in a world where states with low levels of inner liberty and little respect for the rights of others exist, and should be at least matched by powers that are more liberty oriented at home and more respectful of the rights in the international sphere. The role of liberal democracies has not always been admirable in this sphere, but better those errors than unchecked aggression from authoritarian states.

The institutions of liberty are more likely to flourish in democratic states, where a multiplicity of national and regional identities flourish, than in attempts to break away based on some inclination, of some degree of intensity, that singular national identity is better than multiplicity and that national identity needs unrestrained state sovereignty. In the particular case of Scotland, the Scottish National Party, and others for independence, are relying on the dream of a more socialist country where ‘Scottish’ oil is protected from the English to fund an expanding state, without having a plausible explanation for the currency to be used on independence, or any sense of reality about how international markets testing the prudence of a new state are likely to drive it towards high interest rates and displays of deficit reduction.

The political consequences of a subsequent disillusion with social democratic dreams mingled with existing  assumptions of a morally superior Scottish community, and related anti-English feeling, in economically disruptive circumstances could be most severe and disturbing. Even on a more optimistic assumption about the future in which Scotland moves smoothly into a more social democratic future, nothing is gained from a pro-liberty point of view. Pro-liberty commentators who think that because Hume and Smith were Scots that an independent Scotland will be guided by Enlightenment classical liberalism have completely lost the plot.

A Letter to Stuff You Should Know

Rick Weber Economics

SYSK recently published a podcast introducing the idea of socialism. Below is my open letter to them.

Hey guys,

I love your podcast but was bracing myself for the socialism episode (I’m an economist interested in the socialist calculation debate, I’m no expert but many economists don’t even know about this debate). You guys did a great job discussing socialism and I was pleasantly surprised. Most people think “socialism can’t work because people will be lazy” but you rightly pointed out that gulags are a strong motivator and the real problem was a sluggish adaptation to changing conditions due to a non-spontaneous price system.

Some clarifying points:

  • In economics socialism is defined as centralized control of the means of production (e.g. TV factories, but not necessarily TV sets). A socialist economy is one that takes this to its limit and as far as I know has only existed in Russia between 1918 and 1921.
  • In 1920 Ludwig von Mises wrote Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Prior to this point the official socialist stand was essentially, “1. Capitalism lays the foundations for socialism. 2. ??? 3. Utopia!” Socialists had never described how socialism would solve economic problems (what to produce, where, by whom, for whom, etc.). Mises pointed out that those issues are solved automatically by the working of unfettered markets that match incentives with information. If the price of steel is $X/ton that tells buyers “you’d better feel pretty confident that you can use this steel to create something more valuable than that,” while telling sellers “the resources you are using would be better used elsewhere in the market if you can’t keep your cost below $X/ton.”
  • (This is expressed eloquently by Hayek’s 1945 article, The Use of Knowledge in Society.
  • Market socialism is a system where a socialist economy sets up pseudo-markets. So Josh and Chuck are each put in charge of a plant that makes shoes and each has to get the required leather. In theory they have to compete to get leather (just like in real markets) and that competition provides information about competing uses of different inputs. But if Josh turns a profit he doesn’t get to keep it for himself and if Chuck makes a loss he can’t go bankrupt (though he could get sent to the gulags). This sort of system was proposed in response to Mises’ 1920 article. This is when socialists started actually coming up with a theory of socialism (how it could work to allocate resources so that benefits exceed opportunity costs).

Here’s a great read that covers the essentials of this issue: National Economic Planning: What is Left. It boils down to this: without private property and rule of law (i.e. a situation where the “king” can’t arbitrarily interfere with people’s plans and has to follow the same universal rules as everyone else) there can’t be markets with profits and losses. Without that there can’t be prices that incorporate all the information, which is scattered and often tacit (i.e. non-reportable), relevant to economic decisions. Without those prices it becomes impossible for central planners to know the opportunity costs of their actions and so they cannot make economic decisions that are rational (i.e. weigh benefits to consumers against costs to producers). This is true even if we assume perfectly altruistic and motivated “New Soviet Man” and benevolent dictators.

Without markets central planners are groping in the dark. With markets there are no longer central planners.

Thanks for making my commute more enjoyable!

Your fan,
Rick

Why cash is beautiful

Rick Weber Economics ,

If you had $20 to spend, what would you get? Would it be the bottle of wine a guest brought to the dinner party you invited her to? No? It cost her $20, but you wanted it less than the jar of Nutella and very nice glass of whisky you bought with the last $20 you spent. Economists recognize that that gift was inefficient. She took $20 and turned it into something worth less than $20 by making it a gift for you. And you’ll do the same when she invites you over for dinner.

You agree with me, but you feel like something is fishy. I’m tricking you somehow maybe, but certainly you won’t bring an AJ with you the next time a friend invites you to a party. And you’d be disturbed if they did the same to you. A gift is just more thoughtful.

This was a common theme from my students listened to an Econtalk podcast. But I disagree with that assessment. Not as an economist (from which position I also disagree), but as a sociable person, from an aesthetic position. Cash is beautiful. When you give me a twenty dollar bill you are giving me the sweat of your brow to buy anything my heart desires. And what I receive may very well spare me the sweat of my own brow to meet my own needs. A bottle of wine is thoughtful, but cash gives me access to time and time is the most precious commodity.

Most people, when receiving a gift, would be happier with something that is less valuable to them than they would getting access to anything they want or need via a cash gift. And frankly, I’d rather try to convince them that I wronged them by not giving them cash over a bottle of wine over a bottle of wine. So the next time I go to a party I’ll bring a gift and not cash. At least if that party’s hosted by “civilians”. Economists I’ll just give cash… I’m not sure if that implies I like them more or less.

A few remarks on interventions in Syria and Iraq

Edwin van de Haar Current Events , , , , , , , , , , ,

After a few busy days at the office I finally have the time to take up Brandon’s challenge and write a few lines about interventions in Syria and Iraq. Indeed, as Brandon writes in some of the comments the basic classical liberal and liberal position is that interventions are a bad idea. They are a breach of the sovereignty of other states, and rarely achieve their goals. Military interventions upset the international order and the international and regional balances of power, and open the door to all kinds of counter-interventions. They are especially prone to failure when their goals are extensive, such as a desire to construct democracy in countries without democratic traditions. This is an act of rationalist constructivism, long associated with communism and socialism rather than liberalism.

Whether all interventions also weaken and possibly destabilize the intervening power, as some libertarians (and Brandon) claim is another matter. This surely depends on so many other variables that it is hard to take as a general rule. Indeed, to welcome a Chinese intervention to fight ISIS/ISIL in the expectation this would seriously weaken authoritarian China (again see Brandon’s thought provoking blog a few days ago) seems a few bridges too far.

Still, it is too simple to rule out all interventions, in all circumstances. While a duty to intervene cannot easily be defended, the right to intervention is a different matter altogether. For example, while generally opposed to military interventions for humanitarian purposes, David Hume and Adam Smith did allow prudent political leaders to intervene. Hardly ever for humanitarian reasons, but for reasons of state. Important principles they embraced, for example found in the work of Hugo Grotius, were the rights to punishment, retaliation, preventive action, the protection of property rights and the protection of subjects against other countries.

Applying the wisdom of the Scots to our current world does open the door for some military action by the West against ISIL in Syria and Iraq. For the US and Britain, the beheadings of their subjects are clear reasons for action. Also, ISIL clearly upsets the fragile regional balance of power, where the West has a clear stake given the recent intervention in Iraq (regardless what one thinks of that intervention, but that is all water under the bridge). Also, ISIL’s state formation is not a case of regular secession which libertarians may sympathize with. While it has its supporters, this is mainly a  case of state formation at gun point, against the will of most people inhabiting the land controlled by ISIL.

Of course, this does not mean President Obama’s plan is going to succeed. While military action may kill many of the ISIL leaders and perhaps ultimately minimize its military capacity, it seems highly unlikely that foreign intervention is able to eradicate ISIL. After all, interventions do not change the mindsets of people. Surely, this ideology will remain with us, in one form or the other. That is no reason to abstain from intervention, yet it is a reason to set clear and limited goals, and to be honest and modest about its inevitably limited long term effects.