DISQUS

I think that there's an important mid-point between Patri Friedman and yourself that needs to be fleshed out, which is the cultural one. At the risk of getting all Turner Thesis on things, the availability of the frontier create a different sort of culture, which in turn creates people with different intuitions, even among those people are not on the frontier. I think seasteading is a great idea not because I want to live in the middle of the North Pacific but because I want to free ride off of its cultural effect on those of us on land.

To take up cvd's point above, it is fairly easy right now for politicians to engage in a particular sort of populist, nationalist discourse, in which there are few hard choices and lots of easy answers, in part because through a sort of Bayesian updating a voter cannot help but notice that every other country seems to go in for roughly the same sort of thing, so it can't really be that bad. So long as that is an easy line of discourse, we should expect it to keep winning elections. We aren't going to beat the public choice incentives in this sort of world.

To counter this irrational (but perhaps "rationally irrational") fondness for impractical populism and nationalism, libertarianism needs a similarly irrationally appealing notion. Of the ones that have been tried, it's hard to see any that have worked as systemically as the frontier. The notion of a frontier has a romance that the state seldom has managed to harness or even match.

A few hundred Ron Paul lunatics on a leaky barge with Friedman and Thiel could do more good for democracy than a hundred Catos. And if it actually works -- so much the better!

I also think that you are mixing up state democracy with practical democracy. I'd bet good money that a lot of those seasteads, if they ever happen, will take decisions democractically. Even with the option of exit, the stakes in most public decisions are low and democracy is a fairly low-energy alternative to other forms of politics. The question isn't whether people vote, it's whether those votes are taken with a knowledge that the losers have an alternative. And that's the other place that a frontier pays off even for those of us still in land-lubber democracies: It restores that discipline to democracy, and requires the majority to regard the minority as real, self-motivated human beings on whom they from time to time depend.

So while you can chalk me down as one of those democratophobic anarchist types, I have to say that democracy could get a lot less toxic if the seasteaders succeed.

Welcome back!

If this is what we get every time you take a vacation, I will happily endorse sending you on vacation more. If on the contrary this is what we get when you get engaged, it may not be practical to arrange for you to get engaged more often, and we will have to find an alternative means of supply.

Weekly is fine. No RSS is fine. But weekly with no RSS? The comic had better be frickin' incredible.

Of course with authors like this, it just might be.

Mike Rappaport writes: Another problem with (nonclassical) liberalism is that it often exaggerates the two liberal modes. For example, some forms of multiculturism praise alternative cultures, even though those cultures are not praisworthy. Yet, once again, it is not clear that the conservative modes would help here.

I'll go one more step and say that the conservative modes are actively unhelpful in this. What makes many other cultures non-praiseworthy is exactly that they embrace subordination, tribalism, and taboo to so great an extent. Conservative mores actually require a much thicker multiculturalism that most of us are willing to contemplate.

The conservative must look at a witch-stoning in Nigeria and say, "oh, how wonderful! They are acting out their disgust by forcibly subordinating someone who has offended the in-group! If only we had more of that back in my native soils!" It is only the liberal who is free and indeed required to reject it as the utterly abominable barbarism that it is.

(Here, indeed, Haidt may be right, in a backward way: these traditional barbarian societies have much greater levels of social cohesion and stability than our communities. This is because social order is not in fact the absolute good that Haidt makes it out to be. Bad -- and even good -- social orders collapse all the time, and the world does not end so long as there are active alternatives at hand; divorcees are not immediately cast into a Hobbesian state of nature, for instances.)

It's not that Haidt doesn't have evidence of his "too little conservative virtue means social breakdown" thesis. It's that there is no such thing as evidence of this thesis. If there were in fact evidence that harmful and unfair results such as social breakdown followed from not having the conservative virtues, then they wouldn't be the conservative virtues at all but the liberal virtues -- demanded by fairness and harm-avoidance!

To the extent that they are uniquely conservative virtues, they need to be right or wrong without reference to the liberal norms. To the extent that they must be justified by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we would be perfectly justified in throwing them overboard when they became destructive to those ends.

Wow, I feel like I'm ahead of the curve for ditching philosophy while still an undergrad!

I was recently rereading Epictetus and found myself wishing he was incoherent in basically exactly this way. He totally nails the "happiness as indifference to love and praise" thing (indeed that happiness relies on indifference to _happiness_). But he has no story then about why we ought to strive for anything other than indifference.

Perhaps I need to reread Smith too.

How about "automatic" for the Authorized-Until-Revised spending? That's really the distinction -- that the AUR stuff sticks around even with no action taken, whereas the AA stuff would go away.

Is "meaningful" a sufficiently well-theorized term for all the work that it seems to be doing these days? A naive person might well conclude that it just means "things that I think are good but that you don't like." Is there a reasonably widely accepted meaning beyond that, or it just a stand-in for a dislike of utilitarian concerns?

I wonder if this desire to conduct transactions at arms-length and under well-defined terms is exactly why capitalists are hated by the entire world.

I also am terrified by the notion of haggling. It bothers me that I am -- it seems like one of the things I ought to be more comfortable with.

I think it's important here to separate two issues. The first is, assuming arguendo that the things we hear about this sect are true (eg, child rape, brainwashing), how ought they best to be dealt with? Second, since we cannot entrust the state with the discretion to declare what the sect has or hasn't done to children, what constraints on the state's responses should that uncertainty and/or respect for procedural rights impose?

My inclination is that the answer to the first question is that the state is doing a reasonable if slightly overzealous job; removing the kids from the compound makes sense, though denying their parents contact with them seems extreme.

The second question is where things get thorny, as I think most people would agree that the state should not be able to act all the way to the limits of its power until some sort of standard of proof has been met, procedural niceties observed, and whatnot -- certainly more than has happened here, where a false tip and unsubstantiated claims seem to be the whole of the state's case so far. This, it seems to me, is the unanswered question. As a previous commenter noted, there's a distinct smell of Nozick to it.

Ken -- If you can estimate inflation better than the market, you can short stocks to buy bonds or vice versa. Bonds pay off constant, inflation-pummeled dollars, while stocks price in the inflated revenues of the underlying company.

As for the "productivity of government", you can if you prefer substitute "the deadweight loss of government"; the problem of its being hard to measure remains the same. Governments do provide goods and services (albeit generally the wrong ones, and badly); if those goods and services get better or worse there is a real effect on peoples' lives that isn't going to be adequately measured in GDP figures.

Can you rescue inequality perhaps by pointing out that confiscatory redistribution, the burning down of houses, and so forth are a form of inequality, and a particularly pernicious one at that?

Iceland's economy is fairly unusual to begin with, though. For one thing, prices are astonishingly, brain-crushingly high -- just window-shopping in Reykjavik is enough to convince you that you're hallucinating. Probably largely a result of the whole isolated island thing.

Presumably when cost of living is very high a welfare state looks much more appealing because the baseline of economic subsistence is such a large fraction of income. It may be that in terms of the ratio of per capita welfare spending to cost of living, Iceland isn't nearly as welfarist as it seems. Worth checking the numbers, anyway.

Comparative advantage is a good way to look at the problem. To translate 50/50 to "exactly half of every task" is a logical jump akin to the argument that trade causes inequality -- a complete blindness to the notion that bargaining and trade can improve everyone's lot.

I like to cook, and my wife loathes cooking. It is perfectly reasonable, then, for us to make the exchange that I do the cooking and she cleans up after. (This creates an incentive problem with respect to dirty dishes, of course, but the savvy married person will generally be able to handle it).

50/50 is, conceptually, the right place from which to start bargaining. This means that it will almost never be the right place to stop bargaining.

I think the point here is that the philosophy involved needn't be "complex" or "mindbending" -- it need merely consist in not making a (on consideration obvious) error. There are dozens of ways of accepting materialism and still saying no to determinism.

You can attack it as Matt does as an unjustified composition, or as composition's big sister sorites. You can attack the concept of free will which is, as Sigivald notes, more phenomenon than noumenon, and is in any case somewhat silly. In the opposite direction, you can attack the notion that material components are necessarily deterministic in the first place. You can spin any of half a dozen different compatibilist stories -- that free will implies not an absolute independence from material but merely an inability to predict action as a practical matter; that determinism is underdefined and when defined coherently excludes or includes both human action and free will; that the distinction between free will and determinism is not in fact of any practical import. Blah blah blah.

The point, as Will I think correctly points out, is not that a particular one of these stories is correct. The point is that some story along these general lines must be; for most purposes we may take that as read and move on. Determinism, like an other skeptical proposition, is subject to its own variant of "here is a hand" -- we are more certain of free will than we are of any particular story of the universe's (or free will's) composition, of the definitions of these comically fuzzy terms, of the nature of the phenomenon of "certainty that free will exists", or what-have-you. To bootstrap from premises you are unsure of to a conclusion contradicting something you are sure of is the opposite of good philosophy. It is college dorm room too-late-at-night bull session philosophy.

But "a nation of the thoroughly assimilated" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Frankly, your comment reminds me why I'm libertarian. Tolerance for a diversity of preferences and all that, including your bizarre and unnatural and perverse ones.

As someone with no personal tolerance whatsoever for traditional gender roles, I am continually amazed by their continued popularity. How _inefficient_, at the very least. Social femininity seems an elaborate system for the manufacture of statists, social masculinity an elaborate system for the manufacture of militarists. I believe that traditional gender roles became inefficient the moment that education and birth control became cheap and ubiquitous. I firmly believe that gender phenomonology will beat and outcompete gender essentialism in the end.

And you believe otherwise. And we can both live in the same world, and not be killing each other. (Indeed, not only are we not in competition, but our opposite preferences are probably efficient for both of us, at the margin. Liberty turns diversity into information, and whatnot.)

That's a reminder, right there, of how incredibly rich a world we live in. It is unnecessary for me to beat your head in, or for you to cut my head off, or for anyone to be shipped out for re-education, to resolve our differences. Time will prove one or the other of us right, or more likely both of us wrong, and we can wait. That's a heck of a thing there.

More of that all around, whatever the gender. And less of everything that would require people to agree or be the same.
--G

For people to face death rationally and make rational choices about it would be profoundly bad for the present society. After all, if you knew that you were going to die in a month, why not wrap yourself in explosives and say hello to your least favorite person? Death is a resource, like money or life, that can be spent toward one's personal values. But it is a resource with too much purchasing power for society to allow people to spend it rationally.

Hence the fixation on taking all rational calculation and cost-benefit analysis out of death. If people are permitted to consider death rationally, some will, and their values may not be yours. That, I think, is the central fear: Rational thinking at a point where society's constraints and rewards cannot apply will lead to collapse and anarchy.
--G

In the absence of some future utopia in which putting up a contract written by a lawyer is rightly regarded as prima facie evidence of intent to defraud, what these EULAs really need is some sort of translator. Given that they're mostly a cobbling-together of stock phrases, with no more than a sentence or two of original content, it should be quite simple to build a program to find the "and your soul and firstborn child" clauses hiding in them and flag them for actual human attention. But I'm concerned that writing such a program would run afoul of the unlicensed practice of law regs. Any advice?

This suggests one easy and obvious method of advocacy: Find out when the PTC is going to send complaint letters, and arrage for twice as many letters urging the FCC to let free speech survive this time. Given that the letters need not even be unique or by different people, the blogosphere should be able to swampt the PTC without breaking a sweat.

A well-designed slippery slope is a trap, waiting for the unwary to descend a single step and then sabotaging all attempts to step back up. You've fallen into a classic one already. When you accept the terminology of "harmful to minors," you're already three steps down the slope.

No such causal harm has ever been found -- the Meese commission, you may recall, was a bust. So to speak. To accept the language of harm minimization and the notion of speech capable of damaging a person's moral development as such, is to accept all the premises of censorship; to pretend that this view is improved by layering a further unsubstantiable concept of "minors" on top of it is simply to sugar-coat censorship.

So long as we accept the argument that there are "secrets man was not meant to know" -- restricted to minors or not -- we have granted the conditions for censorship, and will be doomed to live with censorship forever. As long as information is viewed as degrading and corrupting, rather than merely reflective of degradation or corruption, we are slipping, slipping, slipping down the slow slope back to Queen Victoria and the death of the libertarian dream (a dream which is, after all, nothing but information -- and not something most decent folks want their kids exposed to, for fear of moral harm).

We must purge the phrase "harmful to minors" from our vocabularies, purge the word "harmful" as applied to information as well. This world of harmful information is the ground on which the social right and left wish to fight their culture war, which ought to be proof enough that it's not a healthy place for liberation.

Surely, though, free-riding is not always morally blameworthy. For instance, I free-ride off of my neighbor's good temper -- she does not throw loud parties or make a mess of the neighborhood, because that is not the sort of thing that she likes. Does this make me a bad person -- ought I to compensate her somehow for this benefit from which I free-ride?

No. She does as she likes, and any benefit I see from this, while "free-riding", is morally neutral. I have no responsibility to, eg, install sound insulation to block the noise of the parties she does not throw, or to compensate her for not being the sort of person who likes to party.

The United States, oddly, likes building a huge military and marching it to-and-fro -- it always has. It is hardly blameworthy for our neighbors then to "free-ride" off this unusual but convenient habit, no more than it is blameworthy for me to enjoy my neighbor's quiet disposition.

Indeed, if a United States exists, it is positively incumbent upon its neighbors to not waste their taxpayers' money on redundant services. To ride free in such a case is not merely convenient but morally requisite -- to pointlessly duplicate American armaments and belligerance would be a silly waste, and a wasteful state is justified neither under utilitarian nor contractarian nor indeed libertarian grounds.

"Free-rider" is not a slur. It is a mark of rational distinction.

I tend to agree with you, but your list of alternatives is a bit shoddy.

BPL: If sharing isn't competing, vandalism certainly ain't, so don't list BPL among your list of alternatives: It is a noisy technology that massively interferes with wide swaths of the radio spectrum. It's about as anti-capitalist as you can get without actually suggesting broadband-over-other-peoples'-entrails.

VoIP isn't a network technology but a use of existing networks. It can hardly be counted as "showing the way."

And fixed wireless, well, I and many other techno-utopians have great hopes for it, but it just hasn't shown any market traction. If it's showing the way, the way is straight down.

One renewal regime which ought seriously to be considered (both for copyrights and for patents, in my view) is one in which renewal fees are exponentially increasing multiples of the price of a single sensibly-licensed copy of the good.

This would impose the highest fees on the works and inventions that intuition tells us should be the least encumbered: Old works and works which the author or inventor declines to license at economically efficient prices.

For instance, the copyright fee on an ordinary novel might be its list price for the first five years, twice that for the next five, four times that for years ten to fifteen, and so forth. Patents might work the same way but with a one year rather than five year renewal period, at least until the bright day when independent reinvention is legalized and patents can move to a term more comparable to that of copyright.

All this would result in a large number of "abandoned" works either becoming avaliable cheaply or falling into the public domain, and at the same time end the emerging and parasitic practice of patenting things to prevent them from being built rather than to profit from them.