Why Republican Libertarianism? V Concluding Remarks

Barry Stocker History, Liberty , , , , , ,

(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented in an improvised speech. As it was quite a long text, I am breaking it up for the purposes of blog presentation)

There is a tendency within liberty oriented though which sees the intrusions of the state in the modern world as something to do with republicanism and the democratic political spirit. The development of what has been called the administrative state, administered society, the iron cage of bureaucracy, disciplinarity (generalised power throughout society), biopower (sovereignty over life and health), and so on, has taken place in all state forms. It is deeply embedded in the emergence of modern industrial world, where traditional authority structures and customary laws are eroded by city life, national and international markets and technological innovation.

This process has one aspect the emergence of a modern state in which we see national debt financing an investor class, and the expanded central state enforcing uniform legal codes. There is a political economy of this which ties interest groups to the state, and tries to find ways in which everyone could be defined as belonging to a group that benefits from state action. At any time we see states in the double process of maintaining such a political economy and using state power to protect the associated institutions.

There are periods in which such developments of the state take place at a heightened pace, usually due to war of some kind and maybe a collapse of attempts at peaceful balance between groups in a society. Groups  which seem marginal or even as the source of violent resistance are assimilated or subject to maximum state force.  in practice has always gone along with these developments, in all forms of state.

A lot of this has come out of the pre-modern monarchical state reinforcing its traditional power. Resisting he administrative-bureaucratic state means engaging in politics, in citizen movements, in peaceful civil disobedience where necessary to defend basic rights. That is not  looking back to pre-modern forms of law, authority and statehood, in which pluralism exists in rigid state enforced hierarchies, and tradition limits individual self-creation. In the modern world republicanism has sometimes acquired a ‘Jacobin’ form of intense and violent state creation, but as Tocqueville pointed out in The French Revolution and the Old Regime, it carries on the work of the old monarchy in doing so.

The republican political tradition has to some degree acquired a tainted reputation due to association with the most violent aspects of the French Revolution, and Machiavelli’s frankness about what can happen when regimes change. However, the violence attributed to the republican moment was always at work before in the strengthening of central political institutions and the unified ordering of the society concerned. There have been such moments throughout history, but the shift to the modern administrative state has made them  much more thoroughgoing in  their influence on social relations.

Republicanism is a way of coping with this that tries to bring in the restraints of law and accountability to the public in various forms. It has not been an escape from the modern administrative state, or the violence accompanying much of the historical emergence of that state, but no other way of doing politics has escaped either, and the republican way even in its worse moments has at least emphasised the principles of law above persons, the non-passive rights of citizens, and the importance of instruments of political accountability. The monarchist and depoliticised forms of thinking about liberty have also sometimes collapsed into state terror, without the message that a better way exists. The conservative empire and the traditionalist state have used, maintained, and intensified violence in reaction to real and perceived threats without being able to offer the prospect of better political forms and structures than the hierarchies of tradition. The differences are not absolute, as Tocqueville indicates, and at times republican city governments have existed within traditional hereditary states, and monarchist reformers have attempted to bring in ideas with republican origins. A republic can collapse into a permanent system of personalised authority, but it is the republican tradition which tells us what is wrong with that.

In any case, republicanism as it exists now in political thought is concerned with restraints on power not intensification of state power. Its engagement with historical situation and concrete politics, its appeal (at least in the form associated with Hannah Arendt) to individuality and contestation in politics is the best way of making a complete application of the principle of liberty to the political and historical world.

Does size matter?

Edwin van de Haar Current Events, Liberty , , ,

No matter how one sees the ideal liberal world, there will always be differences in size between the sovereign entities on the globe. Even in an anarcho-capitalist world there will be different sizes of the communities that people voluntarily form, although they will of course lack sovereignty in any external legal meaning we now associate with the term. So the question is: does size matter in international relations?

There are many answers to this, and I will be unable to provide them all here (or elsewhere, for that matter). There are instances where size, measured in number of inhabitants of a particular state, does not matter at all. Trade is probably the most important one. After all, it is not countries that trade but people, and if the trade is free, the nationality or location of the traders is of no importance whatsoever. This more or less still applies to the completely distorted trade situation we now regard as normal, with states continually interfering through all kinds of tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers. The real exceptions are cases where political action forbids trade, such as with the several economic boycotts between Russia and the West at present.

Size does not matter in other important segments of international relations either. In cultural exchange, there is no general correlation between size of country and quality of cultural expressions. Of course in the mainstream Western arts (sculpture, paintings, opera, symphony orchestras, etc.), it helps if a country has reached a certain level of wealth, but this is independent of size. Also, talented artists will normally be recruited from all over the world, or be able to sell their (indigenous) works globally. The same applies to sports. If one corrects for population size, many medals at the Olympics, or other championships, are won by athletes from small or middle-size countries.

The size of an economy does matter. Richer countries (in terms of gross domestic product per head) are able to direct more resources to influence international relations. Not only through military expenditures, but also through resources deployed for diplomacy, international negotiations, ‘soft power’, or otherwise. Yet a rich country does not need to be big country, neither in land mass, or in number of inhabitants. And poor countries can still influence international affairs, take for example North Korea.

Still, there are greater and lesser powers in international politics. There is not one distinguishing feature, but most of them combine a large number of inhabitants, a fairly large land mass, either a developed economy which allows for significant military expenditure or the assignment of extraordinary share of GDP to the military. Even then there are real great powers (US, China, Russia at present), middle sized powers (UK, France, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa) and countries punching under their international political weight (India, Germany, Japan, Egypt, the Philippines, perhaps Turkey). This division is never stable, as the past decades have shown, where only the US has been a consistent top dog. Even small countries can exert significant international political influence, as Singapore shows, although the sheer lack of size will always ensure they can rank higher than the middle category .

So the answer is clear: size hardly matters at all. All countries can become more, or less important, regardless of geography, inhabitants, or economic circumstances. Different policies may cause countries to rise or fall on the “international relations influence league.” Of course, liberals will aim at dynamics caused by liberty increasing policies. That is the perpetual opportunity for liberals across the globe.

Gun Rights, the Black Panthers, and ‘the South’ in the United States

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , ,

From a report by Aaron Lake Smith in Vice:

The Dallas New Black Panthers have been carrying guns for years. In an effort to ratchet up their organizing efforts, they formed the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, uniting five local black and brown paramilitary organizations under a single banner. “We accept all oppressed people of color with weapons,” Darren X, who is 48, tells me in a deep, authoritative baritone. “The complete agenda involves going into our communities and educating our people on federal, state, and local gun laws. We want to stop fratricide, genocide—all the ‘cides.”

Interesting, and brings up the question: will the NRA support their right to bear arms, or will they revert to their early 20th century stance and begin supporting gun control again? Also in the article is a bit of history:

The seeds of what was to become the Black Panther Party lie in the 1940s, when black veterans returned to the South after fighting in World War II and found themselves dehumanized by segregation.

I’ve often wondered about this. The desegregation of the South and the achievements of the Civil Rights movement were perhaps the greatest human accomplishments to come out of World War 2 and the Cold War, and this has startling implications for libertarians who advocate for a hardline non-interventionist foreign policy. Libertarians in the US point out that worldwide empire is bad, even a liberal empire, but without it I don’t see a Civil Rights movement happening (which in turn means nobody in the developing world has a model to look up to).

After Germany and Japan surrendered Washington was forced to cede political rights to blacks because of the hypocrisy that pro-rights marches highlighted to the world. The US was engaged in a propaganda war with the USSR, and the segregation of blacks and whites in the US was very bad press. Without the Cold War, blacks would probably have remained official second-class in the US (and the world). Libertarians should be proud of the Civil Rights movement, even if the legislation passed didn’t conform perfectly with individual rights (i.e. affirmative action instead of reparations, or nothing but individual rights!) and even if blacks got their individual rights through legislation rather than law.

Smith’s reporting in other places is less than convincing, though:

Shootings of civilians by police officers reached a 20-year peak in 2013, even as the incidence of violent crime in America went down overall.

I believe that the shooting of “civilians” by police officers is a violent crime, but unless I am missing something Vice simply treats the data as if shootings by police officers are different from shootings by people who are not police officers. Nothing will change as long as this kind of mindset is prevalent in the US. I understand that police officers have a job to do, and that their job makes them different from people who do other jobs (say, a doctor or a lawyer), but it does not place them above the law.

Also, a more disturbing implication of this would be that a more violent police force decreases crime. This is not discussed by libertarians or left-liberals. I don’t like it, but it cannot be ruled out as a possibility just yet. I hope somebody will debunk my notion in the ‘comments’.

One last fascinating tidbit from the article is the difference between the old leaders of the Black Panthers (one who claimed that the Koch Brothers are behind everything, thus showing – to me, anyway – that hippies and Black Panthers have more Baby Boomer similarities with each other than they’d like to admit) and the new leaders (“all power to all people,” including gun rights). Racism is so interesting to me in the American context because of the demographic perceptions amongst other reasons). My parents and grandparents have very different types of racist assumptions than I do, but I’m getting way too far ahead of myself. More on American racism later, or just take me to task in the ‘comments’ section!

(h/t Chris Blattman)

Why Republican Libertarianism? IV

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

(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented in an improvised speech. As it was quite a long text, I am breaking it up for the purposes of blog presentation)

(I took a break from posting this over the holiday period when I presume some people are checking blogs, rss feeds, and the like, less than at other times of the year. Catch up with the three previous posts in the series, if you missed them, via this link.)

The most important advice Machiavelli gives with regard to maintaining the state, is to respect the lives and honour of subjects, refrain from harassing women, avoid bankrupting the state with lavish expenditures, uphold the rule of of law outside the most extreme situations,  and concentrate on military leadership, which is to turn monarchy into a hereditary command of the armies, a republican idea, if the monarch withdraws from other areas of state business and certainly from law making. That is certainly how John Locke, at the beginning of classical liberalism saw the role of kings.

It is true that unlike antique thinkers, Machiavelli does not see human nature as essentially ‘good’, at least when guided by reason and law. What those thinkers meant by good was a life of self-restraint difficult to make compatible with commercial society. Machiavelli understood the benefits of commercial society compared with feudalisms, and though there was an element of antique nostalgia in his thinking, he understood like the political economists of the eighteenth century that public goods come from self-interest, softened but not eliminated, by some sense of our connections and obligations to others.

Machiavelli’s longest book on political thought is The Discourses, a commentary on the Roman historian Livy’s account of the earlier periods of Roman history, covering the early kings and the republic. Here Machiavelli makes clear beyond any doubt that his model state was a republic and though it was Rome rather than Athens, he takes the original step of seeing Rome as great not because of Order, but because of the conflicts between plebeians and patricians (the poor or at least non-noble masses and the aristocracy), which resulted in a democratisation process where the plebeians learned to think about the common good and where everyone shared in a constructive competitiveness which developed individual character through civic conflict under law (well a large part of the time anyway). His view of the republic requires both a sphere of common political identity and action and a competitive non-conformist spirit.

Machaivelli’s republican hopes for Florence, and even the whole of Italy, were dashed by the Medici princes and a period of conservative-religious princely absolutism under foreign tutelage in Italy, but his ideas lived on and not just in the one sided stereotypes. He had an English follower in the seventeenth century, James Harrington, author of Oceana. Harrington hoped for republic in England, though a more aristocratic one that Machiavelli tended to advocate, and was too radical for his time, suffering imprisonment during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, the leader of a republican revolution who became a new king in all but name. There was a British republic, or commonwealth, after the Civil War between crown and parliament, lasting from 1649 to 1652, which was then not exactly absolved but became a less pure republic when Cromwell became Lord Protector.

Even so the republican poet, John Milton, served Cromwell as a head of translation of papers from foreign governments. Milton is more famous as a poet than as a political thinker, nevertheless he wrote important essays on liberty, drawing on antique liberty in Greece and Rome, as well his republican interpretation of the ancient Jewish state (important to Milton as a deep religious believer whose most famous poems are on Biblical stories). Milton helped change English literary language, almost overshadowing the ways that he furthered republican political ideas and did so on the basis of an Athenian model of law and free speech. His defence of freedom of printing, Areopagotica is named in honour of the central court of Athenian democracy (though with older roots) and draws on the idea of a republic based on freedom of speech and thought. Both Milton and Harrington were major influence on the Whig aristocratic-parliamentary liberalism of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth and so feed directly into classical liberalism in practice and the defence of liberty of speech and thought to be found in Mill’s On Liberty.

The development of classical liberalism and the libertarian thought of the present come out of the republicanism of antiquity and the early modern period. There is a strand of thought within libertarianism which is anti-politics or only minimally willing to engage with politics as a part of communal human life. However, the parts of the world where liberty is most flourishing, if far short of what we would wish for, are where there ‘republics’ in the original sense, that is political power is shared between all citizens, regardless of the issue of whether a royal family provides a symbolic head of state.

On the whole, historically commerce has been linked with the existence of republics, even within monarchist medieval and early modern England the City of London was a partly autonomous city republic focusing resistance to royal power as it protected its commercial gains from state destruction. Despotism, and the state that plunders civil society, wish for a depoliticised atomised society. Republican politics can go wrong, but the answer is republican reform, republics with less of the aspects of absolutist monarchy and traditionalist power structure, not an idealisation of states which exist to preserve and reinforce forms of authority obnoxious to open markets, individuality, equality before the law, and the growth of tolerance for forms of living not so well recognised by tradition.

“How to recognize and avoid embedded values biases”

Brandon Christensen Politics , , , ,

The appearance of certain words that imply pernicious motives (e.g., deny, legitimize, rationalize, justify, defend, trivialize) may be particularly indicative of research tainted by embedded values. Such terms imply, for example, that the view being denied is objectively valid and the view being “justified” is objectively invalid. In some cases, this may be scientifically tenable, as when a researcher is interested in the denial of some objective fact. Rationalization can be empirically demonstrated, but doing so requires more than declaring some beliefs to be rationalizations, as in Napier and Jost (2008), where endorsement of the efficacy of hard work – on one item – was labeled rationalization of inequality.

This is from an article (here is the full pre-print pdf) by a number of social scientists on the lack of intellectual diversity in academia (the excerpt can be found on the bottom of page 13). I would suggest that referring to oneself as a political “centrist” or “pragmatist” is also a giveaway of embedded values bias. Just think about how that affects your perception of other points of view!

Pages 25-27 have great stuff on intelligence (so does NOL!), but the authors missed an opportunity to point out that when liberals use IQ arguments to explain such a heavily Left-wing presence in academia, they are simply invoking the same argument used by conservatives to support all sorts of racist mumbo-jumbo. (Pages 30-34 deal with the hostile climate and outright discrimination that conservatives face in academia, so it might be charitable to view these sections as making my point for me.)

(h/t Bryan Caplan)

Federalizing the Social Sciences

Michelangelo Landgrave Comments, Economics, History , , , , , , , ,

A few days ago I asked whether the social sciences could benefit from being unified. The post was not meant to make an argument in favor or against unification, although I myself favor a form of unification. The post was merely me thinking out loud and asking for feedback from others. In this follow up post I argue that the social sciences are already in the process of unification and a better question is what type of unification type this will be.

What is a social science?

First though allow me to define my terms as commentator Irfan Khawaja suggested. By social sciences I mean those fields whose subjects are acting individuals. For the time being the social sciences deal with human beings, but I see no particular reason why artificial intelligence (e.g. robots in the mold of Isaac Asimov’s fiction) or other sentient beings (e.g. extraterrestrials) could not be studied under the social sciences.

The chief social sciences are:

Economics: The study of acting individuals in the marketplace.

Sociology: The study of acting individuals and the wider society they make up.

Anthropology: The study of the human race in particular.

Political Science: The study of acting individuals in political organizations.

There are of course other social sciences (e.g. Demography, Geography, Criminology) but I believe the above four are those with the strongest traditions and distinctive methodologies. Commentators are more than encouraged to propose their own listings.

In review the social sciences study acting individuals.  A social science (in the singular) is an intellectual tradition that has a differentiating methodology. Arguably the different social sciences are not sciences as much as they are different intellectual schools.

Why do I believe the social sciences will be unified? 

On paper the social sciences have boundaries among themselves.

In practice though the boundaries between the social sciences blurs quickly. Economists in particular are infamous for crossing the line that the term ‘economics imperialism‘ has been coined to refer to the application of economic theory to non-market subjects. This imperialism has arguably been successful with Economists winning the Nobel prize for applying their theory to sociology (Gary Becker), history (Douglass North, Robert Fogel), law (Ronald_Coase) and political science (James M. Buchanan). The social sciences are in the process of being unified via economic imperialism.

Imperialism is a surprisingly proper term to describe the phenomenon taking place. Economists are applying their tools to subjects outside the marketplace, but little exchange is occurring on the other end. As the “Superiority of Economists” discusses, the other social sciences are reading and citing economics journals but the economics profession itself is very insular. The other social sciences are being treated as imperial subjects who must be taught by Economists how to conduct research in their own domains.

To an extent this reflects the fact that the economics profession managed to build a rigorous methodology that can be exported abroad and, with minimal changes, be used in new applications. I think the world is richer in so far that public choice theory has been exported to political science or price theory introduced to sociology. The problem lays in that this exchange has been so unequal that the other social sciences are not taken seriously by Economists.

Sociologists, Political Scientists, and Anthropologists might have good ideas that economics could benefit from, but it is only through great difficulty that these ideas are even heard. It is harder still for these ideas to be adopted.

Towards Federalizing the Social Sciences

My answer to economic imperialism is to propose ‘federalizing’ the social sciences, that is to say to give the social sciences a common set of methodologies so that they can better communicate with one another as equals but still specialize in their respective domains.

In practice this would mean reforming undergraduate education so that social science students take at minimum principle courses in each other’s fields before taking upper division courses in their specializations. These classes would serve the dual purpose of providing a common language for communication and encouraging social interaction between the students. Hopefully social interaction with one another will cause students to respect the work of their peers and discourage any one field from creating a barrier around itself. A common language (in the sense of methodology) meanwhile should better allow students to read each other’s work without the barriers that jargon terminology and other technical tools create. It is awful when a debate devolves into a semantics fight.

Supplementary methodologies will no doubt be introduced in upper division and graduate study, reflecting the different needs that occur from specialization, but the common methodology learned early on should still form the basis.

The unification of the social science need not mean the elimination of specialization. I do however fear that unless some attempt is made in ‘federalizing’ the social sciences we will see economics swallow up its sister sciences through imperialism.

As always I more than encourage thoughts from others and am all too happy to defer to better constructed opinions.

What’s up with Oil and the Saudis?

Warren Gibson Current Events, Economics , , , , , , ,

In case you haven’t noticed, the price of oil has dropped dramatically and has not rebounded as yet. As I write, the price of the most common form of crude oil is under $54 per barrel, about half of what it was in mid-2014. What’s going on?

Several factors contributed to the fall. One was increased U.S. production, much of it shale oil. Also, U.S. consumption has not been rising apace with GDP in part because of higher fuel efficiency. Demand in Europe and Japan is muted due to low growth or recession.

Those things did not happen suddenly, however, so the drop would appear to be overdone. Large producers, who have a lot of pricing power, would normally cut production in this circumstance. (Pricing power means a change in their production has a noticeable effect on the world price.) The Saudis have considerable pricing power and their production decisions are controlled by their government. Why have they not cut production? I believe they are engaging in predatory pricing.

Predatory pricing is illegal in the U.S. and elsewhere, under anti-trust law. Predatory pricing occurs when a supplier cuts his prices for the purpose of bankrupting a competitor, or at least driving the competitor out of the market. The predator is willing to suffer losses or reduced profits temporarily, while holding the prices low. Once the competitor is gone, the predator’s pricing power will have increased enough that he can raise prices a lot and make up for losses suffered during the period of predation. Predatory pricing is definitely possible in free markets but is very risky for several reasons: (1) the predator can’t be sure how long it will take to ruin his competitor, (2) he can’t be sure how long he can maintain low prices without sustaining ruinous losses or perhaps face a shareholder rebellion, (3) it’s possible the competitor, or someone who has bought his assets in bankruptcy, will come back to life and start competing as before. For these reasons (and others, such as the difficulty facing regulators who are supposed to distinguish predatory motives from “innocent” business strategy), I believe there is no reason to outlaw predatory pricing.

The situation is a little different in the international oil market because the Saudis and many other major players are government controlled. They are not constrained (much) by the market forces outlined above. They are not accountable to shareholders and are only vaguely responsible to the population of Saudi Arabia. They have substantial latitude to pursue political motives even if their profits suffer.  And anti-trust law does not operate across national borders.

What might the Saudis want to accomplish politically? They hate Russia and Iran, both of which rely heavily on oil exports. They don’t hate the U.S., at least not openly, but they surely wouldn’t mind sticking it to U.S. and Canadian shale oil producers. Those producers are largely market-driven and thus have limited ability to withstand predatory pricing. The Saudis could indeed drive smaller firms out of the market, and also less profitable operations of larger firms.

That might not be such a bad thing. There has been a huge land rush into shale oil and fracking. In any such boom, whether in energy, mining, or computers, many small firms fall by the wayside. If the Saudis ruin some marginal firms or projects, that’s not such a bad thing.

We little guys are sitting pretty. We’re paying a lot less for gasoline. If we hold shares of the major oil firms we’re probably OK, as their share prices have held up and their dividends look solid. The same is true of the pipeline operators. Only if we hold shares of marginal energy firms or oilfield service companies are we in any trouble.

So – go for it, Saudis! Stick it to the evil governments of Russia and Iran and help us clean out some of our marginal energy operations.

2014 in Review

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Links , , , , ,

2014 was a good year for NOL. I hope it was just as good for you and yours.

I particularly enjoyed Dr Stocker’s ‘Liberty Canon’ series and cannot wait to see what he comes up with for 2015. I could not decide if I liked “…Tacitus on Barbarian Liberty” or “…Icelandic Sagas of the Middle Ages” more, so they are tied for first place. DONE! I also enjoyed his posts on Michel Foucault and Francesco Guicciardini.

Also enjoyable was Dr Delacroix’s book I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography. I hope to have a review out shortly.

My most enjoyable moments here at NOL were simply reading what others wrote, both as posts and in the ‘comments’ threads. We’ve got a unique composition here at NOL and it provides for some thought-provoking, entertaining reads (if I do say so myself!). Call me a loser if you like, but I get very excited when my phone tells me I have an email and I check my email and there is a post at NOL just waiting for me to read. I only hope that everybody will have enough time to blog waaaaay more often in 2015.

Speaking of ‘comments’ threads and blogging, I am also glad I came across the Policy of Truth group blog, run by philosopher Irfan Khawaja. I actually came across the PoT consortium because I was looking for someone to add a little oomph to NOL and I thought Khawaja had what it took (my method for hunting down potential bloggers and pestering them into becoming Notewriters will remain a family secret, but there is both a science and an art to it). Alas, when I began my search I found PoT and found it to be alive and well (you can tell the health of a blog by its ‘comments’ threads). True story bro.

Thanks to all our Guest Notewriters as well. Be sure to check out their projects and give ’em some NOL hell when you get the chance. Hank’s new consortium, The Libertarian Liquidationist, is especially coming along nicely.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Athens on the Midway: Defending Leo Strauss
  2. Should Earth Shut the Hell Up?
  3. Space of Mediation: Why do international labor recruiters in China charge so much, and why are they difficult to regulate?
  4. The strange normality of life in the middle of Syria’s war

Christmas went well. I’ve got four books I have to read before the three books I ordered from amazon.com (thanks to a gift card) arrive.

What is a Governmental Intervention?

Fred Foldvary Liberty ,

A governmental “intervention” is a law or action which changes what people would otherwise voluntarily do. Interventions are market-hampering, as the use of force by government reduces the well-being of the people who are coerced. In contrast, laws which protect property rights are market-enhancing, as they increase the well-being of people; such laws are not interventions.

The word “intervene” derives from the Latin words “inter,” between, and “venire” to come. To “intervene” means to come between two or more things, to interfere in order to change the outcome. If a US company seeks to export goods to Cuba, and the government prohibits this trade, the government comes between the parties that sought to trade, changing the outcome to not trading.

To analyze intervention, we first need to understand its absence, liberty. In a purely free society, the law prohibits only acts which coercively harm others. A harm is an invasion into a person’s proper domain: his body and his property obtained by voluntary means. Theft, murder, kidnaping, and trespass are invasions. In contrast, an offense is an act that a person deems displeasing only because of his beliefs and values.

When people are offended by images, speech, or the observation of actions they don’t like, these offenses are not prohibited in a free society. If one is not allowed to make a speech whenever any person does not like it, then there is no freedom of speech. Morally, a victim is a person who has been coercively harmed. Acts which may offend but not harm people are victimless crimes.

Laws prohibiting offenses, such as gambling, prostitution, drugs, nudity, and words regarded as obscene, are interventions. In a society that has complete liberty, people are free from interventions. The law prohibits acts which coercively harm others, but not acts which are merely offensive.

Government officials enact interventions because of political pressure by special interests, but also because some people, perhaps a majority, believe that society is better off with the intervention. For example, illegal drugs may be physically harmful to health. But we need to see the broader effects of the intervention. Prohibitions create an underground market, and then the government responds with more interventions, invasions of the privacy of financial accounts, intrusions into homes, the confiscation of property, and an increase in the prison population. But aside from these effects, the policy of intervention erodes liberty and rights to property and privacy.

Governments also interfere in the belief that the intervention makes markets more competitive. In the USA, anti-trust action is intervention by government into firms that dominate a market, such as IBM did in computer hardware, or Microsoft with computer operating systems. Governments require licenses to practice law, medicine, and hair styling. The provision of public goods such as security and streets is done with taxes that intervene into earnings and spending.

Such interventions have as an alleged justification, the prevention of “market failure.” The economics textbooks claim that markets fail when there are externalities, uncompensated effects such as pollution, which justify the intervention of regulations. But a pure free market would not have negative external effects, as these would constitute trespass, an unwanted invasion into others’ property. Government can play a market-enhancing role by enforcing property rights, such as enabling a lawsuit against a polluter, or making polluters pay periodically for on-going damage. Such compensations would not be interventions. Thus a law requiring a smog test for a car is an intervention, but a payment by a polluter for causing damage is not an intervention, as the latter helps to establish a voluntary market.

Advancing technology, such as the Internet, has made information more widely available, often at no charge, and so whatever justification there was for interventions such as licensing laws has become obsolete. Technological progress also erodes the rationale for the intervention of anti-trust action, as companies need to continuously innovate as new companies reduce the dominance of existing firms.

Interventions are often bad substitutes for sound economic policies. For example, the economic solution for traffic congestion is tolls just high enough to let the traffic flow smoothly. But instead, governments typically impose restrictions such as high-occupancy lanes, an intervention that prohibits cars from entering an underused lane. Today, it is possible to have electronic charging along streets and highways that enable the tolls to be paid as the car moves along.

Interventions include subsidies that reduce the prices of products below the cost of production. The taxes that pay for the subsidies have a social cost greater than any gain to consumers. Taxes on events, other than negative externalities, intervene into these events. Events include earning wages and profits, buying goods, and adding value by production. But truly voluntary user fees are not interventions, and a levy on ground rent or land value is not an intervention, since it does not depend on any event, and the fee prevents what would otherwise be the implicit subsidy of the rent generated by government’s provision of public goods.

Governmental interventions destroy liberty and damage economies. People want interventions partly because of their misunderstanding of ethics and economics, and partly because our constitutions have structured government in a way that gives special interests political clout. But as interventions cause the plundering of the earth, and cause poverty and war, it is all the more necessary for people to understand the meaning and consequences of intervention.

A Quiz on Public Finance

Fred Foldvary Economics , ,

How well do you understand public finance? Below is a quiz. Answer whether the statements are true or false, and briefly explain why. If you think that the statement is only sometimes true, or true under particular conditions, say “maybe” and explain. My answers follow the quiz, but first write down your own answers.

1. After a high tax on land value is in place, it will impose a burden on landowners and reduce the productivity and efficiency of the economy.
2. The most efficient way to pay for a city bus service is to make the bus riders pay for the full cost.
3. The best way to decide whether a club should have a party is by a yes-no vote, with the majority of those voting deciding the outcome.
4. No decentralized pricing system can optimally provide collective consumption.
5. Subsidies that reduce the price of goods below the cost of production typically have net benefits to society.
6. The best policy for government budgets is always to avoid deficits, hence to finance all spending from current revenues such as taxes and fees.
7. The best way to handle pollution is with restrictive regulations, as these are less costly than pollution taxes or permits.
8. The least worst tax for the USA would be a flat-rate income tax with no deductions or credits.
9. The least worst tax for the USA would be a national sales tax that replaces the income tax.
10. A pure free market generally fails to provide adequate public goods and to efficiently and equitably handle externalities such as congestion and pollution.

Answers

1. False. A tax on land value reduces the price of land and replaces what would have been paid in mortgage interest. A land-value tax pushes land to its most productive use, increasing productivity and efficiency.

2. False. The best way to pay for mass transit is to charge riders only when the service would otherwise be too crowded, and just enough to prevent congestion. The rest of the cost is best paid for from the increase in the land rent generated by the transit.

3. False. The best way to decide on a club party is the method called “demand revelation.” Each member records the most he would pay for the party. The amounts are added up. If the total is greater than the cost, have the party. To keep the members honest, if any member changed the outcome, relative to stating one’s cost, that person has to compensate the group an amount equal to the net loss of everyone else (their stated values minus their costs). This method is better because it measures how much the members want the party, not just whether they want it.

4. False. Collective consumption paid for by land rent can be decentralized, because the rent reflects the demand to be located there, and the land will not flee, hide, or shrink when its rent is tapped to pay for collective goods.

5. False. The social cost of taxes that pay for subsidies is greater than the gain to consumers.

6. False. Government borrowing can be a good policy if the funds are spent for investments that are more productive than if the funds were spent in private investments. Otherwise, the budget should not have a deficit.

7. False. A charge or tax on pollution, based on its damage, is more effective than regulations and permits, and the funds can replace taxes that harm the economy.

8. False. A land-value tax is better for the economy than a flat-rate income tax.

9. False. A land-value tax is better for the economy than a national sales tax.

10. Some textbooks say this is true, but the better answer is, False. Private communities such as homeowners’ associations and shopping centers can and do provide public goods from the site rentals. In a pure market, pollution is trespass that requires compensation. Private transit can have congestion charges. A pure free market would have contractual governance that could adequately provide public goods and prevent pollution and congestion.

Could the social sciences benefit from being synthesized?

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty , , , ,

This past month a paper Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan by on the ‘Superiority of Economists‘ has made the rounds around the webs. Our own Brandon has made note of it before. I have given the paper some thought and cannot help but wonder if the social sciences could not benefit from being synthesized into a unified discipline.

Some background: I have been studying economics for a little under half a decade now. By all means I’m a new-born chicken, but I have been around long enough to have grown a distaste for certain elements of the dismal science. In particular I am disturbed by the insular nature of economists; relatively few seem interested in dropping by the History or Political Science departments next door to see what they’re working on. I cannot help but feel this insular nature will be economic’s undoing.

It should be no surprise that I hope to enter CalTech’s Social Science program for my PhD studies. The university is famed for its interdisciplinary nature and its social science program is no different. Its students are steeped in a core composed of microeconomics, statistics, and the other social sciences. For a while the New School in New York City offered a similar program.

I am sure there would be those who would object to synthesizing the social sciences into a unified discipline. Sociology and Economics might be more easily combined (as they were by folks such as Gary Becker) than Economics and Anthropology.

I am eager to hear other’s thoughts on this. Is the gap between the social sciences too large for them to be unified? Is unification even desirable? Should we content ourselves with an annual holiday dinner where we make fun of our common enemy?

The Most Embarrassing Factions of the US-Cuba detente

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , , , , ,

I can only list, in order of magnitude, three: 1) Republican hawks, 2) condescending Leftists, and 3) anti-Americans abroad.

In some ways none of this is surprising. All three of these factions hate each other, mostly because they are the least libertarian factions in the world (familiarity breeds contempt, it is often said).

Republican hawks are first on my list because they are the most dangerous. This is a deeply reactionary faction that does not care one iota about the national interest. It is a vulgar mob that has no need for nuance or depth. One of the state of Florida’s Senators, Marco Rubio, exemplifies this isolationist faction. This is demagoguery at its finest. It also goes a long way toward explaining why I will never, ever be a Republican, despite the honest efforts of courageous statesmen like Ron and Rand Paul.

Condescending Leftists are second because of their reactions to the beginnings of the end of a vicious, self-defeating embargo: Decrying the fact that Starbucks and McDonald’s will soon be forcing poor, naive Cubans into becoming customers with actual choices in an actual marketplace. According to the worldview of these Leftists: the lives of Cubans have been better than those of Westerners because of its simplicity (this simplicity was brought about, of course, by the heavy-handed tactics of the Castro dictatorship, but somehow this always fails to make the final cut of the condescending Leftist’s narrative). Capitalism will put an end to the simple lives of the Cuban people, and this is a bad thing for both the world and the Cubans themselves.

Embarrassing and disgusting.

The last faction on my list, anti-Americans abroad, have taken the Obama administration’s decision to reach out to Cuba as an excuse to lie to domestic factions everywhere. They have seized upon the fact that the US sometimes pursues bad policies, and have turned it into a soapbox preaching session for all of the gullible schoolboys and girls in the world who instinctively hate the world’s liberal hegemon. What is lost (or, more likely, ignored) in these preachers’ message is the fact that the US is changing its bad policy. The same cannot be said for the tired tropes wielded by aging anti-Americans in the name of some variant of socialist (whether national or international) revolution.

Some notes in the margins:

  • Cuba will not become free or (or) democratic overnight.
  • It will not become wealthy overnight, either. In fact, there is bound to be a whole lot of cronyism in the near future, as Castro’s butchers and henchmen gobble up much of the wealth that will inevitably flood Cuba’s markets. Remittances will likely increase as well, which means that the cronysim of Castro’s henchmen will be offset by the influx of cash from the US. This, in turn, means that the Castro dictatorship is likely to be around for a lot longer than anticipated.

Peggy Noonan’s piece in the Wall Street Journal is well-worth reading. Observe:

A closing note: I always thought, life often being unfair, that Fidel Castro would die the death of a happy monster, old, in bed, a cigar jutting out from the pillows, a brandy on the bedside table. My dream the past few years was that this tranquil end would be disturbed by this scene: American tourists jumping up and down outside his window, snapping pictures on their smartphones. American tourists flooding the island, befriending his people, doing business with them, showing in their attitude and through a million conversations which system is, actually, preferable. Castro sees them through the window. He grits his teeth so hard the cigar snaps off. Money and sentiment defeat his life’s work. He leaves the world knowing that in history’s great game, he lost.

Open the doors, let America flood the zone and snap those pictures. “Fidel! Look this way!” Snap. Flash. Gone.

Happy Holidays

Brandon Christensen Books , , , , , , ,

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanzaa.

I’ve just been chillin’ with family the past week or so. My brother got home from Paris recently and my sisters arrive in town, from Utah, sometime this weekend.

I’ve been browsing through the Bismark section of Kissinger’s Diplomacy, as well as the Bismark sections of Ozment’s A Mighty Fortress and Tipton’s A History of Modern Germany Since 1815. I’m trying to get a feel not so much for the man himself but for how he created a federal state out of many and called it Germany. I would welcome recommendations on this topic.

I’ve also been reading the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. There is not enough gratuitous sex and violence for me to recommend the series (in fact there has been no sex at all in the series so far, and I’m about halfway through the second book), but the story line has hooked me enough that I’ll read through the entire trilogy. I think I’m done with fantasy though. I mentioned that I read the A Song of Ice and Fire series and really liked it, but apparently that series is considered an anomaly of sorts within the fantasy genre. A damn shame.

Why Republican Libertarianism? III

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

(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented in an improvised speech. As it was quite a long text, I am breaking it up for the purposes of blog presentation)

There is a gap between ancient Athens and classical liberalism, and covering that gap will explain more about the development from antique republics to modern liberty. The trio of major antique republican thinkers mentioned above, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, sets up the tradition. They establish the idea of the best state – polity/politea in Greek, republic/res publica in Latin – as one of hearing political power between groups in the context of shared citizenship and decision making.

For Aristotle, that is the sharing of power between oligarchs (the rich, in practice those wealthy through commerce), aristocrats (the virtuous, in practice the educated land owning classes) and the poor majority. Polybius was a later Greek thinker who admired the Roman republic and Cicero was a Roman aristocrat-philosopher from the last years before the republic gave way to the one-man emperor rule system.

Both use arguments from Aristotle but tend to refer to Sparta rather than Athens as the ideal republic, which indicates the difficulties for antique thought in accepting a commercial and free thinking republic as model. Polybius and Cicero both admire the Roman system because they see it as based on law and on sharing power between the people (citizens’ assembly), the aristocracy (senate), and a monarchical function shared between two year-long co-rulers (consuls).

Their arguments also rest on the idea of the state as military camp. It is interesting to note that Pettit the egalitarian liberal prefers this Roman model to Athens and that Arendt prefers the Athenian model. This suggests that Arendt has something to say to classical liberals and libertarians, though she is rarely taken up within that group, and that egalitarian liberalism is rather caught up in strong state ideas, the state strong enough to force redistribution of economic goods rather than impose extreme military spirit on its citizens, but a strong intervening state.

All three of the ancient republican thinkers had difficulty with the idea of a commercially orientated republic and has some idea of virtue in restraining wealth, though Cicero in particular was staggeringly rich suggesting that ancient republican thought had some difficulty in accommodating commercial spirit, more so than some ancient republics in practice.

There is one major step left in ancient republican thinking which is the account the senator-historian Tacitus, of the early Roman Emperor period, gives of liberty in the simple tribal republics of ancient Germans and Britons. He sees them as based on independence of spirit and a willingness to die for that independence, in a way largely lacking amongst the Romans of that time.

The admiration for such ‘barbarian’ liberty also gives some insight into the difficulty of combining commercial spirit with republicanism in ancient thinking. Wealth is seen as something tied to benefits from the state, state patronage, so reduces independence of the state whether the local state or a foreign invading state.

Republicanism takes the next great step forward when some way of thinking of wealth as existing at least partly independently of state patronage appears. This is what happens in northern Italy from about the thirteenth century. To some degree this Italian republicanism has older roots in the maritime republic of Venice, but the trading wealth is still very tied up with aristocratic status and a rigid aristocratic hold on politics.

It is Florence, which serves as a thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century Athens, where Italian culture, commercial wealth, and republican thinking all thrive. The cultural greatness goes back to the poet Dante and the republicanism to his tutor Bruno Latini. The really great moment in Florentine republicanism comes in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, though, with Francesco Guicciardini, but mostly with Niccoló Machiavelli.

Commentary on Machiavelli is heavily burdened by the image of Evil Machiavel or at least of Machiavelli the cynical advocate of power politics in The Prince. This is just a completely false image of a man whose ideal was the revival of the Roman republic, not the rule of absolute and absolutely immoral princes.

The supposed wickedness and cynicism of The Prince related to comments on how kings seize and maintain power, in which as far as Machiavelli advocates rather than analyses, he advocates minor acts of political violence. The age of Machiavelli is the age of the Catholic Inquisition torturing heretics and passing them to the state to be burned at the stake, the mass persecution and expulsion of Iberian Jews and Muslims, wars of religion and conquest, which involved systematic and mass destruction of property, torture, rape, and murder.

Those who chose to condemn the ‘wickedness’ of Machiavelli at the time were often those engaged in such activities. Machiavelli’s advice to princes does no more than advocate at the most extreme, very limited amounts of violence to institute and maintain rule, certainly very limited by the standards of the time.