DISQUS

Will, you make a lot of good points here. This whole debate provides a nice illustration of why the libertarian-conservative strategic alliance was a mistake: people suspect us of being indifferent-to-hostile to the real gains made in the 20th C for the individual liberty of those other than white males in part because we have been associated with the side of the political spectrum that was genuinely indifferent-to-hostile to those gains, and too many of us have absorbed our erstwhile allies' distortions of history. It is really blinkered, I think, to speak of the decade of the KKK's greatest power and of the wave of nativist immigration laws as one in which "it was possible to be optimistic about politics."

On the other hand this post, like many of yours, reminds me why I am a confirmed Menckenian anarchist. I accept as a pragmatic fact the probable inevitability of a state, but that doesn't mean I have to think democracy is moral, decent, or otherwise a positive good. Persuasion in politics may be a necessity but it is a very disagreeable one indeed; it amounts to having to beg a mass of half-thinking mediocrities for things that you should in a just world be able to claim as a matter of right. And why bother doing such a nasty task when it is almost always more rewarding to spend the same time and effort improving your personal situation, economic and otherwise, so you can buy or sneak your way around the obstacles the state places in your path?

(9) and (6) seem very deeply illiberal-- he's arguing for straight-up paternalism by "the smart people with clean hands" (as if that weren't one of the oldest and most useless of all the pseudo-reformers' tropes, from Bellamy onward) and forcibly stopping people from taking risks they want to take. Those who, honestly and with clear eyes, value freedom over certainty are deemed not to be "normal citizens." This is scary stuff, and scarier because like a lot of demagogic appeals it mixes totalitarian fantasies with genuine and legitimate grievances.

I'd like to know why we should take seriously the arguments of someone who believes that the obviously-mythical "Fall" actually happened. Not to get all Hitchens on you here, Will, but you're giving this myth-spinning more respect than it deserves by trying to imagine a rational argument that might coincide with it.

One problem with this is that you can't just keep eliding the distinction between classical-liberal and modern-left-liberal aims. The former, as I understand it, include a moral commitment to realizing as fully as possible Spencer's "right to ignore the state" (hereafter RTITS). You can recast this in more modern political-philosophy terms as a sort of strong combination of value-pluralism and separateness of persons, but it's still a fundamentally classical-liberal meme. And there are core modern-left-liberal aims, like ensuring a minimal standard of living for all through forced redistribution, that are just flatly incompatible with this ideal.

Of course committing totally to a full realization of RTITS entails anarchism; but you can believe in the desirability of RTITS as an ethical ideal and still think some amount of a state is a practical necessity. This is what you're missing, I think, in your account of where minarchism comes from and how it relates to other libertarian and liberal strands. You point out rightly that "big-government libertarianism" might be minarchist non-ideal theory but you ignore the extent to which minarchism may be (in my experience is) anarchist non-ideal theory.

Anyway, I think one of the things minarchists and anarchists share is a broad conviction that RTITS is the foremost moral and social ideal, or at least one of the foremost such ideals, and is certainly more important than, say, maximizing economic growth or providing a safety net. Do you reject this conviction outright? Do you think that RTITS has any moral value at all?

Will, I note that this post doesn't address what I think is among the most important consequentialist-anarchist critiques of the state: namely, entrusting the solution of a collective action problem to the state doesn't actually solve the collective action problem, it just replaces it by another, different, very possibly worse collective action problem.

It seems to me that pro-state libertarians have yet to give an account of why the collective action problem of getting the state to provide public goods reasonably well in the face of public choice issues is all that much easier to solve than the collective action problem of getting voluntary institutions to provide the same goods. Yes, states can force free riders and holdouts into line without the messy complexity of dominant assurance contracts. But the power to do so is functionally identical to the power to let a class of rent-seekers predate on everyone else under color of law, and states do lots of that.

You may think I'm asking essentially "Well, sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?" And to some extent I am, but my point is that without a theoretical account we cannot have any confidence that the current state of practical affairs will persist over the long run. As Jer points out, despotism is the historical norm and liberalism of any variety may be for all we know a fluke departure from that norm, a bubble in the quantum foam, soon to pop.

The problem with your analogy is that rabies just exists in nature. But neither the housing bubble nor the securitization bubble that magnified the housing bubble's effect were products of the free market. Both were created by bad government policies that distorted incentives: bad interest rate policy, bad tax policy, and stupidly written regulations that created an incentive for regulatory arbitrage by securitization of low-quality mortgages (read Arnold Kling on this last, he's particularly good). Yes, a bureaucrat-god could have come up with better regulation that would have prevented the mess: but part of the larger libertarian point is that the incentives and knowledge available to political actors are such that they are unlikely to do regulation that well in practice.

So, to bring it back to your analogy, what the Canitarians are saying is that the vets should lay off the dogs because

(a) they are drunk and Parkinsonian and likely to botch the vaccinations
(b) even more, *they are the principal carriers of rabies in the world*.

speaking of better regulation, where the hell were the disclosure requirements on this one? a lot of this mess seems to have revolved around a sequence of events like

(a) Institution A makes big bets on Complex Risky Instrument I, which has big profit potential but also big, big downside potential

(b) Instrument I, being Complex and Risky and all, is hard to value

(c) so Institution A doesn't put anything on its books about the potential upsides and downsides of its investment in Instrument I, it just shovels the cash from its profits onto the books in the good times

(d) and oblivious investors keep on putting their money into A.

What I want to know is, WHY THE HELL IS STEP (c) LEGAL??? That just seems like outright fraud. "You have to inform your investors of the potential risks and benefits of what you're doing with their money" is, like, Market Rule #5. Why aren't the people who did this on trial for fraud?

don't you need to give an account of what kinds of reasons for rejection are legit? And/or what rejecting classes have standing? Otherwise you get e.g. racists rejecting property rights for blacks, for reasons that may seem as good to them as blacks' reasons for rejecting the denial of those rights.

Will, is there any data supporting the thesis that more compulsory state "social" insurance produces higher levels of entrepreneurial risk-taking? People claim that it should be true all the time, but I've not seen anything backing up the claim beyond intuition and anecdote. And I can give intuition and anecdote the other way just as easily (the US's lower levels of "social" insurance coincide with high levels of entrepreneurship; it's unclear whether those most inclined and likely to be successful entrepreneurs actually care as much as the rest of us about the downside risks that "social" insurance ameliorates). Furthermore, note that you have to show not just that it increases entrepreneurship ceteris paribus, but that it increases it enough to outweigh the effects of the taxes on entrepreneurs' gains required to pay for it.

But in some sense debt doesn't have to be repaid, right? Not under modern bankruptcy law regimes, anyway. You can declare bankruptcy and walk away from most debt if things go sour, at the cost of severely limiting your subsequent access to credit. Which might be worth risking, if the probability of having to declare bankruptcy is sufficiently small and the process of repairing your credit post-bankruptcy sufficiently feasible.

Social Security supports Will's point, though, because it's not clear it reduces inequality significantly, if at all. It's funded by a regressive tax that does nothing to the highest incomes, it gives higher benefits to those who need them less, and rich people die later than poor people so they get benefits for longer. Note the thesis here is *not* the obviously false "the public is not sympathetic to the welfare state" (I wish!) but rather "the public is not sympathetic to policies designed to reduce inequality".

Why say "libertarianism is not" rather than "libertarianism is not necessarily"? Why exclude from your libertarian tent those of us who believe that

(a) liberty *is* valuable for its own sake, in part because of the morally suspect nature of interpersonal utility comparisons

(b) at least some level of liberty is morally mandated as a side-constraint, rather than simply being an input to the great utility objective function?

That seems at least as bad as the exclusion you (rightly) complain about. IMHO the dialogue between deontologists and consequentialists is one of the things that makes libertarianism such a vibrant and productive intellectual movement; it is, if you will, a process of reflective equilibrium carried out between rather than within people. We'd be worse off without Hayek but also without Rothbard.

Of course, if they took their own "libertarian paternalism" argument seriously, they would favor not only changing in the nudge-paternalist direction those things that are now more straightforwardly left to individual choice, but also changing to nudge-paternalism those aspects of our lives now controlled by old-style, no-opt-out, do-this-or-we-shoot-you paternalism.

For example, a consistent libertarian paternalist would support making Social Security opt-out, support school vouchers to let parents opt their kids out of public schools, and oppose any universal health care proposal that did not let people opt out and use their money to buy their own health insurance, or even forgo health insurance altogether.

Somehow I doubt Sunstein + Thaler would sign on to that part.

John Doe: you're missing the point and caricaturing Will's argument. It's irrelevant whether sex is "morally indistinguishable" from other uses of the body. All you need to observe to refute Ross's argument is that sex is *practically* distinguishable in that it requires special kinds of maturity, emotional and physical, that most other uses of the body do not.

Moreover, sex is not the only type of use-of-the-body that has such special maturity requirements. You can't teach your kid to be a coal miner or a firefighter or even a wine critic. Yet no one suggests that these should not be morally (or, a fortiori, legally!) acceptable professions for adults. "Good, unobjectionable stuff for adults but not suitable for children" is not a category made up by libertines; it's a category everybody recognizes, which we libertines merely want to expand a bit.

Gil: right. The unfortunate thing about Megan's failure to deal with the reality of the collective action problem is that, as you can see in Henry's comments, it gives leftists an excuse to smirk and say "oh, those silly oversimplifying knee-jerk libertarians". Actual libertarian economists who understand the problem perfectly well and propose innovative solutions (like Alex Tabarrok's dominant assurance contracts) are much harder to sneer at.

Also, false dichotomy alert. Why does either of them have to specialize in cooking, cleaning, and shopping? Why couldn't they be better off both specializing in bringing home the bread, and using the resultant increased income to get takeout meals, hire a maid service, and pay delivery fees?

"All but a few Americans just shrug and accept it when courts overturn popular laws as unconstitutional"? I think this is too strong. All but a few do accept that it's necessary to bow to the current verdict of the courts as long as that verdict stands. But plenty nonetheless grumble and say to themselves, "we've gotta get some different judges up there", and vote/contribute/etc accordingly. And I don't think it's too cynical to say that they do so not on the basis of any actual theory of legal rules, but just because the courts have reached a conclusion that goes against the majority's.

What if we view things not in terms of freedom but in terms of justice? Then it seems to me it's easy to see the special normative salience of coercion, and as Javier suggests, it's rooted in the axiom that justice requires we treat persons as ends in themselves.

First of all, I take justice to mean the fulfillment of legitimate expectations; an injustice is done to you if and only if someone else has violated a legitimate expectation you had of them. So that incorporates the man-made/fact-of-reality distinction (we can't legitimately expect anything from reality; its facts in and of themselves have no bearing on justice) but sharpens it to say: what can we legitimately expect of other people?

And here's where the power of Kant is clear. We can't legitimately expect of other people that they act in such a way as to provide us with the largest possible range of choice-- because to do so would be to treat them as means to our ends! But we can expect that they not coerce us, i.e. that they not treat us as means to their ends either.

Has anyone actually done comparative studies of the top-to-bottom-quintile difference in diets over time? I don't doubt you're right that they've shrunk a lot, but it'd be interesting to see how much, and when most of the shrinkage happened.

And I suspect you'd see much more shrinkage in "sufficientarian" measures of difference (gross calories/day, intake of essential nutrients, etc) than in measures like diversity of things eaten which take into account the continuing drive for more subjective excellence in the diet of the best-off. I am perhaps particularly sensitive to this, as I eat my weekday lunches at a corporate cafeteria where pasta in lobster-cream sauce with beluga caviar is not luxurious enough to attract special notice, and where I've learned to avoid the rice pilaf because they put way too much saffron in it for my taste. But more generally the Whole Foods phenomenon is a nice illustration: the extremely expensive food they sell isn't exactly an inherently limited positional good; rather it represents a huge jump upward by often-nebulous subjective quality measures, even though the stuff Wal-Mart's grocery departments sell is almost as good by any basic nutritional criterion.

Well, I have a pretty high income, am fairly sure my optimal consumption pattern is not available to me at it, and I also am an example of how the housing cost vs commute time tradeoff doesn't always go in the direction you think. But maybe I'm just in such an atypical situation that my life does nothing to undermine your theory.

I live in San Francisco and commute to Mountain View, about 40 miles away and anywhere between 45-90 minutes travel time each way, depending on the whims of traffic. It is significantly *more* expensive (especially per square foot) for me to live where I do than it would be to live 10 minutes from work. Nor do I get a quick, gridlock-free "reverse commute" from city to suburbs: lots of other people do the same thing I do. Some go even longer; I have several co-workers who live in Berkeley, 20 miles further away.

I live where I do because San Francisco is one of the great cities of the world and Mountain View is a pleasant but not particularly great town in the middle of a soulless sprawl-o-mania. My neighborhood is a New Urbanist wet dream: within six blocks of my apartment there are approximately thirty good restaurants, several independent bookstores, an artisanal cheese shop, an artisanal chocolate shop, and an artisanal bakery, as well as all the more mundane conveniences like groceries, banks, etc.

I work where I do because (a) my job is really cool and (b) as far as I can tell, none of the jobs that pay enough to enable me to live in my neighborhood are in the city proper: they're all down the Peninsula. Probably this is partly because of weird SF geography and partly because the city government is run by a bunch of self-caricaturing Communists. My optimal consumption pattern isn't available to me at my current income because my optimal consumption pattern involves buying an actual house in my neighborhood, and to afford *that* you pretty much have to have hit the pre-IPO-stock-options jackpot.

I'll wade into this. The problem with your consequentialist leap, Bill, is that it smuggles an egalitarian premise into the discussion without justifying it: the premise that we can define a notion of better or worse overall consequences through interpersonal utility comparisons, i.e. that we can speak of "better consequences" without answering the question "consequences to whom?".

But this won't work, because different people's utilities are incomparable, and this incomparability *is* a consequence of self-ownership: it is, in fact, pretty much what self-ownership means. I own myself because I am an end in myself, not a means to anyone else's ends or to a greater social end of maximization of good overall consequences. And my utility is neither lesser, greater, *nor equal* to anyone else's. That's why you need rights to be side-constraints and not balancing acts.

So consequentialist egalitarianism cannot be used to reconcile attacks on property rights with self-ownership.

One silly electro-tram from the lower terminal level to the rental car ramp. Or have they put in more since I was last there?

Detroit, now, there's a cool tram.

Oops: I forgot to mention that John T. back in the comments a few threads ago made a bunch of these same points (the education pt is actually his, not Russ Roberts'), and you didn't bother to address them then either.

monkyboy, you've been flogging this one statistic a lot, and have never bothered to address the obvious problems with it. Go look at Russ Roberts' recent series of posts on Cafe Hayek:

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek

entitled "Inequality I-IV." All of the points he makes about the problems with measuring inequality in general apply to your statistic in particular. Household sizes change, time spent in education changes, and immigration rates change, and all these affect average household income independently of any actual change in income mobility. So your favorite statistic simply does not show that there is any significant percentage of Americans whose incomes have stayed flat over 25 years.

Gareth: Cato has called Bush on his spending profligacy repeatedly. They've opposed his reckless, costly imperial wars and his expansions of the security state at home. They've castigated the Republicans for hardly even trying to live up to the Contract with America. The claim that they're not consistent opponents of big government of all types just plain flies in the face of the record.

And no, classes don't make any deals worth respecting, and to the extent the world's economies depend on them it's because those economies have been corrupted by the vicious evil of managerialist, paternalist welfare statism, whose proponents claim that it's perfectly OK to trample upon the inalienable liberties of individuals in order to "spread risks" incrementally better. The fact that you think rejecting such deals is a problem with my ideology indicates the essential evil of your ideology.

Anyway, it's not my ideology that precludes any such deal being legally binding here, but the Constitution and the common law. For the last time: do you understand the principle that a Congress cannot bind future Congresses, or not?