Current Events

Why did the Pseudo-Libertarians Bring a White Nationalist to ISFLC in the first place?

Zachary Woodman Culture, Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , , ,

This weekend I attended the International Students for Liberty Conference in DC, the largest global meeting of libertarian students, professionals, and intellectuals. I was excited to meet a few friends I seldom get to see from across the world, listen to a few exciting talks by some of my favorite intellectual influences, such as Jonathan Haidt, Steve Horwitz, Edward Stringham, Sheldon Richman and the like. It was my third time attending the conference, and I always enjoy myself there.

However on Saturday afternoon, something that I did not want to see at all had reared its ugly face and even more hideous haircut: alt-right pseudo-intellectual think tank head and noted white nationalist blowhard Richard Spencer decided to come and troll us libertarians. I was just walking through the lobby when I looked over and saw him sitting at the hotel bar surrounded by a gang of ostensible thugs wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.

Now at this point, it is worth noting that Richard Spencer was in no way invited to this event by SFL in any official capacity. It is easy to be misled on this point as Spencer, being a complete fraud, had a sign next to him saying “Richard Spencer at ISFLC” as though he were invited. Immediately after seeing Spencer, I walked over to talk to some SFL staff who said he would not be allowed in the conference and, though he had every right to just hang out in a public space outside of the conference, he was in no way allowed in the conference itself.

Instead, Spencer was invited by a group calling themselves “The Hoppe Caucus,” named after noted bigot Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It is perhaps revealing that a bunch of students who want to invite a self-proclaimed white nationalist who does the Nazi salute to Trump and calls for “ethnic cleansing” of non-whites to a libertarian conference give themselves this name. The organizers were originally planning to invite Augustus Sol Invictus (the linked post was deleted) to do a similar event hijacking the conference, but were unable to pay for his travel. (The same Augustus Sol Invictus who was kicked out of a Libertarian Party Senate race for being a “neo-Nazi” who supports eugenics and participating in Satanic goat-sacrificing rituals.)

The “Hoppe Caucus” is nothing more than a Facebook page started by a couple of alt-right crypto-fascists masquerading as libertarians surrounding websites like the oxymoronically named The Liberty Conservative and the grossly misnamed trashy click-bait site  Liberty Hangout. I do have the misfortune of knowing a couple of the people who were involved in organizing Spencer. Only one of whom at any point in any official capacity associated with SFL as a low-level campus coordinator, and is mostly associated with YAL as a state chair and various other alt-right blogs. He shall remain unnamed as, from what I’ve seen, he’s been too cowardly to explicitly associate himself with the group publicly. Notably, he also recently left SFL’s CC program after some SFL staffers were blocking him from bringing Augustus. Another is a former YAL chapter leader who is now doing work with a number of right-wing think tanks in the midwest and writes for the Liberty Conservative, whose name is Mitchell Steffen.

I stood around at a distance observing Richard Spencer and the growing crowd around him, it appeared to me to be fairly standard relatively boring tone of conversations that happen at the conference, just with the notable difference of a fair amount of complete bigotry and Nazism. I went downstairs and decided not to feed the trolls. But about a half an hour to forty minutes later, I heard that Jeffery Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education, a conference speaker who was actually invited there, went upstairs to confront Richard Spencer. You can watch a recording of the exchange here. After the conversation got heated, hotel security intervened and kicked Spencer out of the venue. As Robby Soave notes in Reason, some have reported that Spencer requested for security to escort him out, though it is unclear if that is the case (there is at least one video, see around 40:33 which seems to suggest Spencer asked for security, though was being kicked out).

Now, to combat further misinformation put out by the same group of complete liars who brought Spencer at the Liberty Conservative: no, Richard Spencer did not “nearly start a riot.” Meanwhile in reality, while Tucker was visibly upset, he did not threaten nor engage in violence at all, nor did any other attendee at the conference. First, Spencer and Tucker talked for nearly twenty minutes without any physical altercation, and Tucker arrived after nearly an hour of peaceful discussion between Spencer and some students. You can watch the videos linked above for proof. If merely getting impassioned in a debate is “nearly a riot,” these Hoppe occultists are the true snowflakes who need a safe space.

Further, Tucker and the other attendees were not upset because Spencer “merely show[ed] up in the Hotel Bar.” We were upset because these frauds dishonestly put up a sign implying that Spencer was invited and was there in an official capacity. In order to attend, one needed to pay a registration fee for the conference, which Spencer didn’t, and needed to be invited to be a speaker, which he wasn’t. He was committing fraud and attempting to disrupt a peaceful private event, if he went unchallenged the press (like Liberty Conservative’s fact-free report implies) would assume he was invited there officially. Additionally, it is a complete lie to say that around fifty attendees was “one of the best attended breakouts” at the conference, of all the breakouts I attended the smallest was around 45 (Stringham’s lecture) and most were well above 150 (eg., Haidt’s lecture and Caplan and Wilkinson’s Basic Income debate). I know you alt-righters love your alternative facts, but just because you can put them on your dumpy little click-bait site doesn’t make them true.

Regardless of the reality of the situation, some pseudo-libertarians have rushed to Spencer’s defense saying Tucker reacted in a hyperbolic fashion and didn’t take Spencer’s right to free speech seriously. Some have even idiotically claimed that the “left libertarians” at SFL (I am one of the few, the majority of the conference attendees are not, by the way) used force to oust Richard Spencer. Somehow, when Tucker asserts the liberty and dignity of all human beings it’s some act of aggression because the fascist snowflakes didn’t like his tone, but if Hoppe fanboys demand that communists get thrown out helicopters and their homeboy Spencer demands the state ethnically cleanse black people, that’s hunky dory.

First, nobody from SFL ousted Spencer, he either left of his own accord because he couldn’t handle Tucker’s debate or the hotel kicked him out, which the hotel is well within its rights to do because of this thing these pseudo-libertarians have apparently forgotten called private property. Spencer intruded on a private event with the intention of misleading everyone about his involvement in it, Tucker cleared up Spencer’s and the Hoppe Caucus’ fraud, and the hotel kicked him off of their private property for trespassing. It’s amazing how these crypto-fascists think “free association” is primary if you’re a bigot who doesn’t want to serve a gay person a wedding cake, wants to “physically remove, so to speak” people they disagree with from society or is a racist who discriminates against black people. But when it comes to an actual libertarian not wanting a Nazi at their private event all of a sudden “free association” doesn’t matter because they can lazily caterwaul “free speech.” It’s almost like they don’t actually believe in free association unless you’re a white, straight Christian fascist like them.

Further, the idea that all ideas always get the same hearing is a gross misunderstanding of the point of free speech and the usefulness of public discourse in a liberal political order. The fact is, there is always an opportunity cost to inquiry. Racism, Nazism, white nationalism and the like were long ago proven to be continuously false and extremely dangerous, and it would be a misuse of intellectual resources to continually need to “engage with them.” This is for the same reason astronomers do not need to continually write academic papers disproving flat-earth conspiracy nutters, medical biologists do not need to continually refute anti-vaxxer cranks, and economists do not need to continually engage with erroneous labor theories of value in their original academic work. The intellectual resources of the community of inquiry can be better used by addressing new ideas that are actually relevant to our current situation, not by continually discussing with dogmatic cranks who spew pseudo-scientific lies about race.

Of course, it is arguable that this principle is not applicable in the current situation because ideas like Spencer’s have gained popularity, possibly in part because of a breakdown in discourse in the United States caused by some on the left refusing to engage in any serious discourse with anything they don’t agree with. This means one ought to write refutations of the odious seeds of the alt-right, like Tucker himself has done. But free speech, and even the necessity of engaging with an intellectual (or in this case, pseudo-intellectual) opponent does not mean you hand him the loudspeaker by inviting him to your conference, and it does not mean you let him defraud and defame you by pretending to be a part of a private event to which he was not invited. Just because a Nazi has the liberty right to free speech does not mean they have the claim right to oblige you to give them a platform for said speech. (The difference between claim-rights and liberty-rights is lost on both Hoppe fans and Hoppe himself.)

Even though I am happy that my libertarian peers stood up to Spencer at the conference, I think this is time for libertarians to engage in serious reflection. These weren’t just a group of odious, intellectually immature, adolescent edge-lords crashing an event. Though they were also that, this was a group of pugnacious kids who were to some extent legitimized by prominent student groups. One made it past the screening into SFL’s CC program, and while it is worth noting he’s one of a very few bad CC’s out of over a hundred across the country and is no longer a CC because SFL was stopping his excesses, the fact that he thought SFL would be a good platform for his nonsense and that he was a CC for this long (about six months) in the first place should cause some concern. Further, he and others involved are prominent in YAL, not only chapter presidents but even state chairs.

Why would a group of pretty overt fascists feel comfortable masquerading as libertarians and naming their fake news sites after the ideas of liberty? Why would they feel and think inviting a prominent neo-Nazi to a large libertarian event was a good idea in the first place? Why are pseudo-intellectual occultist hacks, snake-oil salesmen, bigots and conspiracy theorists like Milo, Molyneux, Cantwell, Hoppe, Alex Jones, and the like so revered by self-proclaimed “libertarians” in such large circles? Why, when I mention I’m a libertarian, do I feel the need to disassociate myself with so many other libertarian students who are newer to the movement? I think this points to a series of deep problems with the infrastructure of the “libertarian movement” as it exists, and I will chronicle them one by one: an overly intensive focus on activism, populism, a history of right-wing fusionism of various sorts, and immature contrarianism.

Activism
Activism is clearly something any political movement of any form is going to have to engage on at some level. By activism, here, I mean recruiting new people to your movement, spreading your ideas through popular culture, engaging a little in the political process and engaging in grass-roots movement building with activities like tabling, advertising for and organizing events, and the like. It’s something I’m admittedly not particularly good at nor do I enjoy doing it, so I do have reason to downgrade its importance on some personal level admittedly. However, I still believe that a number of student groups in the liberty movement–particularly YAL and to a lesser extent SFL–have put far more emphasis on it than is warranted, and I think it is doing legitimate damage to their cause.

Activism is all about the numbers–how many chapters did you start? how many emails did you get on your list from tabling? how many attendees do you have at your event? how many votes did your candidate get?–and not about the quality of participation or ideas–do your chapters actually do good work, if any at all? will the people you got on your email list ever actually engage with you? did your attendees at the event get anything meaningful or useful out of your event? did the voters actually vote for your candidate because he was good? Undoubtedly, the numbers are important–part of the reason why libertarianism was stifled for so long was high-quality white papers were just being written by think tanks and nobody would read them. However, lately numbers seem to be all that too many people in the development departments of political activist non-profits and think tanks and too many activists think about it alone. It’s all about quantity, not about quality.

YAL has next to no screening–at least that I’m aware of–for who can start a YAL chapter and who makes it up in their ranks. SFL, meanwhile, does have some screening and an application process for becoming a CC, but it’s still obviously pretty easy for alt-right entryists to make it pass that process. Because what seems to matter most to them–and all that seems to matter for YAL–is that they can brag that they have a hundred CCs and hundreds of YAL chapters. The result: you have a recently-resigned SFL campus coordinator and current YAL State Chair bringing a neo-Nazi to a prominent SFL event. Further, they train their activists to focus on these metrics and not metrics of quality (which they don’t even really provide often) for measuring their goals and success of their activism. The result: YAL presidents are trained not to worry that when they invited Milo to “#trigger” leftists that Milo said nothing even remotely related to libertarianism, or that the attendees of his event got nothing substantive out of it; all that mattered was that YAL scored a media-hit because their rabble were roused and their leftist ideological opponents were upset, and that they got a lot of attendees.

Now the reason for the focus on activism is understandable: it’s the easiest way to prove to your donors as an organization that their money is doable, and it is absolutely true that if you don’t have a readily available way to measure the success of your well-state goals means there’s no way to improve. Things like attendance numbers, number of email registrations, and number of chapters and media hits, are an easy way to do this. But when your activism has deteriorated in quality to the point that you have a bunch of entryist activists who are promoting ideas that are literally antithetical to your cause, when they–while representing your organization–are bringing Nazis to a libertarian event, maybe it’s time to reconsider the usefulness of your metrics. They are such a poor measure of quality and can easily be substituted for things like surveys of the attendees of the event for their perception on the event’s quality (IHS does this a lot, and I see SFL doing it more and more often). Further, why not train your activists not only to be activists but to be legitimately good ambassadors for your ideas, or even to be remotely familiar with the ideas they’re supposed to be promoting in the first place (which far too many activists are not beyond a very superficial level)?

Further, this activist mindset creates an in-your-face attitude almost akin to religious proselytizing. The activist thinks “I have the truth already and am now just looking to spread it” and uses in-your-face style evangelism to do so. That mindset is not likely to produce quality ideological ambassadors, but rather pugnacious little dogmatists. As my fellow Notewriter Brandon Christensen once noted in a Reason Papers article, it is at odds with the humility inherent in the libertarian ethos, but very much at home in morally chauvinist ideologies like fascism which Richard Spencer loves. It’s not surprising that YAL-style in-your-face activism is attracting the undesirables just because the type of social interaction it requires is not at home with the psychological mental state libertarianism requires, but is very at home with crypto-fascists like Hoppe.

Populism
I won’t spend a lot of time on this one since I spent ample time in an article on the dangers of populism to liberty last month. Suffice it to say, the events of this weekend reaffirms what I had to say in that article about how populism inherently will lack principles and turn into something nasty:

Because the main thing driving populist movements are “the people vs. the elites” rather than the core principles the movement tries to espouse, there’s good reason to think the base of that movement will abandon many of those principles as it grows simply on the basis that they have something similar to what “the elites” believe. It’s not surprising that many of the younger pseudo-libertarians who supported Ron Paul have since jumped on either the Trump or Sanders bandwagon, or, even worse, have defected into the crypto-fascist, dark corners of the alt-right (Stefan Molyneux and Chris Cantwell’s occultists are examples of this). Even left-wing populist movements often have abandoned leftist principles throughout history (the Jacobins in the French Revolution, for example).

Now add the pseudo-libertarians who have jumped on the Richard Spencer and Hans-Herman Hoppe bandwagon to the list of evidence for why populism is so toxic.

Right-Wing Fusionism
When libertarianism in its present form was first fomenting in the seventies, the biggest global conflict was between the communist Soviet Union and the United States. Further, at the time the biggest issues in domestic policy were about creeping state economic regulatory policy left over from the progressive era and social welfare programs with Johnson’s Great Society. All these were big issues for libertarian ideology so they formed a coalition with what was currently the biggest political opposition to those: the emerging post-war conservative movement. It was always an awkward marriage, with intellectuals lashing out against each other from both sides, and honestly both making good points about how libertarianism and conservatism were wholly incompatible. But the awkward coalition, it was argued, was necessary to resist the growing state at home and the specter of communism abroad (even though libertarians and conservatives at the time, obviously, deeply disagreed and fought about the Vietnam war and America’s militaristic impulse to resist the Soviets with foreign intervention).

Today, though, it is clear that this alliance is no longer working. The right in the United States, for one, has morphed into something even more incompatible with liberty than the old Buckley-Kirkian conservatism with which it was once awkward bedfellows with into an ultra-nationalistic program of protectionist economic planning, opposition to cultural pluralism, and hostility to religious liberty (for non-Christians).

If one knows the history of right-wing libertarian fusionism, it should surprise no one that modern ideological delinquent libertarians are are inviting a white nationalist to speak at your conference. There was, of course, the odious phase of “paleo-libertarianism” Rothbard and his cult tried to launch in the early nineties embracing Pat Buchanan like the Hoppe Caucus embraces Trump, the toxic fruit of which includes the infamous outright racist Ron Paul letters which read like some of Richard Spencer’s delusions. In fact, there is a direct line from this “paleo” poison and Hoppe himself to Richard Spencer, Spencer and another white nationalist Jared Taylor were invited to speak at Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society Conference in 2010 and 2013 respectively on the alt-right and race relations. Hoppe started the Property and Freedom Society in 2006 after feeling that the old Mont Pelerin Society, started by Hayek and Friedman in the forties, wasn’t sufficiently racist-friendly for him.

Even one of my personal favorite libertarian thinkers, FA Hayek, fell for the fusionist vial of toxin in his uncomfortably close relationship with a certain Chilean fascist dictator (obviously not that this discredits his stellar academic work). The point is that even our best intellectuals, and obviously sophomoric college kids, wind up being more defined by what they oppose that they are willing to ally with anyone who’s an enemy of their enemy–including those most opposed to their ideas–at the expense of actually improving anyone’s lives when political alliance is valued over principle.

This does not mean we substitute right-wing fusionism with some left-wing fusionism where we let the likes of Elizabeth Warren get away with saying “The heart of progressivism is libertarianism” like Reagan did. This doesn’t mean we form an alliance with the left and pretend to be ideologically in the same place as politicians from major leftist political parties who poison our ideas by doing things that have nothing to do with our ideology. It would be a fool’s errand to institutionally ally ourselves on as many issues as we can with existing leftist institutions, like libertarians did with right-wing ones in the past. I much prefer the infuriatingly slow, though necessary, process of social and intellectual change through discourse, cultural engagement, entrepreneurship, and resisting state tyranny where we can. If need be, maybe ally with groups like the ACLU or Heritage on a single issue where we may agree with them. But don’t sit there and pretend that the alliance is anything more than a temporary, single-issue co-authorship for expedience. These little alliances should not make you delude yourself into thinking something like “liberaltarian” (in the American progressive sense of liberal) is anymore meaningful than the oxymoronic “conservatarian” and start bringing Stalinists to your conferences.

My point is that, obviously, fusionism has had a corrosive effect on libertarians to the point that it’s not even clear what self-identified libertarians believe at this point, if it claims to support liberty while its members feel comfortable giving a platform to white nationalist neo-Nazis. I understand the need for a movement to be big-tent and not fraction off with infighting, but when your movement includes people who work for self-identified white nationalists while everyone else is trying to claim something from the classical liberal tradition your big-tent is turning into a circus dominated by demented clowns.

Contrarianism
This last point is something pointed out well by Kevin Vallier a few years ago in reaction to one of Hoppe’s more vitriolic racist screeds:

Libertarianism is an unpopular view. And it takes particular personality types to be open to taking unpopular views. Some of these personality types are people who are open to new experience, love the world of ideas and have a disposition for independent thought. However, some of these personality types simply enjoy holding outrageous and provocative views, who like to argue and fight with others, who like insult and and shock. The contrarian is someone of the latter type.

…The worst flaw in the contrarian trap is that it makes libertarians open to views that deserve to be unpopular and despised, including the thinly-veiled racism of the sort the Hans Hermann Hoppe trades in from time to time. The social democratic left can’t just be wrong about the state, they have to be wrong about everything, and obviously wrong at that.

And this applies not just to libertarians, but also to the edge-lord alt-righters who have now successfully co-opted a number of American conservative institutions. In reality, these are just people with the psychological composition and intellectual (im)maturity of a 14-year-old troll in his mommy’s basement posting nonsense on 4Chan who use cartoon frogs to try to thinly veil their odious ideology. They are just contrarians who never grew out of going “No” when their teacher told them to do something in high school, but instead of the teacher telling Pink to “eat your meat” it’s Jeffery Tucker saying “respect the basic liberties of other human beings.” The problem is because libertarianism is still somewhat on the fringe, but just mainstream enough for it to be popular among contrarians, it is attractive to people with that level of immaturity. This is exacerbated by the fact that, for the reasons listed above, the libertarian movement are giving these immature edge-lords a platform.

My main reason for making these points is that while SFL is completely justified in pointing out about how they had nothing to do with Spencer’s presence and opposed it, and libertarians should be happy that we stood up to a Nazi in our midst, we need to remember: not playing footsies with Nazis is the bare minimum for being ideologically tolerable, and not something to be celebrated. We need to recognize that the reason Spencer even felt comfortable showing up and the reason minor leaders in libertarian student organizations felt comfortable inviting him his a symptom of a deeper disease that’s been in the making for quite some time. I do not know exactly how to address this disease, but the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that we have one.

The Roots of Truth and the Roots of Knowledge

Rick Weber Culture, Current Events, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics , , , , ,

John Oliver raises a Hayekian point on the roots of knowledge:

Just because they believed you and you believed them, doesn’t make it true! This isn’t like Peter Pan where believing in fairies will keep Tinker Bell alive. This isn’t a magic thing Peter, she has Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

He’s rightly picking on Donald Trump, who has a) been a particularly bad epistemologist, and b) should be held to a higher standard because he’s the president.

But the truth is that we’re all in the same boat: we believe what we hear from what we believe are reputable sources (because we heard those sources were reputable from sources we believed to be reputable). Most of our knowledge we take on faith from other people. In essence, we can’t simply know the truth in a vacuum; we depend on the context created by our culture, language, and personal experience. It’s only by trusting others that we can stand on the shoulders of giants.

What’s so special about science is that the standards are higher than in other domains. Knowledge has been carefully curated over generations by fallable humans engaged in a particular subculture of society. To the extent science makes good predictions, it creates value in society, and to the extent it can verify and capture that value, its practitioners get funding and get taken (mostly) seriously by the educated public.

You might notice that there are many places where science can go wrong. And the history of science is replete with blind alleys and shameful episodes. But also glorious advances in our knowledge, capability, and humanity. The same is true of all areas of life that deal with knowledge from politics and journalism to how you clean your kitchen. To the extent we see both competition and cooperation (in a variety of institutional forms) we will tend to see knowledge and truth converge. (I think.)

In this respect, we’re all, essentially, in the same boat. We should expect fallability and adopt a humble attitude. As surely as I want to believe John Oliver’s portrayal of current events (most of the time), I’m not about to fly to DC to check things out for myself.

Because, this isn’t about belief, it can’t be… Faith and Fact aren’t like Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. When you confuse them it actually matters. Real people get hurt when you make policy based on false information.

We face trade offs when it comes to knowledge. Received wisdom might be correct enough to operate a bed and breakfast. But we’ve created real fragility in our political system by vesting so much power in the White House. It means that the standard of truth has to be so high that not even a crazed billionaire hell-bent on becoming president (a segment of society usually celebrated for their levelheadedness!) can be trusted to pursue.

Let me sum up:

  1. Our knowledge is always based on the trust we place in others. As such we can be more or less certain about any thing we might know. I am very certain (0.99×10^-100) that gravity exists and keeps me rooted to the earth, but less certain (0.05) that I am organizing my bookshelves correctly.
  2. We can, and do, have different standards of truth in different areas of our lives. I don’t make any important decisions that don’t account for the severity of gravity. But I’m not going to sweat it if I put a new book on an inappropriate shelf.
  3. We absolutely need to hold our government to very high standards. Nuclear weapons are scary, but lesser powers also call for very high standards. The level of certainty I’d insist on for nukes is at least an order of magnitude higher than the level for regulating pollution. But the level of certainty for the latter is orders of magnitude higher than might be possible under alternative arrangements.
  4. At the same time, we have to accept our own fallability, particularly when it comes to our ability to accurately know the truth. But that’s no reason to be nihilistic; it should inspire a striving for constant improvement in general (while making the appropriate trade offs on the margin).

Dear Muslim Fellow Citizens:

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events, Religion , , , , , ,

President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring entry into the US to those coming from seven countries was a rude act.* To make things worse, it was badly implemented, causing inconvenience and even distress to a number of innocent travelers. What’s more, it’s unlikely to be very effective in its stated goal of keeping Americans safe. The reason the administration gave for the order was to give the appropriate agencies some time to improve their techniques for vetting ordinary travelers from those countries.

As I write, the bar is in circuit court where it will be decided whether a previous federal judge’s order suspending application of the bar holds or not. There is a mano-a-mano between a largely liberal circuit court and a fairly conservative and decisive new executive. Whether the executive prevails or not, the order was given and it will be remembered as one of the first acts of the Trump administration. It’s worth discussing.

Much of what has been said about the order is false, ridiculous, or dishonest. I urge you to preserve your collective credibility by not falling for the falsehoods, and worse, for partially true but misleading statements you have heard. Some, you have heard repeatedly.

Beyond this, I suspect you have not done enough collective self-examination. I suspect this because no one reasonable talks to you frankly about matters concerning you. There are plenty of ill-informed hysterical, obscene anti-Muslim shouts which you probably (rightly) shut out. The rest of America is too paralyzed by political correctness to say anything to you that may seem critical. I am reasonable and I am not paralyzed by political correctness. In addition, there is a good chance I am pretty well informed. (Go ahead, Google me.) Where I am not, I listen to advice and corrections with an open mind. I wish to talk to you about mistrust of Muslims and about what you may not have done to represent yourselves in a light inducing others to be fair. Lastly, I wish to address you about what you have done that has not been helpful.

The persecution of Muslims

Fact: The seven countries the executive temporary banning order targeted are all predominantly Muslim countries.

That does not make the order an anti-Muslim measure. If President Trump had wanted to persecute Muslims, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and even India (yes, India) would be heading the list. There are something like forty predominantly Muslim countries in the world. How do you think the seven were chosen?

The seven were originally selected by the Obama administration as dangerous countries from which it was difficult to obtain enough information to vet travelers. This explains why most Muslim countries – by a long shot – did not make the list. In the case of five Arab Muslim countries on the list, they are there because they are failed states unable to provide credible information if they want to. Iran is a special case. President Trump, and some of us, think that the information should not be trusted that comes from a country where the political class has been smiling benevolently for the past thirty years on demonstrators whose main demand is “Death to America!” Taking people at their word is not a dirty trick, right? The sixth country on the list, Sudan, is there for both reasons. It’s an ineffective state and its leadership is openly hostile to America. It’s unable to cooperate in vetting and it will not.

Why should President Trump want to go to extraordinary lengths to vet travelers from those particular countries, you wonder suspiciously? It’s because – you are right – the Muslim world is widely thought to be a privileged source of terrorism. That’s in the 21st century. In the 20th century, it would have been (largely Catholic) Ireland, the (Catholic) Basque area of Spain and, especially, the (Hindu) Tamil area of Sri Lanka. The fact that no IRA terrorist, no ETA terrorist and no Tamil Tiger terrorist ever claimed to be acting in the name of God or of his religion may make a difference though. What do you think?

Personally I don’t see how anyone can disagree with the proposition that Muslim countries (not all, some, of course) generate large numbers of terrorists when those same terrorists massacre many more Muslims than they do anyone else? I can’t believe you are not aware of the many car bombs detonated near mosques during prayer from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Iraq. And have you ever thought of what the proportion of Muslims must have been at the massacres in the French night club or during the Bastille Day festivities, in Nice, France? Let me tell you: Many French Muslims are immigrants from rural areas in Africa. It’s been true for a long time. They have more children than people born in France. Whenever you find children and young people, in France, you are looking at many young Muslims. And, go back to the “Underwear Bomber” trying to blow up a plane over largely Muslim Detroit, during Christmas Eve, of all times. Who do you think would have died, primarily? How many Christians are on a plane on that night? (Reminder: He is a young man from a good Nigerian family. He is having a bad time in federal prison, right now.) It’s your duty to be informed about the people who are massacring both your people and your neighbors, I think.

Incidentally, the fact that Muslims die much more than other people under the knife of neo-jihadists does not give your passivity a pass.

This all is sufficient to explain well why there are only Muslim countries on the ban list. It would have been more polite of the Trump administration to add, say Iceland, Paraguay, and Laos, or Timor. Perhaps, they did not think of it. No one is perfect. Perhaps they did think of this trick and decided to not implement it to signal that political correctness has to go, at last.

Before I move on, note what the paragraphs above do not (NOT) say, lest your memory tricks you later: They do not say that “most Muslims are terrorists,” as stupid liberals allege such statements mean. I don’t think most Muslims are terrorists. I do not think that many Muslims are terrorists. I am not even sure the terrorists who claim to be Muslims are Muslims, or good Muslims. I don’t really know. However much I regret it, I can see how it is easy to find justification for religious acts of violence in the Islamic sacred Scriptures. (Ask me or tell me plainly that I am wrong, that there are no such justifications in the Scriptures.)

Trump’s order was intended to keep terrorists where they are for the time being, until we learn better to spot them. It was intended to protect me and my children, and you and your children. I have my doubts about its efficacy, as I have said elsewhere. You should feel free to criticize it on that ground without going to motives you have little way of knowing. “Stupid” is not the same as “prejudiced.”

The Muslim contribution to the mistrust of Muslims: Inaction

Next, I need to ask you if Muslims collectively have done anything to contribute to widespread mistrust of Muslims in America. First I need to ask what American Muslims did not do that they should have done – and can still do. This can be brief.

Large American Muslim organizations have put themselves repeatedly on the public record denouncing terrorism perpetrated by those who claim to be inspired by Islam. They are quick to assert that religious violence is incompatible with Islam, that the neo-jihadists are simply bad Muslims, or even, not Muslims at all. This is all for the good although – I am sorry – most of the protestations sound hollow. One of the things missing, incidentally – is condemnations by obvious religious authorities.

What bothers me personally, and probably others who don’t have the time to think about it, is the lack of individual faces to accompany condemnations of neo-jihadist barbarism. There are two exceptions I know of, two Arab-American men who sometimes come on TV to reject barbarism or any links to American Muslims vigorously. I don’t have either name in mind right now and I would not name them anyway because I don’t have a clear idea of the risks they are taking.

What I am missing is reactions from individual, private persons of Muslim faith, people with a face. I ask how many of you said anything – outside the family – when ISIS was beheading an American journalist and then, an American social worker, all on video. I wonder if you said anything, at work, even if only at the water fountain, when ISIS was burning people alive in cages. How many of you expressed horror aloud or when it was turning thousands of young women and girls into sex slaves. How many dismiss Boko Haram which is burning its way through North Western Nigeria as a (black) African monstrosity?

Some of you, most of you, or all of you, think these questions are superfluous and even, that my expectations are outrageous. I have a friend, a young Muslim woman who tells me straight up that terrorism is no more her problem than mine. It’s unrealistic and it’s false. The abstract category “American Muslims” (I am not using “community” deliberately) turns out enough terrorists and would-be terrorists to destroy this presumption of distance between you and the prevalent kind of barbarism. Note also that, irrespective of provocations, since the masterful, well-planned, very successful aggression of 9/11, there has not been a single act of private terrorism against Muslims or Muslim institutions in America. (Hectoring of women wearing the hijab in public places does not quite count as terrorism.) Mind what I am really saying: It’s not your job to stop terrorism committed in your names but you would be wise to reject it forcefully and loudly, and also in person when you have a chance.

The Muslim contribution to mistrust of Muslims: Actions

There are also the things American Muslims did that contributed to the process leading to the Trump administration temporary ban on travel from seven Muslim countries.

Let me help you remember. In 2008, you voted for Barack Obama in large numbers although he was a leftist of zero demonstrable achievement but one. (He did pass the bar exam.) I don’t know if you did it because the father he never knew was a Muslim (a drunken Muslim), or because his middle name is “Hussein,” or because you were caught up in the great Democratic emotional sweep. Later, in 2016, you largely supported the candidacy of an obvious liar and cheat who had already sold some of the country to foreign powers before even being elected. What’s more, she presented herself squarely as President Obama’s successor. Many of you just bet on the wrong horse without much of an excuse for doing so. (I think I have read somewhere that American Muslims are better educated than the average American. Correct me if I am wrong.)

Had more of you voted Republican, they just might have influenced the result of the primary, perhaps, Marco Rubio (my candidate) would have won it, or the honorable Mayor Giuliani. The presidential election could have played out differently. If it hadn’t, there is a chance you would have still earned a voice within Republican politics. You chose instead to trust in liberal cliches to go with the easy flow of falsely generous liberalism.

Even with Donald Trump as president, you would have avoided getting trapped in the Democratic identity mishmash. You would have saved yourselves the embarrassment of ending up squeezed in their book between illegal aliens from China and transgender activists. At this point, your main public, visible representation in American politics – by default, I realize – is the pathetic, corrupt loser’s personal assistant. She is very elegant but she is married to a gross pervert. The fact that her parents are members of the Muslim Brotherhood does not help. It’s not a terrorist organization exactly but it’s very unfriendly to America and to its main values. By the way, you appear to still not be paying enough attention. The fact is that, right now, thousands of Americans are talking (and screaming) in the streets in defense of, and often in the names of, Muslims in general. Yet, the voices of American Muslims themselves are hard to perceive in the din. It makes no difference; when the fog clears up, some Americans are going to blame you for the riots. You are innocent, of course but, to a large extent, you put yourselves there.

There is danger in letting others speak in your place on the public square. It’s the same others who recently used the armed power of government to force others to violate their conscience. (By forcing a Catholic nuns’ order, for example, to provide contraceptive services to their employees.) How is this going to play out tomorrow when your own religious practice needs protection, I wonder.

The executive order and our constitutional order

There is much misunderstanding everywhere about the legal nature of the order. It’s all over the media and elsewhere. One Iranian woman, a distinguished MD, I am told, is suing the federal government because she suffered some travel inconvenience as a result of the executive order. (I don’t know if she is a Muslim; it does not matter.) I hope the suit only shows confusion about the American Constitution rather than some sinister plot. Whatever some little liberal judge in the boondocks may say, the Constitution does not apply to those who are not under the power of the US government. This includes citizens, legal permanent residents, illegal permanent residents, prisoners of war, to some extent, and those who are already on US soil by whatever means, or otherwise under exclusive US control. It does not apply to Mr Yokama in Osaka, to Mrs Dupont in Marseille, or to Ms Reza in Iran, or on a layover in Dubai.

The media have also shown growing confusion about the nature of a visa. It’s not a contract between a government and a private foreign party. It’s not enforceable in any court. It’s a promise to admit and evidence that someone is considered acceptable at a particular time. Either of these assessments can change in minutes. Incidentally, American immigration officers at all levels have always had discretion to do what they think is best: You can arrive at LA International from Finland, with a perfect visa, and have a fat federal employee in short sleeves get suspicious of you and deny you admission on the spot. There is no legal recourse, never has been.

Nation-states avoid canceling visas in ways that would look arbitrary, for two reasons. First it makes the relevant government lose international credibility. That’s a subtle phenomenon. No one knows how much denials and cancellation push the relevant country over the brink. Thus, any government, including, the Trump administration assumes it has a good deal of discretion in this matter. The second possible consequence of many negative visa events is that other governments may take retaliatory measures: You do it to us, we do it to you or even, we deny your citizens any visa. It’s not surprising that some governments of small, poor countries just don’t care much about serving up reciprocation to a large, desirable country such as the US. If you are an alien and you have a visa for the US, it means that you have a good chance to get in. It’s not a guarantee.

The president and his conservative supporters are not responsible for the confusion about the Constitution whipped up and smartly supported by liberal opinion.

Islamophobia

By now, I suspect, you are thinking “Islamophobia.” I don’t quite know how to defend myself against accusations sitting in your mind about what’s going on in my own mind. It’s like suspecting me of watching porn inside my head. How can it convince you that I don’t? Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, nothing predisposes me to a blind, irrational hatred of Islam or of Muslims. I have known Muslims all my life. I have had nothing but harmonious personal relationships with them. I think there is much to love in Islamic culture. For example I am fond of calligraphy in Arabic, the language of the Koran, so fond that the Profession of Faith (the Sha’hada) hangs over my bed. (I wouldn’t be surprised if this usage by a non-believer is considered blasphemy, somewhere or other.) The few times I have lived among Muslims, I have liked it. There is even a Muslim country where I would like to live permanently now that I am old. (My wife won’t hear of it; what do you know!)

“Islamophobia” is not a real concept anyway. It was invented by liberal intellectuals to shut up debate up. If it were not so, there would be other similarly formed words such as “Protestanphobia” and “Bhuddistphobia.” The impression that Muslims in America take refuge behind that rotten old hyena hide is deplorable. It feeds many unfair stereotypes.

And, by the way, what would be wrong with being an Islamophobe? I mean in the American tradition of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech? Being a Muslim is not a race, an unalterable fact about a person. It’s a choice. If I understand a little about Islam, it’s even the supreme choice. There is widespread confusion there also.

Why should anyone not be morally, intellectually allowed to detest a choice you can reverse any time you wish? Take me, for example. I used to be a Catholic. I am not anymore. I am an ex-Catholic. Anyone could have blamed me for being a Catholic, a believer in fairy tales and a supporter of an organization massively complicit with child rape. “Catholicophobe” would not become an insult; it did not. Why would you deserve special treatment, in this regard?

No one at all blames me either for being an ex-Catholic, by the way. There is (well-founded) Catholicophobia in this country. There is no such thing as “ex-Catholicophobia.” I am also aware as I write that changing religion is called “apostasy.” I am further aware that apostasy is punishable by death in a number of countries. They are all Muslim countries, as far as I know. (Please, correct me if I am wrong on this.) One of the advantages of living in the US, as you and I do, is that there is no penalty here for transgressions of conscience. There is no punishment for walking away from a set of beliefs. This is never discussed in narratives that use the word “Islamophobia.” We don’t speak enough about such matters. Muslims, in particular, don’t speak enough. (And, I don’t believe the media suppress such conversations. The liberal media will print anything said by anyone identified as “Muslim,” especially if the speaker wears a hijab.) I realize that one can find many statements by American Muslims on the Internet. That’s not good enough; I shouldn’t have to do research.

There is also much confusion – often spread by the liberal media – about the First Amendment to the US Constitution. That main amendment to the Constitution is widely misunderstood, by native-born citizens and by many others as well. It states categorically that government cannot have a favorite religion; it says that government cannot interfere with religious practice or belief. Moreover, the Constitution forbids government to administer religious tests as a precondition to holding any government office. That’s it!

There is no part of the US Constitution that protects anyone from criticism by private parties. There are countries where such criticism is illegal; the US is not one of them. Personally, I hate Communism and Devil worship, and I also detest obsessive talk about baseball statistics, for example. Do I have a right to my dislikes? May I express them openly? Should I count on the protection of my government – whose first assignment is to protect me – when I express these dislikes? May I say safely, “Devil worship is an abomination”? How about, “Christianity is a false religion”? Should you, personally, have to forbid yourselves from detesting Devil worship aloud? How does the Constitution answer these questions?

Since I began talking calmly about things some Muslims don’t enjoy hearing, let me continue a little way. Let me affirm as a preamble that you have as much right to be here as anyone. If you are an immigrant like me, you might have even a little bit more right than most. (Immigrants contribute somewhat more than the native-born.) Irrespective of your rights, if you are a person who dislikes the separation of Church and State, if the gap between religion and government is anathema to you, I hope you will leave. I won’t do anything about you but you must know that I don’t want you as a fellow-citizen. And, if you take my suggestion, please, take with you as many Baptists, Lutherans and Catholics of the same belief you can find. I hope our government will do its best to limit or prevent the entry of people who hold such beliefs.

To end: It’s likely that most of you are people with whom I would like to have a cup of coffee or a meal. I suspect that we have more in common than not. You would yourselves be astonished at what a pleasant person of culture I am in real life. (Go ahead, Google me.) We would talk about our children and our grandchildren. We would share our experiences in the country I chose. This probable commonality creates no obligation for me to tolerate nonsense. The Trump temporary executive order of mention may well be regrettable. If it’s unlawful – I don’t see how – it will not be implemented. Our institutions are working. In the meantime, it’s not the end of the world. We, Americans, you and I, have bigger fish to fry.

About Syria: There are tens of thousands of Syrian refugees we could take in without endangering ourselves. We should do it, for two reasons. First, it the right thing to do and it’s good for our souls. Second, we are partly responsible for the unending disaster in Syria. I have not forgotten the red line in the sand the dictator Assad was not supposed to cross or else…. That was before the Russians were heavily involved. At the time, the US Air Force and the US Navy could have destroyed 95% of Assad’s planes and helicopters in one morning if there had been political will. It would have made it extremely more difficult for him to continue fighting and to massacre civilians. We did not intervene. Now, we have to give a hand, a big hand. I don’t see why this help should include a path to citizenship.

*The executive order has been suspended by a judge (a single judge) as I write. The Administration fast track appeal has been rejected. Afterwards, the administration appealed to the 9th Circuit Court. Our institutions are doing their work even if it’s at the cost of some judges believing it’s their job to make laws. To my mind, the fact that the order was issued at all is important whether it’s ultimately put to work or not.

On 7 million deaths from air pollution

Vincent Geloso Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

ATTN published a video of An-huld (the really cool guy who made my childhood by being in all my favorite action movies like Predator* and who ended up being the governor of California). In that short clip, Schwarznegger starts by saying that 7 million individuals die from pollution-related illnesses.

That number is correct. But it is misleading.

People see pollution as “all and the same”. But some forms of pollution increase with development (sulfur emissions and some would argue that too much CO2 emissions is pollution as it causes climate change). However, others drop dramatically – especially heavy particules (Pm10) which are a great cause of smog. Julian Simon (the late cornucopian economist who is one my greatest intellectual influence) pointed out this issue and noted that the deadliest forms of pollution are those that relate to underdevelopment.

Back in 2003, Jack Hollander published the Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence is the Environment’s Number One Enemy. Hollander pointed out that simply from the combustion of organic matter (read: firewood and animal manure – literally burning fecal matter) indoors for the purposes of heating, cooking and lighting was responsible for close to 2 millions deaths.

Since then, the WHO came out with a study pointing out that around 3 billion people cook and heat their homes with open fires and stoves that rely on biomass or anthracite-coal. They put the number of premature deaths directly resulting from this at over 4 million people. This is close to 60% of the figure cited by the former President of California (yes, I know he was governor – see here). In other words, 60% of the people who die prematurely as a result of strokes, ischaemic heart diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases and lung cancers can be attributed to indoor air pollution. That means pollution resulting from the fact that you are so poor that you have to burn anything at hand at the cost of your health.

True, richer countries pollute and there are policy solutions (I have often argued that governments are better at polluting than at reducing pollution, but that is another debate) that should be adopted. But, these forms of pollution do not harm human life as much as those that come with poverty.

* By the way, when you watch Predator, do you realize that there are two future American governors in that movie? I mean, imagine that when Predator came out, some dude from the future told you that two of the main actors would end governing American states. Pretty freaky!

What the Bible really says about how to treat refugees

Bruno Gonçalves Rosi Current Events, Liberty, Religion , , , , , , ,

Recently a text written by Jesse Carey, in Relevant Magazine, supposedly about what the Bible says about immigrants, refugees and displaced people, has come to me. The text is a bit old (from November 17, 2015), but is being reheated because of President Trump’s recent decisions in this area. Given these things, here are some comments on “What the Bible Says About How to Treat Refugees.”

Carey presents what he calls “12 verses about loving immigrants, refugees and displaced people”. The first thing to note is that none of the texts presented by Carey mentions the word refugees. The texts speak about foreigners, the poor and needy, travelers, strangers, and neighbors, but never about refugees. A refugee is a foreigner, but not every foreigner is a refugee. The same goes for stranger. Amazingly, refugee is also not synonymous with traveler. Every refugee is traveling (against his will, it is assumed), but not everyone who is traveling is a refugee. Finally, a refugee can be poor and needy, but poor and needy and refugee are also not synonymous. It seems that Carey has difficulty reading: when he sees words like foreigner or traveler or poor and needy or stranger his brain reads refugee. Either that or he’s being flagrantly dishonest.

The second observation is that, in the language used by Jesus, for the Christian every refugee is a neighbor. Not every refugee is poor and needy, not every foreigner is a refugee, nor does every stranger is a refugee and not every traveler is a refugee. But for the Christian, every human being is a neighbor, and so deserves his mercy. The problem is that Carey wants to apply this to immigration policies, and immigration policies are not made by Christian individuals, but by governments.

The history of the relationship between churches and governments is long, complex and tumultuous. To make a quick summary, suffice it to say that during the Middle Ages church leaders and political leaders fought and argued among themselves about who would dominate the people of Europe. The Bishop of Rome wanted to be above the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. At the local level, bishops and priests fought with nobles of all kinds. The result was a general confusion. One of the great victories of the Modern Era, beginning with the Protestant Reformation (which celebrates 500 years this year) was the separation of churches and state. Especially since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the tendency has been for states not to use their arms to impose a religion on the population. Carey wants to go the other way. He even cites 1 Corinthians 12:12-14 as if it applied to every human being, and not only to Christians.

The Bible teaches that individual Christians must care for needy people, and certainly refugees fall into this category. But the Bible does not teach that the state should do this. The role of the state, according to the Bible, is to carry the sword to punish wrongdoers and to benefit those who follow the law (the classic text regarding this is Romans 13). In other words, biblically the function of the state is restricted to security. Receiving immigrants is certainly a policy with which Christians can agree, but fully open borders, without any vigilance, are a delusion and nothing more. Wrongdoers can disguise themselves as immigrants to enter a country, and it is up to the state to do some kind of security check.

I am not discussing here the details of Trump’s current policy for immigrants and refugees. It is quite possible that there are aspects within it that Christians can or should disagree with. But by wanting to impose Christian behavior on the state, Carey goes against one of the greatest victories of the Modern Age, the separation of churches and state, something amazing for a liberal and progressive author. Does he approve of compulsory prayer in schools, the end of teaching Darwinism and punishment for those who do not attend Sunday worship? Hope not.

Roger Williams has already presented this discussion very clearly more than 300 years ago: Christians cannot impose their religion using the state for this. What can be expected Biblically from the state is in the second table of the law: you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony … Basically, do not hurt others, do not lie to them and do not take their stuff without permission, things that any kindergarten child knows are wrong. I do not think we need the Bible to teach us that.

I hope that the state is open to immigration as much as possible, being restricted only by security concerns. I hope Christians will welcome the refugees. I hope the wall of separation between church and state is never overthrown. And I hope that the rulers of the United States will leave the Islamic world for the Islamists to take care of. They already have enough work taking care of the safety of Americans in North America.

Against Libertarian Populism

Zachary Woodman Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , ,

Over at The Liberty Conservative (which is, in my opinion, something of an oxymoronic name), Alex Witoslawski of the Leadership Institute recently wrote an article defending populism as a strategy for libertarian activists to embrace. I am going to disagree with Alex at almost every turn, but it should be known that I am friends with Alex and mean no ill-will towards him. In fact, he privately asked me for my input and asked that I publish my criticisms publicly.

Alex defines populism as “a political strategy that aims to mobilize a largely alienated base of the populace against out-of-control elites.” In order for a movement to be populist, Alex claims it must use four distinguishing factors:

Messaging: the central message obviously has to revolve around the theme of populism – “the people versus the privileged elites”

Strategy: put simply, the central strategy of populism is to bypass the ruling class – academia, mainstream media, and political establishment – in order to get the message out directly to the masses

Tactics: in order to achieve the strategic goal of bypassing the ruling class, populist candidates and organizations must make use of grassroots organizing, events, digital communication (social media and email), and the alt-media to communicate directly with the masses

Issues: the message of “the people vs. the elites” is closely adhered to on every single issue advocated; in addition to this, the policies advocated for must be sufficiently radical to inspire a core base of supporters who will passionately support the populist campaign/organization as donors and activists.

To cite reasons why libertarians should embrace this populist ethos, Alex cites the recent surprising election of Donald Trump and the relatively successful Ron Paul primary campaigns of 2008 and 2012, and gives the example of Lew Rockwell’s and Murray Rothbard’s infamous paleolibertarian phase in the late eighties and early nineties for inspiration. Let me give eight reasons why principled libertarians–and classical liberals–neither can be nor should be populists:

1. Is Populism even Necessary for Electoral Victory?
It’s not even apparent that populism is always and everywhere the best electoral strategy in the first place. The three best turnouts, for example, in LP history for president were the decidedly non-populist Gary Johnson campaigns and the non-populist, left-leaning Ed Clark/David Koch 1980 campaign, ranking much lower with less than half the votes of Clark/Koch was the much more populist Ron Paul 1988 campaign. For further evidence, there were many similarities between populists and progressive parties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one of the few major differences were the degree of technocracy and even outright elitism that progressives embraced (populists were more Jacksonian, progressives Wilsonian). Which parties and candidates were more popular at polls? Progressives. All this is, of course, anecdotal and casual historical evidence from which no necessary causality can be established, but so are the examples of Trump vs. Cruz and Rand vs. Ron that Alex gives. There’s likely an empirical political science literature on the electoral effectiveness of populist messaging that might shed light on this question, one with which I am admittedly ignorant, but, at any rate, this is an antecedent point to my main argument.

2. The Narrow Focus on Electoral Politics
Even if populism does win elections, it’s not even clear that’s a good goal. As any good anarchist will tell you, electoral victories are not the only, or even a particularly good, measure of a political movement’s accomplishments. Who can cater to a rationally ignorant and irrational voting population has little to do with whether your ideology is actually improving anyone’s lives. In fact, for reasons I’ll get to in a later, if all you’re doing is winning elections, there’s a fair chance you’re making people’s lives worse. The goal should be to minimize the real world importance of elections, to get politics out of people’s lives, not to make electoral politics the end goal. Consistent libertarianism is (or at least should be), in fact, not really a political movement at all; it seeks the abolition of politics to begin with.

3. Populism’s Democratic Ethos Leads to Support for Bad Policies 
Even if you manage to get a majority of voters to vote for ostensibly libertarian politicians, the question of how to implement those principles in real-world policy is much more complex. Populists, because the goal is to “tear down the establishment,” are likely to call for haphazard, potentially dangerous policies which democratize institutions that shouldn’t be controlled by the people (eg., courts, central banks, etc.) and make currently controlled democratic institutions more democratic. It goes without saying that putting coercive institutions in control of rationally ignorant and irrational political actors is pretty rash–be they “elites” like politicians and bankers or “the little guy” like supposedly disenfranchised voters.

Examples of such bad ideas supported by populist libertarians include congressional term limits or auditing the fed. Those policies may have libertarian normative goals, but it requires working technical economics and institutional analysis to know if they’re the best way to work towards those goals. For reasons anyone who knows the first thing about public choice can tell you, the masses will never have such knowledge. In fact, the populist attacks on “the elites” are likely to lead people to detest those who do have such knowledge, exacerbating the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Call me an elitist, but I’d go far as to say that populism of any form is just the political manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect.)

4. Populism will Likely Turn into Something Nasty
Because the main thing driving populist movements are “the people vs. the elites” rather than the core principles the movement tries to espouse, there’s good reason to think the base of that movement will abandon many of those principles as it grows simply on the basis that they have something similar to what “the elites” believe. It’s not surprising that many of the younger psuedo-libertarians who supported Ron Paul have since jumped on either the Trump or Sanders bandwagon, or, even worse, have defected into the crypto-fascist, dark corners of the alt-right (Steffan Molyneux and Chris Cantwell’s occultists are examples of this). Even left-wing populist movements often have abandoned leftist principles throughout history (the Jacobins in the French Revolution, for example).

The irrationality of the masses makes it hard for them to have any principles–libertarian or not–for very long. Indeed, even the examples Alex gives are pretty bad examples of libertarians. Rothbard and Rockwell, of course, embraced outright racist and homophobic nonsense to appeal to their culturally conservative base (sometimes using Ron Paul’s name), which is antithetical to the classically liberal ethos of libertarianism which values reducing all forms of coercion–be it through casual institutional forms of oppression or statist coercion.

5. Populism’s Demand for Immediate Change is Likely to Cause Unforeseen Harm
Unlike other methods Alex mentions, populism is a form of immediatism. It really is just a post-enlightenment, first-world, institutionally democratic form of revolution. It’s no coincidence that most populist movements, from Bernie Sanders to Ron Paul rely on the language of revolution to further their appeal. However, there is good reason to be skeptical of any accelerated method of political change–be it “the masses” taking over and overhauling the errors of “the elites,” or violent revolutions like those in late eighteenth century France or early twentieth century Russia.

Institutions and policies often serve tacit functions in society of which we aren’t even focally aware. We are in a radical position of ignorance about what the effects of sudden change that populism demands, such as swapping out entirely who’s in power and changing all policies to the whims of “the masses,” whether those whims are libertarian principles or not. In sum, ironically given the name of the site Alex writes for, populism can never really even be conservative–not in the bastardized tea party or paleo sense, but in the principled Burkean sense. Even if I agree with the ends any political movement aims for, epistemic humility necessitates far more gradualism than populist rhetorical strategy can possibly accommodate.

6. Populism Leads to a Breakdown in Discourse and Awful Praxis
Whether you’re a conservative, libertarian, or liberal, if you are existing in a democracy the main thing you should strive for is to be understood by others. In fact, the alleged raison être for democracy–though famously fails at in its present institutional form–is aiming at better forms of government through arriving at some sort of consensus through open and honest public discourse. In order to have any sort of functional democracy in this sense–which, again, we are already woefully lacking in existing democracies–fulfill the primary function of speech, which is understanding. In order to do this, a necessary norm for discourse to function is the assumption of the good will of all participants in discourse.

The first assumption of populism, much like most crude forms of Marxism, is a violation of what is necessary for such discourse. It assumes, after all, that “the elites” are just an out-of-touch, greedy, mean group of people that “the masses” must depose and everything they’ve done is wrong and must be replaced with the vox populi. Anyone, then, who disagrees–even those within populist movements–is liable of being charged with being “one of the elites” (not unlike accusations of being “bourgeoisie” and “counter-revolutionary” after Lenin’s Vanguard Party took control), and ignored, leading to a communicative breakdown. Discussion is shut off, possible perspectives and principles that could improve the state of affairs are ignored if they bear any even superficial affinity to “the elites,” and one of the few sets of norms–those of communicative action taken from the lifeworld–that make existing democracy at least quasi-functional is replaced with simple partisan hackery. Try talking to your standard dogmatic Trump, Bernie, or even Ron Paul supporter (or really any overly partisan hack, including dogmatic Clinton supporters), and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

7. Populism is Inherently Illiberal and Opposed to Liberty

Populism tells us the problem is that “the elites are in power” and demands that the elites be deposed and replaced with “the masses.” But libertarians say the problem isn’t the fact that the wrong people are in power, the problem is that anyone is in power in the first place. As a consequence, classical liberals have always with good reason been very skeptical of the wisdom of the masses, and have had an ambivalent relationship towards any form of democracy. The radically Jacksonian democratic demeanor of populism, which asserts the masses are equipped to use coercive political institutions, is fundamentally at odds with classical liberalism’s value placed on individual liberty–which asserts that nobody is equipped to use coercive institutions. That’s a fine distinction populist rhetoric necessarily blurs, and you can’t expect “the masses” to understand.

Even if you say you’re just using populist rhetoric to depose those in power, the populist faction of our movement (once “the elites” are out of power) are going to ask, “What’s next?” and are liable to be upset when you say “nothing.” As Hayek tells us, one of the main reasons people get so heavily involved in the political process is that they want to be in charge, that’s true of “the masses” as it is “the elites.”

8. Populist Alliances Often lead to the Destruction of Libertarian Values
Alex mentions the rise of the religious right and other right-wing populist movements as possible fruitful avenues for libertarians to ally with and pursue. However, I’m of the opinion that any sort of fusionism is probably a really bad idea. Not just because many on the religious right want to be unfathomably cruel to me because I’m gay, but because libertarians have philosophical, fundamental disagreements with the people in those movements that cannot be bridged. It is simply not true that the religious right and nationalists are “anti-statist in their nature,” the fact that he cites “forced integration” from immigration supported by nationalists (derived from an infamously bad argument by Hoppe) as common ground is telling. Indeed, if you press most “fusionist” “conservatarians” (including paleos) or “liberaltarians” very far, you’ll find that outside of a few superficial single issues on which they agree with some libertarians, they do not even remotely understand or apply the principles very widely at all. If your movement is composed of walking Dunning-Krugers who do not really understand the extent to which coercive is possible and are not able to engage in constructive dialogue and you’re relying on rhetoric of “take power from the elites” to motivate them, you’re probably not going to have a very libertarian movement.

To illustrate, there’s no reason why “populism” needs to take on a right-wing flair for libertarians at all. In Rothbard’s young years, for example, he attempted to ally with left-wing populist progressives from the anti-war movement. Today, I could say, libertarians should ally with left-wing Sanders supporters. They, after all, share a skepticism towards foreign policy intervention, attacks on social freedom for religious freedom, and corporatist crony capitalism. In fact, there’s a case to be made that Sanders’ supporters are more libertarian than Trump’s, though I don’t necessarily agree with it. Regardless, it is worth noting libertarians have philosophically more in common with those on ‘the left’ in general, but that’s, again, an antecedent point.

Alex would probably reply “But Sanders supporters are socialists, and are fundamentally opposed to libertarians.”  Ignoring the fact that neither Sanders nor most of his supporters are really socialists, he’d mostly be right that they are fundamentally opposed libertarianism. Regardless, Trump supporters are nationalist–which Hayek famously called “the twin brother of socialism”–and are fundamentally opposed to libertarians. Alex might reply, correctly, that some right-wingers can become libertarians by engaging with the populist movement, but so can Sanders supporters. All that point establishes is libertarians should communicate with non-libertarians, and work with non-libertarians on single-issues with which we agree, that need not take on a populist flavor.

The Alternative
If we’re going to forego a focus on electoral politics, and not to populism, what should we replace it with? Alex mentions two possible alternatives:

Hayekian educationism, named after Friedrich Hayek’s theory of social change expounded in his essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” relies first on persuading a core group of intellectuals to adopt libertarian ideas. Then, according to Hayek’s model, those intellectuals persuade a growing number of what Hayek calls “second-hand dealers in ideas” like journalists, teachers, and politicians to propagate their ideas among the general populace.

Fabian incrementalism, named after the Fabian socialists of late 19th century Britain, relies on a similar group of individuals – intellectuals, journalists, and policy wonks – to persuade government bureaucrats and politicians to adopt gradual changes in policy. This, performed consistently over a long period of time will, theoretically, lead to the adoption of long-term social changes that the reformers set out to achieve.

First of all, Alex misunderstands Hayek’s theory of social change. The claim is n’t that you “persuade a core group of intellectuals to adopt libertarian ideas,” and completely ignore political actors and everyday people, the idea is that ideas coming from intellectuals filter down into the extended order of society and eventually become actualized. It’s not as if you just convince a bunch of professors and philosopher kings that you’re right and they’ll create a libertarian utopia, it’s that you put the ideas out there and they eventually filter down, a messy process which takes an extremely long time (possibly centuries), and one which libertarians have really only barely started.

A necessary thing that must occur before they actually become actualized is that the general population is at least subsidiarily aware of the ideas, which requires communicating with the general population in some form (which can and should include what Alex calls “grassroots organizing,” like engaging with them through the electronic forms and the alt-media). But that communication cannot take on the populist message for reasons given, it requires education and dialogue, it requires populizers–which can include educators, journalists, communicators, activists, and even to some extent politicians (though they are not acting qua politicians in the ideal typical capacity used in the model when doing this) to communicate with the masses. Contra Rothbard, it’s not about convincing the “ruling class,” it’s about overcoming them.

Regardless, I will agree that the method some beltway libertarians, unfortunately, take from Hayek’s theory of just writing academic journals and white papers is incomplete. You do need to communicate with the masses, but  I am heavily skeptical that this communication needs to be political in nature. Alex’s narrow focus on elections leads him to neglect other, possibly more fruitful, methods of social change. You can engage in direct action, agorism, or entrepreneurial action (eg., what Zak Slayback, et. al. talk about in “Freedom Without Permission“). In these forms, it requires actively defending the masses (in direct action), spreading ideas by improving the lives of real people by providing alternatives (agorism and entrepreneurial action), and making the effects of state intervention felt on people (eg., when entrepreneurial innovations, like Uber and Lyft, are taken away, the hypocrisy of regulation is made clear). They all accomplish the goal of making the ideas known, even if tacitly, among the masses, while adding bonuses of actually doing things that improve their lives without the riskiness inherent in using coercive institutions like elections to do so.

Though those aren’t necessarily at odds with populism (or Hayekian educationalism for that matter; in fact, I think it’s an inherent part of Hayek’s theory of social change), I put far more faith in these than in elections in which irrational, ignorant people only legitimize the state. Socio-political change happens at the micro-level, through everyday social interactions, through lived real-world experiences, through you reading this article, through good discourse and conversation. If you want to change, you need to alter the lifeworld in which individuals live, just focusing on getting “the masses” to turn out the polls is insufficient. Political activism can only get you so far.

A non-argument against immigration

Vincent Geloso Culture, Current Events , , , , ,

I often encounter the argument that immigrants, especially Muslims, are so different from the populations of their host countries that they threaten the institutional foundations of these societies. As a result, the logic goes, we must restrict immigration.

I do not accept that argument as valid nor do I accept it as sufficient (in the case I am wrong) to make the case in favor of further restrictions on immigration.

First of all, the “social distance” between immigrants and the hosts society is very subjective. The caricature below offers a glimpse into how “unsuited” were Catholic immigrants to the US in the eyes of 19th century American natives. Back then, Catholics were the papist hordes invading America and threatening the very foundations of US civilization. Somehow, that threat did not materialize (if it ever existed).  This means that many misconceptions will tend to circulate which are very far from the truth. One good example of these misconceptions is illustrated by William Easterly and Sanford Ikeda on the odds of a terrorist being a muslim and the odds of a muslim being a terrorist. Similar tales (especially given the propensity of Italian immigrants to be radical anarchists) were told about Catholics back then. So let’s just minimize the value of this argument regarding going to hell in a hand basket.

nast1

But let us ignore the point made above – just for the sake of argument. Is this a sufficient argument against more immigration? Not really. If the claim is that they hinder “our” institutions, then let them come but don’t let them participate in our institutions. For example, the right to vote could be restricted to individuals who are born in the host country or who have been in the country for more than X-number of years. In fact, restrictions on citizenship are frequent. In Switzerland, there are such restrictions related to “blood” or “length of stay”. I am not a fan of this compromise measure (elsewhere I have advocated the Gary Becker self-selection mechanism through pricing immigration as a compromise position).*

The point is that if you make the argument that immigrants are different than their host societies, you have not made the case against immigration, you have made the case for restrictions against civic participation.

* Another “solution” on this front is to impose user fees on the use of public services. For example, in my native country of Canada, provincial governments could modify the public healthcare insurance card to indicate that the person is an immigrant and must pay a X $ user fee for visiting the hospital. Same thing would apply for vehicle licencing or other policies. Now, I am not a fan of such measures as I believe that restrictions on citizenship (but offering legal status as residents) and curtailements of the welfare state are sufficient to deal with 99% of the “problem”. 

On Gentrification, Inequality and Zoning

Vincent Geloso Current Events, Economics, Law , , , , ,

On the CityLab blog, Richard Florida posted a piece pointing out that gentrification has virtually no effects on homeowners. I can buy that result, especially since I wrote a policy piece for a think tank back in the summer of 2016 on the issue. The important point that Florida underlines (by citing a paper by Martin and Beck in Urban Affairs Review) is that homeowners are not being displaced, but renters are more likely to be. This will probably fuel some people who are concerned about inequality. I disagree.

I want to point out that my interest in the issue is entirely related to the issue of inequality which some individuals have tried to tie to gentrification (sometimes without understanding that causality can run both ways). If you want to tie the two issues together, then you must realize that there are four “types” of gentrification. First of all, gentrification always appear in an area that is poor and it is always a result of a shift in demand for land in that area. However, that area can be largely unoccupied or heavily inhabited. It can also be in a district where zoning is lax or burdensome. In each of these situations, you will different effects with different interpretations for inequality.

  • Scenario 1 (largely vacant, lax zoning laws): in this situation, demand shifts right but there is slack in the local housing market and in any case, supply can adjust easily. In that case, the effects on rents will be minimal and will probably be smaller than the economic gains in terms of local economic activity. In this situation, there is little displacement and there is in fact a reduction in inequality.
  • Scenario 2 (largely vacant, heavy zoning laws): same happens, except that the restrictions on construction and building conversions put a ceiling on the capacity of a local area to adapt. The effect on rents is ambiguous and depends largely on the relative quantity changes (how many people relative to empty units). There are probably small to moderate gains in the area. There are ambiguous effects on inequality.
  • Scenario 3 (heavily occupied, lax zoning laws): in this situation, the influx of individuals creates a temporary surge in rents. This is because, in the short-term, housing supply is inelastic. In the long-run, the supply is more elastic and new units can be added to counterbalance the price effects. So, there is a long-term benefit that comes after a small bump. More individuals will be displaced than in scenario 1. Overall, a reduction in inequality might occur.
  • Scenario 4 (heavily occupied, heavy zoning laws): in this situation, the influx happens in a market where the supply is highly inelastic (short and long-run). In that case, the shift in demand creates a substantial increase in rents. This is where gentrification can hurt and be tied to inequality.

These four scenarios are important because they show something important that some people have to understand. Gentrification can increase inequality. However, that depends on the context and the institutions (zoning) surrounding the area in which it happens. In all cases, gentrification is a normal process that can’t really be stopped but turns sour because of zoning laws. Thus, if you really want to tie gentrification to inequality, it should twice removed since the first parents are zoning laws and construction limits.

Trump Is Right!

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

It is easy to emphasize all that is bad about the new American President. For sure, I think he is a clown who will do a few bad things to the US and the world at large. His protectionist agenda is of course a libertarian nightmare, which will also make the people who elected him worse off. Still, the US President is not a dictator, so some trust in the institutions and the actors that fill them still seems appropriate.

Trump is also plainly right on a number of issues. Foremost, his plea (also in yesterday’s inaugural address) for the partners of the USA, especially in NATO, to contribute in equal measure. This is not new, all recent American Presidents have pointed this out to their European allies. It is simply outrageous to let Mrs Jones from North Dakota pay for the defense of other rich countries, such as my home country of The Netherlands. The Europeans got away with major free riding. Only recently did they start to get their act a little bit together, as the Russian threat is looming again. The defense budgets in almost all European NATO members have decreased drastically since the early nineties, which is plainly immoral if you are in the world’s most important security organization together. So hopefully Trump will pressure them to the max.

He is also right in pointing out that many US foreign interventions have been a disaster. And it is good that he wants some closer scrutiny from now onwards. I am not a great fan of military intervention, although I also do not want to rule them out them perennially (as opposed to many others in the liberal tradition). Many of the interventions over the past few decades have lead to nothing though, and created their own follow-up problems. So it’s pretty good if that same Mrs Jones is not likely to lose her son or daughter at the battlefield in some faraway country.

And of course Trump is right in asserting that the government is not ruling the citizens, but is just a service provider on behalf of the people, and fully accountable to them. Sure this is bit more complicated in practise, but it is the only proper principle.

So in these three respects: hail to the new chief! Hopefully he sticks to them and does not screw up too dramatically at all other policy fields.

Is Trump So Old? Its all relative really!

Vincent Geloso Current Events, History, Politics , , , ,

Today is inauguration day. Donald Trump will officially be the 45th President of the United States of America. Many have pointed out that Trump is the oldest president (slightly above 70 years of age). I disagree.

Old is not a “purely” absolute concept. Advances in living standards mean advances in our ability to live longer lives. Not only do we live longer lives than in the past, but at any point in our life, our health is better. Someone who reached 65 years of age in 1900 probably did not have the same health prospects as someone who reaches that age today. Basically, the “quality” of old age has increased over time (see this great book on the economic history of aging). So, when people say “old”, I ask “old as compared to what”.

To meet that test, I took the CDC data on life expectancy as well as soon historical database  from 1900 to today. I combined it with David Hacker’s work on life tables in the US from 1790 to 1900 which can be found in this article of Historical Methods.  Hacker’s data concerns only the white population. I took only the age expectancy at birth of males. Then, I plotted the age of the president at the time of inauguration as a share of the life expectancy at birth (E0). This is the result:

inauguration

As one can see, the age of presidents as a share of life expectancy is falling steadily since the early 1900s. In this light, Donald Trump is not the oldest president. In fact, the oldest president is …. drumroll…James Buchanan (1.85 times the life expectancy of white males at birth). Moreover, in this light, the youngest president at inauguration is not Teddy Roosevelt (Kennedy was the youngest elected). Rather, the youngest is Barack Obama followed very closely by Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy.

I find this post to be interesting as it shows something more important in my eyes: how the poorest in society have done. Presidents have generally stemmed from the top of the income distribution. Over time, the ages of presidents at inauguration (in absolute terms) has not followed any clear trend. The drop seen in the graph above is entirely driven by increases in the life expectancy of the “average” American. In a certain way, it shows that the distance between that “Joe the Plumber” and the “Greatest Man in America” (huh…Lord Acton anyone?) seems to be diminishing over time.

The Asian Age

Edwin van de Haar Books, Current Events, Economics, Liberty , , , , , ,

I love Asia. Ever since my student days I have had a keen interest in South East Asia and China, with my course on the Politics of the Asia Pacific at the London School of Economics in the run up to the handover of Hong Kong as a high point. This was followed almost a decade later with four years of living in Manila, with time spend as a freelance journalist covering Philippine politics and society, as well as teaching for three years at the European Studies Program at the elitist Ateneo de Manila University. I also had the opportunity to travel to almost all countries in the region (with the notable exceptions of Laos, Taiwan and the Koreas, but one should keep something to be desired). I admire the resilience of the Asians, their humour, great work ethics, the beauty of their countries, and of course their sumptuous food.

As a classical liberal I always have a keen interest in the economic developments of the region, which to me serve as the prime evidence for the great and positive impacts freeing up economies have. The rise of Asia in essence is the empirical proof that classical liberal ideas work, that capitalism has the capacity to improve the life of millions of people, in a very short term. This despite the imperfect implementation of capitalism throughout the region, so there is much room for further improvement. In this light it is also interesting to see how long economic freedom and political lack of freedom can co-exist. Classical liberal ideas predict, most clearly expressed by Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom, that one follows the other. Economic and political freedom cannot be separated forever (nor forever suppressed together, as the experiences in the former Soviet bloc continue to make clear, even despite Putin’s increasing autocratic rule).

For an international relations observer from Europe, the developments in the Asia Pacific are of particular interest, because the rise of Asia seems to go together with the fall of Europe as a geopolitical player. Or more precisely: the fall of the middle rank European powers, as the European Union itself is a significant player in trade politics only, the only field where it represents all member states and policy is determined at the European level, with a leading role for the European Commission.

The recent book Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century, by Financial Times journalist Gideon Rachman, deals precisely with this issue.

blog-easternisation

It is a great book, bringing together Rachman’s extensive experience in the US, Asia, and Brussels. Often, books written by journalists lack sound analysis for the mid to long term, and historical perspective. While Easternisation is not an academic tome either, it does provide sufficient deep analysis, especially by tackling developments in all important countries which play a role in the process. It is not just another volume of simply USA or EU bashing, as we have seen before with the huge literature on the alleged Japanese take-over of the US economy.

Rachman’s main argument is that the influence of the West, Europe in particular, has crumbled. This may lead to a major conflict in the Asia Pacific, most notably between China and the US, which also endangers the global economic order. Yet many other conflicts are also building up, in a region which heavily invests in armaments. In short, in the 21st century, ‘rivalries between the nations in the Asia Pacific will shape global politics, just as the struggles between European nations shaped world affairs for over 500 years from 1500 onwards’. I think this is an important message, which should be taken seriously by everybody. Certainly by the Europeans, who are in danger of just inhabiting the world’s largest open air museum within a few decades.  One thing is certain: the Asians will not wait for them to come to terms with the current shift of power.

Summing up: the year of irrationality

Rick Weber Current Events, Economics, Liberty, Politics , , , , , ,

Brandon says I’ve got one last chance to write his favorite post of the year. But it’s the end of a long semester and I’m brain dead, so I’m just going to free ride on his idea: a year end review. If I were to sum up the theme of this year in a word, that word would be irrational.

After 21 months of god awful presidential campaigning, we were finally left with a classic Kodos vs Kang election. The Democrats were certain that they could put forward any turd sandwich and beat Trump, but they ultimately lost out to populist outrage. Similar themes played out with Brexit, but I don’t know enough to comment.

Irrationality explains the Democrats, the Republicans, and the country as a whole. The world is complex, but big decisions have been made by simple people.

We aren’t equipped to manage the world’s complexity.

We aren’t made to have direct access to The Truth; we’re built to survive, so we get a filtered version of the truth that has tended to keep our ancestors out of trouble long enough to get laid. In other words, what seems sensible to each of us, may or may not be the truth. What we see with our own eyes may not be worth believing. We need more than simple observation to actually ferret out The Truth.

Our imperfect perceptions build on imperfect reasoning faculties to make imperfect folk economics. But what sounds sensible often overlooks important moving parts.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Only a small minority of the population will ever have a strong grasp on any particularly complex thing. As surely as my mechanic will never become an expert in economics, I will never be able to do any real work on my car. The trouble arises when we expect me or my mechanic to try to run the country. The same logic applies to politicians, whose job (contrary to what your civics teacher thinks) is to get re-elected, not to be a master applied social scientist. (And as awful as democracy is, the alternative is just some other form of political competition… there is no philosopher king.)

But, of course, our imperfect perception and reasoning have gotten us this far. They’ve pulled us out of caves and onto the 100th floor of a skyscraper*. Because in many cases we get good enough feedback to learn a lot about how to accomplish things in our mysterious universe.

We’re limited in what we can do, but sometimes it’s worth trying something. The trouble is, I can do things that benefit me at your expense. And this is especially true in politics (also pollution–what they have in common is hot air!). But it’s not just the politicians who create externalities, it’s the electorate. The costs of my voting to outlaw gravity (the simplest way for me to lose a few pounds) are nil. But when too many of us share the same hare-brained idea, we can do some real harm. And many people share bad ideas that have real consequences.

Voting isn’t the only way to be politically engaged, and we face a similar problem in political discourse in general. A lot of Democrats are being sore losers about this election rather than learning and adapting. Trump promised he would have done the same had he lost. We’re basically doomed to have low-quality political discourse. It’s easy and feels (relatively) good to bemoan that the whole world is going to hell.

We’re facing rational irrationality. Everyone is simply counting on someone else to get their shit together, because each of us individually is more comfortable with our heads firmly up our asses.

It’s a classic tragedy of the commons and it should prompt us to find some way to minimize the harm of our lousy politics. We’ve been getting better at this over the centuries. Democracy means the levers of power can change hands peacefully. Liberalization has entailed extending civil and economic rights to a wider range of people. We need to continue in this vein. More freedom has allowed more peace and prosperity.

 

So what do we do? I’d argue that we should focus on general rules rather than trying to have flawed voters pick flawed politicians and hope for the best. I don’t mean “make all X following specifications a, b, and c.” I mean, if you’re mad, try and sue someone. We don’t need dense and exploitable regulations. We don’t need new commissions. We just need a way for people to deal with problems as they arise. Mind you, our court system (like the rest of our government) isn’t quite ready for a more sensible world. But we can’t be afraid to be a little Utopian when we’re planning for the long run. But let’s get back to my main point…

We live in an irrational world. And it makes sense that it’s that way; rationality is hard. We can see irrationality all around us, but we see it most where it’s cheapest: politics and Facebook. The trouble is, sometimes little harmless irrational acts add up to cause real harm. Let’s admit we’ve got a problem with irrationality in politics so we can get better.

*Although that’s only literally true in 17 cases.

SteemFest interview

Chhay Lin Lim Current Events , , , , , , , , ,

The first ever international Steemit conference was held on November 11, 12 and 13. I loved the positive vibe that radiated from the community and I enjoyed meeting people I have had known only from the Steemit online platform.

Steemit is a social network that looks quite similar to Reddit and that rewards people with the cryptocurrency Steem for blogging and curating content. SteemFest, consisting of 206 attendees, had a remarkable mix of people from different nationalities. They joined the event from 32 different countries including Russia, China, India, Japan, Panama, Lithuania, Cambodia, Mexico, and the US. There were also many female attendees, something that you don’t see often in other cryptocommunities. 35% were female and 25% were developers. The event attracted famous writers like for example Neil Strauss, bitcoin artists like Tatiana Moroz, and Ned Scott who is the co-founder of Steemit. I loved listening to people’s stories and how they got involved with Steemit. I met someone who lived together with Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum) in Barcelona, a homeless person who tries to get by by living on the cryptocurrency Steem, and so many other interesting people.

I was one of the 35 speakers at the event, and was also interviewed on some of my libertarian philosophical views. You can see the interview above.

If you’d like to know more about Steemit, then visit Steemit.com to see what it’s all about.

2016: Year in Review

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , ,

I hope you have all been enjoying the run-up to your holiday season. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah, etc. to the whole world, from me.

NOL had another great year, and it wouldn’t have been so great without you. Some of the older Notewriters have parted ways or disappeared from the blogosphere, and some newer blood has stepped up to fill in the gaps, including Nick Cowen, Lode Cossaer, Mark Koyama, Vincent Geloso, Zak Woodman, Adrián Lucardi, and William Rein. Keep your eyes peeled to NOL in 2017, baby!

Below are some of the top posts of 2016. (I am only going by the numbers this ’round, but I’ll try to patch together some of my favorites next week.)

These posts summed up the most viewed posts of 2016, but as I mentioned above I am going to highlight my favorites of the year next week.

NOL has been around since 2012 and I’m starting to see a number of posts attain “classic” status, which simply means that they are popular year after year and thus have a bit of staying power. Barry’s post on Foucault’s political thought always brings in a bunch of traffic, as does my post on libertarian intelligence. Amit’s post about migration from Bangladesh has become a classic since only last year, as has Rick’s “Gun control: Centralized vs Dispersed.”

Thanks for another great year, dear readers, this place wouldn’t be around without you. So keep stopping by, keep those comments coming, keep arguing with us (and each other), and I hope you’ll stick around for another year in 2017.

Next week: My favorite posts at NOL for 2016!

Minimum wage, measurements and incarceration rates

Vincent Geloso Current Events, Economics , , , , , , , ,

A few weeks ago, I published a blog post about how incarceration rates affect our measurement of the relative economic conditions of Blacks in America. My claim was that the statistics are hiding a reversal of the painfully achieved advances secured between 1870 and 1960. Basically, my claim was that those who (in greater numbers) found their ways to a prison cell tended to be at the bottom of the income distribution, were more susceptible to be unemployed and had lower wages. This creates a composition effect whereby the official surveys cream-skim the top of black wage, income and employment distributions.

But, could this problem also affect our measurement of the effects of minimum wage? Let me be clear before you continue ahead, I am just asking this question because I could find no satisfactory answer to (or even mention of) this issue.

In recent times, minimum wage surveys have tended to find some gains in earnings for some workers following increases in minimum wage rates. Regardless of how you look at the prison population, it increases  – albeit at a decelerating rate since the early 2000s – since the 1980s. Coincidentally, that starting point is also the point at which the famous Minimum Wage Study Commission was published (1981). That report basically cemented the point made by George Stigler (i.e. minimum wages are not desirable). That report surveyed the entire literature to summarize the amplitude of the effects. That literature encompassed articles written between the end of the Second World War and … well… 1981. If you look below at the graph, incarceration rates were more or less constant during that regime. Thus, if there were composition effects associated with surveys of wages, incomes and employment, they were more moderate than after 1981 when incarceration rates surged.

minwage

But, its also after 1981 that some papers began to find some positive effects of minimum wage increases. These studies took place under a growing composition problem in surveys of wages, incomes and employment. Take the famous Dube, Lester and Reich paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics  who used data from 1990 to 2006. During that period, the male incarceration rate surged from 297 per 100,000 to 501 per 100,000. I understand that DLR used a time fixed effect method, but would that be sufficient to at least deal with the issue of shifting labour supplied (it won’t for the data bias issues described notably by Bruce Western)

If we assume that those who are plausibly affected by minimum wages (i.e. lower income individuals) are also those more likely to end up in jail in the United States, then there is clearly a bias. As they are dropped from the labor market (or as they join the prison population), they leave only the workers least affected by the minimum wage inside the samples. That is one possibility.

The other possibility – which is that surveys do not suffer from a large composition, but which is not mutually exclusive to that composition problem – is that the growing prison population represents a year-over-year reduction in the labor supply which offsets the effects of hikes in the minimum wage (or maybe even eliminates them entirely if the shift is big enough).

minwage2

I have tried many variations of this google scholar research and went back to my copy of the Handbook of Labor Economics and my Economics of Inequality, Poverty and Discrimination  (a book worth reading by the way) and I found very little on this point. Very few scholars have considered the possibility of this problem (which implies a shift of the labor supply curve concurrent with minimum wage hikes and a composition problem where those affected are simply not measured anymore). Yet, I feel like this is a defensible claim. In England, where some studies also show minimal effects or positive effects of the minimum wage, there has also been an increase in the prison population. In contrast, Canada – whose prison population is declining moderately (meaning that the labor supply is increasing as the minimum wage is being increased – the studies do tend to find the “conventional” result.

Am I crazy or is this a case of poor measurement? Personally, I feel that there must an answer, but please tell me I did not just stumble on this!