DISQUS

I think the problems with existential and stoic freedom (as you call them) are actually different.

The problem with stoic freedom is that it has no value except for coping. (Not to slight coping, but its not the kind of value upon which libertarians are seeking to build a conception of the good society.)

The problem with existential freedom is that it really isn't freedom at all. In free will 101 we are confronted with a dilemma between determined choices and arbitrary ones. Is an arbitrary choice really a free one? Existentialism alternatively celebrates and dreads the observation that individuals' actions result from arbitrary choices about what to find meaningful and how. But the more seriously we take the free will 101 question, the more we should reject the existentialists' understanding of our choices as free.

A satisfying account of freedom of choices will be one that gives conditions for choices being free ones. But the conditions will have to go deeper than individual inclinations or else we're back to existentialism. In order to have a free society we have to have individual choices determined in the right way. I think a large part of that right way will be individuals having sophisticated understandings of the structure of the society in which they live and the interrelations among our various individual plights and ambitions.

That which increases our ability to act on this understanding to our mutual and collective benefit increases our freedom. That which distracts us from the attempt, perhaps by satisfying our arbitrary desires, decreases it. Stoic freedom abandons the need for effective action. Existential freedom abandones the need for shared understandings (or says, perhaps correctly, that its impossible).

There's no question that Matt is pandering to partisan Democrats. Bad Matt!

But if only he would have referred to this administration instead of Republicans in general, the sentence Will quotes would make as good an explanation as any.

Will dismisses all government bureaucracies as incompetent and inefficient. But he could not possibly deny that some are more competent and efficient than others. After all, there's really no such things as inefficient and efficient, only MORE and LESS efficient.

When, as is the case, we're stuck with goverment bureaucracies their marginal efficiency does matter. But libertarian ideology is so powerful that it makes people, even Will, ignore this. I think Matt's explanation in terms the cynicism of anti-goverment ideologues is plausible.

I was less careful than I should have been in that comment:

It's not that the generalizations should not be discussed in serious policy discussions and should be in philsophico-economic analysis.

Rather, its that IF we're going to use them in policy discussions, they need to be put conspicuously in service of the actual problem at hand. Instead they are usually trumpet blasts to rally ideoligical supporters and alarm bells to warn ideological opponents. This is WAY counterproductive and trivializes the importance of the actual issues.

Also, on reflection, I think that the risk of ideological communication breakdowns in the use of these concepts is even greater in scholarly analysis than in policy debates. The law that 90% of everything is crap (whatever its called) applies with full force to these literatures. In fact its probably more like 97%.

Libertarians and their opponents need to enter into a non-proliferation treaty of sorts.

Lets call it the IGLT --

Ideological Generalization Limitation Treaty.

Right wingers will agree to stop talking about "free markets", "limited government", and "individual freedom" IN THE CONTEXT OF SERIOUS POLICY DISCUSSIONS. In return, liberal columnists will stop trying to score points by irrelvantly degrading these to-vague-for-use concepts.

Then in the face of the Katrina tragedy we can focus on real questions such as Hillary Clinton's:

"Would FEMA have performed better if it were an independent agency as it was before it was subsumed in the Department of Homeland Security?"

Hell, we can even consider absurd libertarian rhetorical bromides such as:

"Would there have been poor people without cars in New Orleans if it weren't for welfare?"

Let's just leave sickly vague rhetoric about the "free market" to philosophico-economic analysis.

I'm now convinced that ID is motivated by a desire to teach the closest to creationism that can gotten away with and, ultimately, to influence the conduct of science. This is a different goal from trying to get scientists and pedagogues discussing religion and the relation between the science and religion. While that latter goal is perfectly legitimate, ID is unflinchingly devoted to subverting science and science teaching.

testify monkyboy testify

Not in circumstances of justice is the WAY TO BE!

Did you get that nucleaur explosion I asked Ricky Williams to send you?

Gil: Let me just say that I'm sure glad you're not the one in charge of making interpersonal utility comparisons!

"you're proposing to initiate lots of specific new rights-violations against specific extant people"

whether its "rights violations" that I am (supposedly) proposing is exactly the question now isn't it?

I admit that frustrating rich peoples' expectations about what they're entitiled to is a cost. The real question is, how severe are the other costs that would be associated with such actions.

Nick, I love you. I'm not committed to any employer-based insurance. If you've got a plan to create a laissez-faire utopia where everybody is happier than today, then can I please get on the list to help you implement it. And we're playing some hold'em tonight at 7 if you're gnna be around.

Pogge. Uh hum. Boy do I resent his lame ass having a cushy job at Columbia or wherever it is. Sheesh.

Nick: The way you support libertarianism ("the fact that self-employment and self-directed labor are uncommon...is largely due to corporatist state intervention, not to the operation of the market") is strikingly similar to a Stalinist's defense of his implelentation of Marxism.

--If there's anything bad about the society I'm defending it's because of the ideology I oppose. So just let me and my ideas rule and everything will be great. --

Yeah, right!

Nick: Your view of justice seems to be that its a matter of having the least number of rights violations (or maybe minimizing some weighted index of rights violations). Notice that this is not a side-contstraints kind of view at all, but rather what Nozick might have called a "utilitarianism of rights".

You seem very averse to the notion that individuals' well-beings might be comparible. Admittedly assigning that task to government bureaucrats is unappealing, but the idea that individual well-beings are not even vaguely comparible is completely wack.

More to the point, in order to sustain your claim that redressing past injustices will do more harm than good, you'll have to point to something relevant about once and future rights violations. What's that going to be if it has nothing to do with how detrimental these were/will be to people's well-being.

George's line was that all value, and therefore all inequality, did trace to land, right? So, "everything that resulted from the prior inequality", is strictly speaking all inequality (at least for George).

Also, initial joint-ownership is not a hypothesis about which we should ask "true or not". It's simply another possibility consistent with self-ownership. That's why all the arguments against initial joint-ownership (many of which are, ironically, consequentialist) are beside the point.

Nick: It would seem that the Georgist purist should have advocated either re-equalization of land holdings and of everything that resulted from thw prior inequality or (pseudo Rawls) a alternative superior in maximin terms.

I think consequentialism is the way to go. But, like you, I am not convinced that "egalitarian consequentialism" as you called it is the only approach that can be justified after Cohen. Still whatever you get will at least be close to that approach. The Critical Review arguments of (if I remember right) Wolff and Weinberg, did show that self-ownership (which is at least consistent with the possibility of interpersonal utility comparability) does not straghtforwardly yield the libertarian rights (and corresponding "rights definition of freedom") that they are very widely believed to yield. That's why that scholarship is important.

In short: Cohen and his expositers are just talking about what inequalities could be justified on the basis of self-ownership alone. The surprising result: not much.

And don't forget that existing distributions are not, in fact, based on a just set of acquisitions and transactions (and rectifications of injustices) on ANYBODY's view. So AT MOST the libertarian is stuck defending them on the grounds that they COULD POSSIBLY been justly arrived at. It's a fruitless enterprise.

Will: I think that all my points were going to (as you say) what a "citizen can reasonably assume". The questions are (1) how much ignorance is rational and (2) in our ignorance, should we put a lot of stock in what people say about what the constitution says.

Yes, there are different kinds of employment at least some of which do not involve being hired at all. And its possible to be hired and still exercise a satisfying amount of discretion in one's works. It's just that these are quite uncommon forms of employment.

I dunno people. If I can trust my high school teachers the principles in the Constitution were instantiated as they were (including with the electoral college and, lets not forget the 3/5 compromise) largely because of a compromise between the representatives of creditors (remember Beard) and slaveholders. The former were a small minority and the latter were morally reprehensible. Of course Lochner was about the 14th amendment, but see below...

So I wouldn't say:

"The fact that a principle appears in the constitution implies that it was the outcome of an earlier political consensus [among those in the state legislatures, upper class types elected by Christian property-owning males]. A citizen can reasonbably assume that there was some good reason [like worrying about whether the south would be able to keep slavery and on what terms revolutionary war bonds would be repaid] why consensus settled on this principle, and so the principle has some support simply in virtue of being embedded in the constitution."

Of course if you're talking about VERY abstract principles like the separation of powers or representative government that may be a different thing. But unless you look at how these principles were actually instantiated and the public's actual knowledge, then your explanations of how constitutional principles achieve cognitive or any other benefits will amount to nothing more than "the public swallowed this rhetoric about constitutional principle without having any idea what it really meant in practice and, so, they went along." Hardly a convincing justification.

And how do these principles truly play out in practice? Wouldn't Bryan's argument prove that now people are rational to reject Lochner and accept the constitutionality of labor regulations?

"Self-efficacy, and self-control, productive engagement" are one thing. Employment sadly is quite another. If you've only had jobs that truly gave you all of those things then count yourself lucky (as I believe you do).

The problem with employment is that too many people get the feeling that they are efficacious, in control, and productive from the fact that they are employed. But the way this tends to happen is that people need money, so they accept employment and adopt psychological defense mechanisms so that they can feel happy in the face of what is usually a pretty unsatisfying set of relationships. ("I do what you want. You pay me. If you don't like what I'm doing tell me and I'll do otherwise... cause you pay me. I better do my job better than him if I want a promotion. Etc.)

The things that libertarians praise about civil society (voluntary associations, cooperation, and the like), on the other hand, are hardly instanciated in most employment relations. This is one of the most irritating things about libertarian dogmatics.

As for being "tossed by...external forces we are impotent to resist", any person who is sufficiently aware of their broader environment will feel this way (justifiedly) to the extent that they cannot understand and strive to control that environment (together with and with the help of those around them). Employment-fetishism certainly does not encourage us to be aware of our wider environment or to attempt to control it. Rather it tends to inspire the posture: "I'm just doing this cause its my job. What do I care as long as they are paying me? Who are you accept for my co-worker and perhaps competitor?"

Of course, reading the Becker-Posner blog this week, one might get the impression that unemployment is a central cause of terrorism. And blowing one's self up almost certainly reduces one's happiness (not to mention others') so maybe we do need to keep everybody workin for a living.

Gil: Oh, on the contrary, you MUST change them!

:)

Cohen is not arguing for joint-ownership. That's precisely what Palmer (and you apparently) don't see/accept. I'm also not arguing for it.

Your statement,

"...almost anything would make them better off than continued joint-ownership."

seems to illustrate your acceptance of my point that deciding between joint-ownership and private-ownership requires considering the consequences of these regimes. It can't be done on self-ownership grounds alone. (That's Cohen's point.)

Nozick's side-constraints view of rights, on the other hand, says that these rights must be respected no matter what the consequences. But, says Cohen, doing so won't necessarily lead to inequality if the world is jointly owned.

Ergo, if you want to defend non-joint property rights as side-constraints, it will have to be on the basis of the good consequences that flow from such a regime. Once these rights are not absolute but depend on the good consequences, then respecting them absolutely (as side-constraints) can be attacked by arguing that better consequcnes (e.g. for individual autonomy) would ensue if they were respected less than absolutely.

Clarification: Raich is a case where federalism dictates the libertarian position. (The Supreme Court decision illustrates the deterioration of federalism.) The sodomy and interstate wine sales (dormant commerce clause) cases are ones where federalism gives the anti-libertarian result... thus demonstrating the difficulties of consistent federalism.

Very good. It's an attractive line to persue.

But if we can't get agreement, understanding, and motivation, at the first-order level, then how can we assure it at the level of constitutional institution creation? (I've long agreed with those who say that Hayek couldn't provide adequate explanation of why the U.S. constitution isn't an instance of "constructivist rationalism".)

People may like (e.g. Swiss) constitutionally decentralized institutions. But this affection is an article of tradition, common sense, and accumulated experience leading people to believe that the institutions are maximizing social welfare.

American libertarian's faith, on this score, is constantly being called into question. Notice the intellectual contortions that one has to go through to defend federalism PER SE in the American context. Just think of the Raich (medical marajuana) decision for starters.

(Plus, our economic and political institutions ARE UNDENIABLY getting more centralized and its disingenuous and a little obscurantist to argue that we could just go back to greater decentralization.)

I'd rather say that, ideology aside, we have a fair bit of agreement and understanding at the first-order level. Government selfishness and bad incentives are a problem, but so are those in the "private sector". It's best not to think of a government deciding on and utilizing a social welfare function. Better to think of government as just one part (especially deadly) part of the country's attempt to vaguely agree on a social welfare function and implement it.

I don't think I disagree too much with the spirit of this post, contrary to appearnances (maybe).

Cool. I'll check them out. But it would amaze me if they had a convincing method for deciding how accurate a self-assessment is! (That, of course, would seem necessary to proving the thesis.)

And, to be fair, Palmer's article also adduces all sorts of reasons why self-owners should/would/might agree to divide joint holdings or their product. I forgot about that part. Those are the most interesting sections of the paper, but they miss the point too because Nozickian self-owners under joint ownership would have the RIGHT to NOT reason the way Palmer argues they shoud. Also, absent ignorance, they wouldn't agree to anything that would ultimately make them worse off than continued joint-ownership. So we're back to considering the (of course terrible) consequences of joint-ownership and, ultimately, to rejecting self-ownership + side-constraints in favor of, if not some form of consequentialism, then at least a contratarianism that makes stipulations with regard to possible future outcomes.