There is an interesting article in The American Conservative by Robert Locke called Marxism of the Right, by which he is referring to libertarianism. The ‘money quote’ being:
If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function.
Like most right-statist (conservative) criticisms of libertarianism, this one fails on several levels. In this article’s mitigation, libertarianism (like conservatism) means different things to different people and so no doubt some self-described or de facto libertarians believe that ‘pure’ selfishness and individualism are all a society needs to function (that said, I reject the implied semantics suggesting that selfishness and altruism are mutually exclusive as I do not accept the Randian definition of altruism that Locke rather amusingly seems to use). Yet most well considered libertarians do not really take such a simple view of things as Locke suggests.
He asks libertarians many questions:
What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free?
Then is it in fact a ‘free society’ to start with? Or is it just ‘less un-free’ that some alternative? More correctly however ‘society’ does not draft its ‘citizens’ (and I prefer the more honest term ‘subjects’), only states do that… and the two are not the same thing at all.
What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners?
But whose ‘economic freedom’ is really being talked about here? I find it bizarre that in 2005 this argument is still being made about a fungible globally traded commodity.
What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society?
I would be curious to know if Locke feels that society in the United States was hugely less free before the introduction of educational conscription. I also wonder if he feels that the low quality state education imposed on children in the blearier parts of many large US cities has made those people more free and if so, why?
What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways?
And yet Japan, a nation of extraordinarily high land prices, manages to create a rail system vastly superior to that in the USA without legal powers of compulsory purchase. There are always alternatives.
What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?
But surely here the problem is not the origin of voters but rather unconstrained democracy. This is not an argument for controlling immigration but rather for sensible constitutional constraints which set the acceptable limits of politics. I am ambivalent about the whole libertarian label to be frank (I prefer ‘social individualist’) but I suppose it has the virtue of differentiating minarchist classical liberals of my ilk from conservative right-statists like Robert Locke. Locke rightly points out that libertarians come in many flavours but contrary to what he says, it seems to me that most libertarians I know have nothing against collective action (most rather like the idea of voluntary collectives like companies and associations) or altruism (most rather like charities and organizations like the RNLI or volunteer militaries etc.)… moreover they want roads maintained, diseases combated, children educated, garbage collected and fires put out as much as socialists and conservatives do. Where they depart from both the left and right statists is that they think all these things are more likely to get done effectively and more morally when they are not done at gunpoint (i.e. compelled by law). To be a libertarian is to believe that society (which is the sum of its parts but not more than that), not the state, is what actually matters, and moreover the state, far from being society’s protector as conservatives fondly imagine, is as often as not highly corrosive to many of the very values conservatives often implausibly claim to champion.
Also morally speaking, the ‘altruism’ that the Robert Locke article says is needed for societies to function is not really altruism at all because surely it is impossible to compel altruistic actions. If my money is taken by force and given to another, that is not altruistic of me (I have no choice), it is not altruistic of the tax man (it is not his money) nor the person receiving the money (who is just the receiver of the benefits). This is hardly a surprise as the sort of conservatism one sees in places such as The American Conservative is really just utilitarianism and thus rarely has much to meaningfully say about moral theories.
Locke says about libertarians:
They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.
Libertarians attack self-restraint? Really? That is a new one on me! Surely self-restraint motivated by either sound moral theories or failing that, social pressures, is sure the very essence of what libertarians preach.
Society is a network of affinity and dis-affinity that traditionally, at least in the Anglosphere, has motivated behaviour far more than the state has. I want the freedom to motive people not to break into my house by virtue of the fact I want the means to put a couple 40 cal holes in their centre of mass. Thus it makes me laugh to hear so called conservatives decry moves to return to more social ways of moderating behaviours and away from the statist regulatory approach. I wonder if Locke supports an end to tax funded social welfare entitlements that in effect subsidize imprudence and a lack of self-restraint? In a libertarian society, the causal links between a lack of self-restrain and ruin will be far easier to see than in the sort of right-flavoured police heavy welfare state that, when you ask the correct questions, it turns out that most conservatives really believe in.
So the big trouble I have with Robert Locke’s article is that, whilst not quite a ‘straw man’ argument, it is not actually taking on the true philosophical core of what he claims to critique, nor is he making particularly useful remarks about what collective action and altruism really are and how they relate to a libertarian world view. In Locke’s defence I realize that trying to define libertarianism (a seeming prerequisite to critiquing it) is rather like trying to herd cats, but nevertheless claiming that selfishness and individualism, standing in opposition to altruism and collectivism, defines the libertarian world view is little more than a caricature of the reality.
Fine piece, Perry. One quibble: when Randians use the term “altruism” as a term of abuse, the word is used differently from colloquial usage. Randians don’t attack benevolence or generosity at all, quite the opposite. What they attack is the idea that one had a duty to sacrifice one’s life and happiness for some greater, “higher” good such as the State, Volk, Proletariat, God, or Whatever.
If giving aid to others like becoming an RNLI rescuer or volunteer paramedic is a positive value to the individual as well as people being helped, then it is a highly “selfish” act to do such things, from the Randian point of view.
I prefer to use the term libertarian rather than social individualist as the latter can be confusing.
I’ll agree on the label. It took us 30 years to get some level of ‘brand recognition’ of ‘libertarian’. It is really starting to become part of the gestalt and we need to keep pushing that.
I wish I could say more on the main topic, but Perry has said it very well.
Predictably, I think Locke is pretty much on the money. I have commented several times that libertarianism and Marxism do have several things in common, not least a Utopian and wholly unrealistic view of human nature.
I see no evidence whatsoever that this is anything other than plain truth. Humans are individuals, of course, but are also highly social animals and do not function in isolation. Whilst it can be true to say, as does Perry, that “some self-described or de facto libertarians believe that ‘pure’ selfishness and individualism are all a society needs,” this does smack of evasive semantic pedantry. It is also true that it is almost impossible to define what “libertarianism” actually means, so in this sense a thorough criticism of the philosophy is difficult. Equally, this means it is almost impossible to explain to the voter what he might be voting for.
Of course, the real money quote is:
EG
right-statist (conservative)
Criticising what conservatives do in practice as “statist” is legitimate and would earn the agreement of probably most conservatives. But to say conservatism itself is “statist” just shows you don’t properly understand conservatism. Your implication that “right-statist (conservative)” is the mirror of “left-statist” says this even more: do you see no philosophical difference between conservative and left-liberal attitudes to the legitimate limits of government power? If not, then again you don’t understand conservatism especially well.
“What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?”
But surely here the problem is not the origin of voters but rather unconstrained democracy. This is not an argument for controlling immigration but rather for sensible constitutional constraints which set the acceptable limits of politics.
In plainer terms, what you are saying is to preserve libertarianism in a society of open borders you need a constitution that closes down democracy when it comes to distribution of wealth. This is not going to happen. Even if it did, all it would mean is democratic pressure either for a constitutional amendment or a new constitution, because there is simply no way you can impose your favoured constitution on a country irrespective of the attitudes of the people who make it up. As Euan Gray hints, it’s this sort of attitude to human nature that shows where libertarianism really falls down. Instead of recognising that countries like the United States and United Kingdom have relatively free constitutions because of the cultural and political traditions of centuries pointing in that direction, you think free constitutions are primarily the cause rather than the effect of the history and culture of the people who make up a nation.
Surely self-restraint motivated by either sound moral theories or failing that, social pressures, is sure the very essence of what libertarians preach.
This is what they preach when caught out by writers like Locke, and have to fall back on more realistic defences. Much more often, libertarians preach that their thinking is a prize combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, carrying all the advantages of 1960s mores and none of the (inevitable) costs in higher taxes and greater powers for the state.
Self-restraint motivated by sound moral theories and social pressures is the essence of what conservatives preach.
“you think free constitutions are primarily the cause rather than the effect of the history and culture of the people who make up a nation”
Peter: chicken and egg? May not the constitution be both effect and cause of a people’s culture over time? Would US citizens be just as demanding of their political institutions without their Bill of Rights? Would British subjects still be deferential even without our custom-based unwritten constitutional arrangements?
If they weren’t demanding in the first place, would there ever have been a Bill of Rights?
EG
Mike, I do think both explanations are a factor. That’s why I used the term ‘primarily’ – there were and are secondary factors.
What I am arguing against is the idea that political problems like the demand for redistribution of wealth that arise because people naturally disagree can be resolved by drawing up the right constitution. The demand for socialistic redistribution by recent immigrants is not just a theoretical threat to those who want to reduce government but a real life political factor – look at what’s happened to Reagan’s California! – that Democrats at least understand all too well. This pressure cannot be eliminated by a more restrictive constitution. All you will get if you try is pressure for a constitutional amendment or an entirely new constitution.
Peter: Yes I understand your point – I was just flagging up the more general question of how a culture is related to its’ constitution. Your (typical) charge that libertarianism is unrealistic makes me ask myself how far would we get in discussing the likely success of any ‘libertarian’ constitutional arrangement? That seems to me far more interesting than the brute question-mark of whether libertarianism is right or wrong.
Euan: your feeble response smells of cognitive pedantry.
Peter: “Do you see no philosophical difference between conservative and left-liberal attitudes to the legitimate limits of government power? If not, then again you don’t understand conservatism especially well.”
Hmm. I’d question the claim that (for example) the current conservative US administration has any great interest in limiting government power compared to previous centre-left administrations…
In other words, while conservative ideals and philosophy are closer in line with libertarian beliefs, Perry is correct in his characterisation of conservatism as practiced in real life.
Nevertheless, what is the answer to the question?
EG
John, as I say, most conservatives would probably be willing to acknowledge that in power plenty of their fellow travellers have been “statist”. One can pick examples on both sides of that argument without much effort. But as you seem to acknowledge, what is definitely wrong is to describe conservatism itself in that way, doubly so in suggesting that conservatism is simply the “right-statist” mirror image of “left-statist”. No sensible conception of “statism” could fail to recognise the differences in how conservatives and left-liberals view the power and role of government. Perry’s own blogroll is actually a powerful testament to that difference.
I don’t think you can just assert that Peter. Most conservatives believe the State should have the right to involuntarily end a citizen’s life. Most left-liberals do not.
Whether this makes conservatives more “statist” or less than someone who wants to nationalise the railways (for example) is not obvious.
Instead of recognising that countries like the United States and United Kingdom have relatively free constitutions because of the cultural and political traditions of centuries pointing in that direction, you think free constitutions are primarily the cause rather than the effect of the history and culture of the people who make up a nation.
The history and culture of the ‘people’ has nothing to do with it. All political matters are decided by the tiny intellectual elite. The US constitution was written by a tiny elite inspired by works of philosophy, notably John Locke. The great mass of the people have no interest in these matters and no capacity to even understand them, what they think is utterly irrelevant, there is no such thing as ‘democratic pressure’ it is as much a myth as the ‘divine right of kings’, invented by intellectuals.
Peter; in the US the only real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is what they want to use the state for, not how little of a state they want to have. Most Republicans want to use to levers of goverment to dictate behaviour of Americans citizens just as the left via political correctness also wants to dictate their behaviour.
Too many Republicans the recent Bush tax cuts were a really big deal. Many, the RINOS, thought the tax cuts were far too large. If one actually looks at the size of the tax cuts there were in fact miniscule.
As I used to say about the mid-Western/Southern Republicans: “their instinct is to regulate it or ban it and then pray about it…”
Such as the barons at Runnymede, populist religious agitators and self-interested parliamentarians in the 1640s, the army in 1659 and again in 1689, and vote-grubbing politicians in the early 20th century. Intellectual giants, all.
The point is valid when applied to events such as the Russian revolution or the framing of the US constitution, but not necessarily to broader historical and cultural trends which in turn often dictate political changes.
Yet when the political settlement becomes sufficiently dictatorial or oppressive, the people have the capacity to rebel and demand an alternative. Presumably they understand to some extent, and presumably they get sufficiently interested from time to time.
Then how do you explain the collapse of the east European communist governments in the face of populations who had, plainly, just had enough and saw their chance to put real pressure on the state?
EG
Politicians are in thrall to ideology not the demos. Populations will go along with whatever ruling ideology holds sway even unto their deaths. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot all managed to send millions of their populations to their deaths with out any resistance from ‘democratic presure’. The level of taxation, foreign policy, immigration policy, monetary policy are all determined by intellectuals. The people who happen to live in a particular state are not interested in politics and are unable to even understand it.
Re-read 1984. The inner party only needed to control the small outer party, the mass of the ‘proles’ were quite incapable even of understanding their predicament.
East Europe collapsed due to loss of ideological confidence among the elite, the populations would have sat in dumb docility starving to death as they still do in North Korea which has not lost ideological confidence.
But surely in a democracy their policy proposals are governed by what the plebs will find attractive? Many in the Labour movement, for example, even now subscribe to the ideology of large scale nationalisation and state direction of the economy but they do not advocate it since it is well enough known that outright socialism is an electoral turn-off. Equally, many Conservatives privately favour a rather more liberal or even libertarian approach than is party policy but do not voice it particularly, for the similar reason that libertarianism is electorally unpopular.
In my experience, talking to people who take no interest in politics other than voting at election time, the general level of understanding is surprisingly high. Just because they aren’t particularly interested – which is true enough for the majority of people – does not mean they don’t understand.
What is it about the mass of the people that leads you to conclude they are incapable of understanding?
EG
Of course, the real money quote is:
But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
People vote for all sorts of things, and desire all sorts of laws, and then break them. People are hypocrites. The Democracy formulated from hypocrisy is highly corrosive. People want maximum freedom for themselves, and maximum constraints for everyone else. Most individuals are content with their own moral superiority so the laws don’t apply to them in the same way, not like the rest of the rabble who constitute an unbearable risk.
Most people are afraid most of the times, and the fears exist on the boundaries of their imagination. As a consequence, most people exist in a superstitious fog, and as always, will bow to priests of some sort who promise that they will be protected if only they toe the line. Perhaps at a base level that is the origin of any collective. But it is when imaginations run wild that all sorts of foolishness will result (say a balance sheet such as the US Federal Government that has $1.397 trillion in assets, and $47.289 trillion in liabilities and ‘responsibilities’ and the masses not giving a damn, they are somehow confident it won’t impact them. Insanity.).
You may view libertarianism is some sort of ideal, but what political, economic, or psychological theory isn’t? But at least it is a starting point of view, and concessions can be made from there. Minarchists are already those who are willing to concede some layer of State function, but it still desires to use the least amount of force necessary to protect life and property from direct danger. The Citadels of State we have today, the onerous burdens of taxation and regulation, prisons filled (in the US) with people who commited no crime but one constituted from actions the performed upon themselves, we have more bureaucrats than we have ever had in our history (US) and what is the outcome? A massive debt and an abated reservoir of force that will have to be unleashed on someone, or the admission that the security blanket of state has been threadbare or non-existent all along. It is the culmination of irrationality and superstition from a fearful mass who will willingly abandon cause and effect for a warm fuzzy. So theoretical libertarianism might be too ideal, but in practice is to snap people out of their doldrums and get them to examine the cause and effects of decisions, to be cynical about what the State actually does and for whom. The State at any layer could stand a huge cut down from where it stands now.
Paul,
“there is no such thing as ‘democratic pressure’ it is as much a myth as the ‘divine right of kings’, invented by intellectuals.
The masses, or proles, are not entirely passive. They were powerless under communist regimes (and in “1984”) because of the enormous and brutal physical repression machine applied to them (gulag, etc.).
In fact, Communism was built on identifying the masses of proles, who had grievances (miserable life), and the possibility to agitate and use them in a revolt against the regime, toward enthroning in power those communist “intellectuals”. The masses provided the communist with an opportunity and an opening, and were used by them, via demagogy.
So, having a large mass of discontent population is a big problem in societies where brutal repression is not used. (See recent developements in Bolivia).
Incidentally, I don’t think immigrants are “proles”. Immigrats are ambitious and industrious people, who work hard to succeed, and are not in the “pocket” of lefties demagogues.
“The people who happen to live in a particular state are not interested in politics and are unable to even understand it.”
Maybe, but the nature of a constitution surely frames the basic terms in which people think about their lives?
The fact that we think about ourselves as individual persons and not merely the social positions we occupy or the social functions we perform is because the application of our laws must take due consideration to the liberty of the individual even as they apply to all persons irrespective of social position. This is not the case in Iran for example, where their Islamic constitution requires the behaviour of Iranians to conform to, or at least refrain from contradicting, certain Islamic precepts – which is why Khatami was always facing an uphill struggle to reform the Iranian State.
So although ordinary citizens/subjects may not always take a great interest in politics per se, it is politics – and in particular the constitution – that has shaped the basic terms of social life, and when the most important of these are perceived by the public to have been violated by the ruling elite, then there may well be such a thing as ‘democratic pressure’. Whether such pressure makes any difference or not is another matter of course (e.g. foxhunting). And public perception is itself the ruling elite will try to manipulate also of course…
How much liberty a constitution can enshrine then is not entirely unrelated to the question of how much people care about their liberty. So the things which affect how different people think about and care about their liberty (the uses to which they can put their property, for instance) are not entirely uninteresting.
They certainly are not the rational entities libertarianism assumes they are.
Well, it probably won’t. The US has a GDP of some 12 trillion dollars which can to one extent or another be taxed, the probability of the entire 47 trillion in liabilities being called in at once is non-existent and in any case any government can repudiate sovereign debt if necessary. The balance sheet of a state cannot be compared to that of a corporation and the same rules simply don’t necessarily apply.
Depending on how you measure it, US national debt is actually approx. 8 trillion, or 2/3 of GDP. This level of debt is sustainable pretty much indefinitely. I assume you are adding contingent liabilities to this figure.
Ah, the old “victimless crime” idea, eh? About as meaningful as “taxation is theft.” Unfortunately, few people agree on what a “victimless” crime actually is. Similarly, the concepts of natural justice and natural law are unreliable since they are not defined – arguments based on these concepts can be and often have been rejected by courts.
I’m not sure I follow this point. If you mean military force and equipment, it is not necessary to use it, and thus it does not “have to be unleashed” on anyone.
I think the problem is more that it is completely and unworkably Utopian, based on a misunderstanding of human nature and economically naive & therefore it is hard to see how it can be used as a “starting point” any more than, say, communism could be.
EG
I think the problem is more that it is completely and unworkably Utopian
That’s a strawman argument. The idea that you should not interfere with my basic liberties any more than necessary to protect your own basic liberties does not necessarily imply a belief that a Utopia would ensue. Liberty is an end in and of itself.
That self ownership leads to a better *average* outcome (economic, socially whatever) than central control, is a bonus and serves to help bring the utilitarians along if they can be convinced but does not really inform the true libertarian position.
Rich
Euan, libertarianism does not mean isolationism. I wish toolkien would have wieghed in on this issue. I think he’s done it in the past.
Anecdotally, I have found libertarians are extremely social and generally have deep convictions regarding social responsibility. Speaking for myself, the reason I chose to subscribe to libertarian thinking is I have come to believe convictions are for the individuals who hold them.
Not really. It IS based on a naive and optimistic view of both human nature and economics, esp. the supposed behaviour of unregulated free markets.
Perhaps if someone would care to nail the jelly to the wall and actually decide what this is supposed to be then a proper debate could be held.
EG
But surely in a democracy their policy proposals are governed by what the plebs will find attractive?
Yes, that may determine which party wins an election but that has no bearing on what the goverment does with its power. The ruling parties change but the polices that they follow are determined by intellectuals. In the 70’s prices and incomes policies were in ideological vogue now they are not. Which party is in power is irrelevant, policies are formulated, accepted and promulgated by intellectuals. Elections are irrelevant and the masses will go along with whatever policies are accepted by the rulers and the rulers get all of their ideas from the intellectual elite.
“……after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship … That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
Hermann Goering.
Peter’s idea that nations have liberty because of a cultural fondness for it among the people is sheer fantasy.
…in any case any government can repudiate sovereign debt if necessary. The balance sheet of a state cannot be compared to that of a corporation and the same rules simply don’t necessarily apply.
Why not? What is so miraculous about the State that they are not bound by the economic limitations private individuals and associations are? The only way they wouldn’t apply is because they can attack others and take their property. You have just validated the aggressive use of force that States all to commonly apply. As for repudiation, that risks war as well. It’s simply mind boggling how you believe economic smoke and mirrors will not eventually result in open use of aggression somewhere along the line.
Depending on how you measure it, US national debt is actually approx. 8 trillion, or 2/3 of GDP. This level of debt is sustainable pretty much indefinitely. I assume you are adding contingent liabilities to this figure.
Yes. But it is the present value of the future streams. “Having it all come due” is not the point, it is the amount of money that would have to be set aside today to cover those costs, present valuing compares apples to apples. That’s what present value analyses are for. Of course the present value of future tax streams is not included on the asset side, but if one were take the ~$2 trillion now taken in taxes and present values that stream over the same period of time, at the same discount rate, it still comes up short of just covering the “official” debt and the “responsibilites”. There must then be substantial increases in taxation (or war and transfer) to cover all the other expenditures made today, presuming the bureaucracy doesn’t tolerate the elimination of any programs.
Ah, the old “victimless crime” idea, eh? About as meaningful as “taxation is theft.” Unfortunately, few people agree on what a “victimless” crime actually is. Similarly, the concepts of natural justice and natural law are unreliable since they are not defined – arguments based on these concepts can be and often have been rejected by courts.
Hmmm. You’ve changed my mind. I now see the point of filling up prisons with people who smoked weed or snorted coke. How could I have been so blind? It all makes sense now because the courts tend to reject peoples’ appeals for liberty.
an abated reservoir of force that will have to be unleashed on someone
I’m not sure I follow this point. If you mean military force and equipment, it is not necessary to use it, and thus it does not “have to be unleashed” on anyone.
The point here is that the differential between the assets and liabilities/responsibilities discussed above is the dollar figure that can be given to the coercive force necessary to be placed on someone, either the tax base, or foreign countries, to fund the shortfall. It, by and large, isn’t going to allocated voluntarily, so force will have to be used. Pretty simple really.
I think the problem is more that it is completely and unworkably Utopian, based on a misunderstanding of human nature and economically naive & therefore it is hard to see how it can be used as a “starting point” any more than, say, communism could be.
It simply demands less state. I think that is a good thing since I have just shown the catestrophic state the US is in financially. The above numbers, more than anything, shows the irrationalities that are allowed to manifest themselves through collectivism. You’re the one who still blinded by the same irrationalities that begat communism, not me.
IMO libertarianism properly practised has more in common with a moral crusade than with coercive politics. As some of the conservatives here have pointed out, it’s impossible (ethically, pragmatically, and by definition) to impose freedom upon individuals or societies. Ergo, changing minds has to precede changing policies.
To the extent democracy makes any sense, it’s because it reflects this. Perry’s redistribution-banning constitution may come to pass, but only when significantly more than half the influential public wants it.
the true libertarian position
Perhaps if someone would care to nail the jelly to the wall and actually decide what this is supposed to be then a proper debate could be held.
It is not necessary.
One should never get involved in verbal questions or questions of meaning, and never get interested in words. If challenged by the question of whether a word one uses really means this or that, then one should say: ‘I don’t know, and I am not interested in meanings; if you wish, I will gladly accept your terminology.’ This never does any harm. One should never quarrel about words, and never get involved in questions of terminology. One should always keep away from discussing concepts. What we are really interested in, our real problems, are factual problems, or in other words, problems of theories and their truth. We are interested in theories and how they stand up to critical discussion; and our critical discussion is controlled by our interest in truth.
Karl Popper
changing minds has to precede changing policies.
Yes, the minds of the intellectual elite.
Perry’s redistribution-banning constitution may come to pass, but only when significantly more than half the influential public wants it.
No, only a critical mass of the tiny intellectual elite. The public have no influence and are incapable of understanding. Nothing would ever change if the public (demos) had to be convinced.
Not just not necessary, but would be detrimental. Libertarianism is a multifaceted viewpoint, and it’s being continuously refined by new ideas. In my experience, people who want a single textual definition probably want to twist the mere text and ignore the larger idea.
No, only a critical mass of the tiny intellectual elite.
You missed how carefully I phrased the post to which you were replying. More than half of the influential public. Which need not be intellectuals – I think you overstate that aspect. People who hold disproportionate influence do so by originating and propagating ideas. That’s tangential to their official academic rank or recognition. They could as easily just be talkative enthusiasts with a large social network.
… most well considered libertarians do not really take such a simple view of things …
Congratulations, Perry, on the Samizdata Tautology of the Day!
Your essay is perfectly nonsensical. I love the claim that the Japanese government is more respectful of property rights than the US. Such a worldly perspective, you have there! Please, I beg you, continue with the respect shown for gun ownership in Japan. Ha, could you be any more duplicitous?
There is no need to go so far afield, to find the connections between Libertarianism and Leftism. The point is routinely made (and unanswered) in the comments here to devastating effect.
They are both indefensible ideologies that provide the comfort and safety of absolute convictions. Say what you will of the failings of Liberals and Conservatives, but they do the work while Libertarians stroke their … barrels. Hahaha
“No, only a critical mass of the tiny intellectual elite. The public have no influence and are incapable of understanding. Nothing would ever change if the public (demos) had to be convinced.”
It’s not about convincing the public of anything – it’s about not pissing them off too much. It is in this sense that the public are potentially powerful.
The good thing about democractic constitutions is not that they allow the public something they want, but that they allow the public to get rid of something they don’t want. And to get rid of the people who gave it to them.
Euan,
Your views are indeed a series of strawman arguments… libertarianism is not utopian because it does NOT assume everyone is rational. The need for social pressures and mechanisms is because people obviously live in societies.
Helen:
I make no such sweeping claims about Japan as your halfwitted comment suggests. I just point out that if you pick and choose from around the world, you can usually find that the “only way to get things done” (such as US state use of emminent domain to sieze property) is nothing of the sort.
I love the claim that the Japanese government is more respectful of property rights than the US.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. That is not what Perry wrote at all.
Rich
HelenW, in the governmental sense, Liberals and Conservatives are debating how to do the work.
Libertarians are trying to redefine the “work” that needs to be done -again in the governmental sense.
For example, Liberals and Conservatives keep trying to figure out how to do schools. Libertarians are suggesting schools don’t need to be done. (I am speaking strictly in the governmental realm. Schools need and will be done, the question is by whom.)
The bottom line is Liberals and Conservatives in one way or another don’t trust people to run their own lives and manage their own affairs. I am tired of being forced to partake in the “work” of the Liberals and Conservatives. I think I speak for most people who identify with the Libertarian name.
“…the delusion that one can run society…”
Yes, that is the delusion.
The problem isnt how to RUN society but allowing individuals to run their own lives — and maintaining the peace in the process. So this guy has it all wrong. The basic premise of liberatianism is not *how to run all of society*, but the proper relationship between the individual and the State (and individual to individual). At least that is my impression.
“Running societies?” Ugh, gimme a break! That just means one thing: how best to intiate force to effect your economic and social planning. Therein lies the horrid delusion. Liberarianism compared to every other political system are then complete opposites. While all others identify the collective society and the running of it by those in power as the basic premise, proper libertarianism identifies the individual as the sole director of his life — and the system of government is then derived from that fact, hence the American system of government.
Their basic premises are exact opposites. Libertarianism and Marxism have nothing in common.
The state makes the rules.
Not necessarily. Look at Argentina just the other week.
That nations must inevitably go to war to repay debt is a daft notion. This is pretty much the argument socialists use – capitalism ultimately requires forcible transfer of wealth, and therefore inevitably leads to war. It just isn’t true.
A state can repudiate debt easily enough. In Britain, and I suspect in most states, a part of “national debt” is actually only debt in Treasury ledgers – it is money owed by the left hand of government to the right hand, as it were. This can be cancelled at the stroke of a pen and nobody would feel a thing. Current liabilities can in extremis simply be repudiated or revalued. Future liabilities can be cancelled by legislative changes, for example by cancelling state pensions for anyone born after a certain date. Government programs change, can be trimmed down or can be cancelled. Tax rates can be increased. The state has a vast range of measures available to it to relieve its own indebtedness, measures which are not available to companies or individuals. It may be arbitrary or forcible, and in some cases it can be economically unwise, but it is nevertheless fact.
Drug abuse is not necessarily a victimless crime, and the wider effects of it on society need to be considered. I recognise that it is largely pointless trying to persuade libertarians of this, but can only suggest they go into the real world of durg users and see the difference between a casual snort of coke in the drawing room now and then and hard core drug abuse.
See above re Marxist misinterpretations of what capitalism and debt entail. Britain was bankrupt in 1940, but didn’t loot its empire for cash. Britain was bankrupt again in the 1970s, but didn’t go to war to pay the debts. This simply is not inevitable.
One does not need to be a libertarian to see the merits of a restricted state.
It’s also a much more regulated society, both formally and informally. Didn’t stop it becoming wealthy.
Perry, we went through this some time ago on another thread, after you stated the precise opposite of what you’ve just said here. I recall that you couldn’t answer the point then. The viability of an unregulated free market is contingent on the participants making rational choices in their own selfish interest. People don’t do this. On the contrary, they do many things which are actively detrimental to their own interests and those of others. This applies to companies, which are of course made up of people, as well as to individuals. The libertarian idea of an unregulated free market IS Utopian because it is premised on an erroneous, naive and optimistic view of human nature. Much like Marxism.
Furthermore, it tends to assume that the disciplines which tend to (but do not completely) regulate markets (at least where there is perfect competition) will also regulate human social conduct. This isn’t valid either. Economic rules apply to economics, and are not necessarily valid anywhere else. This is, of course, another parallel with Marxism.
EG
Euan Gray: yes, that is a difference, and it might even be a defining difference between libertarianism and other political philosophies: we do not have a low opinion of human nature. We neither see it as bad-but-perfectable like the left, nor doomed-to-stay-bad like the conservatives. Libertarian minarchist philosophies presume our species is not suicidal and in need of straitjacketing for self preservation. Libertarian anarchist philosophies, which eg: I espouse, presume that a vast majority, say no less than nine-tenths of people, are basically good. With those numbers, societies can be stabilized by mere custom, with no central imposition.
Perry—thank you for the marvelous discussion.
My only comment is that a belief in individual rights is a moral position, not an economic one.
Economic rules apply to economics, and are not necessarily valid anywhere else.
Exactly. Economic liberalism works because capitalism is such that even by pursuing your self-interest you advance the overall good via the invisible hand. But there is no equivalent invisible hand in social questions that makes following your self-interest when it comes to deciding if it’s a good idea to abandon moral responsibility to one’s wife, children etc. enhance the general good.
Yes, most people are basically good (although at the same time, and en masse, dumb, lazy and greedy but not actively bad in a moral sense). That’s not the point. The point is that they are not RATIONAL.
Anarcho-capitalism would have a chance of working if people really were rational (whatever their goodness or badness) and acted enough of the time in their own best interests and that of wider society. Unfortunately for anarcho-capitalism, they don’t do this.
As Peter said above, there is no invisible hand in the social sphere. Any philosophy (such as libertarianism or Marxism) which reduces social questions to economic ones & attempts to apply economic rules thereto will fail.
EG
“Any philosophy (such as libertarianism or Marxism) which reduces social questions to economic ones & attempts to apply economic rules thereto will fail.”
Do I hear the sound of a textbook being closed and placed on a table there??
I’d have thought the free-market assumes people to have (or be able to acquire) prudent habits, not perfect rationality as such. I have known many highly intelligent people who spent their money impulsively. Except it wasn’t their money – it was their parents’ money, or their student grant. £500 bottles of whiskey and such like. Tossers.
I just point out that if you pick and choose from around the world, you can usually find that the “only way to get things done” (such as US state use of emminent domain to sieze property) is nothing of the sort.
Picking and choosing in this way is a pointless exercise. Isolating such examples from the wider societal/governmental context in which they are embedded renders them useless.
Perry writes: I make no such sweeping claims about Japan …. if you pick and choose from around the world,…
That is the 2nd time this fallacy has been use on my here. I find that gratifying, so let me explain. You can falsely substantiate *any* theory by cherry picking your data. That is just what you have done, and admitted so in full ignorance. Your self-detonating remarks prove only one thing: If you can’t support your position honestly, you should change your position.
Richard writes: You need to work on your reading comprehension.
That is the 3rd ad hominem I have received here concerning my reading ability. As I explained earlier, it happens to be quite true. However, your hateful comment joins the others in irrelevance. Perry doesn’t not have the courage of his silly convictions to make any point whatsoever. He merely employs the sleazy tactic of citing a single instance of Japanese government respect to *imply* a superior and more universal instantiation of such. I called BS on that bit of lunacy. Sadly, I have no suggestions for how you might improve yourself.
Finally, we get to a thoughtful response where Winzeler writes: Libertarians are trying to redefine the “work” that needs to be done …
Winzeler, I don’t care for your assertion that Libs and Cons don’t trust people to run their own lives. However, you have correctly identified the Libertarian role in politics. I can work with that. Here is my point: There is no effective Libertarian presence in our legislative bodies. I think that shame because it reduces you folks to snipers. But there you have it. I think that will change as the lose of government Leftists creates a vacuum you can readily fill. This will serve my purposes beautifully because I would then be able to criticize what you DO as well as what you SAY.
Now to this business about trusting zee peepeels. Here’s a news flash from the 18th century: We don’t trust them. The Founders specifically constructed a republic for their new nation with the expressed purpose of suppressing the tyranny of the majority. Oddly, you have hit upon the precise connection between Leftism and Libertarianism: democracy. What the Founders understood, but Libertarians cannot fathom, is that we can never have absolute freedom. Our great experiment can only work if there is a compromise between individual rights and security for the society. They saw this as the way to secure most freedom possible for citizenry, and they happened to be absolutely right. Centuries later, their experiment has produced a country with more freedom than an other.
Citing any number of political theorists and philosophers, or cherry-picking factoids cannot change this truth. We have the empirical proof in hand. Extremism of any flavor extinguishes freedom. As such, damn it.
Euan Gray: Irrationality’s curable (mostly self-curable) – I consider it a form of ignorance. Often one encouraged by bad (sub)cultural ideas. It’s no more endemic to the species than bad hygeine.
HelenW and Trew: if your opponent asserts “pink elephants are impossible”, and you can show him one, he must concede. One counter-example destroys a generalization.
Cherry picking from around the world can show the range of what’s possible. It may not all be possible at once or over here – but the burden is now on you to show this, since it is certainly possible somewhere.
No. If you’re assuming I’m quoting, then I’m flattered that you think my words are of a quality sufficient for a textbook. If you’re assuming something else, flattery is not assured.
People are of course able to acquire prudent habits, in just the same way as people can be honest, truthful, faithful, tolerant, open-minded and kind to dogs and small children. This does not, of course, mean that they necessarily WILL acquire such habits. The record of history shows that awfully large numbers of them don’t.
One might also observe that Japan is much more heavily regulated than the US. There are large programs of subsidy and special treatment for industry, widespread protectionism and a deeply conformist traditional society highly suspicious of outsiders and their ideas. The obedience, conformity and discipline of Japanese society is far more important in explaining their success than respect for property rights. One could also note that socialism was less unsuccessful in East Germany than in most other Warsaw Pact nations, again due in part to social discipline and obedience. Neither are exemplars for a putative libertarian society, of course. And then there’s China…
There is always another way of doing things, and of course it does not have to be the libertarian way.
Exactly.
EG
Julian, that’s a good trick. Your logic is sound, but you err by substituting a subtly different proposition. (((I always warn people that I’ve had one too many philosophy courses.)))
Furthermore, Perry attempts to dissolve Locke’s assertion–that Absolutism can’t work–with an irrelevant and distant social anomaly. No-one here argues that eminent domain action could not be curtailed if we somehow transformed our society into one that admires conformity and worships divine imperialism. But that is buffoonery.
Only a Libertarian would debauch himself to claim that Locke is somehow incorrect because Americans don’t have a heritage of abject submission to government. To their credit, Marxists have far more pride.
Euan: don’t take the flattery too far – it’s just that your words seem to suggest the sort of fixed opinion incapable of change that you so often berate the rest of us about. 😉
” This does not, of course, mean that they necessarily WILL acquire such habits.”
No you’re right; people’s habits are learned by association and are formed in response to incentives and disincentives. When prudent habits are not acquired my guess would be that it’s ‘cos the appropriate system of incentives and disincentives is absent – or that an inappropriate system is in place. Rationality on the part of individual actors doesn’t have to be an assumption of the free-market as far as I can see.
I have an open mind and can be persuaded by evidence. There is no evidence that I can see which would indicate that people are on the whole sufficiently rational (or prudent) for the libertarian idea to work. Show me otherwise & I will be glad to read.
No, it doesn’t. But it is necessary for an UNREGULATED free market to operate.
EG
“The libertarian idea of an unregulated free market IS Utopian because it is premised on an erroneous, naive and optimistic view of human nature.”
Declarations about “human nature” aren’t more valid or exact than declarations about “natural rights”. Thery are problematic…
Now consider: an “unregualted and free market” is utopian because human nature isn’t up to the task, but a REGULATED market is the practical answer, as it is well known that the REGULATORS are not subject to those failures of human nature, being superhuman.
A free market might be imperfect, if measured against an unrealistic, utopian, notion of perfection. But regulated markets are still MORE imperfect, measured by any yardstick.
About state indebtness: Yes, states use to repudiate their debts. It hapened innumerable times, it’s the norm, rather than the exception. When states are unable to pay their debts they don’t repay (or repay a fraction only, or repay in devalued currency…). Will probably happen to the US too, sooner or later.
But they have a minor advantage over unregulated markets – they work.
Quite probably. Certainly more likely than the absurd prospect of the US going to war simply because it has gone bust.
EG
Really? Please link to where I wrote that everyone is rational or that libertarianism is predicated upon that notion.
In case anyone cares, I picked Locke’s tirade apart at Eternity Road.
I take issue with the notion that people aren’t primarily rational. If they were not, then no civilisation would be possible at all. People, by and large, don’t obey traffic signals because they fear getting a citation, they obey because they fear having an accident. This is rational behavior that I think we can agree most people engage in.
An unregulated free market is not utopian because it doesn’t promise anything but efficiency in the allocation of scarce resources. The very idea of “unregulated” is a bit decieving. The market would be unregulated only in the sense that the government isn’t the instrument of regulation, but it would very much be regulated by the wishes, needs, and preferences of the soveriegn consumer.
Libertarianism is appropriately NOT label anarchy, because it is in fact NOT anarchy. Libertarians chose libertarianism over anarchy precisely because they recognize the fact that there can be no absolute freedom. Anyone with even the smallest amount more of an increase in statist mindset (left or right of center) than a libertarian would likely suppose a libertarian is advocating anarchy. (I think everyone on this sight refers to this as “strawman” -a term I don’t normally use)
News flash: Libertarians are not advocating anarchy. Libertarians are simply suggesting society (particularly democratic societies like the US) can handle more freedoms than they currently have without self-destructing, and might even profit (morally and economically) from a little de-regulation. Libertarians also suggest that there are other ways to regulate than by force -which is precisely why you don’t see any libertarians “coming to power.”
Euan Grey–
I’ve been following your posts, and I’m sorry to say that your economics is bullshit. There are many differnet forms of libertarianism, I’m going to argue from an Austrian anarcho-capitalist point of view.
1) I’m going to assume that you havent read anything by von Mises, including his Socialism book which shows definitely why capitalism (or libertarianism, if you will) is the polar opposite of Marxism. Selfishness v. Altruism has nothing to do with libertarianism. Giving individuals the freedom to act, so long as they don’t interfere with other individuals property rights (to simplify things), is the key isse. They can act selfishly or altruistically, it matters none to austrian theory–so long as they don’t violate others’ property rights
Voting also has nothing to do with libertarianism, e.g. Hans Herman Hoppe’s Democracy the God that Failed
2) your arguments regarding “sovereign economics” as distinct from normal corporate or individual economics is horseshit. If you know any Austrian economics, you’d realize that von Mises praxeologically tied individual subjective values to price determination and to the quantity theory of money. In other words, he integrated the supply of and demand for money to marginal utility theory. And he saw that government, Keynes to the contrary, has no magical money save what it taxes or borrows from the people (or inflates away, which can be considered a tax).
As Mises noted:
At the bottom of the interventionist argument there is always the idea that the government or the State is an entity outside and above the social process of production, that it owns something which is not derived from taxing its subjects, and that it can spend this mythical something for definite purposes. This is the Santa Claus fable raised by Lord Keynes to the dignity of an economic doctrine and enthusiastically endorsed by all those who expect personal advantage from government spending. -von Mises, Socialism
In short, there is no such thing as a free bloody lunch. If a sovereign repudiates its debt, the lenders get screwed. This may or may not lead to war, but it will have ramifications up and down the world economy. If the defaulting sovereign was lent to be a private business instead of via stealing (e.g., the IMF/Worldbank), then that nation would effectively be cut off from further credit. That’s a big problem. To conitinue spending, they would have to raise taxes or print money (causing rampant inflation and other economic distortions).
3) as for your “economic rules only apply to economics”. no. praxeology applies to all of human action. economics is one subset (and the best studied) of the greater “human action” area of knowledge
4) the viability of the free market has nothing to do with rational choices. there is no such thing as an objective rational choice. they need to make CONSCIOIUS chocies, not RATIONAL choices.
Euan–
You should also read Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy essays–what is seen vs. what is not seen. You clearly don’t understand the concept of an opportunity cost (e.g., comparing Japan to anywhere else is invalid). Empirical evidence is not valid in the social sciences. It doesnt take into account opportunity costs, for example.
Winzeler, don’t be so quick to apply your limits to everybody. I’ve seen this a few times and it always annoys me. “Libertarians are not advocating anarchy”? Some of them definately are. Like me, for example.
Julian, then you would be an anarchist, right?
HelenW, I have considered to no small degree the issue of trust (specifically in my faith). To clarify; people do not necessarily need to be trustworthy for libertarianism to work, only predictable. I do not think individuals are mostly predictable, but the masses usually are.
Furthermore, regarding trust, I would rather risk losing my liberties to abusive, untrustworthy individuals than pre-emptively surrender them to a government. At least against individuals I stand a chance to defend myself. By the way, I’m not going to live or die on the ideas in this last paragraph. They are fledgling and rather undeveloped.
Great post! Interestingly enough I’ve been engaged in a similar debate with some folks who call themselves “radical centrists” on the very same set of ideas and “critiques” of libertarianism. Almost everyone appears to understand libertarianism in terms of Randite Objectivism, which I don’t think actually describes the majority of us who are “classic liberals”, minarchists and/or Rational Anarchists.
If you’re interested in my debate and responses:
First Principles
Misconceptions
I can’t understand why Euan believes people aren’t rational. I believe nearly all of them to be nearly always. Smoking seems to be an oft-cited example of the irrationality of individuals. I disagree – it’s rational. People usually start smoking with friends. Perhaps a schoolgirl smoking a cigarette with her mates lubricates the social wheels, helps her fit in. That’s rational, there’s a (perceived) payoff for that cigarette; not necessarily a sensible motivation, but that’s not really for me to decide. And then once addicted, she smokes to stave off cravings, calm down, be able to operate more effectively. Perfectly rational. Her starting smoking, then continuing to so to stave off cravings could certainly be termed unwise if she gets cancer, however it’s wrong-headed to write off past actions as irrational. They were perfectly rational, but they were predicated on bad information, her personality, a cost-benefit analysis that she got wrong, a risk she took that ran against her etc etc.
This argument can be applied to many of the ostensibly irrational things we do; reckless driving, drinking to excess, unsafe sex, the list goes on. Euan would see these things as irrational acts; I view them as calculated risks – they have payoffs and/or pitfalls. Rationality does not mean one naturally makes decisions that create good outcomes. People are rational; they aren’t clairvoyant. It seems that they’d have to be to measure up to your definition of rationality, Euan.
As a libertarian, I believe in individual rights, and also individual responsibilities. It is my responsibility to ensure that when I make a decision, I have as much information to convince me that the outcome(s) of that decision are good. Or when deciding to run a calculated risk, I am aware of the odds and the consequences of failure. When the nature of the individual is viewed in such a way, libertarianism is perfectly tenable. I believe a libertarian society is currently not feasible because a majority of people are used to relying on government regulation.* This means they don’t have to seek out information that will allow them – the market – to replace government regulation. Individuals in a free market acting independently, yet collectively (because people generally want very similar things), is the most effective regulator around, bar none. However, I believe that we are at the start of a gradual evolution, when people start to realise the power of their choices. Society (and especially the state) will, sooner or later, have to adjust accordingly.
*I guess I’m talking about HelenW and Euan. You guys seem to think the status quo is the natural order of things; kinda like the way your 17th century ideological forebears felt about absolute monarchy, when confronted with emerging classical liberal ideals.
I should have said “…when people start to realise the power of their economic choices, not just their political ones.”
“What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?”
What is the evidence that this is a valid concern?
My understanding is that people are likely to vote against redistribution to people who are not like them. Hence a small, racially homonogenous country like Sweden has a large welfare state, whilst a huge, racially diverse country like America has a smaller welfare state.
Tremendous thread. I want to take issue with a comment Euan Gray made, that “few people agree on what a victimless crime is”. That may be correct, but there is nothing absurd in libertarians showing that the concept of “victimless crime” is incoherent and a free pass for social authortarianism.
I see no reason why the bedrock principles of libertarianism (individual rights, rule of law, belief in superiority of voluntary exchange vs coecion, preference for spontaneous orders over imposed orders, etc) cannot be the foundation for a coherent and workable political philosophy. Compared to competiting worldviews, it more than holds its own.
There is nothing “utopian” in assuming that most people are rationally self interested and want to be happy.
Winzeler writes: Libertarians are simply suggesting society can handle more freedoms
That sounds fine to me. My point is that when you dial Libertarianism down to actually do this, you get Conservatism. That is where I want to be.
Our seatbelt law is a good example. This was a serious assault on individual liberty, but had a substantial positive effect on society. Where the harm is theoretical and the gain is real, I tolerate more regulation.
I do not think individuals are mostly predictable, but the masses usually are.
Yes, bigger is better. That’s why I developed an interest in chemistry–the populations are always near infinite, and the probability functions simplify to a state of elegance. But people are different and chaotic, despite the praxes-speak. A single individual can make a world of difference.
Art writes: You guys seem to think the status quo is the natural order of things …
Hello, Sufferer. Nice to see you again.
It’s true, I constantly ponder the chicken and the egg. Libertarians seem to model government as purely self-propelling. There are surely countless examples, but the overwhelming bulk of regulation comes from informed consensus trying to iron out the wrinkles of an evolving society.
Libertarian opinion on rationality seems mixed. This I know: Virtually all consequences are unintended. Even the most reasoned decisions take us just a blink into the future. We are human and do what we can, but it’s not much.
And when it comes to realizing the super fantastic power of our economic choices, we must heed the most excellent advice of the Manolo, yes?
When I have time I will trawl through the past few months of Samizdata to find it.
Not necessarily. If you visit a place (I have) which has traffic signals but no real law enforcement, you see people routinely ignoring the signals, numerous accidents, etc.
Yes, I know this is what “unregulated” means. My point is that it depends on market participants making rational choices for it to work properly. This doesn’t happen often enough.
Now we’re getting to the “not true libertarianism” level. It was said earlier that it was unnecessary and even counter-productive to define what libertarianism is. I think this is unreasonable, since it means libertarianism (whatever it happens to mean this week) is immune from criticism because the libertarian can always say “ah, but that’s not REAL libertarianism.” That’s absurd. I wonder how much of libertarianism’s electoral unpopularity stems from the fact that libertarians can’t decide what it means, so what bloody hope has the voter got?
Ultimately, you need force. You can try all sorts of consensual methods, commercial remedies, and so on, but ultimately you will come up against the man who refuses to cooperate unless you compel him – how is this addressed?
You just don’t get it, do you? Libertarianism is obviously not Marxism, and nobody is saying it is. What people ARE saying is that there are assumptions and concepts held in common by both – unrealistic view of humanity, reduction of everything to economic question, millenarian view of the future, etc – and therefore that there are certain parallels between the Marxist world view and the libertarian one. This does not mean they are the same thing.
Nevertheless, states actually do behave in the way I have described. How do you explain this?
Again, this is the same analysis that Marxists make. It’s wrong.
Unfortunately, people tend to take the risk without performing the calculation. It’s all very well for you to say that YOU assess the risks, and I’m sure you do. The average Joe, however, tends not to do this.
EG
“sensible constitutional constraints which set the acceptable limits of politics.”
The US Constitution, which looks to be wearing pretty well, and so a fairly good example of the breed, limits the arbitrary power of the state, and to prevent politicians, parties or people from easily altering the forms and rules of government.
However, it does not place politics within pre-ordained constraints.
It seems to me that imposing libertarian orthodoxy by irrevocable constitutional fiat is a reprehensible, imprudent and impudent as its mirror image:
the EU Constitution imposing social democratic multicultural welfarism.
Except, of course, that you are right and they are wrong. Of course.
“Hello, Mr Pot, have you been introduced to Mr Kettle?”
Hi Helen, great to see you out in force too. 😉
I agree to some extent on what you say, however there are numerous decisions we can make and, more importantly, behavioural patterns we can adopt that heavily influence our future. Therefore, to cut back on regulation we need to be able to make adequate choices that don’t endanger us. Rationality is a crucial factor here, and I believe, as I said above, that nearly everyone is nearly always rational. I suppose this argument somewhat irrelevant, going on what you said above about rationality. Fair enough. I dig the Manolo too. 🙂
Euan – I think they probably do. Once or twice in my life I have driven after drinking too much. I did this because I knew a) the chance of me being caught was negligible and b) the chance of me causing harm to myself or someone else was even slighter. I knew that the payoff of almost certainly getting home quickly, cheaply and easily was worth the miniscule risk of getting caught and/or slightly increased risk of having an accident compared to sober driving. On each occasion I pondered this tradeoff for around zero seconds – or at least briefly enough to forget about pondering it almost instantly. I would argue that this was a rational act. It was at the time and is in hindsight. I was aware of the facts; I didn’t need to think about them. I didn’t need to make the type of decision where you have a think about your action – I just did it. I make the same kind of (non) decision when I am in my car and confronted with a red light – I don’t need to think about whether I should stop; I just do it because I am already aware of the facts surrounding my action. If I went driving at night in, say, Johannesburg, I might have to re-evaluate those facts and start (cautiously) not stopping at red lights. Or if I drove an ambulance. Is all of the above irrational? I think not.
I’m sure your Average Joe makes exactly the same kind of choice when he/she does things that we think are dumb or nonsensical. I’m sure that if any person, not just us cognitively-advantaged types, knew there was a 100% detection rate for drink drivers, drink driving would almost never occur. I don’t kid myself that my motives and some knuckle-dragging idiot’s are different – he probably just wants to get home too, and realises he probably won’t get caught. Same thing. Still rational.
Like I said before:
Nearly everyone is nearly always rational.
Suffering,
I really don’t see how you can say deciding to drive home when you are drunk is a rational decision. You were drunk at the time of deciding, and therefore by definition less able to act in a rational manner simply because you are when drunk unable to accurately weigh the consequences of various alternative courses of action. Something that seems unwise when sober can appear to be a good idea when drunk. You simply don’t make the same choices and it is folly to pretend this is a rational decision – it’s simply post hoc justification.
Even if there was a 100% probability of being caught drink driving, and once caught a 100% probability of losing one’s licence or being heavily punished, some people would STILL do it. This is irrational, but nevertheless it is how many people work.
This is lamentable but there is nothing that can be done about it. The point is that enough people act like this to make the libertarian philosophy unworkable in practice even though it is elegant and wonderful in theory.
EG
HelenW, I have been a conservative all my life, except for the last few (maybe 2) years. I basically thought the way you seem to -that conservatives are in favor of less gevernment and regulation. Then the gay-marriage issue came up. Then I thought about abortion. Then I thought about the “war” on drugs. These are all areas of life where conservatives are for more regulation. In essence, I believe liberals are generally after moral freedom and economic constraint, while conservatives are after economic freedom and moral constraint.
As a libertarian I would prefer to decide what to do with my own money and my own morals. By the way, in the US with the highest levels of economic regulation in its brief history, I do not see morality and economic prosperity (particularily in the target income levels -low income) on the rise. There are obviously some exceptions, but they are not the rule.
I would like to say that of the two I still prefer conservatism, because if one can keep their money they can usually buy their moral freedom -as somewhat evidenced in the US by some of the drug-abusing celebrity elite.
Euan,
I wasn’t drunk; however I was over the legal blood alcohol level limit of 0.05. I was perfectly capable of rationalising my choice, had someone challenged me. I would go so far to say that even if I was drunk I still could have rationalised it. In hindsight I may not have agreed with that rationalisation, but at the time it was rational. You could make the same argument about how caffeine alters your decision making, or any other number of legal drugs.
I agree, even if there was a 100% detection rate for drink driving, you would still get a very small number of people being caught. That’s why I very carefully said “Nearly everyone is nearly always rational”. Then again, who’s to know, maybe said people like jail time, catching the bus etc? Could be perfectly rational 🙂
Your definition of rationality is far too absolute for my liking, and seems to be based on what you think is rational. I believe rationality is much more subjective. What is a rational decision now, may, in the future turn out to be a poor choice. Nonetheless, at the time it was rational.
Once again, I disagree. Consumers are capable of regulating the market. Just because they haven’t in the past and don’t right now does not mean they can’t. 40% (maybe even less) of highly informed consumers would be enough to create a critical mass that couldn’t be ignored by manufacturers. This would broadly ensure acceptable level of quality, reliability and safety, because that’s what we all want. Sure, there would be aberrations, but government regulation isn’t 100% effective either.
Humans are great learners. We can easily learn to consume more thoughtfully. When we do, much regulation will become irrelevant. I can’t see why you find this proposition so absurd.
Regards,
Defining Libertarianism – I don’t think it is so difficult. There are many kinds of libertarians (it’s a big movement …) from – on the one extreme – the anarchists and utopians – to the other extreme – the moderates or pragmatists who would not only accept a state, but even (perish the thought) some kind of welfare state.
Still, lebertarianism can be defined thus: libertarianism is concerned mainly with the rights and freedom of the individual (and NOT with the destruction of society).
Marxism is also easily defined: it is about the welfare of a class (proles…) acheived through (state) violence (revolution…).
It is Conservatism that is difficult to define – for me at least. It is a fact that a great majority of conservatives are also religious, so Conservatism could mean: an attempt to govern acording to religious ethics. What else is there, apart from religion?
Conservatives also oppose radical upheaval in social institutions, favoring a slow and cautious process of change. But by this logic, Democrats opposing Social Security reform are coservatives too.
Are Coservatives pragmatists ? Impossible, that label belongs to liberals.
So, this apparently coservative critic (Locke) what does he stand for ? Status quo ?
HelenW, I just reread your last post. The seat belt law is another one of those things I can’t stand. I have no idea how many millions of dollars my state has spent advertizing and enforcing that law, but I can’t see how it is worth saving the lives of the few who would risk it. Wearing a seat belt (which I always do) is extremely uncomfortable for some. In fact I even have a friend, Jared by name, who has had two relatives have problems with seat belts. One was seriously injured. The other died from none other than strangulation from a it. Should I, in my moral superiority be forced to spend my money on a seat belt enforcement program to make sure he is wearing his seat belt at all times. I don’t really think so.
Just because it appeared to make sense at the time does not mean it was rational.
So for you, “rational” is defined as meaning whatever you happen to think is rational? I don’t think this has merit.
To which one might respond “Communism is capable of improving the lot of all mankind. Just because it hasn’t in the past and doesn’t right now does not mean it can’t.” In reality it cannot, because it misunderstands human nature. Ditto for libertarianism.
But unfortunately this doesn’t actually happen in practice. The closest we have come to this libertarian Nirvana was probably the almost laissez-faire economy of mid 19th century Britain – complete with its short measure, adulterated goods, lack of any concern for safety, etc. The problem is that people do cheat given half the chance, and that most people don’t act rationally enough for enough of the time to catch them out. If people were as rational as you assert, then laissez-faire would have been a resounding success, a paragon of fairness and equity in the market. It wasn’t. People just are not the way you assume they are.
In my experience, the vast majority of conservatives are pragmatic, far more so than liberals (whether the American or European definition of the word).
EG
Ah, what’s the use? Men are stupid, greedy and ignorant, nothing lasts and we’re all going to die. Let’s thank God for the monarchy, get another round in and photograph each other making faces like the British libertarian tendency.
According to dictionary.com:
rational –
1. Having or exercising the ability to reason.
2. Of sound mind; sane.
3. Consistent with or based on reason; logical: rational behavior. See Synonyms at logical.
logical-
1. Of, relating to, in accordance with, or of the nature of logic.
2. Based on earlier or otherwise known statements, events, or conditions; reasonable: Rain was a logical expectation, given the time of year.
3. Reasoning or capable of reasoning in a clear and consistent manner.
reason-
4. The capacity for logical, rational, and analytic thought; intelligence.
5. Good judgment; sound sense.
Euan and Suffering, it sounds like this one might not be resolvable unless you agree on either “reason’s” defintion #4 OR definition #5. If you use #4, then I would say most people are mostly rational, because most people are at least somewhat analytical and somewhat intelligent to their varying degrees. If you use #5, then I would say most people are not mostly rational, because most people have severe malfunctions in their cause-reaction-consequence-cause… cycle.
Just thought I’d try to help you agree.
Well, yes. I may have a warped view, and that may produce warped rationality, but even totally twisted people can be rational in their own way. Rationality is not whatever I happen to think you think is rational. You seem to be labouring under the impression that you have a monopoly on what constitutes rational thought.
One might respond that way but it would be meaningless. You’re not comparing like with like. Just because the principles behind communism were fallacious, doesn’t mean anything else is necessarily so.
How do you know? We’ve never seen anything close to the conditions that would allow such a deregulated environment to exist. However we’ve never been closer to those pre-existing conditions right now and I believe we’re moving forward.
Rubbish. Would you consider 19th century consumers well-informed? Could information that would help them make better choices be disseminated to them quickly (instantly, even) and cheaply? No. The example of 19th century Britain is absolutely no kind of rebuttal. We’re closer now that we’ve ever been. In the not-so-distant future many, many individuals will be (to borrow a French prefix, apologies) hyper-informed, rather than an elite few – who typically run government and make policy, surprise surprise. This will happen because of constantly refreshed, up-to-the-second information streaming from a plethora of sources. We’re seeing this already, and it’s only just begun. How could people not become more informed?
This is the point I was trying to make.
Most people are not very good at figuring out the likely consequences of their actions. I wouldn’t really agree that most people would meet the criteria for definition 4, either. Definition 2 of logic is of questionable applicability too, IMO, since it follows from 5.
There is ample empirical evidence that the mass of the people don’t make terribly wise decisions a lot of the time, that they don’t necessarily learn from earlier mistakes and that they are not on the whole particularly good at thinking through the consequences of their actions – they will buy crap, they will keep buying it again even though they know it’s crap, and they often don’t care that it’s crap.
Given this, it is unwise to assume that the consumers will en masse regulate the free market. It has never happened, and there is no reason to suppose it would happen. This aspect of libertarianism is therefore, IMO, of extremely doubtful validity.
EG
Euan,
Speaking for myself, I do not subscribe to libertarianism because I think consumers could regulate the free market, but because I think they should regulate the free market. In general, I think they should live with the natural consequences of their own actions. In other words, how can consumers (I’m using economic terminology, but I think it, in this case, also applies to social behavior as well.) be expected to grow in capacity to mentally connect consequences to their behaviors without an environment where they experience the consequences of their behaviors.
On a personal note, this is extremely important to me in my own family. My wife tends to “rescue” our daughter from the consequences of her actions due to her nurturing side. I, on the other hand, tend to prefer she experience those consequences in order that she might profit by having understanding of behavior/consequence relationships. By the way she’s only 14 months. I am purposed to establish, beginning at even this young age, in her mind the behavior/consequence relationship.
Probably because they’re not used to thinking about their decisions – they’re happy to let the state protects them from themselves. Sometimes it doesn’t. People should get in the habit of doing so, and I believe they slowly will.
Rational thought is logical thought. You can’t be rational “in your own way” – you are either rational or you are not.
Would you say there was something stopping them informing themselves? 19th century Britain was economically successful, but far from economically honest. There was nothing to prevent the consumers informing themselves about the true nature of the products on the market, and given that Victorian England was perhaps the epitome of self-improvement and self-education it is patent that the people had both the means and the ability to do this. Yet they didn’t. Why would they do so now?
Well, yes. Ever hear of newspapers? Public libraries? Evening classes? All those places where people met, discussed, learned and generally exchanged all manner of information? Just because they didn’t have the internet doesn’t mean they could not inform themselves.
You might also wish to consider that although the spread of information was perhaps a little slower (although in the case of printed magazines, it was actually much faster 100 years ago than it is today), this applies to the vendor as much as the purchaser.
I suggest you read some history. You are quite wrong on this point, I’m afraid.
Possibly because they don’t care to do this for everyday trivial purchases. That people will take advantage of increased information access to more thoroughly research the purchase of, say, a car or a tv/hifi system does not mean they will do the same for everyday stuff. People can do this now, but don’t – witness the hysteria and mass stupidity over food quality, diet, etc.
EG
Even where the state doesn’t protect them (19th C England, for example), they STILL don’t do this, at least not the extent necessary to control an otherwise unregulated market.
EG
When it comes to the test of coherence, libertarianism wins over conservatism hands down.
This has been an excellent comment thread, apart from that little fleck of spittle from Luniversal, who is rapidly acquiring troll status.
Why does libertarianism win the test of coherence, Johnathan?
That is the 3rd ad hominem I have received here concerning my reading ability.
Frequently, a comment does not rise above the level of deserving more than an ad hom in reply. However, I must sincerely apologise for my comment, I was honestly not aware that you were deliberately misrepresenting Perry’s words.
Rich
There is ample empirical evidence that the mass of the people don’t make terribly wise decisions a lot of the time, that they don’t necessarily learn from earlier mistakes and that they are not on the whole particularly good at thinking through the consequences of their actions – they will buy crap, they will keep buying it again even though they know it’s crap, and they often don’t care that it’s crap.
Given this, it is unwise to assume that the consumers will en masse regulate the free market. It has never happened, and there is no reason to suppose it would happen. This aspect of libertarianism is therefore, IMO, of extremely doubtful validity.
are not on the whole particularly good at thinking through the consequences of their actions
But you evidently are. Not only for yourself but everyone else. Or are you going to beg off on this and say “that’s not what I mean” then you just mean those other fellows that you have faith in have the expertise to defend people from themselves.
How does this same mass turn out at given intervals and pull levers in elections (i.e. buy political crap, never learning from previous mistakes)? How is this different? It’s the same masses, did they somehow snap out of their stupor just long enough to elect a wisened bunch of leaders, then revert back to their amoebic existence? Your argument seems to be a fine argument against democracy too. Perhaps a Statist dictatorship ruled by yourself is the proper structure. You argue for State, obviously, have deduced everyone else, by and large, are idiots, and you believe that the masses, if given a choice, will make poor decisions, which must include their casting of ballots.
Hi Euan,
My response will have to wait for tomorrow; it’s late here and I’m in need of some sleep.
Until then,
Johnathan writes: When it comes to the test of coherence, libertarianism wins over conservatism hands down.
Nothing to deny there. Conservatives are more cautious than Liberals because we recognize the perils of Change. Conservatives are more adaptive than Libertarians because we recognize the perils of refusing Change. In my mind, Coherence and Conviction are euphemisms for Entrenchment. Sometimes that can serve you well–like when a monolithically Leftist media is trying to subvert an election. Other times is it nothing more than a way to avoid rationality. We all need some of that too, on occasion.
Winzeler writes: Should I,… be forced to spend my money on a seat belt enforcement program
That’s a fair question, and why I mentioned it as a contentious issue. In the end, I have decided for myself that I should be forced to support the program. Most importantly, seatbelts are a very good idea. Your exceptions are not the rule. They save 10’s of thousands of injuries and deaths.
But you say you don’t care about that, it’s your freedom that is most important. I agree. You don’t have to wear a seatbelt. But the damnable threat of fines, you say. Pay them. No freedom comes without cost. However, in this case your savings are far greater. Seatbelt usage enriches our society. You share in those riches, so bear your share of the cost with a smile. This societal deal is almost pure profit. Adam Smith would applaud, as any other rational thinker. But you see, this is where Libertarian convictions get in the way of rational thought. Who needs that?
Then the gay-marriage issue came up.
Yeah, tell me about it. Nothing has been sadder for me to see, than Republicans trip all over themselves trying to reenact their failure to support civil rights legislation 40 years ago. Call me a fool, but I see nothing Conservative about Marriage Apartheid, except the hesitancy to act. Maybe it’s a latent Libertarian influence?
I hate drugs and abortion, and freely admit to having no rational thoughts there.
Rich: thank you.
Toolkien writes: … you believe that the masses, if given a choice, will make poor decisions …
Yea-ess, praise the Lord, we have communication. Reiterating, we live in a republic, not a democracy. That was not an accident. Therefore, the citizenry votes for representatives who they consider best qualified to make governmental decisions for them. Only in my wacky state of Vermont do we carry on the nonsensical tradition of democracy once a year at Town Meeting Day.
Try to think of republican governance in Libertarian terms. Adam Smith advocated the division of labor, right? So you don’t do your own carpentry, butchery, and nuclear weapons testing. Similarly, you hire politicians to do the work of government instead of plodding through every one of those thousand page pieces of legislation yourself. Obviously this is a far more efficient use of labor and results in tremendous cost savings for our society. Right? Can I get an AMEN?
HelenW, I hate abortion, too. I don’t really care about drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. Nevertheless, I have a real problem with my convictions (or 51% of the people’s convictions) ruling over the masses. Specifically regarding abortion, I think states and maybe even municipalities (logistically problematic -I concede) should make up their own minds about it.
Hardly. You are, perhaps predictably, distorting my point and creating a straw man.
I assert that the people on the whole will not regulate an otherwise unregulated market because they aren’t terribly good at making rational choices or acting in their own best interests. Since corporations are made up of people, with the same failings and weaknesses, they cannot be depended upon to do this either. I assert as a consequence that the market needs some form of regulation sufficient only to keep the market free by imposing the rules that individuals and corporations, left to themselves, will not impose upon themselves.
Now, it is apparent that over-regulation chokes the market. It should also be apparent that monopoly, cartel and other sharp practice chokes the market. It seems logical, therefore, to posit that a degree of regulation sufficient to prevent monopoly, cartel, adulteration, false measure and fraud is enough to maximise the efficiency of the market by keeping it free whilst minimising the restrictive effect on the market participants.
The number of people needed to create and enforce such regulation is very small. These people must in all cases be honest, reliable, impartial and incorrupt. Whilst it is fair to say, as I assert above, that on the whole most people do not necessarily have all of these qualities, it is nevertheless reasonable to expect that of a population of several tens of millions a few hundred can be found who do possess the necessary attributes. For example, most people have limited understanding of the law, yet we manage to find a few hundred magistrates and several thousand lawyers who do. As another example, although most people wouldn’t have a clue about quantum mechanics and few have the intellectual ability to understand it at all, nevertheless we can still find physicists and chemists who do.
It is therefore erroneous to assert that if the people en masse are incapable of regulating an otherwise free market then it logically follows that NO people are capable of doing so. Regulation dependent on the low average ability of the mass of the people is one thing, but regulation dependent on the high ability of a very small number of impartial and disinterested people is quite another.
Furthermore, where this situation exists it is more efficient to have a small number of people doing the job on a large-ish scale than it is to have millions of people endlessly repeating the same thing. Even from the corporation’s point of view, it is better – corporations would prefer, say, an annual audit and inspection rather than having a whole department dedicated to the wasteful task of answering the identical queries of millions of potential customers. Helen alludes to this above – it is simply the efficient division of labour.
The error some make is in assuming that if the foregoing is true (and the record of history shows that it works pretty well), then a small number of people regulating every aspect of private life can do a better job than the individuals concerned. To a certain mindset, this is attractive, but putting the idea into practice, we get the bloated state, welfare, excessive petty regulation and so on. The key distinction to be made is that the market requires the implementation of only a small number of general regulations to cover a fairly narrow range of circumstances, whereas regulation of private life would require innumerable regulations to cover a vast number of different circumstances. The complexity of regulating private life is so great compared to the simplicity of regulating a capitalist market that it becomes impossible in practice. Attempting to do it only results in ever more restrictive regulation as the regulators attempt to narrow the number of unique circumstances to manageable proportions, but even so ever more regulators are needed to cope not only with the wide range of different cases but the new problems thrown up by the unintended consequences of the narrowing regulation. For this reason, individual regulation of private life is more effective than state regulation, and state regulation of the market is more effective than individual regulation.
The opposite error lies in assuming that if the state (say) cannot regulate private life with any success, then it cannot regulate the market efficiently. Both mistakes look at the same problem, but from opposite sides of the road, as it were. So fixated are they with what lies on the other side, to continue the metaphor, they overlook the traffic on the road.
Clear enough now?
It isn’t any different. This is the problem with democracy, namely that people will vote themselves rich at the expense of everyone else, and/or vote for really stupid things. It is a serious problem, but the alternatives (oligarchy, dictatorship, restricted franchise, restrictive constitutions, etc) are at least as bad. I have sympathy with the idea of restricting the franchise, but at the same time I recognise the problems this would bring.
Some people say that the solution is to just do away with the state altogether, but this is not really workable in practice, however seductive in theory. In reality, this would mean the replacement of the state by private corporations, and within a pretty short time these corporations would be as close to a de facto state as makes no difference. The transition from guilds and corporations to the modern state has already been made (several centuries ago), and I see no sense in going back to make it all over again.
The pragmatic solution might be to have strict rules for the conduct of public affairs (feasible, small number of regulators needed for narrow range of cases), and try to raise the calibre of the tribunes of the people. How this is done is another issue, of course.
EG
Euan, the problem with what we’re all saying still remains: people. Any way we slice it, people remain a factor. People can be (often are) corrupted, and NEVER disinterested/unbiased. Personally, this is why I think libertarianism is a preferrable model. In a libertarian society an individual’s corruption and bias has the maximum amount of impact on their self, and the least amount of impact on others.
People can be (often are) corrupted, and NEVER disinterested/unbiased
Incorrect. People can be disinterested and unbiased. It’s pretty much a requirement for being a judge, for example, and disinterest is essential for meaningful scientific research.
Disinterest does not mean one does not have an opinion on a given subject, rather that one does not permit that opinion to colour one’s conclusion.
Unless of course he happens to run a large corporation, a major security firm or a court of arbitrators.
EG
The sentence “There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most)” amply demonstrates how shallow Locke’s understanding is. This is a totally false dichotomy. You can just as easily justify anarchism on natural law grounds as minarchism. You’d think someone writing for a paleo publication would have at least passing familiarity with Uncle Murray.
All this talk about how the irrationality of human nature makes libertarianism a utopian ideology is complete bunk, as many in this thread have already pointed out. As my co-blogger Jonathan Wilde correctly put it, “If people are rational, it’s best to let them make their own choices. If people are irrational, it’s best not to let them wield the power of the state.”
I have previously dubbed this the “Turtles All The Way Down” fallacy. If people are too irrational for markets to self-regulate, then they are too irrational to elect the right politicians to regulate the market. And for reasons that Hayek famously identified, there are systematic reasons why “Why the Worst Get on Top.”
“But wait!”, you say, “all we need is a properly written Constitution to constrain the politicians! Problem solved!”
This is Cat-In-The-Hat reasoning, as Murray Rothbard pointed out so clearly:
Or, to put in terms that some of you “irrational” folk might better understand:
Ah, the logic of conservatives.
All this talk about how the irrationality of human nature makes libertarianism a utopian ideology is complete bunk, as many in this thread have already pointed out. As my co-blogger Jonathan Wilde correctly put it, “If people are rational, it’s best to let them make their own choices. If people are irrational, it’s best not to let them wield the power of the state.”
I have previously dubbed this the “Turtles All The Way Down” fallacy. If people are too irrational for markets to self-regulate, then they are too irrational to elect the right politicians to regulate the market. And for reasons that Hayek famously identified, there are systematic reasons why “Why the Worst Get on Top.”
“But wait!”, you say, “all we need is a properly written Constitution to constrain the politicians! Problem solved!”
This is Cat-In-The-Hat reasoning, as Murray Rothbard pointed out so clearly:
Or, to put in terms that some of you “irrational” folk might better understand:
Ah, the logic of conservatives.
Micha writes: I have previously dubbed this the “Turtles All The Way Down” fallacy.
I’m always delighted to see a reference to this instructive story, but you completely missed the point. Hawking continues: “why do we think we know better?” The thesis of his book is that we don’t. So you see, ‘turtles all the way down’ is exactly not a fallacy, and I can prove it.
Ah, the logic of conservatives.
That’s a good story too, but Conservatives never claim to be perfect. We only ask to be recognized as best.
Helen,
The purpose of my post obviously has nothing to do with Hawking or his book. He is not the originator of the story, but is merely the most convenient person to cite as a source when mentioning it.
Of course you can! Who else is going to judge what is rational on a day to day basis? You? I don’t think so.
That isn’t how I see it. The fact that it wouldn’t have crossed their minds to inform themselves to any great degree is more appropriate and this is for the following reasons; an unfamiliarity with a consumer market, a lack of consumer affairs publications, an embryonic understanding of “people power”, a lack of/poor education (which you have noted on previous threads as being a precursor to Britain’s industrial supercession), a less cynical view of industry, class roles (ie. most of the well-informed members of society weren’t doing the shopping), I guess I could think of a few more given some time…
Hang consumer awareness, why didn’t they invent nuclear fusion, make interstellar travel feasible etc? I don’t think the concept of consumer awareness was mature enough at the time; expecting Victorian Britons to regulate their market would be like expecting a toddler to drive a car.
Well, I guess this is related to my above remark – it depends what’s being published in those newspapers, being taught in evening classes, the things people discuss, the books found in the library, the books people wrote etc. I apologise if I inferred that people had no opportunity to discuss consumer affairs, or no medium they could utilise. It’s not that they couldn’t, the crucial fact is that they didn’t to any great extent. I’d like to see you argue otherwise. I think it’s definitely safe to say that the average consumer today is considerably better informed than his counterpart in 19th century Britain. And the average consumer is getting smarter. That’s a given; ask anyone in marketing. Or retail.
I suggest you don’t be so presumptuous. My awareness of the 19th century British economy is just fine, thank you very much. I’m perfectly aware that in the first half of the 19th century particularly, the free market there was more or less unrestrained, and became brutal and ruthless. That was never up for discussion. 19th century Britain was no kind of rebuttal because of the difference between the sophistication of the 19th century consumer and today’s, or more aptly, tomorrow’s. The libertarian belief is that consumers must be well informed to regulate. I don’t believe many 19th century consumers were well informed; certainly nowhere near the level of consumer sophistication we see today. Thus, your example is irrelevant.
That’s because they don’t need to – BB does it for them! And not always well. Like I said earlier, not every consumer has to be ultra-informed. A large-ish minority would do the trick – it would give rise to a large, powerful consumer awareness industry encompassing print, broadcast and electronic media.
A friend of mine studied PR at uni. Her course was littered with case studies of modern day consumers forcing big companies to back down/clean up their act. That sort of thing simply didn’t happen 50 years ago -evidenced by the fact that the PR industry is a recent phenomenon, created to deal with such issues. The first consumer activists were like creatures crawling out of the sea (okay, a lot of them were and are still mutants!). Consumers will evolve to be capable of regulating the market – I can say that because we’re a long way into the evolutionary cycle and I believe it’s the logical conclusion.
Micha writes: The purpose of my post obviously has nothing to do with Hawking
Oh, but it surely does. It’s your hypertext reference, your citation, and your misunderstanding. Once again, Turtles All The Way Down is not a fallacy. Or perhaps you think your depths in the philosophy of science exceed those of Newton’s Chair?
You tried to make an erroneous point using only lame platitudes and name dropping. It didn’t work and better rhetoric won’t help. Libertarianism makes no allowance for chaotic human behavior, and that eliminates it as a practical ideology. Sorry, but it’s broken.
Um, Helen, again you missed the point entirely (and I think intentionally). Did you actually read the link? My post has absolutely nothing to do with Hawking or even the philosophy of science. It has to do with logical consistency – of treating like cases alike and extending a requirement in one sphere to comparable spheres. As I mentioned, this fallacy is often committed in theological debates, where the existence of God is posited as a necessary step to explain some natural phenomenon, but where the existence of God simply begs the question one step backwards. What is not as often recognized is that this same fallacy is committed with regard to government – where government is posited as necessary to solve some social problem, but where the existence of government simply begs the question one step backwards.
As I said before, Hawking didn’t come up with the Turtles All The Way Down story; he used it in his own book to explain some other phenomenon. I am using it for an entirely different purpose. If you don’t see how it relates to question begging arguments, I’m not sure how else I can explain it further, other than reminding you once again to read the actual post, which none of the many other commenters seemed to have a problem digesting.
Libertarianism makes no allowance for chaotic human behavior,
Tell me: what allowances does conservatism make for chaotic human behavior when those same chaotic humans make up the government?
This is incorrect, for the basic reason that expecting people to regulate markets depends on a consistently high level of rigour and ability from millions, but expecting external regulation of the market depends only on the same level of rigour and ability from a few hundred. The second is obviously much more feasible and practical than the first. This has been explained at more length in my earlier post above.
Rational is rational. It doesn’t depend on what you think or on what I think. It is objective and not, as you suggest, subjective.
Perhaps because someone first needs to discover the underlying physics, etc. Why haven’t WE done these things yet if we’re so much better?
But what do they do with this extra knowledge? As I have said before, if you ask someone in marketing he will confirm that people will wear a gold-plated dog turd round their necks if they can be persuaded it is fashionable. Fashion is more important in many purchasing decisions than the objective quality of the item purchased, which is an illustration of why the mass of the people are unable to regulate the market.
See above re fashion. It won’t work if the consumers are well informed but do nothing with this information because they see other things as more important.
EG
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who regulates the few hundred regulators? (More like tens or hundreds of thousands, but lets ignore that for now.) The voters, perhaps? If you are as familiar with economics as you claim to be, you should know that the rational ignorance of voters is perhaps the most consistent form of error we observe, precisely because voters do not directly face the costs or benefits of their choices. And yet this is primary mechanism by which you want to regulate a society full of irrational people.
For your benefit or the benefit of those reading this thread who are not familar with the concept of rational ignorance, here is David Friedman explaining it in an interview on Booknotes with Brian Lamb:
Finally, your endless confusion in this thread stems greatly from the fact that you do not understand what economists mean by the term “rationality.” Economists do not use this term in the same way that philosophers or psychologists do. Here is Donald J. Boudreaux, the Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, explaining the distinction:
Boudreaux then goes on to explain in detail what each of these three prongs entails.
It would be encouraging if critics of libertarians had a clue what they were talking about before they opened their mouths. Then I might be able to spend my time engaging in fruitfull debate rather than elementary level instruction.
It certainly can do. Just because I believe I’m thinking rationally doesn’t mean you necessarily do. Look, we aren’t going to agree on this point and it’s peripheral to the main game, IMO. So I’m not going to mention it again; feel free to have the last word on the issue.
Exactly!!! Berating a self-regulated market by pointing at 19th century Britain is putting the cart before the horse, because the required “underlying” sophistication of the 19th century consumer was not there; that sophistication being a prerequisite of a self-regulating market. I’m assuming you’ve conceded the point about the uninformed 19th century consumer since I see no rebuttal of it in your last post.
That wasn’t my point at all. See above for clarification.
Plenty. I know from experience that the behaviour of consumers changes considerably when they’re armed with knowledge. And, assuming their knowledge is sound, they always get a better deal than they would if they were ignorant. I’m not just talking about dollars saved, either.
And there it is; the crux of your argument. Trouble is, you can’t write off the logic behind a self regulating market by pointing at a consumer’s behaviour towards fashion items. You’re right; people are irrational when it comes to fashion items. That is the very essence of fashion – form doesn’t necessarily follow function, and even if it did that probably wouldn’t be the primary factor in an item’s popularity. However, your argument fails because fashion counts for not a great deal in the purchase of almost everything bought by almost everyone. For starters, to use your facetious example, only a very small minority of people would wear a dog turd even if it was fashionable. The much more rational concerns of “does it represent good value?”, “is it going to harm me?”, “will it do what I’m led to believe it does?”, “is it of appropriate quality?” would be much more persuasive for most, and also count a great deal more than fashion considerations for the vast bulk of purchases. Why are there only 100 or so haute couture buyers in the world today? It’s the height of fashion, after all. The fact that consumers occasionally blindly chase fashion is not an adequate dismissal of the self-regulating market.
Nemo.
Look, why don’t you read the stuff I posted earlier explaining why this works? It’s obvious you haven’t done this. In summary, it is more likely that a few hundred regulators can maintain the necessary consistently high standard and disinterest than can a few tens of millions. This works, as the record of history shows. Libertarianism might, theoretically, work. Maybe, although frankly I think there are many pragmatic reasons why it will not. Conservatism, on the other hand, actually does work and has done for ages.
Boudreaux’ stuff is all very well, but people DON’T act in the way assumed, however internally consistent and logical the argument may be. People just aren’t the rational market players economic theory says they are – the theories break down when confronted with the reality of tens of millions of individuals. Relying on the mass of the people to regulate the market will NOT prevent corruption, cartel or even monopoly, whatever the theory says. It just doesn’t hold up in the real world.
So you’re arguing that the increasing complexity of the market renders it more amenable to regulation by the people?
I don’t agree. Not because of the complexity (see above re regulation of private life versus regulation of the market), but because the few things which need to be regulated demand consistently high standards not only of knowledge but also of personal conduct and of impartiality. An informed public will not necessarily do anything to prevent fraud, false measure, adulteration, corruption or cartel – provided the public is getting what it decides it wants it will not care about the rest. It may be argued then that these other things are unimportant, but I don’t think they are. It may also be argued that these things can be defeated by the creation of non-corrupt, honest and competitive companies, but this ignores the bully-boy effect of the existing market players who can – in the absence of external compulsion – use whatever means they please to artificially raise the barrier to market entry.
I do not concede the point at all. I think it is self-evident and I cannot explain things in any simpler terms than I already have – that when people have the ability to find out these things and use them to inform their purchasing choices & thus regulate the market, then by and large they don’t actually do this. The same principle applies to the 19th century consumer as to the 21st – it just doesn’t now happen they way you assume it will, it didn’t then and there is no reason to suppose it will in the future.
Quite. Of the vast amount of information available, some is sound, much is garbage and opinion with no basis in fact. The consumer has to wade through it all and decide which is which.
But in reality they are not. We went through this before on another thread, and the fact undoubtedly is that people do buy rubbish even though they know it is rubbish, they do buy stuff that actively harms them, even though they know it harms them, and they do keep buying things even when they know it doesn’t do what it leads them to believe it does. All this despite the vastly increased amounts of information available and the ability to access it.
If the purchase in question is sufficiently important to the purchaser, it is valid to assert they may make an extra effort to find out more about it. See above re buying cars or tv/hifi systems compared to everyday stuff. It is not valid to extend this logic to routine everyday products.
Occasionally? Try frequently.
EG
HelenW writes: “coherence and conviction are euphamisms for entrenchment”.
I need another cup of coffee to fire up my brain because I have not the faintest idea what that sentence means.
Micha Gertner is spot on. It never fails to amaze me how folk who like to mock the rational capacities of their fellows simultaneously voice support for giving all these powers to flawed human beings. The contradiction never seems to surprise or strike them.
HelenW says society as a whole benefits from laws such as compulsory seatbelts etc. One could turn that sort of argument upside down and say “society” is harmed by the moral hazard costs of people who drive more dangerously because of laws seeking to eliminate risk from life.
rgds
It isn’t a contradiction. I explained this at considerable length above.
EG
EG,
You haven’t explained anything. You’re just being circular.
The few overseeing the masses has worked as history has shown? Is that the same history replete with warfare? Correct if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the last 100 years produced more bloodshed than all the rest of the known conflicts combined? And, coincidentally enough, the last 100 or so years has seen the massive increase in the State. Naw, just coincidence.
You go on at length that you’ve ‘proven’ something. You’ve proven nothing. I assert that the few cannot rule the masses. To think so is insanity. I showed you the results of this misunderstanding in the Federal balance sheet, and your comeback was the “rules are different for government” – which is nonsense. The only outcomes of the accrual balance sheet of the US Federal government is to perpetrate coercive use of force on a massive scale, or admit that it was all a huge fraud from the beginning – “hey, we’re welchers, whaddya gunna to about it?”. One choice is a jackboot, the other, the magicians disappear in a puff of smoke. Hardly the heartwarming picture of Statism you portray. Every ponzi scheme works well for a period of time. But at some point the fraud is revealed. When it is, nothing good comes from it.
It may make sense to you, but it is gobble-de-gook to me. Please refrain from calling your circular belief systems as some sort of proof. You have the underlying belief that there are a holy few who can rule over the masses. This of course is a fiction. (Speaking in terms of the US) to think that 537 people can minister to 289,999,463 million is pure insanity. If 1.397 trillion in assets and $47 trillion in present valued obligations merely elicits “the rules are different” and governments can be liars and welchers (and individuals can’t) can only derive from the mind of an adherent to insanity.
We exist in an antebellum period where the benefactors simply have changed the tactic of warfare and conquest to impounding of money and the credit market. Make a bunch of promises that it will be the future generation to sort out only puts off the day force needs to be used. (Western) states have thrived on this mentality (hey – we can provide for the masses and we don’t have to resort to imperialism). But the time will come. The reality of economic constraints will eventually have to rule the day. And when the people are taxed mercilessly (directly or by confiscation of savings via government inflation), or the military complex is turned outward or inward, or the promises turn to lies, or a pleasant combination of all three, then we will see what States have wrought.
Maybe somewhere along the line, we might have had some agreement about local councils, constables, dog catchers, or electrical wiring inspectors. But you’ve committed to the notion that a few can rule mass on a comprehensive scale. This is false. The shambles that is the US finances proves this (assuming escape hatches aren’t built it like being liars and welchers).
The previous 100 years, on the other hand, also saw massive increases in the state and yet long periods of prolonged peace. There is no lesson to be drawn from your example since counter-examples can so easily be given.
Crap. Once again, you’re creating a straw man.
Yes, of course we do. State debt in the US is going inevitably to lead to a war. Ho hum. This is Marxist logic, and it’s plain wrong.
In fact, I said the opposite. I referred to the regulation of the market, which does work better with a few high-quality regulators, and constrasted this with detailed rule of individual life by external regulators, which doesn’t (and can’t) work for reasons of complexity.
Now, if you’d care to address the arguments I actually made rather than the ones you’re pretending I made, we might get somewhere.
EG
Euan, you cannot separate individual life from the market place in this sense. This does not mean they are the same thing. However, the market place cannot be governed/regulated by an elite “unbias” few without inividual life being governed/regulated. I understand the distinction you are trying to make, but being a self-proclaiming pragmatic you should understand that the one (market/economy) cannot be regulated without affecting the other (individual life).
Why not? Why, for example, do legal sanctions against fraud, cartel, adulteration and false measure necessarily entail rules saying who can fit new windows to your house? After all, for the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th in Britain there was very little regulation of private life but there were regulations governing the market, so history would appear to suggest it is perfectly possible to regulate one but not the other.
EG
Euan, I don’t know where you live, but here in Michigan (and every other place I have lived), I have experienced first hand how regulations having the intent of preventing fraud have impacted personal life specifically in something as simple as fitting windows.
I am a general contractor. I am a young 25 years old, and I have been doing this since I was 14. My dad has been a contractor for 28 years. Between his experience and my experience I would say we have some idea what we are doing. Right now I am finishing a job for a friend that I have done volunteer. They bought the materials I did the work for free. It’s for a young couple who is expecting their first baby in mid April. He has a low to mid income job. She stays at home in their one bedroom house. I over the past 3 weeks have taken a worthless, ugly sunroom in the back of their house and converted it to living space, which involved framing, flooring, electrical (even replacing their load center), drywall, trim, everything. I am capable of doing all of those things. However, I am not licensed to do any of them. My father has his builder’s license, and I could have done all the work under his, but neither of us is a “master electrician.” I finished this job by illegally not pulling any permits and not getting any state certified inspections. They spent a total of $2000.00 on the materials that they borrowed. If I had pulled the legal permits and gotten the inspections I would have been required to have a master electrician do the electrical. Having dealt with them extensively on other jobs I know the electrical alone on this job would have cost $2,000.00, which would have put this whole thing way over budget.
The point to all this overly long story is that the state’s good intentions to regulate hoping to prevent fraudulent contracting would have prevented my friends from having this baby’s room (certainly in the realm of “private life”) if I hadn’t been willing to break the letter of the law, without breaking the intent of the law.
By the way, you may call into question my wiring skills. I have never had a wiring job I have done have any problems. Whereas, one of the two master electricians to whom I regularly subcontract had his house last February go up completely in flames as the result of wiring he did under a state certified permit and inspection.
By the way, I have a dozen rentals and I have also seen time and time again low income, poor tenants get screwed by higher rents because I had to spend money fixing something “wrong” in one of my city inspected, licensed rental units, when the thing that was “wrong” was totally and obviously beauracratic.
Boy did I butcher “bureaucratic.”
EG,
You’re the one stating that rules are different for the select few who are better than mortal man. Such reasoning has led to the dark pages of history. And I’m creating strawmen out of this?
Why don’t you address how the State is going to make good on all the promises they have made? How are the debts going to paid? I guess it’s not necessary because States can perpetrate fraud on a massive scale. The Wise must have had a Good reason.
How about you address how warfare has been used throughout the centuries by the wise and select few to perpetuate their mastery over the unwashed? And to fob it off as marxism is hilarious. You’re the one perpetuating a style of rule that is much closer to how marxism presents itself in reality. A desire for liberty is in no way marxism.
The foundation of liberty is private property, including means of production. This is as contrary a point to marxism as one can deduce, and the main tenet of libertarianism. It is your stylings that ultimately refuse the recognition of private property. When nearly 50% of my labor is taken by the various levels of State, even before the increases necessary to fulfill the nonsensical balance sheets discussed previously, I don’t consider myself at liberty. And rejecting this Statist invasion makes ME more of a marxist? Again, only from an adherent to insanity.
Liberty cannot exist under the mentality that the infinitesimal few can rule the many. It IS nonsense, pure and simple, and proved that marxism was false because it inexorably led to the few ruling the many, and it collapsed.
To continue to believe that a handful can rule the mass is to disregard the cognitive limits EVERY man has, regardless of how profound a thinker YOU think they are. Simply because you believe that a few thinkers can trounce liberty, and somehow aren’t bound by economic constraints, and when they occasionally burst the seams and bomb and destroy others to gain control and access to resources to make Good on their promises to their folk, then so be it. Because your system does just that, allows our ‘betters’ a different set of rules, and whether you care to see it or not, that includes aggressive use of force.
I will not continue to argue. The State is your religion. You have an innate belief that the State is separable from the masses. IT is endowed with some greater Good. IT contains the Wise and Fair to minister to the rest of us. IT contains those with a higher moral draft than the rest of us mouth-breathers. Nothing I can say will change this mind set. It is set in stone in your mind and all your ‘proofs’ are axiomatic extensions of this entrenched belief. No amount of typing will change this so I shan’t try any longer.
To repeat, if we think that humans are ignorant of many things (true), that they are fallible (true), that they are prone to greed, fear and many other things (true), it kind of undermines the case for anything other than strictly limited government and open markets, since why put such flawed creatures in charge of Big Govt agencies?
In fact the late F.A. Hayek and other “Austrian” economists have made the point that it is precisely because of human fallibility, not inspite of it, that the market order is vastly superior to the imposed orders such as socialism, etc. The market enables us to profit from our mistakes and exploit hitherto gaps in knowledge, etc.
Winzeler,
I don’t really accept your tale as evidence that anti-fraud regulations inevitably impact private life. The type of regulation you cite is really more of a health and safety inspired thing, I suppose. There is no reason that I can see why anti-fraud regulations would necessarily mean building work needs to be inspected like this, although I can see the logic of those who would put it that way. My concern on fraud is to ensure company public accounts are true and complete, and that what a supplier says he is supplying matches with reality. This does not need inspection (except by the buyer), but it does need an objective standard of probity against which the supplier or accounts can be measured and action taken. Some would say that the buyer can deal with this by taking the supplier to court, but you need some concrete rule to be broken before you can get legal redress. Buyers can be (and sometimes are) intimidated by suppliers in these circumstances, so it is perhaps as well to have an objective rule backed by someone who will not be intimidated – e.g. a state and its courts.
Over here in Britain, you would be able to do all the electrical work you listed without needing a master electrician (I suppose the equivalent here is just a “qualified electrician”) doing any of the work. What you would need to do, though, is get the electricity company to pull the main fuse (illegal to touch it yourself, even if you are a super-qualified electrician, it’s company property), and also to replace and seal it afterwards. This assumes you actually need to pull the fuse, which for many jobs you don’t have to do. The company can insist upon professional testing (or their own testing) prior to reconnection, but they don’t always do this. The local government in theory should demand testing, but won’t go out of their way to find out if any new work has actually been done. Again in theory, the local government should insist that a qualified electrician installs wiring only in a bathroom or kitchen, but not necessarily elsewhere. It seems statist Britain is somewhat more liberal in this regard than the Land of the Free ™.
“Inspection” over here amounts to little more than a visual check of the completed system plus using a plug-in socket tester to find earth & neutral faults, BTW.
I can also do domestic wiring, although I’m not an electrician. I also know how to test the circuits properly, and I know perfectly well that many “professional” electricians won’t do this because it takes too long. I believe your story about the apparently “professional” wiring jobs catching fire – it happens here too. My younger brother is a building contractor like you, and can tell many similar tales.
As for the other work, most of that is unregulated over here but you DO need to get planning permission to extend a property. If you were converting an existing room but making no structural alterations nor turning it into a bedroom you basically can do what you want. Structural alterations need planning and engineering approval, and there are specific regulations about certain types of room – other than that, it’s pretty much your house and you can do what you want. Whatever the doom-mongers on this blog say.
EG
No, I’m saying it is more likely that one can find a small number of people capable of maintaining a consistently high standard of rigour and personal probity than that one can find several million in the same population who can do the same thing. I would have thought this would be fairly obvious to the meanest intellect. Apparently not.
Pretty much, yes. If you look through history, you will in fact see precisely this sort of thing happening over and over again – government promises are worth nothing in the long term. I’m not saying this is good or laudable, merely recognising the reality of what happens. And it doesn’t always lead to war, either. History again, I’m afraid.
Sigh. Nobody said you were a Marxist. Please stop attacking arguments that haven’t been made. However, the idea that state indebtedness will inevitably lead to war is Marxist logic, and wrong. That you accept it does not make you a Marxist, nor does it make your position Marxist. I can’t put it in simpler words.
Marxism doesn’t work because its economic model is flawed. Its economic model is flawed because it has no functioning price mechanism. Liberty has nothing to do with it, frankly. Liberty is not essential to rising prosperity, as has been shown in Taiwan, Singapore and now China.
You really should try responding to the arguments people put, not your internal re-write of what you think or would like those arguments to be. Of course you won’t have any effect if you are attacking an argument that hasn’t been made.
Which is why I argue for limited government. Duh.
Limited government is not the same as no government, though.
EG
Euan, I am a minarchist, not an anarchist, by the way. Judgiing by your remarks, your definition of limited government is, however, considerably more expansive than mine.
Judgiing by your remarks, your definition of limited government is, however, considerably more expansive than mine
A few hundred people to enforce minimal regulation in the market is hardly the hallmark of expansive government.
EG
Sorry, screwed up the blockquote tags for the first para.
EG
Euan,
How are those few hundred people selected? You have repeatedly dodged this question. Please answer it.
Please list the places the question was “repeatedly” asked. If you’d like a question answered, you might find it useful to ask it in the first place before getting all snotty that it hasn’t been answered – I just read through the posts on this thread and you haven’t previously asked, nor has anyone else.
I already did explain what qualities they need – personal integrity, probity, disinterest. Essentially they need pretty much the same qualities as, say, judges in a court. These manage to get selected, at least here in Britain, without undue difficulty or controversy.
As to the precise mechanics of selection, there are several ways of doing it, some of which might be combined. There could be public examinations to determine understanding of the law and how companies work, investigations into the record of the applicant for any dishonesty, a requirement to have no investments in any area that might be regulated, or at a minimum to have them in a blind trust, a willingness to do the job for a fixed (short) period to avoid interests developing, and so on. All of this information should be made public.
Patently, you swallow the idea that if many people often do silly things and exercise poor judgement, then nobody should be a regulator because they cannot be trusted to be sensible and impartial. This betrays a belief that if most people are incompetent at a given thing then ALL people must be incompetent – incompetent turtles all the way down, as it were. This logic would mean that nobody could be a judge because most people frankly could not, that nobody could be an expert in anything because most people could not. One would expect this type of argument to come from conservatives like me who assume the default state of humanity is rather base, but instead it comes from libertarians. Libertarians stress the value of the individual, yet do not seem to understand that some individuals are better in this respect than others. Perhaps a blind spot in the libertarian world-view? Possibly this comes from the erroneous idea that everything can be reduced to a question of economics and thus that everyone has a naked profit interest in every question – which simply is not true.
Hobbes was right about people in general, but this does not mean he thought (or that the fact is) that ALL people are equally brutish thugs. Clearly they are not, as the most cursory assessment of a dozen random individuals will reveal. Some people are smarter, more honest, more disinterested and more honourable than others. Some people CAN be trusted to judge, even if most cannot. It is most emphatically NOT turtles all the way down. The thesis is manifestly absurd, and so obviously false that I am surprised it persists.
EG
Let’s see. In my first post in this thread, on March 10, 2005 01:20 AM, I wrote:
Later, in response to Helen, I asked, on March 10, 2005 07:02 AM:
I then asked you directly, once again, on March 10, 2005 07:33 AM,
And this is not to mention all of the many other times other people in this thread asked you the same question.
And who determines the content of these public examinations? Who makes the final decision about who is honest and who is dishonest? And did you even bother to read the link to Hayek’s famous argument about Why the Worst Get on Top? Apparently not. Let me spell it out for you then:
Or, to put another way, as PJ O’Rourke famously quipped, “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
Not at all, and your failure to understand my argument betrays either your ignorance or your intentional misreading as a way of avoiding admitting you have no response. If many people often do silly things and exercise poor judgement, then nobody should be a regulator because there is no reliable mechanism to choose trusted, sensible, impartial regulators. That is to say, we can all think of a King, who in theory, is good and just and wise, and this King would certainly be a better ruler than a democratically elected parliament or a congress. But the problem with Monarchy is that we have no way of guaranteeing that the King will be good, and in this sense, democracy is preferable. But as many all too often forget, if we assume that most people are irrational, this problem is not solved by democratic government, for the government itself is chosen by the majority vote of these irrational people. It’s turtles, all the way down.
Wow, this is turning out to be one of those epic threads! There hasn’t been one this long for a while. Nice one Perry.
Euan – I admire your perspicacity and tenaciousness in this thread and in general, but I really don’t think you’ve made a particularly convincing case on this issue.
Nope, read that again. I argued that the 19th century consumer wasn’t particularly sophisticated. I said nothing about the complexity of the market.
I think they almost certainly would if exposed and if they were convinced it affected them. Rapacious and powerful consumer advocates/publications would do that kind of work and that kind of convincing. Consumers aren’t as doltish as you seem to think. Most companies would quickly realise that doing the right thing is more profitable.
Okay; I assumed you did because of your lack of response. However, do you accept that the 19th century consumer was considerably less well-informed than today’s consumer? I believe they are, even relative to the complexity of today’s market. This is the key reason why I dismiss your example, and you haven’t really refuted it.
And I think I’ve made it quite clear in past posts why it doesn’t happen now.
Once again, you’re not comparing like with like. 19th century Britain is no kind of example for the reasons I’ve detailed at length above. Today’s regulated market is not instructive, either; regulation allows people to consume without rigourous attention to what they’re consuming. Thus it’s hardly a contradiction of my hypothesis. Basically, you can’t rebut my argument by using historical or current-day evidence because a confluence of the elements that I believe would give rise to a self-regulating market has never taken place before; not today, not in 19th century Britain.
Which, when the market is mature, would be about as difficult as deciding which news source/s one should imbibe ie. not particularly.
I wholeheartedly disagree. You have an exceedingly low opinion of the intelligence of the average consumer. I can tell you from personal experience (having worked in retail in low and high socio-economic areas) that the vast majority of consumers primarily share those concerns.
You make it sound as though there was resolution in favour of your assertion. I didn’t agree with you then and I don’t agree with you now.
Undoubtably? I think you’re totally wrong here. Sure, people do buy rubbish. I buy rubbish. I (very occasionally) buy something from a $2 shop or similar. I don’t expect much from my purchase, and nor should I, because it cost $2. When the vast majority of people buy rubbish and know it’s rubbish, they would have bought it because it’s cheap. People will pay for rubbish, sure, but they rarely pay more than what it’s worth. It’s bought to serve some purpose, but more often than not, not much of one. Maybe keep the kids occupied for five minutes. Still, they’ve decided that for $2 whatever that “some purpose” is is value for money. That’s a completely rational decision, and nearly all consumers are guided by such choices, regardless of the quality of the good purchased. Yes, they buy stuff that harms them, like cigarettes and bad food. See my comments above about rationality and smoking. This is not a reason why a self regulated market would fail. And I absolutely disagree that the average consumer would keep buying something that they *knew* didn’t do what they were originally led to believe.
Once again, I wholeheartedly disagree. Fashion is an incidental factor in decisionmaking when the average punter purchases most items.
Micha writes: reminding you once again to read the actual post,
Congratulations on being the 4th person to incorrectly criticize my reading. Your trouble is, I read too much. Want to discuss “logical consistency?” How come you link references, and when it is discovered they you have entirely misinterpreted them, deny they have any relevance? Hmmmmmmmmm?
I am using it for an entirely different purpose.
Except that purpose presently escapes you, right? You brought Hawking to the dance–now you can leave with him. I think you understand that you were perfectly incorrect to label Turtles as a fallacy, but can’t admit it.
Furthermore, your primary buffology–that governments should not be run by bad shoppers–is simply idiotic. We don’t pick our legislators randomly at the door of Wal-Mart. Wait, let me guess: Your post had nothing to do with government either?
none of the many other commenters seemed to have a problem
Your post was not generally accepted here, but rather roundly ignored. Nobody is impressed with the name-droping and pseudo-erudition. And need I explain what to do with your paternalistic remarks?
Tell me: what allowances does conservatism make for chaotic human behavior [in government]
I’m glad you asked. We design to involve as many legislators, from as many regions, as possible in the decision making process. We make those legislators accountable to the public in a mix of 2 year, 4 year, and lifetime terms. We make the process slow and public. Despite the errors and abuses, it works very well over time. Of course you don’t agree. When how is it that American longevity and personal wealth reached new highs this month? Wait, let me guess: Health and prosperity have nothing to do with government either?
You sir, are an eccentric skeptic. That is a mold for casting absolutist thinking. And Absolutist are always wrong. Almost.
Suffer writes: Fashion is an incidental factor in decisionmaking
That’s insane.
((And good evening to you.))
Micha writes: Who regulates the few hundred regulators?
That’s a fair question. Legislators are regulated by their own elected committee chairmen and house leadership. They also have internal devices such ethics committees and a Sergeant at Arms. Individually, they are subject to the entire judiciary. Both the President and the Supremes can overrule their actions. Finally, the voters they represent may dismiss them.
Of course, all that has proven to be inadequate, from time to time. Still, it is the best in the World.
I didn’t link the reference. If you had read the ACTUAL POST, you would have seen that there was no link to the Amazon.com entry for A Brief History of Time, which there would have been had I been referencing the content of the book rather than merely using it as a credited source for an anecdote. Not that the inclusion of a link to Amazon would have supported your point anyway. You seem unable to comprehend this simple concept.
And the fact that you complain that I falsely criticize your reading skills, and then blatantly commit an obvious reading error is freaking hilarious. Please, continue.
Yes, that is the way these things work. Anecdotes need not be used for their original purpose, especially in this case where Hawking wasn’t even the originator of the anecdote, but instead credited someone else for the story. God, this is like talking to a brick wall.
So you are claiming here that the concept of “rational ignorance,” the basis of nearly all academic research into voting behavior performed by economists, psychologists, and political scientists, is “simply idiotic”?!? And we should take your word over the word of experts in the relevant field…because why, exactly?
People are not bad shoppers; that’s precisely the exact opposite of what Friedman’s car-election analogy shows. Shoppers are spending their own money, and thus have an incentive to spend wisely, else they suffer the concequences. Voters face no such cost, and the chances that a single vote will effect the outcome of an election are effectively zero. So there is no similar incentive to vote wisely, because there are no consequences tied to the decision to vote. People make excellent shoppers, but terrible voters. That’s the point of rational ignorance, and it’s simple enough for a school child to understand, if they bother spending a little bit of time reading and digesting, which you clearly did not.
You missed the point, yet again. (No surprise there.) Who chooses these legislators? Voters do. Who are these voters? The very same people you conservatives think are systematically irrational and chaotic. So why do you expect rationality and order from a group of people when they vote if this same group of people is considered irrational and chaotic when they engage in market transactions? Again, this is where the turtles fallacy comes in to play.
And as for your claim that this works very well over time, coming from a conservative, in a country that has moved further and further away from conservativism over the last fifty years or so, all I can do is gaze in absolute wonder how any self-respecting conservative can make that claim. Standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”, as history passes you by, indeed.
Hi Helly :),
For the vast majority of purchases fashion is a distant consideration when confronted with the priorities of function, value etc. This is true even in regards to fashion clothing – witness the fact that fashionware is one of the (if not the) most cut-throat and difficult sectors of retail to make a buck in.
(Written from the asylum) Regards,
Euan reckons that his model of minimal govt. will need just a few wise and smart folk to regulate the market so that we irrational dullards don’t get misled and make the “wrong” choices. However, as far as Mr Gray is concerned, this is “limited” govt in action. Riiiight.
Public choice economics will show that once you set up government regulatory agencies to try and “protect” the consumer, such bodies have a habit to grow like ivy around the trunk of a tree as they frequently succumb to empire building and get influenced by the very groups they are supposed to be regulating. To wit: the SEC, the UK FSA, the Food and Drug Administration, the European Commission, etc, etc.
Such an understanding of the need to constrain government functions to minimal limits is one reason, btw, why it is dumb to portray libertarianism as “utopian”. In fact, such insights are drawn from painful reality. It is the folk who think they can “protect” us with all kinds of rules and agencies who are the utopians.
All we need is for the market to have rules outlawing fraud and theft. Period.
Micha writes: I didn’t link the reference.
Your duplicitous word shuffle offers no escape–you’re a bold-faced lier. Hawking, Brief History of Time, Turtles All the Way Down–as I said, your link, right here. Oh look, your link even includes “turtles-all-the-way-down”. Hahaha
http://catallarchy.net/blog/archives/2005/02/15/turtles-all-the-way-down/
there was no link to the Amazon.com.
Yet another self-conscious, desperate mendacity–Amazon ? hypertext link.
… freaking hilarious. Please, continue..
My pleasure. So I’m a freak, and my pov is hilarious? High praise from a proven LIER.
Hawking wasn’t even the originator of the anecdote, but instead credited someone else for the story.
I have a copy of his book in hand. The story is given on Page 1, to frame his thesis. (Which you also do not understand.) There is no credit given. You LIE again. Or perhaps, you have a “reading” problem?
God, this is like talking to a brick wall.
So you and God are agreed than I am thick as a brick? Ha, what your wise men don’t know …
So you are claiming here that the concept of “rational ignorance,”
No, that is you, a LIER, putting false words in my mouth. I claim YOU are ignorant. Dishonest about it, too. See the diff?
People are not bad shoppers
Yes, they are. Numerous examples have been given here. Your “reading” problem or another LIE?
Shoppers are spending their own money, and thus have an incentive to spend wisely
That’s why the Moonbats gave Howard Dean $42 million to win 3 primary electors? Or why Soros gave $30 million to elect Kerry? Such wisdom, eh?
So there is no similar incentive to vote wisely, because there are no consequences tied to the decision to vote.
An impossibly ignorant comment–elections are being decided by infinitesimal margins all over. The incentive to vote has never been more keenly recognized. I once changed a vote at Town Meeting by merely letting out a loud “HA.” ((True story.))
Interestingly, your argument is flawed beyond your wildest imagination. Shoppers have lost the incentive to purchase wisely because manufacturers have learned to overcome quality concerns with warrantees. After “read my lips,” we know that politicians come with less assurance than Ronco products.
it’s simple enough for a school child to understand
Reducing me to a “school child,” are you? More proof that your views cannot be substantiated. You wouldn’t need to hurl insults if you had any ability to debate, LIER.
You missed the point, yet again.
No I didn’t. And you offer no rebuttal other than a slur. Cuz that’s all you’ve got, LIER.
So why do you expect rationality and order from a group of people when they vote if this same group of people is considered irrational and chaotic when they engage in market transactions?
Your non sequitur. I do not expect irrational behavior from large populations, although it happens. Individual behavior is more radical. Group behavior is more conservative. This goes to the heart of your mendacity. You purposefully weave individual and group characteristics in the attempt to substantiate your fallacies. Doesn’t work with me, LIER.
And as for your claim that this works very well over time …
You make no attempt to invalidate it. Nor could you, because it is so obviously true. Name the superior Libertarian state, LIER.
in a country that has moved further and further away from conservativism over the last fifty years
Your comment is absurd. By world standards, we have always been conservative. However, since Reagan, our politicians have become increasingly conservative as well. Why do you make this stuff up as you go on? It reveals you.
all I can do is gaze in absolute wonder
No doubts there. I’m certain you are quite glazed. Oops, ha, my reading problem.
how any self-respecting conservative can make that claim.
Oh, I get it. Your sentence structure is very difficult for a poor reader. You err here by confusing Libertarianism with Conservatism. Eisenhower was the last President who could claim any element of Libertarianism, but Sputnik instantly cured him of that. You’d be surprised to learn that Kennedy and even Bill Clinton were conservative in many respects. It got Bill re-elected. But Jimmy Carter and Bush I–no, too Liberal to last.
Standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”, as history passes you by, indeed.
Ha, this is extremely amusing coming from a Libertarian. You know–the ideology with NO HISTORY. Hahahaha. Try again, LIER.
Unfortunately for your thesis, nobody asked the question. Including you:
If people are too irrational for markets to self-regulate, then they are too irrational to elect the right politicians to regulate the market.
That’s you asking a question, is it? Forgive me if I remain unimpressed by your inquisitorial skills. In any case, I addressed the point more than once previously.
Your argument about turtles all the way down is just plain stupid. It simply isn’t true, otherwise we would have no teachers, no judges, no experts – yet we have these people. If all you can do to support it is quote other people rather than reasoning for yourself, it really does indicate you have just swallowed the argument & don’t think too much about it. It has been explained to you now more than once, and not just by me, why the turtles argument holds no water.
It is such a basic and self-evident concept that all people are not possessed of the same degree of incompetence that it is difficult to explain in any simpler terms. If you cannot look around yourself and see that people are not all equally incompetent – even if most people are pretty unimpressive – then I cannot for the life of me see how to explain it to you in any simpler terms. It is akin to praising motherhood, such is the obvious nature of the answer.
In any case, the turtle argument for an unregulated markets is perhaps self-defeating. If, as seems to be commonly held by libertarians of a certain type, democracy is a mistake because look at the sort of politicians the people elect, how is it reasonable to suppose that the same people will suddenly become wise when regulating the market? If they cannot elect sensible politicians, despite the fact that political actions affect them directly and immediately, why would they be any better at regulating a market where the commercial actions taken also affect them directly and immediately? Essentially the argument is that people cannot be trusted to regulate the political market by means of “buying” services with the currency of their vote, but they can be trusted to regulate the commercial market by buying services with the currency of their cash. So if they cannot be trusted to regulate one competitive market, how can they suddenly be trusted to regulate a different competitive market?
Politicians notoriously offer to bribe the voters with welfare, tax cuts, special projects, etc. So too do companies bribe the prospective purchaser with discounts, added features, etc. Both are forms of market, and in both markets the bribes and promises are not always what they appear to be. If you don’t like the commercial product, you don’t buy it again (although in the real world people have a distressing tendency to keep buying the same old crap). If you don’t like the political product, you don’t vote for the politician again (although in the same real world voters do have a habot of continually voting for the same failed policies). Why is it that the libertarian assumes the consumer cannot regulate one market with any success, but can regulate the other with complete success?
The conservative, in contrast, accepts that people depressingly often make dumb choices, and in many cases keeps making the same dumb choice over and over again. To this end, he proposes a system of moderate regulation to prevent the worst excesses of these idiocies screwing everything up. This applies to both the political and the commercial markets. It does have one cunning feature – it works.
It is not hard to devise means to select people with the necessary qualities. We do this for judges, we do it for professors of physics, and so on. It can be done, and the proof if this is that it actually IS done on a regular basis. It is not hard to devise a means of ensuring that incompetent regulators are removed – again this sort of thing is already done in other fields. You seem to be assuming that regulators would necessarily be elected by the people, which is only one way to do it. I would not choose this way, just as I do not think it appropriate to have court justices elected by the people. Objective standards are required, not appeals to subjective emotion.
But no system is perfect. Democracy is deeply flawed, but the alternatives are even more deeply flawed. Given checks, balances, and rigourous impartial enforcment of the law, democracy pretty much works most of the time. Given that man cannot be perfected, this is probably the best we are going to get. Things will go wrong from time to time, but in ANY political system this will happen. The consequences in a democracy are usually rather less serious than in other forms of government, though.
EG
I don’t mean to neglect you, Johnathan, but there are a lot of long posts here!
“coherence and conviction are euphamisms for entrenchment”…. I have not the faintest idea what that sentence means.
Happy to explain. Libertarianism is correctly characterized by coherence and conviction. Far more so than Conservatism. Despite the positive connotations these words carry, they denote the worst part of Libertarianism. That is ideological rigidity or entrenchment.
This is a big deal for me. I was faced with an important fork in the path of my life, and chose for love. It was an incoherent choice. Oddly, I would be quite dead now, if I had stuck to my convictions at the time.
Micha Gertner is spot on.
Micha has been reduced to looping fallacies and ad hominem. We’ve found the depth of his rational capacity in a puddle.
[One could say that ] “society” is harmed by the moral hazard costs of people who drive more dangerously because of laws seeking to eliminate risk from life.
Yes one could say that, but why would they? Many people have protested seat belt requirements, but not with self-destructive driving. Here you are feeding my prejudice by invoking absolutism. Nobody has ever said that seat belts eliminate driving risk. Let’s not make Perfection the enemy of Practical. Do it for the children.
Look, lady, I just showed everyone reading this thread that your accusation was dead wrong and your reading skills are atrocious.
Everyone here is free to read the link for themselves and clearly see your blatant error. You claimed that “How come you link references, and when it is discovered they you have entirely misinterpreted them, deny they have any relevance?” And yet is is clear from my post that I linked no such reference; I credited an anecdote Hawking used in his book – an anecdote that he himself credits to someone else. Harking himself credits Bertrand Russell as the originator; others credit Thomas Huxley, and still others credit Carl Sagan or Isaac Asimov.
And despite all of this, you are forgetting the more general point: It simply doesn’t matter who created the anecdote; as anedotes can be used for any purpose whatsover, so long as they relate and help better illuminate that purpose.
Page one reads, and I quote, “A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy.” Anyone who wants to confirm this is free to use the Amazon.com Search Inside feature and see this for themselves. Here is a link directly to the first page for your convenience.
Not only do you seem to have trouble reading my online posts, but you also have difficulty reading a book you claim to have directly in front of you. Embarrassing.
I’m done with you. Someone who refuses to read basic English when it is staring them directly in the face is a waste of my time. Goodbye.
No, he doesn’t. He speculates that it may have been, according to some people, Bertrand Russell. This is not the same thing as crediting Bertrand Russell.
EG
Finally, you have demonstrated that you understand the argument. Bravo.
I’ve already spelled out why in great detail, earlier in this thread:
If you don’t believe me, or feel that my analysis is biased, pick up any introductory economics textbook and look up “rational ignorance” in the index. Here is one example from a webbed econ textbook:
Or if that is not enough, look it up on Wikipedia:
Or take this excellent explanation from The Concise Encylopedia of Economics:
Finally, responding to your last important contribution:
And thus the conservate either fails to or refuses to recognize that this system of “moderate regulation” does not remain “moderate” for long (and never has), precisely because the people who make the dumb choices that need to be regulated are exactly the same people who make ever more egregious dumb choices when voting for regulators, for all of the reasons mentioned above. Need I say, yet again, that it is turtles, all the way down?
True. My mistake for not accurately accrediting his claim.
The point, though, is that Hawking, by referencing the possibility that it was Bertrand Russell, is admitting that he himself was not the originator, and that someone else was. If one searches online, one can easily see that this anecdote is like an old wives tale; no one really knows who first came up with it, and different people use it for different purposes. That is the only point I’ve been trying to make, but Helen is so adamant in her refusal not to admit that she made a simple reading error that she instead choses to embarrass herself for all to see.
Okay, I know I just finished saying that I wouldn’t waste any more of my time with Helen’s illogic, but when someone argues in favor of incoherence (!), I just can’t resist.
So we can conclude that conservativism is correctly characterized by incoherence and lack of conviction.
When arguing over theology, one can tell when the athiest or agnostic has won the debate as soon as the theist concedes the incoherence of God by claiming that God is “unknowable” or “beyond reason,” and must be taken on faith alone.
As soon as a conservative admits that their own ideology is self-contradictory, illogical, and thus incoherent, his opponent has, by definition, won the argument (as the defintion of an argument is the persuasiveness and validity of the logic and rhetoric. An incoherent argument cannot be understood, and thus cannot be persuasive or logically valid).
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
What utter piffle.
Voters are casting their ballot to influence their future and thus have an incentive to vote wisely, else they suffer the consequences. For what it’s worth, the chance of a single consumer affecting the output of a given supplier in the market is also effectively zero.
There are many parallels between the market of goods and the market of politics. If the people cannot be trusted to regulate one, I cannot see why they can be trusted to regulate another. You (or rather, the source you quote from) argues that the difference is the coercive power of the state. This can also happen in the market when a cartel or monopoly forms, and in the absence of regulation cartels and monopolies WILL form pretty often because it is easier for the corporations than competing. Naturally, this does not apply in every case, but it does apply in many.
Perfectly true. This is a consequence of human nature, which cannot really be changed. We’re stuck with it. Instead of trying to invent a perfect way to subvert humanity’s inherent limitations, we should consider more pragmatic and workable solutions to deal with them, recognising that they will always be there and that they will always have the potential to cause problems. This is called conservatism. It works.
As for the rest of your lengthy post, all you are doing is quoting. You are not making an argument, nor are exhibiting any sign of reasoning the thing through for yourself. If it’s in the textbook, it must be right, hmm?
Sorry, but I can get the same level of intellectual discourse from Communists. At least Communist apologists have some historical precedent to debate, albeit a horrible and failed one. This makes them try harder, I feel, even if they still end up being wrong.
I agree absolutely with Helen – libertarianism is ideological. Much like Marxism – another parallel. Conservatism is not, being more pragmatic and grounded in reality rather than theory. Claims that libertarian insights are derived from real-world experience are at best partly true – the experience may be real-world, but the solution most definitely is not. One should be suspicious of politico-economic theories which claim to have everything proven and explained irrefutably, for that way lies the gulag.
Yes. It’s called pragmatism. It works.
Conservatives recognise that you cannot prove everything, nor can you reduce the totality of human existence to an economic equation amenable to scientific solution.
This would be valid if we assume that political arguments require mathemtically rigourous standards of proof. Of course they don’t, so this simply does not apply & your entire thesis is without merit. Neither do economic arguments require such proof, to be honest, since economics is more of an art than a science – unless you’re a Marxist or a libertarian, when apparently you can, unlike everyone else, prove logically that you are correct.
Take something else that undoubtedly exists and which greatly enriches our time in this vale of tears – love. You can rationalise romantic love in people of breeding age, of course. The simple mechanical necessities of species propagation explains this. What is the economic justification (since apparently all can be reduced to economics) of a man’s sacrifice of his own life for the wife he loves but who is beyond breeding age & responsible for nobody? Or his self-sacrifice for a complete stranger? The man makes a choice and pays the highest possible price for it, for zero gain. Why?
If people are often illogical, is it any surprise that the reality of their lives and their interactions is also frequently illogical?
Not everything is economics, nor is everything in life susceptible of logical proof or mathematical demonstration.
EG
Amen, Euan. Libertarianism is a parlour game with as much relation to real politics as Monopoly to the building trades.
I reckon you could run representative government with randomly selected adults, like jurors, and get as good a result as the cabal of professional careerist politicians produces.
In a limited state, yes you probably can. This is one way to do it, and I suppose it could be workable at a local government level but probably not at the level of a state.
Another, and more practical, way of getting around the professional politician problem is term limits. Politicians don’t like the idea, so there’s probably some merit in it. I suggested this above in respect of the market regulators (who are not politicians).
EG
False. The chances of my single act of voting effecting the outcome of the election are infinitesimally small. Thus, my single act of voting has no instrumental value – it has approximately zero chance of influencing my future. Thus, I have no incentive to vote wisely, because no matter which way I vote, the consequences of the election will be the same. This is all explained in my previous post, so I don’t know why I need to explain it again.
But the instrumental purpose of purchasing a product is not to influence the output of a supplier; rather, it is to consume the product purchased. Influencing the output of a supplier is only an indirect effect of consumer choices. Again, this should be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of econ 101.
That is most certainly not what the author is saying, Rather, she is arguing that the incentives of public decision makers differ from private decision makers because private decision makers are spending their own money, whereas public decision makers are spending someone else’s money. This is not an argument specifically about coercion, but about incentives.
So let’s see…you want to solve private sector monopolies (which are extraordinarily rare if even existent, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this thread, but can easily be discovered with a quick google search) with government – itself a legal monopoly? Or as I’ve written elsewhere: The Solution to Monopolies? A Monopoly. Turtles anyone?
And for some empirical evidence, from the above Encyclopedia of Economics article I cited,
Continuing…
I wanted to demonstrate that what I am saying here is not simply my opinion, but standard textbook economics. Since your “all humans are irrational, thus markets cannot be trusted” argument is a specifically economic argument, I thought it might be useful to show how economics proves you wrong. Now, I could have just given the links to these articles, instead of excerpting them at length, but I figured you would be more likely to read the relevant text if I included it in my post. Apparently I was wrong – you weren’t going to read it either way.
Ugh, and now Euan is embracing incoherence as well. This is why I think it is hopeless to argue with conservatives of the “status quo is safe, progressive change is scary like communism” type. Once they give up the logical argument, they attack economic theory, and then resort to this nonsensical form of pragmatism where what currently exists is pragmatic and what does not currently exist is utopian. At least with leftists you can have a logical debate, even if you don’t share the same ethical premises or disagree over which means are more likely to achieve certain goals. What is the response to the “conservativism is incoherent, therefore it is good” argument? There is no response, because incorence cannot be argued with. I’ve seen this same pattern of argument a million times. It never gets any less droll.
I’m actually starting to think religious conservatives are easier to work with, because at least with them you can show how governments stifle religion and community, as Hoppe recently tried to do. Strange that the “status quo at all costs” conservatives are even harder to deal with than the religious nuts.
HelenW writes:
“Perfection is the enemy of the practical. Do it for the children”.
Oh dear. The “do it for the children” argument all too easily morphs into a general approach which treats all adults and kids like wee kids. The increasingly nanny-state rules which afflict us all are testament to that. It is dangerous to eliminate risk from life as it infantilises the population at large, which is not in anyone’s long term interests, including any children.
As for Euan’s defense of “mild” regulation, I’d be grateful if the prolific gentleman could say what his definition of “mild” is.
Euan also dismisses as “piffle” Micha’s point about there being a big difference between voting and shopping. Euan is the one talking piffle, in fact. When I go to the store to buy a book or a can of milk, there is a fairly decent chance that I will get what I want. In the haphazard system of representative democracy we have in the west (leaving aside the PR vs first-past-the-post issues fairness), no such confidence can be had that one will get a desired outcome from a vote.
Notice the wonderful cognitive dissonance taking place here. At first, Euan agrees that is it “perfectly true” that a “system of ‘moderate regulation’ does not remain ‘moderate’ for long,” which is to say, as Thomas Jefferson once did, that “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Not only that, but Euan also agrees that this has always been true – keeping limited government has always been impossible in practice.
And conservatives want us to believe that libertarianism is utopian? Yet they themselves agree that limited government is obviously a utopian scheme that has never worked and cannot possibly work.
Or as David Friedman so amusingly put it,
So at once admitting that limited government cannot and does not work, they maintain simultaneously that it can and does work. Total blankout. No surprise, though, from someone who admits that conservativism is incoherent.
Woah, keep it civil, guys.
Euan, apologies, the word you used was “moderate” not “mild”. My error. Mind you, “moderate regulation” is still a question-begging term.
This is a great thread, although it appears Helen’s underpants caught fire a few posts above.
Hey Micha, how about a deeply religious libertarian?
I don’t think my idea of the degree of necessary regulation is all that different from yours. We would both agree on the prevention of fraud and theft, for instance. I would also say that cartel, monopoly, adulteration and short measure (the last two really being types of fraud) need to be prevented. I do not think there is any need for much regulation beyond that. Certainly it is, IMO, unnecessary to regulate for the minimum size of peaches or the curvature of bananas, for example.
Many libertarians deny the possibility of monopoly, or at least assert it is very unlikely, and similarly for cartel. It is valid to state that a true monopoly is rare in a free market, but a near-as-makes-no-odds monopoly is not so uncommon, and whilst there are perfectly good economic theories expalining why it won’t happen there are others which explain why it can or will. Economic theory is inherently dodgy, and I suspect many economists spend a lot of their time trying to figure out why the real world doesn’t conform to their theories. However neat and seductive the theory may be, the test is not its logical elegance but how it actually works in the real world.
As for cartel, most are familiar with OPEC. The supply of oil obviously has a heavy state involvement, and is in no sense a free market. However, the market in some (but not all) oil derivatives is a non-state cartel – the polyolefin market is a specific example, where feedstock prices are fixed by the manufacturers for some time in advance. In the UK, there is a cartel in the supply of cement. Again, the manufacturers freely collude to rig the market for their own ease and convenience, with no prompting from any state or regulator. There are similar “arrangements” made in the supply of iron ore, another key industrial material.
It seems that the danger exists where the material or service provided is essential or close to essential. Western society would collapse overnight if the supply of oil, plastics or cement was stopped. The supplier can therefore see a more or less captive market and he does not really need to compete for a share of it. Why fight for a large share at a low price when you can get a smaller share at higher prices by collusion? Where the market is in non-essential goods or services, the supplier really does need to compete for market share, since nobody actually NEEDS to buy the product. Cartels are rarely found in the supply of non-essential goods or services.
But where the thing is necessary, the temptation to cartelise and have an easy life is high. Add to this the huge cost of entering the market for (to use my examples) cement, iron ore or plastics, and the threat of the honest new contractor springing up is minimal. The shareholders don’t care, as long as they are getting their dividends – it does not matter to them whether the money comes from the free supply of many cheap items or the cartel supply of fewer more expensive items.
It might also be the case that cartel is more likely when there is a naturally high barrier to market entry, as well as the supply of essential goods. It should be obvious that corporations don’t like free markets, since this means they have to be more competitive and work harder for the same profit. Where it is difficult for competition to arise – whether for technical or financial reasons – the pressure of the true free market is substantially lessened, and the temptation to cartel greatly increased. The consumer might complain, but unless some competitor can come up with the tens or hundreds of millions to set up in rivalry (and assuming he can then actually buy raw materials, which is not certain in such circumstances), nothing is going to happen. Cartel members can artificially raise the barrier to entry. This is admittedly easier where a large state exists, because the corporate lobbyists can entrench their interests by demanding legislation, but there are other methods. The consumer is thus impotent, and the regulatory ability of the vaunted free market fails – because the market is no longer free.
This, I think, is frequently missed by libertarians advocating an unregulated market. It just won’t stay free for long, certainly not in the supply of essentials. I think it is inescapably necessary to have external regulation to prevent this kind of thing happening.
Adam Smith was perfectly well aware of the dangers of this kind of thing, noting that producers are ever plotting to rip off the consumer. He correctly notes that the free market keeps this tendency in check, but obviously it only works when the market actually is free. Furthermore, it is or should be obvious that corporations will expend a lot of effort trying to eliminate or manage competition, and there are many ways to do this. It is necessary to keep the market free, but I think it is naive to assert that in all cases the consumers can do this without external regulation.
EG
The argument seems to boil down to the concept that no matter what the purpose of an association is, it is comprised of finite, fallible individuals. Such individuals have only the same amount of time in a day, though there are slight differences in ‘processor’ capabilities. No matter how they are assembled, no matter how it is engineered, there is a finite limit as to the success of an association can achieve. This reality drives my affinity for individualism. My Libertarianism isn’t the baseline, it is manifestation of my individualism.
I enter associations knowing that it is very likely that I will not be in the association for ever. Whether it is my place of employment or a bowling league, the duration of my involvement has a limit, and it’s not simply by death. I voluntarily move in and out of these associations, and coercive force is not involved. I know this because, even as I enter the association, I know that it cannot fulfill all of my needs, and in some associations there are leaders in whom I cannot respect. In effect whatever illusions led me to join will be dispelled. It is perhaps existential, but, by and large, individuals must toss carrots in front of themselves to motivate them to move forward.
Given this, how can I abide massively scaled associations, so far beyond the comprehension of any individual, that is alotted the coercive use of force to make me abide by their notion of what the carrots aught to be? The matter is ultimately is preserving individual value systems, because that is where it resides. Proper associations are those that are largely comprehensible by the individual. To even conceive of a Federal System, in the fashion it has comprised itself, is incomprehensible by anyone, and is nonsensical. Believing in something that is nonsensical, to be taken simply on faith, is a form of insanity. The problem really becomes when the most zealous of the insane turn their guns and force people to at least abide by the rules eminating from their insanity.
There have been commentators who talk about perfection versus practicality. What is practical about recognizing an association that no one within can hope to have more than an iota of understanding of it (and this applies to whatever supermen supposedly distill from common ranks)?
{as an aside, taking the notion of State down one layer, from the Federal to the State, I’ve known several State legislators in the State of Wisconsin, and my long time friend is a State assemblyman (I can recall the days when he was the milk monitor in the salad days of junior high through college graduation).
Now the State of Wisconsin certainly doesn’t have the exactly the same issues as the Federal government, but suffice it to say, it is fairly complex. My friend is a capital fellow, and has more ambition in a day than I have in a week, but he in no way has the capacity to know even a scintilla of issues and concerns of all the other individuals in the State of Wisconsin, even when amalgamated with the other 98 assemblymen or 33 Senators. The capability to just doesn’t exist.
He has all but admitted to me that the amount of information he has to process, and the legions from which it eminates, is overwhelming. Ultimately he can only fall back on his base beliefs, which, believe me, is no purer than any one else’s; I lived with him for 6 years, I know from where I speak. I’ve known one assemblyman who commanded my respect and I don’t think even she had the stuff to be in such a position. And yet this amalgam of individuals has a great amount of power to apply force, or at least dictate in what useful directions it should be used. It seems fantastical to me that they have such broad stroke power, knowing what I know of several of their personal foibles. Simply put there is no person that has the character to be so powerful while being so functionally ignorant. And this is only compounded by a huge factor at the Federal level.}
Too ideological? Too impractical? All I can point to, again, is the output of collective insanity. The complete rubishing of basic economics. The publishing of ‘financial’ reports’ by the treasury, issued directly to the branches of the legislature, and the top executive, which clearly state that massive impounding of the production of the ruled will have to happen, or an admission of a massive fraud has been perpetrated, and it’s backslaps all around, see you next session. One look at the 2004 financial report of the US Federal Government shows an example of insanity put to typeset and graphics.
People have a limited cognitive ability, and the associations created therefrom should be comprehensible, and the use of force should not be so easily invested in fundementally incomprehensible associations. Of course people should be free to allocate their property through the market into whatever incomprehensible amalgams they desire, and bear the costs of being wrong. People shouldn’t be compelled to join by force.
This is borne from my individualism, not libertarianism. If it makes me Marxist-esque then so be it. I know that, and the end of the day, that those who dislike my frame of reference are those who are similar to those who tried to impose a form of Marxism, or at least how they interpreted it. If I’m fobbed off as too similar to the theoretical Marxism, fine, but it assumes that the similar results would occur, but I know very similar results to practical Marxism are outputted from the constructs we have now. I’m willing to endorse a much different approach.
So, toolkien, you’re saying that because you don’t understand the government it should be reduced in scope to the level where you can understand it?
You’re not comparing apples with apples. It is perfectly true that government is complex, sometimes to a Byzantine degree, but then so is the market. The valid comparison would between understanding the whole of the government and understanding the whole of the market – all the companies, all the rules, all the balance sheets, products, purchasers and prices. Nobody could hope to do that either.
It is fallacy to suggest the market is simple to understand and government complex. In suggesting this you are comparing the general principle of the market and the detailed practice of the government. This is unfair. If you compare the detailed practice of each, you will see they are both very complex, beyond the total comprehension of a single person. Equally, if you compare the general principles of the market and the general principles of government, you will find both relatively simple and quite capable of comprehension by a single mind.
Doubtless it will be argued that we only need to understand broad market principles, but need to understand all of government because it affects us so much. Fair point, but then we are all affected to a very large extent by the detail of the market – it constrains where we go, what we eat, what we wear, where we work, how much we get paid, how much we pay to own or rent our home, and so on. Yes, we have choices, but it is wrong to pretend we have infinite choice in a perfect free market for purchases compared to compulsion and extortion as far as government is concerned. The choice in government is much more limited, and we have to cede some individual authority to the collective, but it really is like that in any human society. But, you can make your voice heard, you can vote, you can start your own party, and so on. It is not as if you can do nothing, a helpless slave of the state.
EG
it constrains where we go, (FAA, DOT)
what we eat, (FDA, BATF)
what we wear, (FCC -bit of a stretch I admit, remember Janet)
where we work, (State licensing)
how much we get paid, (Minimum wage)
how much we pay to own or rent our home, (FRB)
and so on.
That’s an interesting list.
it constrains where we go (cost of car, maintenance, fuel)
what we eat (what foods are available at what price)
what we wear (ditto for clothes)
where we work (who will buy the talents we market)
how much we get paid (for how much they will buy them)
how much we pay to own or rent our home (market valuation of property)
EG
As for the argument about the regulatory mechanism in the market and in politics, I do not think it is piffle to say the same applies in both.
The question is the REGULATION of the market, not whether or not a particular good, service or political viewpoint is available for consumption. This is the point that Micha consistently misses – it is not about consuming the product, it is about REGULATING what products are available and how honest the descriptions are. The aspect of libertarianism I am discussing is the idea that the mass of the consumers can REGULATE the market more efficiently than external REGULATORS.
Clear? Good.
Now, clearly the idea of the free market is that the type and range of goods and services available is governed largely by the purchase choices of the consumer. If an unpopular product is made, likely it will not last long because there is no profit in making it. If prices are high, consumer pressure in the form of falling sales or a better alternative will reduce them. If suppliers are dishonest, the consumer won’t buy and thus is honesty enforced through pure market means.
In general terms, the above is valid. There are exceptions, particularly in the supply of essential goods or in the case that market entry is extremely expensive, where cartels are likely to form. There are other exceptions where internal fraud is unlikely to ever be noticed by consumers, who in any case probably won’t care as long as they are getting what they want. Further, in the supply of trivial items people are unlikely to scrutinise the market closely, and so abuses can creep in pretty much undetected.
In the political marketplace, policy is the product. The range of policies available is largely dependent on what the voter will approve or “buy.” Unpopular policies won’t survive for long because they will not attract enough votes, the democratic equivalent of poor sales. Dishonest politicians in theory won’t survive long because they will not be voted for. If the price of policy is high (e.g. in the form of punitive taxation), then in theory the market solution of providing a lower tax alternative will provide effective competition by attracting more votes. Thus is political policy and honesty enforced through the marketplace of voting.
Again there are exceptions, where bad policy wins the PR battle (generally through appeals to emotion rather than reason), where dishonest politicians go unchallenged, and a public willingness to keep paying high taxes that other individuals may find objectionable.
It is fair to say that we have a choice whether or not to buy a specific brand of orange juice, but we are compelled to accept whatever the government says even if we don’t like it, at least until the next election. On the other hand, it is quite possible to vote periodically and to do many other things to try and persuade other voters of one’s viewpoint. Most people aren’t interested in politics beyond general broad principles. Then again, most people aren’t particularly interested in the freedom of the market as long as they can get what they want, and nor are they interesting in becoming super-informed for any but the most expensive or important purchases
In general terms the regulatory mechanism is the same, and the depth to which the people are interested is pretty much the same. If the people cannot be trusted with one, how can they be trusted with the other?
EG
Micha writes: Look, lady, I just showed everyone reading this thread that your accusation was dead wrong
No, you proved that you are a [fill in the blank], who supports his rhetoric with nothing more than defensive accusations and misunderstood quotations. I have repeatedly highlighted your ad hominem, to encourage you to desist. Sadly you can’t. That is how reasonable people define a debate loser.
I’m done with you.
Pppppfffftttttt. Another log on the fire.
Harking himself credits Bertrand Russell as the originator;
Perfectly incorrect. Hawking cites Russell as a possible character in the story. You can’t differentiate Mickey Mouse from Walt Disney?
Hawking cites no-one as the “originator”, source, writer, story-teller or anything else. That makes you “dead wrong.” It is this purposeful manipulation of minutia that makes you such a terrible [fill in the blank], and self-detonating advocate for your cause. Would you have us believe that all Libertarians are so fundamentally dishonest?
Again I ask, if you can’t make your point honestly, why bother?
Now having your ridiculous rhetoric sunk point by point, you resort to the losers’ life raft of irrelevant jargon. As if the words define the meaning? As if your argument grows in stature from the added girth? Sorry, that doesn’t work with me either.
she instead choses to embarrass herself for all to see.
So now, you base your ideology on magic–a bit of misdirection to evade your lack of sincerity.
QED
I’m confused by this. Are you invoking the persona of a pompous ass or a humorless twit? I have a classic phrase for you too, hahahaha. But it’s in ‘French’.
Toolkein writes: No matter how they are assembled, no matter how it is engineered, there is a finite limit as to the success of an association can achieve.
No, not even close. That is merely an expression of Fatalism. In the month my grandmother was born, the National Geographic featured an article about ‘helium, the new airship gas.’ Next time I bring her Cassini images of Saturn’s rings on my Powerbook, I’ll ask what she thinks about your notion of human limits.
What is practical about recognizing an association …?
Just one thing: It works. We have pounded this point home repeated and you must evade it. As you run on with hysterical theories, Conservatism is working in the real world. Don’t trust your lying eyes? I have another good example.
Cassini/Huygens traveled 7 years to the Saturn system. Along the way, many mid-course adjustments were made. Does the Libertarian denounce the rocket scientist then, for not understanding gravity or computer science? If the initial trajectory could not be made perfectly, why embarrass oneself with such incoherence? The conviction-less Conservative says, ‘launch the thing. Reprogram the computers with better code along the way. Make measurements that show true position, and correct course as needed.’
Of course, no significant project or government can be implemented with Libertarian ideology because it is useless in the real world. Life requires compromise and adaptation. There are no limits to achievement if you don’t make Perfection the enemy of the Practical.
People shouldn’t be compelled to join by force.
I totally agree. Celebrate your Individualism renounce Adam Smith! For those who find our division of labor and republican government intolerable, I invite them to leave. Get thyself to Utopia. And being ever so kindly, I offer directions: Come to Vermont. We have a place for you in the Earth People’s Park. No wicked taxes, no intrusive ID cards, no Satanic RFID portals, no pesky building inspectors or police. You will have total freedom and zero government worries. Just keep your gun loaded and try not to fall asleep.
Sadly, my warm invitation has no takers. So I have another deal: Enjoy the freedoms of security, association, speech, health, and prosperity that come with the best government humanity has ever invented. Then pay your taxes.
Euan: “In the political marketplace, policy is the product. The range of policies available is largely dependent on what the voter will approve or “buy.” Unpopular policies won’t survive for long because they will not attract enough votes, the democratic equivalent of poor sales. Dishonest politicians in theory won’t survive long because they will not be voted for. If the price of policy is high (e.g. in the form of punitive taxation), then in theory the market solution of providing a lower tax alternative will provide effective competition by attracting more votes. Thus is political policy and honesty enforced through the marketplace of voting.”
This portion of your position is called dictatorship by the majority. In a free market (I tend to not mean absolutely unregulated when I say “free.”) the individual seems to be, by in large, the one to pay the consequences for his/her stupidity. In this political marketplace you have described, individuals end up paying for the stupidity of the collective. For example, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Ted Kennedy’s bridge in Boston, the Iraq invasion (I’m neither pro nor con, but there are a lot of people paying for it that otherwise would not), federal aid to airlines, federal aid to other countries, schools, grants, welfare, I remember when I was in the Navy my division paid $14,000 for a circuit from government approved supplier that would have cost a few hundred at the local CompUSA…how far do I need to take this?
Still waiting 🙂
I think you will have rather more success finding where I have said that unlike sundry forms of statism, a more libertarian approach does not end up underpinning irrational behaviour (i.e. making otherwise irrational behaviour rational) because it is the approach which makes people bear the consequences of their actions rather than subsidising foolishness.
Perry, I think it’s safe to say that we are all having too much fun to bother with you and your snippy demands. Your original proposition has long since been discarded. Libertarianism and Marxism are two sides of the same coin. Get over it.
Winzeler, your list is silly, but only just. Over the years, I came to realize why illegal drugs were never a temptation for me: No FDA approval.
HelenW, check out realhealthnews.com. I think you’ll find that FDA approval doesn’t mean anything when it comes to health.
About your response to toolkein, you’re assuming everyone wanted to go to Saturn, to use your analogy. Thank you for perfectly helping me demonstrate my point. You conservatives can take your little spacecraft and go where ever you want, but PLEASE don’t expect or force me to participate in your aspirations, and especially don’t expect or force me to pay for them!!!
Well, what’s the choice? Dictatorship of the one?
It is true that small government doesn’t stay small. It is true that militaries buy $500 hammers and such like. It is true that everyone has to pay for programs they don’t necessarily use.
However, let’s not pretend the market cannot do the same thing. Consider insurance – you may have a perfect record and never have claimed on any insurance policy. Your premium will therefore be low. But even so, an element of that premium subsidises those who do claim and whose premium would otherwise be unaffordably high. I know perfectly well that the market will price these things much more efficiently than the state, and please don’t infer from this that I support massive state expenditure – it is the general principle of subsidy I am trying to illustrate and the fact that it is not unique to the state.
There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the scope of government in the west can and should be significantly reduced. The state does things it needn’t do, and overextends in things it might reasonably do.
I have already written far too much tedious stuff in this thread, so I will not attempt to give practical examples. Suffice it to say that, IMO at least, it is not possible to do without a state of some form. We no longer live in a simple bucolic paradise where most of life involved only the individual, his family and a few friends. Life just isn’t like that any more, and it likely never will be again. This needs to be recognised.
I think the state may legitimately conduct foreign affairs, maintain order, administer justice, run the armed services, regulate markets in some circumstances, maintain public health and generally enforce the circumstances where people are at liberty to enjoy their lives as they see fit (within the bounds of order). Of course, my view of “order” may differ somewhat from yours. I think a good case can be made for some degree of assistance to the poor where this cannot otherwise be provided and within strict limits (as a supplement to charity and insurance). I see no fundamental reason why the state may not pursue things which may be in the long term interests of the people in general but which the market will never initiate – but it should then leave when the market can take over.
All of this has to be paid for, which means you need to pay tax of one form or another. You must also accept a degree of waste and inefficiency in the state, but this must be tempered by the realisation that ANY large organisation, state or private, will be wasteful and inefficient. If you had a single private corporation with a turnover of three trillion dollars and a few million employees, you’d be faced with pretty shocking levels of waste, incompetence and inefficiency. Even if the whole thing was private, you’d still have to pay for it, and you’d still end up subsidising things you didn’t use.
So it’s not perfect. You can’t have a perfect system – we are but human, and we will screw up. There are a lot of us, so there is much screwing up. Conservatives don’t bugger about with abstruse theory about some postulated Nirvana – they deal with the real world. In the real world, government is pretty much a necessity, however unpleasant that may be. It just isn’t realistic to think it can be done away with or all its functions carried on in the market. That just won’t work.
Instead, we have to accept the unpleasant necessity of the state, and keep a close eye on it in order to keep it in check & deal with the inevitable bloat. We need to be pragmatic, accept reality and realise that scientifically thought out ideology is not necessarily the best answer. The state sucks, democracy sucks, tax sucks – but the alternatives suck even more.
If we could make everything perfect, we would be angels and not men. I see no wings, unfortunately.
EG
So, toolkien, you’re saying that because you don’t understand the government it should be reduced in scope to the level where you can understand it?
You’re not comparing apples with apples. It is perfectly true that government is complex, sometimes to a Byzantine degree, but then so is the market. The valid comparison would between understanding the whole of the government and understanding the whole of the market – all the companies, all the rules, all the balance sheets, products, purchasers and prices. Nobody could hope to do that either.
Precisely, but one uses force and the other doesn’t. One can opt out of one decision or another via the market. One can desire to be a subsistence farmer. One can live on baked beans and shutter up their residence, working only enough to keep themselves fed. Under a free market no would bother them. That is not true with the government; the taxman comes for his share. What is the nature of a property tax? It FORCES you to enter the market and be productive whether you want to or not, or to greater degree than you might otherwise have desired to. You will be assessed on merely owning assets. Amazing.
One can choose to be in the market to whatever degree he or she desires, but is compelled to be a part of the association by government. You have no choice. And the only ‘choice’ you have is between he who would take 50% and he who would tax 70%. Better turn out and make your ‘market-like’ decision and vote.
I think we both agree that life is hopelessly complex, and that people are idiots. It is for this very reason I do not desire to turn my life and liberty to the first fool who thinks they’re in touch with some holy writ.
You hold the belief that a few can rise from the filth and lead, history ‘proves’ this. Of course, history for me holds the epic struggle for freedom from tyranny from the First Among Idiots, and endless bloodshed. I guess it depends which way you hold the book I guess.
War is economic in origin, always has been, always will be, and it is fueled by those who don’t know simple economic constraints, or don’t think they apply to them. At the end I find your belief that wisened arbiters will rule only as much as the need to over multi-million masses, and do no more, is just as quaint and idealistic as you insist on making libertarianism. I could buy into a much smaller conception of such constructions, one that allow for the individual a legitimate chance to reject, either by moving, or hold a chance in dissolving the system when it becomes tyrannical. Perhaps all such associations are destined for revolution, Jefferson appears to have thought so, and I am just a bitter enough husk of a human to see his point. But IF revolution is inherrent, the cataclysm that must attend Statism, as we seem to have been discussing it, makes for much more bloodshed, and makes it much more far reaching.
I don’t live under a rock, I make my concessions to ‘how things are’, but find that the belief that even if such a ‘pragmatic’ institution were founded, it soon would be corrupted by those who deem to have a superior value system than anyone else, and will back it with force. Your description of a few leading the many, balancing the vagaries of ‘capitalism’ with ________ sounds more like the Politburo to me. Or a Benevolent Dictator/Benevolent Oligarchy. This is just a fantastic to me as minarchism seems to you. I’ll concede a the existence of a government, but I will continue to demand its size and demeanor be as small and simple as possible.
The US debated this very issue a few hundred years ago. The Federalists got the upper hand, perhaps not by much, but the upperhand nonetheless. But the revolver institutions of wisened folk succeeded in exploiting flowery language in the preamble and the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to disasterous effect. We are now several generations into dependency and shattered value systems. The few powers enumerated to the Federal Government have but been tossed aside. Again, maybe all such constructs are destined for corruption or Tyranny of the Caring, but when the scale is such that it is, the price is very high to wrest freedom away from those who bind you.
That’s not really what I was getting at, but it is nonetheless true. The idea I have been trying get across is that, however much you may object, life is unavoidably of sufficient complexity that some degree of regulation is necessary.
There are places where you can shut yourself away from worldly cares and live on your home-grown beans. I don’t imagine there’s very much stopping you moving there – other than the lack of electricity, clean water, healthcare facilities and transport systems that involve the use of the wheel. I am quite confident there are several million people in the third world who would gladly change places with you, thus increasing the sum of human happiness. Speaking as someone who has lived and worked in third world hell-holes, I am tempted to advise you to count your blessings.
You seem to want the best of both worlds. This is not going to happen, unless you become extremely wealthy. You should probably accept this. The price paid for advanced healthcare, a high standard of public health, working transport systems and a reasonably orderly society is the state and taxation. This is reality, and it isn’t going to change any time soon.
Well, it works for court justices. I am not advocating government by some self-perpetuating elite, by the way, simply the need for some small number of regulators to perform the control tasks the people and the market cannot or will not perform.
I quite accept that such a system will bloat and extend itself. It will be necessary from time to time to trim it back. But we cannot create a permanent system that will run without such periodic intervention and trimming, and it is sheer fantasy to pretend we can.
Yes, I agree with that. Accepting the need for some regulators does not require one to advocate huge bloated governments, you know.
Not leading, regulating the excesses. And only where they will not regulate themselves.
So it can’t be fixed? You just give up and assume that if we don’t make it perfect in the first place we shouldn’t bother trying at all?
EG
Helen,
What use is it to send a rocket to Saturn? What market reason is there? Will it be exploited? Is there an economic reason to visit any other planet? The Moon? What economic benefit was there to showing the rooskies what’s what?
If there is a reason to, demand will lead someone there. Be coerced into bolstering a fumbling institution such as NASA is nonsense and always has been. People exalt the ‘progress’ made by such investments, but somehow those folks always seem to forget to what, MORE PRACTICAL, use those resources would have gone to without them being taken by force. Just another example where the wise elders strayed from the course.
“But we have computers!” “If it weren’t for government you wouldn’t be conversing on the internet now!” Well if it weren’t for the State I wouldn’t be here at all (the story is long, but involves Marx, fear of attacks over the polar ice cap, and eminent domain).
None of which validates the State. Tang and pens that write upside down don’t either, nor does high rez glossies of Saturn.
In fact collectivist procured knowledge has only spurs more collectivism, misallocation of resources only spurs more misallocation of resources, and strengthens the NASA, NOAA, and the non-profit/research industrial complex and the strongarm takeover of ‘higher’ education….and adds incrementally to the massive debts of the US.
…and pay your taxes.
I might be willing to part with a total of 10%, concentrated in roads, signage, water treatment, a constabulary (a managable bunch against which one could stand up if they got a wise idea to take my stuff to build a rocketship to the moon). MAYBE.
50+% composite in taxes, and a prorated obligation of a massive debt? Count me out. But we wouldn’t have pretty pictures of Saturn I guess. But then maybe we wouldn’t have a $45 trillion accrual net deficit either.
I explained this above where I stated that this is precisely why we specifically choose libertarianism as opposed to anarchism.
I mostly agree with this except for maintaining public health. Probably the biggest reason for the decay of personal responsibility (look back in our discussion about cause-reaction-consequence stuff) in the US is the “tyrannically caring” government has alleviated most consequences (economic mostly) of piss-poor decisions. I tend to think people would by in large regain their capacity to govern theirselves if the “caring” government would step back and let them experience some of the hardships to which their piss-poor choices would inevitably lead.
By the way, between Euan, toolkien, and me, there isn’t really that much dissension except toolkien and I have embraced the libertarian name, and Euan refuses it, possibly because in his mind he too closely associates it with anarchism -which it is not.
EG,
We are obivously beating up against each other’s brick walls. Nothing we say to each other will move us one iota, and scores more entries will only clog an already brimming thread. Again, I should just stop typing and using up Samizdata’s resources (though I have fronted some $ for the privilege).
Suffice it to say I am deeply concerned about the Western World and its endless slide into Statist Socialism. Taxes assessed not so long ago was less than 10%-15% total, and regulation was fairly nil. Now I pay nearly 50%, and definitely do if one includes embedded business tax burdens and the quasi-taxation of regulation. And this is before balancing the accrued deficits we discussed a few days ago. If it only were a mere ‘trimming’ as you style it. …but it is runaway insanity as far as I am concerned. But I guess you’ve at least gleaned that. And to conceive that it is either THIS, with a prudent trim here and there, or third world poverty is revealing in itself.
Adieu
Gentlemen, I’m sorry that you did not appreciate my Cassini mission analogy. That’s ok. I certainly do appreciate your reluctance to fund space exploration.
Although I’m one of those who enjoys astronomy and robotic exploration, I don’t care for human space flight at all. In any case, I also agree that our society receives vanishingly small benefits for all the expense. Of all human endeavors, I think cosmology is about as useless as it gets. It just happens to delight me.
That brings us to an interesting debate point. I would normally argue that we should all go along with personally disagreeable programs, because that is the price for benefiting from others. In other words, each of us gets his piece of the cake. But clearly, that’s not going to work on you folks because you don’t want *anything* from government. Am I getting this right?
So you have only one reasonable alternative: Move to Earth Peoples Park. No service, no taxes, guaranteed. Believe me, yur gonna love it!
What’s that, you say? You actually like living where you are now, better than some frost-bitten, lawless acre of useless wilderness?
Yes, I suppose you would. I invite you to consider that it is your unexpressed appreciation for government services that makes your present circumstances preferable.
HelenW, I respect you for your capacity to abstract thought, not for your wit and demeaning remarks. Toolkien and I are not after no service, no taxes. We only want a little (ok, maybe a lot) more respect for individualism and personal property, even if it comes at the expense of some so-called benefits of the “Tyranny of the Caring.”
“Public health” doesn’t mean hospitals and Medicare. It means drains, sewers, epidemic control, hygiene in public places, mandatory vaccination programs, etc.
The market has never, does not now and almost certainly never will do things like eradicate smallpox, control cholera, require clean water of a standard minimum purity and quarantine typhoid cases. There is no financial reward for this (quite the opposite), so it doesn’t happen in a purely commercial setting.
I would have an easier time of it if someone would decide what libertarianism actually is. However, from earlier comments it seems this would apparently be counter-productive. How can I possibly be expected to subscribe to a philosophy when no two people can agree on what it is?
My understanding of libertarianism – and before you say it’s wrong define the bloody thing yourself – is that it is a philosophy: which attempts to reduce every aspect of life to an economic question despite ample historical evidence* that this is a fuck-up; which has an unjustifiedly rosy view of humanity in markets; which at the same time and without apparent irony** has an excessively dim view of this same humanity in government; which assumes with zero empirical evidence that markets can largely/somewhat/entirely*** replace the state; that prefers textbook theory to the reality of life; which largely denies the collective and over-emphasises the individual aspects of human nature; and which replaces pragmatism with ideology.
The previous paragraph is more or less serious. With the heavily qualified exception of the bit about markets replacing states, I do not approve of any of the ideas listed. To the extent that any of these ideas correspond with your definition of libertarianism, I don’t subscribe. To the extent that your definition of libertarianism includes recognition: that a small state is necessary; that this state can and must be continually checked in its tendency to bloat; that a small degree of external regulation of markets is needed to prevent abuse, cartel, fraud, etc.; and that people are by and large not rational or particularly sensible economic entities, then to that extent (a) I’m a libertarian and (b) you’re a conservative.
EG
* Great October Socialist Disaster
** more than just a property of steel
*** delete as appropriate dependent on this week’s definition of libertarianism
Euan, you have no problem subscribing to conservatism. I’m not asking you to take into account how everyone else describes libertarianism, no more than you’re suggesting I agree with conservatism the way George W defines it. I sincerely doubt the definition of conservatism could be agreed on any easier than libertarianism. So please, quit ranting on this minutia, and try to acknowledge how toolkien and I are defining it. I personally think if you did that, we would find consesus.
The reason I considered myself no longer conservative has nothing to do with economics. Economically speaking, I am a conservative. Morally speaking, I am a liberal. That, in my opinion and definition of libertarian, makes me a libertarian. The reason I will not subscribe to conservatism has to do with (as I mentioned above) the marriage amendment, drug war, abortion issues. George W is poised to sign a constitutional amendment restricting the liberty of gays to marry. If this is the way conservatives regard freedom, I will dissent.
Winzeler,
And someone else explained above that the two are not mutually exclusive. Minarchists are not the only kind of libertarians.
I’ve followed this thread the whole way and can’t find anyone explaining that they are not mutually exclusive. Even if they aren’t, they certainly are not synonomous. Maybe, if you want to split hairs, I could agree that minarchists and anarchists can be libertarians, of which I would label myself a minarchist -but that seems to confuse things, as well as give Euan more ammo for his libertarians-can’t-define-themselves argument.
That said, Micha, I agree mostly with what I comprehend of your points, but I would ask you to try to come across as more respectful. I think it helps our cause when self-prescribed libertarians are a little more tolerant of dissenting opinions.
Winzeler,
See Julian Morrison’s response to you at March 9, 2005 03:58 AM, where he wrote:
Continuing with your response…
No one in this thread ever claimed that all libertarians are anarchists, only that some are.
Libertarianism, like conservativism, left-liberalism, socialism, and all other political ideologies, can only be defined as a family resemblance and not a strict definition of value beliefs or policy positions. No such definition can be given for any of these ideologies that can be used to divide all people into one of two categories: either inside or outside the group. So it is no fault of libertarians that we disagree with each other on certain issues; every other political ideology does this as well. If we all shared the same beliefs on issues as complex as ethics and politics, there would be great cause for concern, as that is a sure sign of a cult.
You should know that anarchists make up a significant portion of the libertarian movement, and many well known libertarians are or were anarchists: Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Jan Narveson, Roy Childs, Brian Caplan, Anthony De Jasay,…
Even Samizdata’s own Brian Micklethwait is a libertarian and an anarchist, as is “Resting Contributor” Andy Duncan.
I am respectful of those who deserve respect – those who treat me with respect. Neither Euan Gray nor HelenW demonstrated much interest in reading or understanding my arguments, so I therefore concluded that it would be a waste of my time trying to persuade them of anything. At that point, my responses to them were for the benefit of interested inlookers and not Euan or Helen themselves.
And as I just finished writing for Catallarchy, incoherent opinions need not be tolerated or respected, because they are, by definition, nonsense. There is nothing else to do when someone admits that their own position is incoherent except ridicule them and hope that they begin to deal with their own cognitive dissonance.
Oh, and I should add Randy Barnett to that previous list since he is pretty well-known in the blog world.
I don’t see how anyone can read this thread and not be a libertarian by the end of it.
I agree with Winzeler – this thread has been corrupted with vitriol. Which is a shame, because it’s one of the most interesting I’ve come across since I first started visiting samizdata.net.
Micha – I get a very strong impression that when you say “reading and understanding my arguments”, you actually mean “throw up the white flag and concede defeat in the face of my mighty arguments”. This is confirmed because it is only those who disagree with you who you don’t believe “deserve [your] respect”. Helly’s a bit of a bruiser, sure; I can see why you two are at each other’s throats. Euan, on the other hand, I have always found to be an unflappably calm contributor, not to mention an exceedingly prolific one – incidentally, Euan, don’t you have a wife? She might want some attention soon :). From my vantage point, his style has not altered a jot on this thread. That you would take issue with Euan, who is guilty only of disagreeing with you, makes me suspect an overweening intellectual ego is at work.
Micha, I just read your post on Catallarchy, and I am sincerely curious one thing. Give me one response. I will not argue with it. I will merely read it to try to understand your thinking.
For the sake of discussion, if there is a God, and this God created all things (including the approximately 125 billion galaxies each containing maybe 100 billion stars -do the math) why is incoherent or intellectually dishonest to believe that he would be incomprehensible (maybe just a little bigger than our brains)? Notice I did not say totally unknowable. I said to incomprehensible: meaning individuals could know parts within limits, but not all.
Precisely. Either concede defeat or address the relevant issues, but don’t repeat ad nauseum the same faulty claims I’ve already addressed and make me have to repeat my answers over and over again That’s just plain annoying.
I don’t recall making any ad hominem or excessivelly vitriolic statements in this thread other than accusing people of not reading or willfully not understanding very simple points. If people can’t handle that kind of criticism, all they need to do to avoid it is pay attention and think. Is that too much to ask? If so, you have pretty low standards.
Winzeler,
Incoherence in philosophy of language means a statement is meaninglessness. An incoherent statement is unintelligible – it is impossible to understand or comprehend it. Incoherent statements could either be made of nonsense words, like baby talk, or self-contradictory, like the claim that you are a married bachelor.
So supposing God exist, is it logically possible that he is unknowable? Sure. Lots of things are unknowable. The number of hairs on Thomas Jefferson’s head on his 25th birthday is unknowable, even though we know a certain number existed at that time.
And it would be absurd to claim that in order to say we understand or know something, we first need to know and understand every possible thing there is to know about it. All of our knowledge and understanding is only partial.
But to say that something is incoherent is to say that it is a logical contradiction or that it has no meaning. To use a statement or word that has no meaning as the basis of one’s argument, where the presumption is that we are engaging in argument for the purpose of transmitting information to each other, is to essentially concede the argument. There is nothing left to say, because the argument has devolved into an admission that one side’s position is the equivalent of baby talk.
This has been done, not once but several times. I will do it one more time in as simple language as I can.
Firstly, on the general principle of establishing the veracity of a political thesis by logical argument.
You may be familiar with the tale of the horse’s teeth. It runs like this. Two philosophers were arguing about how many teeth a horse has, and could not agree. A stranger came upon them, and they appealed to him to decide the matter. Each explained his argument, replete with premises and deductions. The stranger said both arguments seemed to be logically consistent, but begged leave to consider, and left. Shortly he returned, and said the first philosopher was correct and the second wrong. The philosophers asked how he had reached his decision. The stranger replied that he found a horse and counted the number of teeth it had.
I suppose this little parable will also need explanation. It does NOT matter how logically elegant, internally consistent or perfectly coherent an argument is. If it conflicts with reality, it is WRONG. Marxist logical arguments for the merits of communism are elegant, coherent and consistent – nevertheless, they are wrong because they do not match reality.
Secondly, on the thesis that it is “turtles all the way down.”
This is easy. It is manifestly and self-evidently false, for the simple reason that not all people are equal. The premise that most people are venal, biased, greedy and short-sighted is true. However, it is logically invalid to infer from this that ALL people are venal, biased, greedy and short-sighted. This is demonstable empirically by a cursory assessment of a dozen humans selected at random.
Thirdly, and peripherally, on your analysis of Aquinas’ argument from first cause.
You misunderstand the nature of the God Aquinas assumes, and the fourth premise of the argument does not invalidate the conclusion. To be fair, you need to know something of theology to realise this. Within the context of Christian theology, the argument is consistent and the conclusion valid if the premises are true. Within a Newtonian universe which does not have an infinite life, the premises are true. The first cause argument fails for two reasons, one of which was known in theory but was not justifiable in Aquinas’ time, the other being quite unknown. The first reason is that the necessary first cause need not be God, since entirely natural phenomena can explain it. The second reason is that, on a quantum level, not all events necessarily have a cause and thus that there is no need in theory for a first cause.
Fourthly, on the relative coherence of libertarianism and conservatism.
It should be stated at once that coherence is irrelevant in political and economic questions, since these subjects are not sciences and in general are not susceptible to logical proof – or rather, one can make logical proofs but they do not necessarily survive contact with reality.
Even so, a comparison is invalid. Libertarianism, to the extent it can be defined, seems contingent on certain assumptions about the nature of humanity, on the universal validity of certain economic theories, on the assumption that most if not all human questions are reducible to economic questions and that the eocnomic theory can answer these human questions. I accept that it is consistent and coherent, but as illustrated above this does not necessitate that it is actually true – I am not here addressing the validity of the premises, merely the internal logic of the idea.
Conservatism, on the other hand, does not rely on any assumption of economic theory beyond what works, does not attempt to reduce human questions to economics and makes assumptions about humanity only insofar as these are empirically justified. It makes no pretence to be coherent or consistent, and claims only to be pragmatic and workable in the real world.
It is quite possible for a conservative to maintain, for example, that although the capitalist free market is IN GENERAL the most efficient economic mechanism yet discovered it is nevertheless justifiable to nationalise the railways. Note that this example is more applicable to Britain than to the US, and note also that it in no sense means that conservatives hold that the railways SHOULD be nationalised as a matter of principle or in all circumstances, or even that all conservatives agree with this postulate.
Conservatism is pragmatic before ideological, whereas libertarianism is ideological before pragmatic. Comparisons of consistency and coherence are therefore meaningless. You have not “won the argument” since an argument on the ground you have chosen is pointless, proves nothing and compares two quite different things.
EG
So, do you think it is incoherent to believe in something that is incomprehensible?
Many common human beliefs are incomprehensible, irrational, unjustifiable, incoherent or just plain wrong. Doesn’t stop people believing, though.
In general, people don’t need their beliefs to be logically justified or comprehensible. Gut feeling, inherent prejudice or even just upbringing are often enough for the believer to justify his faith in whatever it is. Religion is certainly a case in point – assuming God exists, the nature of God is pretty much by definition incomprehensible to man, yet many people have a strong, sincere and genuine religious faith. Is this incoherent? Perhaps. Is it unjustified? Perhaps.
The fact remains, though, that people believe, and this applies to politics as much as religion, especially the more dogmatic and theoretical political ideas. A pragmatic world-view accepts that people believe things that may be stupid, wrong, unjustified or actively harmful to the believer and works around it rather than trying to change the views of millions of people.
EG
Micha : It’s rather telling when you and your opponents are accusing each other of the same thing; a lack of comprehension of each other’s respective positions. Perhaps you’re so wrapped up in what you consider is correct (and I consider myself on your side) that you aren’t paying your opponents the courtesy you expect from them, ie. to “pay attention and think” about what they’re going on about.
Euan Gray, in his defence of “moderate regulation”, defends anti-trust laws and argues that there instances of monopolies developing in a marketplace which have to be dealt with by regulations. In nearly every decent economic textbook I can think of, most such “monopolies” have in fact arisen by squeezing privileges from the state. If a firm gets to be “dominant” by producing excellent products, it is hard to see how this is against the interest of the consumer and a basis for anti-trust breakups.
There may be examples of cartels, but such cartels tend to be unstable and hard to sustain without state aid.
I think we need to start another thread!
In almost every region of the world there is a regional cement cartel. This requires no state aid, and gets none.
There is a global cartel in plastic feedstock. Ditto no state aid.
These has existed for decades, and there is no sign of them about to give up. Cartel is more common than you probably think. In the case of public goods, I would expect it to be near universal in the absence of properly enforced regulation. What do you think?
And how have the arisen in the real world, as opposed to in textbooks?
More seriously, if the state were to withdraw from the supply of public goods such as defence, order, public health, etc., what would be the likelihood of monopoly arising in some or all of these fields? How would this be addressed without regulation?
EG
Suffering,
I don’t recall anyone in this thread accusing me of not understanding their arguments. I’ve understood everything that’s been said in this thread (in as much as it has been coherent, and much of it, admittedly, has not been) so my comprehension is not at issue.
I could really care less whether my political views are correct; I’m more interested in debunking frequently used “turtles all the way down arguments” like the claim that human irrationality makes self-regulated free markets undesirable, but yet at the same time makes self-regulated political markets desirable and necessary. Libertarianism might be false for other reasons; here, my only concern is to show that this particular argument against it is completely fallacious.
By admitting that conservativism is incoherent, the conservatives have essentially conceded this already. Conservativism might be desirable for other reasons, but the rationality of humans cannot be one of them. This is a specifically logical, theoretical argument, and not an empirical pragmatic one, so Euan is either dishonest or confused when he jumps from making the theoretical “human nature is irrational” argument to the “theoretical logic doesn’t matter; only emperical results matter.” You can’t have it both ways. If the concern of conservatives is only what works then they cannot fall back on theoretical arguments when it pleases them, and when called on, claim that logical coherence isn’t necessary.
I may respond to some of the other posts in this thread when I get home from work, but for now, this alone should answer most of them.
Let’s take the turtles, shall we?
Empirically, you are wrong since it is indisputably fact that not all people share the same level of incompetence and bias.
Logically, you are wrong since there are no logical grounds to infer that all people are incompetent and biased from the fact that many or most people are.
So, whatever way you slice it, your argument fails and you are, quite simply, wrong.
This is also wrong, since conservatism is pragmatic and not ideological. The general basis of it is that humans are indeed largely irrational and the political philsophy (to the limited extent that conservatism actually is a philosophy) is framed around this empirical observation. Conservatism works because it accepts that people are irrational and proposes pragmatic steps to deal with the fact.
Perhaps this explains why conservatives rarely do fall back on theoretical arguments?
EG
Cite one place where I ever claimed this. Just one.
My argument was never that all people are equally irrational. Rather, my claim was that if we accept your argument that a significantly large enough portion of the population is irrational to make markets not function well, this same problem will occur, only even moreso, with government, because of the way government officials are chosen in a democracy.
For other folks looking in, this is why I continue to claim that Euan is either stupid or dishonest, since he continues to misread my argument and accuse me of arguing things I never argued.
Which, again, was never my claim. I personally have no clue how many people meet your definition of rationality, because I have no idea what your definition includes and excludes, and couldn’t really care less. My claim was that no matter what portion of the population is irrational under your defintion, if this causes a problem for markets, it causes an even greater problem for governments. Hence, it is “turtles all the way down” to replace one problem with an even greater problem.
Pragmatism is an ideology. I cannot believe I need to explain this to you. This is really getting dumb.
Micha,
You are trying to twist your way out of this by distorting what other people have said and trying to bring up irrelevant peripheral issues.
Your thesis on the turtles is that the people cannot be trusted to regulate the political market because they are biased, greedy, short-sighted, etc. (or insert whatever undesired attribute you like, it makes no difference), and by extension that external regulation of the commercial market cannot be successful because of the flawed way the people select politicians. This thesis could only be valid if no people exceeded a standard sufficent to perform regulation. However, this is not true – people of the calibre needed are found in the positions of court justices, research scientists, etc. The thesis is thus defeated by empirical contrary evidence.
You also misunderstand that although the politicians are flawed, and the method of selecting them flawed, neither the flawed politicians nor the flawed electors themselves are the ones doing the direct regulating and judging.
All that is necessary is that a small number of people meeting the high standards required are in the position of regulator. They can then impartially and with disinterest judge the performance of the market players against the rules, and if necessary take action. This is what judges do in courts, so it is FACT that people with the required standards exist, and furthermore it is FACT that such regulation and administration of the rules can work effectively because it does do so and has done so for centuries in many different cultures.
Thus, the thesis is defeated in logic because (a) it is not valid to infer that all people are inadequate to the task because most are, (b) it is not valid to infer from the fact that flawed people elect flawed polticians that the same flawed people/politicians will NECESSARILY perform the regulation, and (c) it is not valid to infer that because the people/politicians are flawed that the regulations enacted are NECESSARILY flawed (although they may be).
That is one definition of the word. Another, since you like quoting dictionaries so much is:
A practical, matter-of-fact way of approaching or assessing situations or of solving problems
from the American Heritage Dictionary. It is in this sense that I (and most conservatives that I know) use the word.
Even if you want to accept the philosophical sense, it is defined in the same dictionary as:
distinguished by the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences
which fits closely enough with any practical approach to life. It is unnecessary and inaccurate to describe pragmatism as an ideology – it is absolutely not an ideology. Ideology is defined in the same dictionary as:
Conservatism is non-doctrinal, and does not really merit the tag of ideology. It considers the world in a pragmatic way (not in the philosophical sense of the word). This is in stark contrast to libertarianism, which is overtly doctrinal, ideological and non-pragmatic. Indeed, some strands of Austrian economic theory plainly deny pragmatism and suggest that empirical evidence is not relevant. This is an extremely ideological way of looking at things, and one of the major reasons it is not widely accepted.
I understand that you are a libertarian, and that you have a doctrinal non-pragmatic view of the world. This way of looking at the world (to go back to the original post) is identical to that of the Marxist, although of course it arrives at wholly different conclusions.
I suggest you consider that not all political movements, ideas or parties are ideological or doctrinal. This might help you understand conservatism a little more readily.
EG
“Thus, the thesis is defeated in logic because (a) it is not valid to infer that all people are inadequate to the task because most are…”
Nor did Micha, to my knowledge, make such an inference.
“(b) it is not valid to infer from the fact that flawed people elect flawed polticians that the same flawed people/politicians will NECESSARILY perform the regulation…”
Which is of course only kicking the rhetorical bucket. You can insulate the regulator from the electorate as far as you like. Say the system was such that some people elected some other people to elect some other people to elect some other people… to elect some regulators. It does not follow that the regulators will somehow be more rational because of their insulation from the initial irrational electorate.
“(c) it is not valid to infer that because the people/politicians are flawed that the regulations enacted are NECESSARILY flawed (although they may be).”
Nor is it valid to infer that because people are flawed that the unregulated market will be; however, it does follow that it is more likely for imperfect actors to perform imperfect acts, one such act being the choice of politicians and regulators.
“All that is necessary is that a small number of people meeting the high standards required are in the position of regulator.”
And all that is required for humans to fly is a set of wings.
“They can then impartially and with disinterest judge the performance of the market players against the rules, and if necessary take action.”
Impartial and disinterested regulators? Who’s being ideological now?
“This is what judges do in courts, so it is FACT that people with the required standards exist,”
Your thesis is that judicial opinions are disinterested and impartial? Even barring the difficulty in generalizing that to other forms of regulation, from whence have you gathered the evidence for this substantial charge? It is not one which I would care to defend.
“and furthermore it is FACT that such regulation and administration of the rules can work effectively because it does do so and has done so for centuries in many different cultures.”
If by work effectively you mean has not lead to Armageddon, then you are correct, but that tells us little about how preferable regulation is to alternatives.
“This is in stark contrast to libertarianism, which is overtly doctrinal, ideological and non-pragmatic.”
Libertarianism does rely on ideas and doctrine, as does, for example, biology and economics–but it’s hard to see how conservatism is any different. Even if conservatism preaches being pragmatic, then that is in and of itself a doctrine.
As to pragmatism, that’s nonsense. Many libertarians are devotees of economics, attempting to glean from the social science ways of determining how workable their stances are.
“Indeed, some strands of Austrian economic theory plainly deny pragmatism and suggest that empirical evidence is not relevant.”
I am not an Austrian, but I believe the rationale is rather that empirical evidence is too suffused with confounding variables to be of much use. However even Austrians are concerned with what the products of certain policies will be–as such, pragmatic seems a fine adjective.
The “turtles all the way down” thesis depends upon the premise being valid. Otherwise, it plainly is not turtles all the way down, by definition. It does not matter which precise form or words Micha used since the argument depends on this premise.
What you dismiss as fantastical actually happens every day. What is your explanation for the divergence between libertarian theory and the real world in this respect?
What is ideological about that?
Read some court judgements. Read some law. Go to a court and see how the process works. It’s not hard, but I concede this reality (again) conflicts with theory. Nevertheless, it is fact.
It’s hard to see how “if it works, good, if not, junk” can be classed as a doctrine. It’s just plain common sense.
This is also what I understand. It’s somewhat silly, though, isn’t it? I mean, the empirical evidence of how well a chosen policy actually works is practice is not of much use? How can it not be?
It is surely of vital importance. If one formulates a policy and implements it, surely it would be at least prudent to check if it actually works in the way expected? If it does not, would this not affect other things? Might it not then be prudent to accept that one was wrong and look at things again? How can the libertarian possibly justify not needing to look at the practical effects of his policy? What in libertarianism justifies such crass disregard for reality?
EG
Yet again, you continue to intentionally or ignorantly misread my argument, for which I provided ample unbiased explanations from a number of other academic sources.
My thesis on the turtles has nothing specifically to do with people’s irrationality. It has to do with treating like things alike and not solving one problem by creating larger problems elsewhere. That is all.
In this specific instance, all I did was take your own assertion and run with it. If people cannot be trusted to self-regulate in a free economic market, then they cannot be trusted to self-regulate in a political market either. I make no claims about the relatively level of trustworthiness of people. That is your claim. I only show how the mechanisms of the two different systems work.
And you contradicted yourself above. If “external regulation of the commercial market cannot be successful because of the flawed way the people select politicians”, then this has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether the number of people “exceeded a standard sufficent to perform regulation.” The question is how many people thus chosen exceed this standard, and whether the incentives while in office are such that they regulate in the most efficient way possible. Neither of these claims are true, as conservatives and libertarians from the Chicago school have shown repeatedly over the last 50 years or so. The political market is flawed not only because it selects the wrong people, but because even when the right people are in power, they have no strong incentive to do the right thing (other than personal ideology), and many strong incentives to do the wrong thing (encourage rent seeking to increase their own power). So the relevant question is, relative to the non-political market, does the political market do a better or worse job of regulation, especially self regulation? Given that your only argument so far has been the rationality of individual actors, and I showed how that assumption leads to turtles all the way down, I have shown how that particular argument for regulation is invalid. There may be others, but this is not one of them.
Just the opposite, in fact. I am indeed a libertarian, but I reject a priori natural rights in favor of a form of rule consequentialism, where rules are judged by the consequences they lead to, and sociopolitical systems are judged by whether they lead to the creation of rules which in turn produce good consequences. See my post, Utopia Is Not An Option for more.
Lastly, even assuming that Conservativism as a belief system is defined as “a practical, matter-of-fact way of approaching or assessing situations or of solving problems,” which it most certainly isn’t and is clearly absurd to claim otherwise, this is still “a set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.” The idea that we should do “whatever works” is itself a doctrine or belief that forms of the basis of a political system, in this case your mythical, misnamed conservativism. And more importantly, a doctrine of “whatever works” is empty without a set of values to tell us what we want to accomplish so we can know whether something is working or not. We need clearly defined goals before we can examine and decide on the proper means, and once you define your goals, you have again offered an ideological doctrine.
But wait! If we put a turtle on top of a turtle on top of a turtle on top of a turtle, then those turtles, together can hold the world upon their backs.
Does anyone else find it strange that the U.S. Supreme Court splits down ideological line on almost every decision, to the point where swing voters like O’Connor are the only ones that matter? Impartial and disinterested regulators indeed.
It’s kind of funny to see conservatives whine about all of these leftist, activist judges one minute, and then prop them up as the epitomy of impartiality the next.
Scott was just explaining the Austrian rational for rejecting empirical evidence. That does not mean that all libertarians are Austrians. Neither Scott nor I subscribe to that theory.
“The “turtles all the way down” thesis depends upon the premise being valid.”
No, it does not. The TATWD thesis depends upon an equal prevalence of rationality in market actors as well as government regulators. Absolute rationality is not essential.
“What is your explanation for the divergence between libertarian theory and the real world in this respect?”
If you are asserting that regulators are highly qualified, disinterested individuals, I admit I simply don’t believe you.
“Read some court judgements. Read some law. Go to a court and see how the process works. It’s not hard, but I concede this reality (again) conflicts with theory. Nevertheless, it is fact.”
I’m a law student. My every day consists in reading many judicial opinions. I do not believe those opinions are unbiased. There is a reason courts split along ideological lines–there are reasons some judges are described as conservatives and some as liberals.
“This is also what I understand. It’s somewhat silly, though, isn’t it? I mean, the empirical evidence of how well a chosen policy actually works is practice is not of much use? How can it not be?”
I will simply repeat what I said, since you obviously didn’t read it. The empirical evidence is useless because it “is too suffused with confounding variables.”
Here’s a relevent quote from the sister article published along side Locke’s article in the American Conservative.
Seems like the turtle theory is catching on…
Here’s another good one, from the same article, on pragmatism:
Which is exactly what I have been saying, and which is empirically invalid since the prevalence of rationality (or ay other quality) in a very small and selected subset of the general population is not the same as that in the general population as a whole. The fundamental premise of the turtles thesis is wrong.
You are presumably aware that there are legal jurisdictions outside the United States. Not all of these have the same tedency to split ideologically, not least because they do not all have written constitutions. Arguing that because X happens in the US it will necessarily happen everywhere is simply not valid.
OK, so let me understand this. The empirical evidence of how a given policy performs in practice as opposed to the theoretical expectations is to be discounted. The reason given for the discounting is that this empirical evidence is “too suffused with confounding variables.” The logical result of this is that policy would be implemented and maintained solely because it is theoretically correct, even if evidence showed that it did not work, or did not work in the way expected, because the evidence is inherently useless. In simple language, if the policy does not work it is because the observed results are meaningless, not because the policy is wrong. I repeat my question – how can this disregard for the real world effects of policy possibly be justified?
EG
how can this disregard for the real world effects of policy possibly be justified?
((I can’t believe you guys are still at it.)) Euan, your question goes to the heart of this discussion. This is a wonderful example of a fallacy normally identified with Leftists–‘the process is more important than the product’. Micha and others have converted their politics into a religion that transcends the natural world.
Seeing this nonsense surface as a core belief of Libertarians surely confirms Locke’s thesis.
Exactly. Marxist methods, Marxist interpretation of reality where it conflicts with theory (which is quite often). Truly, the Marxism of the right.
No wonder it is not widely accepted (even among serious economists)…
EG
Given that conservatism has failed under its own definition (it has failed to ‘conserve’ a vast list of ‘vital’ social values) and the differences between Labour/Conservative, Democrat/Republican more or less amount to ‘who will increase public spending or regulations less fast by some tiny percentage’, it is amusing to read that it is ‘libertarian’ thought that has failed.
The attempts by the Anglosphere’s statist right to differentiate themselves from the statist left by fetishising the few noticeable differences is rather reminiscent of theological debates about how many Angels can dance on the head of a pin. The increase in the size of the state under conservative governments in the US and UK (who always claim their policy is there to defend society, not destroy it) AND the simultanous slaying of one conservative social sacred cow after another since the 1960’s suggests to me that it is a considerable number of conservatives who are immune to rational analysis of reality. Not that it has all be bad news, mind you, as clearly in some ways economically things have improved dramatically (though this is no longer such a ‘left/right’ thing that many on the right want folks to think, as should be obvious if you look at what happened under Bush vs. Clinton).
A failure to understand the fairly obvious fact that it is ‘the process’ which in the end shapes things far more profoundly that some short term ‘product’ means that conservatives who adopt statist policies for short term electoral advantage (like Bush’s many protectionist policies) are really the ones incapable of standing back and seeing what they are actually doing.
“Which is exactly what I have been saying, and which is empirically invalid since the prevalence of rationality (or ay other quality) in a very small and selected subset of the general population is not the same as that in the general population as a whole. The fundamental premise of the turtles thesis is wrong.”
Yes, but one must show there is a reason the small selected subset’s prevalence of rationality differs from the population at large. I can think of a reason why it does not–the general population selects the small subset. What is your reason for believing the regulators are more rational than the regulatees? And, if you can meet that burden, what is your reason to believe those rational regulators will act beneficently?
“You are presumably aware that there are legal jurisdictions outside the United States. Not all of these have the same tedency to split ideologically, not least because they do not all have written constitutions. Arguing that because X happens in the US it will necessarily happen everywhere is simply not valid.”
You invited me to go to court to verify that judges were impartial–did you mean court in Ghana? At any rate, showing that judges split in the US does not prove all judges are partial–but it does support the idea that judges are biased. I, as of now, am the only one who has provided evidence to this point. Would you care to provide evidence for judges being impartial?
“The logical result of this is that policy would be implemented and maintained solely because it is theoretically correct, even if evidence showed that it did not work, or did not work in the way expected, because the evidence is inherently useless.”
Yes, but I’d point out if the evidence is useless, then it cannot show whether the policy “did not work” or “did not work in the way expected.”
“In simple language, if the policy does not work it is because the observed results are meaningless, not because the policy is wrong. I repeat my question – how can this disregard for the real world effects of policy possibly be justified?”
And as I said, the Austrians (I think) believe that the evidence is useless. The “real world effects” cannot be determined from the evidence. Lacking any kind of empirical evidence to support or not support a policy leads them to rely on other means–theory. It is like any experiment which produces bad data–the bad data cannot be trusted when all is said and done.
it is amusing to read that it is ‘libertarian’ thought that has failed.
Hello Perry. What is really amusing, is that I am the one accused of poor reading. I never said Libertarian thought has failed. In fact, Libertarian thought has never been tried, so it is immune to failure. As I mentioned far upthread, but you were obliged to evade, Conservatism does the work. So it’s failures are real, but also wide open to diagnosis and repair. You will never be able to make such claims for Libertarianism, and thank goodness for that.
the process’ which in the end shapes things far more profoundly that some short term ‘product’
Safe to say that we are all on the same page about this element of the Libertarian belief system. Thanks for the confirmation.
You go on about President Bush as an evasion. You point in hosting this thread was to deny the connection between Marxism and Libertarianism. Instead, you have dramatically confirm it. Can I do my Snoopy Dance now?
“Exactly. Marxist methods, Marxist interpretation of reality where it conflicts with theory (which is quite often). Truly, the Marxism of the right.”
You are conflating Austrian economists with libertarians. The two are not synonymous.
“No wonder it is not widely accepted (even among serious economists)…”
Many hold Milton Friedman was among the greatest economists of the 20th century. He described himself as a libertarian.
Far be it for me to stand in the way of you making yourself look daft. Hell, I would be delighted to invite you to our blogger bashes if you promise to do that.
In reality, libertarian (rather than Libertarian) thought can be found wherever conservatives who are in favour of small government and genuinely preserving civil society can be found. To see so called ‘libertarian’ ideas in action you need go no further than your local carboot sale or commodity market, where the vast majority of rules and regulations were not imposed from above but were developed by evolutionary market processes.
Scott writes: You are conflating Austrian economists with libertarians.
Forgive me for not knowing the personalities. Is Perry an Austrian economist by conviction? Or are we seeing the most rapid of moving targets? To reiterate, Libertarianism meets rationality at the point of Conservatism.
Perry writes: Far be it for me to stand in the way of you making yourself look daft.
A wise choice, sir. I sincerely hope that you may someday find my level of amusement with Internet discussions. I’ve long since forsaken the concept of winning and losing, and trumpeting my superiority. It’s all about fun and enlightenment to me now.
(((My Snoopy Dance comment was a mockery of Micha’s victory claims. Sorry ya dint getit.)))
local carboot sale
I like that name. Yes, it is true that different markets are subject to different controls. I also agree that this diversity is founded on evolutionary forces. So practical, so empirical, so Conservative. What has any of that got to do with Libertarianism? My answer is that when freer markets work well, Libertarians use them for examples. When freer markets don’t work, they run and hide.
Examples please.
…and yes, I am ‘an Austrian’.
Examples please.
My pleasure, Perry.
Let’s take everyone’s favorite–the weaponry market. Some time around when I was born, a fruit cup fired an RPG (known then as a bazooka sp?) at the UN Building. Fortunately if fell short into the Hudson River. At that time, big bore arms were freely sold in the US, but no more. Although some of us might think that such an attack might not be so bad against the UN, it is clear to me that we all live much better w/o RPG availability. I understand that the UK weaponry market is over-regulated. Few try to make the case for the US.
Banking and Insurance. This is a heavily regulated industry and nothing less can prevent rampant fraud. As it is, I struggled to get an insurance reimbursement for 2 years. One phone call to our B&I commission produced a check. My point is that these institutions are good and we need them to facilitate our economy. They could not work w/o the security of tight regulation and oversight.
Broadcasting. Without licensing, broadcasters would overrun each other and we would get nothing but static.
Transportation. In the US, we strongly encourage states to adopt Federal Highway Standards. It works. When I travel across state lines, I don’t need to adapt to different signage styles or driving conventions. That makes my trips safer and more enjoyable.
Construction. There are a forest of building regulations and I am a prominent critic of some. However, when I attend a function at some hotel, I can be certain that the roof will not collapse onto me. (Yes, I know. Building failures are my business, and I shy away from cantilevered structures loaded with dancers.)
“Seeing this nonsense surface as a core belief of Libertarians surely confirms Locke’s thesis.”
You overstate your case–or you read poorly. Nobody said such “nonsense” was a core belief of libertarians.
“Forgive me for not knowing the personalities. Is Perry an Austrian economist by conviction? Or are we seeing the most rapid of moving targets? To reiterate, Libertarianism meets rationality at the point of Conservatism.”
If you’re having trouble with your aim, then the problem is surely your eyesight, for the target has never strayed. Euan explicitly stated something about the Austrian school–not libertarians in general–and I explained what I thought the Austrian–not libertarian–defense would be.
People are quite capable of nominating others better than the average or than themselves and accepting their judgement. The tiresome turtles argument assumes people will only ever nominate others like themselves. This happens in democratic politics since being above a certain age and having a pulse are about the only selection criteria for candidates. It is not impossible to suppose an objective minimum standard regulatory candidates must meet before submitting themselves to election.
But does such a thing ever happen? Let’s look for an example. Ah, here’s the SCOTUS, whose potential justices meet certain high standards the vast majority can never hope to achieve and who are then nominated for election (confirmation by the Senate, but it amounts to the same thing).
So there you go. Theoretically workable, and in practice it happens (but see below for caveats). More than you can say for libertarianism, but there it is.
Why would you think I meant Ghana? You’re rapidly filling a textbook with classic rhetorical dodges and fallacies, you know. This is fun 🙂
But it doesn’t show they are all biased, nor does it show they will all necessarily allow any bias to affect their judgement. Ideological splits in the SCOTUS are principally due to the facts that SC justices are political nominees (albeit of a high standard) and that the US has a written constitution that all law is subject to. Considering the UK, judges are not political appointees (or at least, they are at most indirect political appointees by other legal people who happen to be polticians) and the country does not have a written constitution. Both these factors greatly reduce the scope for judicial activism and ideological split. As I said, that X happens in the US does not mean it will necessarily happen everywhere else.
Circular argument. Another one on the list.
This is the screw-up.
This logic means a policy will be implemented because the theory says it will produce the desired result, whatever that may be, but that there is no way of determining whether the desired result is actually achieved and therefore any evidence which suggests it isn’t being achieved can safely be ignored. In theory.
But surely, if the empirical data cannot show whether the desired result is achieved, it presumably cannot show that it is not achieved. Therefore, we cannot tell that the policy we have now is not doing exactly what Austrian economics would do in practice, because according to Austrian theory there is no way to tell the difference. If there is a way to tell the difference, why can this not be used to judge the efficacy of Austrian policy if it is ever tried? And would this not invalidate the Austrian theory that the data is meaningless? And if not, why not?
This is perhaps why few serious economists give much credence to Austrian economics.
But he certainly is not an Austrian.
EG
I agree that there is a role for the state (or state-like organisation) in moderating people’s ability to blow things up though your example is poor as I have no problem with privately owned RPGs (an RPG being an anti-vehicle weapons with very little ‘area attack’ capability). I certainly do not want private nukes for example, as the ability for abuse and error is simply too great that it far outweighs the benefits (and there are a few).
Not altogether a serious comment, but I’m having difficulty imagining the benefits of private nuclear armaments…
Is not the conservative point that in the absence of regulation the horrors, fraud and theft would be greater? No system of regulation can completely eliminate problems, but how would the banking and insurance system work in practice without regulation?
Tricky one. With no regulation, you will get heavy corporate bias in programming & will almost certainly need to deal with the externalities of broadcast porn, obscenity and excess violence. With regulation, and particularly with state-funded broadcasters, you run the risk of censorship (overt or not) and the state agenda being pushed. To be honest, I’ve never been able to completely make up my mind on this subject, but usually incline towards imposed watersheds & some sort of standard of decency. I have no objection to having state broadcasters provided we also have private ones. It’s desirable to see both points of view.
This applies more to public transport such as aircraft and trains. The immediate effect of safety regulation, engineering standards, and so on is not directly felt by the traveller except in the ticket price. It becomes more of a problem for private road transport, of course. I think, though, that the vast majority of people would accept – indeed insist upon – an enforced high standard for aircraft and trains in particular.
I grew up in a 400 year old house, which failed to collapse. However, it is not the age that matters. The demand for large quantities of cheap housing is vastly higher now than ever before, simply through population pressure. You see what happens without adequate inspection and standards in places like Nigeria, where poor quality buildings routinely fall down.
When my 400 year old house was built, the precise properties and limits of most building materials were unknown in any detail. Consequently, houses were massively over-engineered to very conservative rules of thumb. Given relatively low labour and materials costs then, this was not an issue. My house had 18″ thick stone walls and massive timber beams in the roof – of course it will stand for centuries.
Modern construction is a completely different thing. We use concrete, which ages very rapidly compared to stone and is sensitive to the proportions of cheap (sand) and expensive (cement) materials in the mix. We use steel beams sized just so, which rust, in place of massive timbers. Because we know much more about materials, we greatly reduce the rule of thumb safety factors, and so modern buildings are inherently weaker than older ones. Add to this much increased demand, the high price of wage labour and expensive raw materials, and you have a great temptation to cut corners and skimp on the expensive materials. A little skimping 400 years ago would not matter much, but now it can be critical.
EG
Actually, I believe Scott misspoke. The turtles thesis depends upon an equal prevalence of rationality (and irrationality) in market actors as well as political actors. The people who make production and consumption choices in the market are the same people who make political choices in the election booth. My theory’s focus is on the mechanism of selecting the regulators, but not necessarily the regulators themselves.
As I already explained earlier, and you two chose to ignore, this rejection of empirical evidence has nothing to do with libertarianism (although some libertarians do exhibit this tendancy), but rather, is a feature of Austrian economics. Since most Austrians are libertarians, this distinction may be easily confused. But not all libertarians are Austrians. (I am not, for example.)
You can criticize the Austrian rejection of empirical evidence (I do all the time), but don’t confuse this with libertarianism in general.
In principle, they could be used for rocket propulsion.
Right…Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Vernon Smith, F.A. Hayek, Ronald Coase, George Stigler, Tyler Cowen, Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, Donald Boudreaux, nearly all of the faculty at George Mason University, the major portion of the faculty at University of Chicago over the last 50 years or more, …
Nope, libertarianism is not widely accepted among serious economists. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Could you not say exactly the same thing about the private economic market? People are quite capable of nominating others, say doctors, lawyers, plumbers, carpenters, or an other skilled expert, better than the average or than themselves and accepting their judgement. So how does this show that political arena is superior to the market arena for solving problems of widespread irrationality?
Yes indeed! Moreover the risk of making a bad choice of plumber or even banker pales compared to the risks associated with a plurality making a bad choice of political leaders who have the means of coercion at their disposal.
It is this realisation that make people like me more disposed to the more ‘libertarian’ world view and why it is bizarre that we are accused of being utopians who think people are all rational and trustworthy… whereas it is really the statists who are utopian and almost breathtakingly trusting of human nature to concentrate so much dangerous power in a few political hands rather than seeking widely dispersed social systems (such as markets) for almost everything.
“Why would you think I meant Ghana? You’re rapidly filling a textbook with classic rhetorical dodges and fallacies, you know. This is fun :)”
While you’re writing a textbooks, consider keeping a dictionary close at hand. It could come in useful–for example, you could use it to look up the word “sarcasm.”
As to dodges, note you completely ignored my request for support for your claim that judges are impartial. You simply said other countries have different systems–that, in and of itself, proves nothing.
“Circular argument. Another one on the list.”
Actually it’s not, since I only used a premise that you adopted, one which I specifically indicated was a hypothetical with the word “if.” You were trying to understand Austrian economics, and I was explaining it within the Austrian framework.
“But he certainly is not an Austrian.”
This is what we call a strawman fallacy: feel free to add it to your list. I never said Milton Friedman was an Austrian. You said economists don’t take libertarianism seriously–you nevers said economists don’t take Austrian econ seriously.
“Therefore, we cannot tell that the policy we have now is not doing exactly what Austrian economics would do in practice, because according to Austrian theory there is no way to tell the difference.”
This, you know by now is wrong, since the Austrians hold there is a way to tell the difference: theory.
Micha aptly rebutted your turtles objections, so I omit them.
“Why would you think I meant Ghana? You’re rapidly filling a textbook with classic rhetorical dodges and fallacies, you know. This is fun :)”
While you’re writing a textbooks, consider keeping a dictionary close at hand. It could come in useful–for example, you could use it to look up the word “sarcasm.”
As to dodges, note you completely ignored my request for support for your claim that judges are impartial. You simply said other countries have different systems–that, in and of itself, proves nothing.
“Circular argument. Another one on the list.”
Actually it’s not, since I only used a premise that you adopted, one which I specifically indicated was a hypothetical with the word “if.” You were trying to understand Austrian economics, and I was explaining it within the Austrian framework.
“But he certainly is not an Austrian.”
This is what we call a strawman fallacy: feel free to add it to your list. I never said Milton Friedman was an Austrian. You said economists don’t take libertarianism seriously–you nevers said economists don’t take Austrian econ seriously.
“Therefore, we cannot tell that the policy we have now is not doing exactly what Austrian economics would do in practice, because according to Austrian theory there is no way to tell the difference.”
This, you know by now is wrong, since the Austrians hold there is a way to tell the difference: theory.
Micha aptly rebutted your turtles objections, so I omit them.
Perry you asked for examples markets that could not function well w/o regulation, and returned the favor with gratuitous confrontation. Wading through reflexive duplicity is no fun for me. Yick.
Scott writes: You overstate your case–or you read poorly. Nobody said such “nonsense” was a core belief of libertarians.
Excellent–5th literacy ad hominem. And I was correctly inferring, not quoting, Mr. Reading Expert. You are over-competitive, and that is why you lose.
Euan writes: Broadcasting, tricky one.
I see it as more straight forward. Government is needed to sort out the useful frequencies. I am capable of selecting content suitable for my tender ears.
In transportation, my experience is influenced as a descendant of 2 generations of road and bridge contractors. Dad would point out construction defects as we drove along. Road building by competitive bid is a tough business. To put it politely, materials and processes must be monitored continuously.
I am involved with building construction, so I’ll add a little color to the discussion here. My future MIL was fond of saying that old buildings were better built. I told her she was only looking at the finest examples. Most old buildings are gone, because they were very poorly built. Your comments on over-engineering are perfect. But those unreinforced masonry walls, no matter how massive, come down with a good shake. So some safety factors, in lightweight construction, can be greater. Moisture resistant foundations are a huge advance for human health. Loads are better distributed among many framing elements instead of a few posts and beams. Energy efficiency has been a mixed blessing, creating many health and durability problems from condensation.
Modern construction is also more compartmentalized. Creating closed framing compartments prevents the rapid movement of pests, fire, air, heat, and moisture through the structure. The effect is the same as in living organisms where cellular structure limits injury and disease. We just lost an historic structure in town when a tiny fire in the cellar climbed, through open wall framing, into the attic. In 3 months time, I would have had those walls packed tightly with cellulose fiber. With solid walls, the building would have been almost fireproof. Very sad.
What you claim to be libertarianism in this sense is really nothing more than small state conservatism. If that’s what libertarianism really is, then fine – but perhaps you can see the problem of evading any meaningful definition?
Yes, for God’s sake! What do you think I have being trying to explain? I am NOT calling for political regulation of the market, I am stating that some form of regulation of the market is inescapably necessary in order to keep it free, and that this regulation can be performed by qualified regulators who can be elected or nominated by the people (all of whom to one extent or another are “market actors” if you must use that pretentious phrase). Regulators DO NOT need to be political appointees, and I have never said that they must. Do I have to draw pictures?
It does not work when industries regulate themselves, because there is a patent conflict of interest. External regulation is necessary, but it does not need to be (and IMO should not be) political.
Largely because libertarians seem to have a major problem in defining what it is they stand for. I think it is fair to say that the public perception of libertarianism is the abolition of the state or at a minimum a very large part of it, the replacement of state functions by the capitalist market and the operation of that market in accordance with Austrian economic theory. I imagine most people do consider this somewhat Utopian. It’s true enough that some libertarians don’t do the Austrian thing, but many do.
I recognise that a part of the problem is that few libertarians can agree on anything much other than “state bad, market good” as a general principle of sloganeering. However, this is not the problem of the people who accuse libertarians of Utopianism – it is the problem of the libertarians who cannot define what their concrete proposals actually are. In order to get anywhere in practical politics, you need to have a defined platform that the people by and large can understand – libertarianism either cannot or will not do this. Until it does, it will not attract widespread public support and it will be considered a Utopian fringe philosophy adhered to be a small group of odd people.
But stating the the SC justices in one country sometimes split on partial, ideological lines proves nothing either. You cannot argue to the world from a purely American perspective.
Which is that the theory says it is right, and since the theory also says there is no way to verify this, it IS right. So essentially it is right because it is right, but no-one can prove it.
This is the absurdity of Austrianism – it is self-justifying. Which is all I was pointing out.
Crap. You can prove a theory wrong by the use of the same theory? How? You can prove the theory wrong by the use of another theory? OK, but how do you prove that other theory? This whole idea is utterly absurd. At some point you need to examine the real world to measure effects – this is political and economic reality, not mathematical theory. It will simply not do to say that real-world assessment is theoretically impossible – all you are doing then is indulging in economic mental masturbation. It should be noted that the persistence with the implementation of a theory whilst ignoring the empirical evidence that it didn’t actually work is also characteristic of Marxist systems – another parallel, justifying Locke’s thesis.
He didn’t, but since you two seem to consider that elegant theory and semantic dodges are superior to reality, even when reality shows that the theory is fundamentally flawed, there is no point in persisting. Even if you don’t accept Austrian economics, you certainly use the same methods of justification.
EG
On the problem of defining libertarianism, I should add that:
If libertarians cannot agree on a definition and a minimum set of agreed common ideas (more than “state bad, market good”), then libertarianism will come to be defined by the people who oppose it. If you don’t define yourselves, your enemies will do it for you.
This may be undesirable, but it will happen and libertarians will ever afterwards be fighting pointless battles of linguistic and political pedantry to explain “but that’s not what we really are.” Rather like they do now, as a matter of fact.
EG
“Excellent–5th literacy ad hominem. And I was correctly inferring, not quoting, Mr. Reading Expert. You are over-competitive, and that is why you lose.”
As it stands, I thought “poor reading” was the only justifiable inference. You fabricated something that wasn’t there–other than poor reading, I suppose dishonesty could be an explanation, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.
“But stating the the SC justices in one country sometimes split on partial, ideological lines proves nothing either. You cannot argue to the world from a purely American perspective.”
Yes, it does. You claim judges are impartial, I present a counterexample, hence your claim is wrong. You may backpeddle and say you only meant non-American judges, and that’s fine, but it’s a claim in need of support. You have not supported it, only asserted it.
“Which is that the theory says it is right, and since the theory also says there is no way to verify this, it IS right. So essentially it is right because it is right, but no-one can prove it. This is the absurdity of Austrianism – it is self-justifying. Which is all I was pointing out.”
Nonsense. If you wanted to know how Austrians justify their theory, that is a far larger task. You were merely asking about the implications of the rejection of data. I never said that justified the theory. Nor does any Austrian.
“Crap. You can prove a theory wrong by the use of the same theory?”
Nobody was attempting to prove a theory wrong or right, so spare me. You merely asserted there was no way to judge the real world effects of a policy, which the Austrians would hold is false.
“He didn’t, but since you two seem to consider that elegant theory and semantic dodges are superior to reality, even when reality shows that the theory is fundamentally flawed, there is no point in persisting.”
You continually assert the reality shows the theory false, but never offer anything to that end. Mere assertions do not become persuasive no matter how many times they are asserted.
“If libertarians cannot agree on a definition and a minimum set of agreed common ideas (more than “state bad, market good”), then libertarianism will come to be defined by the people who oppose it. If you don’t define yourselves, your enemies will do it for you.”
On those lines, what exactly is the definition of conservatism? And why need we more than “state bad, market good”? As it stands, the best definition for libertarianism is probably “state very bad, market very good.”
No, I claim there is no reason why they cannot be so, and that it is not hard to conceive of a system to achieve this.
Incorrect, but in any case you fail to take into account WHY the judges in your example are not impartial.
That’s not at all what I said. I said that Austrian theory holds that real world data is useless for judging the efficacy of economic policy. I assert that this is nonsense, that any theory must be capable of assessment next to real world data. In fact, to be accepted as valid theory, it must technically be capable of falsification – Austrian theory disallows this, at least by means of real data, and therefore is of questionable utility.
I have, and which is more I have done it so often now that I am sick to death of repeating myself. If you cannot see what happens in the real world and apply this evidence to your pet theories, there is no point in continuing to discuss the matter.
A pragmatic presumption against the state, but with the acceptance that a state is in principle necessary and in some cases is the only practical answer. Also, an intent to retain the best features of previous practice but to discard anything which doesn’t work, or which did work but no longer does. And a reluctance to make radical changes in anything without very good reason. You will note the absence of dogma and strict theory. There is no set policy or philosophy, and conservatism means different things at different times and in different places – for example, British conservatism today is quite different from American conservatism.
That is sure to win votes. You need to define it a bit more closely in order to get anywhere in politics. This sounds trite considering conservatism isn’t definable so closely, BUT libertarianism has no track record whereas conservatism does, so I think it’s a fair point. Conservatism is also very old, and has changed a great deal over the centuries.
EG
You do realize that of the economists I mentioned, they either consider themselves anarchists or self-identify the libertarian – not the conservative – label?
You are the one playing around with definitions, not me. You made a stupid claim that libertarianism is not widely accepted among serious economists; I gave you a large number of leading economists who self-identify as libertarians. Your rejoinder was to redifine them as conservatives, despite their own self labeling.
So which one of us is evading meaningful definitions, again?
You have repeatedly made this assertion, and I have repeatedly shown why your justification for it – widespread irrationality – is no justification at all.
Whether the regulators are themselves political appointees or appointed by political appointees does not change the equation at all. Turtles.
I guess you’ve never heard of Underwriters Laboratories, Consumer Reports, any of the various Kosher food labeling organizations, or any other form of private regulatory agencies.
Yours is another fallacy, although I forget the name of it right now. Here is Roderick Long debunking your foolishness:
Continuing with my response to your argument:
External regulation, as Long hints to above, and as I wrote about in my original Turtles post, is a conceptual impossibility, and at the heart of most of the statist fallacies you’ve provided in this thread. Going back to my Turtles post:
Turtles, turtles, turtles. You still don’t understand the turtles.
Theory: Any theory must be capable of assessment next to real world data.
Observation: The statement above is not capable of assessment next to real world data.
Conclusion: If it is true that all theories must be capable of assessment next to real world data, then it must also be false at the same time, since that theory itself cannot be assessed next to real world data. Your theory contradicts itself.
Theory: All valid theories, to be valid, must be capable of falsification.
Observation: The above statement is not capable of falsification.
Conclusion: If it is true that all valid theories, to be valid, must be capable of falsification, then it must also be false at the same time, since the theory of falsification itself cannot be falsified. Your theory contradicts itself.
You do realize that serious philosophers rejected Ayer’s Verificationism and Popper’s Falsificationism many decades ago? (Note that Popper never believed that all valid theories need to be falsifiable – only that all scientific theories need to be falsifiable. He was only trying to distinguish science from non-science. And he failed even to do that.)
“No, I claim there is no reason why they cannot be so, and that it is not hard to conceive of a system to achieve this.”
No, you claimed that judges are impartial. To quote you:
“This is what judges do in courts, so it is FACT that people with the required standards exist.”
I presented a reason to believe otherwise.
“That’s not at all what I said. I said that Austrian theory holds that real world data is useless for judging the efficacy of economic policy.”
To refresh, you said: “…we cannot tell that the policy we have now is not doing exactly what Austrian economics would do in practice, because according to Austrian theory there is no way to tell the difference.”
This is a false statement, but I feel I didn’t explain why clearly enough. The Austrians–again, who I may not be presenting clearly, as I am not an Austrian–believe there are indeed methods to predict what effects Austrian policies would have. I believe one such method is introspection. How valid that method is, I do not know.
“A pragmatic presumption against the state, but with the acceptance that a state is in principle necessary and in some cases is the only practical answer. Also, an intent to retain the best features of previous practice but to discard anything which doesn’t work, or which did work but no longer does. And a reluctance to make radical changes in anything without very good reason. You will note the absence of dogma and strict theory. There is no set policy or philosophy, and conservatism means different things at different times and in different places – for example, British conservatism today is quite different from American conservatism.”
Which presents a very fluid target. That’s fine, but in light of that, it is unfair to criticize libertarianism for a similar fluidity. If I define it simply as “state bad, market good” that allows a very fluid philosophy, in much the same way your defining conservatism as “status quo good, radical change bad” allows for the same.
“This sounds trite considering conservatism isn’t definable so closely, BUT libertarianism has no track record whereas conservatism does, so I think it’s a fair point.”
Most do hold that free markets have particularly good track records. It is that track record we rely upon. Our reasoning is such that if freer markets have a history of success, that it is likely freeing other markets will be similarly successful. Bolstering that idea is much of economic theory, which shows why freer markets work better. The combination of both the empirical success of the free market, and the theory that shows why this is so, leads us to believe–quite pragmatically as I see it–that increasing the freedom of more markets will have similar success.
So you see, we do have a track record. And government regulation often has a considerably negative track record–as famous thinkers such as Ronald Coase and Cass Sunstein have stressed the empirical record often shows. Neither one of them is a libertarian, incidentally.
Moreover, many feel that the classical liberal days of the early 1800s were an approximation of libertarianism, and had a considerable degree of success.
It is true that the ideal libertarian society represents a considerable change from modern society–but just because our lodestar is strange does not necessitate that our steps must be radical to reach it. Gradual change is acceptable and even stressed by some libertarians.
Uroboros!
Your understanding of logic is somewhat faulty.
Whatever you choose to think, it is IN FACT axiomatic that a theory must be capable of falsification i.e. even if you cannot falsify it at this moment there must be some means by which in principle it could be falsified. This is not something I have just made up, it is fundamental to rational thought and debate – it is a standard in logic and scientific procedure. Since you either don’t know this or choose to ignore it, you render debate impossible.
EG
Euan,
It’s not like I just came up with the above criticism myself. (I’m smart but many smarter people thought of these things before me.) This is standard issue in any philosophy of science course. A.J. Ayer’s Verificationism was self-defeating in that it could not verify itself. Popper tried to avoid this problem by not positing Falsificationism as a necessary prerequisite for epistemological inquiry, but only as a means for demarcating science from non-science. He failed for other reasons, which I will not go into here for they are irrelevant to the present discussion.
What is relevant is that the way in which you phrased your claims, and your more recent claim that falsificationism is axiomatic (weren’t we just talking about Austrian economics a short while ago? hmm…), and moreover, “fundamental to rational thought and debate” is quite strange, since you are telling me that:
1. Austrian Economics is loony because it is based on axiomatic theories which cannot be falsified.
2. A theory which cannot be falsified is illogical/loony/irrational/bad/must be rejected/etc.
3. Proposition #2 is itself an axiom that cannot be in principle falsified, therefore it must be rejected.
It is not I who has rendered debate impossible, but you with your self-contradictory statements even a self-eating snake could understand.
Any theory is falsifiable since whether or not the predictions it makes come to pass can be tested. An example:
Austrian theory supports the idea of non-fiat money, usually in the form of a gold standard. The reason is the assumption that state involvement in the money supply by the issue of fiat money causes the business cycle. Fair enough, but that constitutes a prediction – a reversion to a gold standard and the withdrawal of the state from any role in the money supply would end the business cycle. This is empirically testable since we could institute an Austrian system and then observe whether or not the business cycle ends. It is therefore falsifiable, since if the business cycle exists in such circumstances the claim of Austrianism in this respect is invalidated.
Austrians seem to deny that statistics are meaningful since they are gross and don’t reflect in full detail all the aspects of the economy. They can’t, therefore, be used to show that Austrian principles actually work (or not) in practice. Only individual transactions matter, and it is only in the context of the individual transactions (i.e. prices) that the economy can be understood. Fair enough, but by the same token the Austrian would have to accept that it would be impossible to prove or disprove that the problems he complains about in today’s economy are actually happening. Thus, my earlier comment that if Austrianism cannot be proven or disproven in practice, or even subjected to useful statistical analysis, then neither can any other economic policy. Returning to the question of the business cycle, how would Austrians be able to tell whether the business cycle had ended in an Austrian economy? How can they tell it exists in another economy?
Another Austrian claim is that monopolies are caused only by government action and would not happen in a completely unregulated Austrian market. Again this is testable – institute an Austrian economy and see if monopolies arise. If they do, despite a complete absence of government involvement, then this claim of Austrianism is falsified.
Any political or economic proposal makes certain predictions, perhaps not explicitly but nonetheless they are made. These predictions can be tested against empirical data from the real world. If one argues that the empirical data is too inaccurate or misleading or susceptible to error to be used for this purpose, one must logically concede that they cannot be used to verify that the problem the proposal is intended to rectify actually exists. If one proposes another method which can demonstrate that the supposed problem currently exists, one must accept that this method can also be used to verify whether or not the rectification proposal actually works.
The Austrian method of subjectivism is therefore useless for all practical purposes, simply because if you cannot verify Austrianism works, neither can you verify that alternatives don’t work or that the problems Austrianism purports to correct actually exist in the first place, thus rendering the exercise somewhat pointless. Any attempt to suggest that our putative Austrian economy doesn’t work the way the theory says, based on a rejection of the statistics on the grounds of error or unreliability is deeply unsatisfactory, since it amounts to special pleading and furthermore the same logic can be extended to any other economic system.
Similarly, with the turtles. Apart from the fact that I will never be able to look at a turtle the same way in the future, I think your thesis is that government regulation of the economy cannot work because the people are flawed and therefore the regulators are flawed since they are drawn from the people. This can also be falsified, since if there are instances where government regulation does work, or if there are instances where regulators have much higher standards of probity, integrity and discipline than the people, then the thesis is manifestly wrong. Since both these things happen in the real world, the thesis is wrong. You can deny this falsification, but only by taking a subjectivist view of reality, which is wholly unsatisfactory.
EG
“This can also be falsified, since if there are instances where government regulation does work, or if there are instances where regulators have much higher standards of probity, integrity and discipline than the people, then the thesis is manifestly wrong.”
Not necessarily. For one, one must define what it means for government regulation to “work.” If by work, you mean improve market outcomes, then that’s a claim unsupported by any evidence or theory I’m aware of.
At any rate, the simple presence of a rational regulator does not prove widespread rationality among regulators, anymore than the presence of a rational market actor proves widespread rationality amonst market actors. Nor would a simple heightened level of rationality amonst regulators prove that they are using that rationality towards the public good. For instance, many Mafia members may very well be highly rational, competent individuals, and their regulations may work, so far as they are concerned, in that they manage to redistribute wealth to themselves. That does not prove that the Mafia “works” for the economy at large.
That won’t do at all – this can be thrown back to the libertarian by asking him to define what he means by “not work.” The libertarian is the one making the assertion (that regulation is counter productive, that it is turtles all the way down) and therefore the burden on him is to either prove his case.
But it does disprove the thesis that they cannot be rational, doesn’t it? Which disproves the turtles thesis.
EG
“That won’t do at all – this can be thrown back to the libertarian by asking him to define what he means by “not work.” The libertarian is the one making the assertion (that regulation is counter productive, that it is turtles all the way down) and therefore the burden on him is to either prove his case.”
Which I believe I’ve defined. We know, empericially, markets work towards economically efficient outcomes. We have no such proof of government actors aiding efficiency. We have a fairly large literature, known as public choice theory, cataloguing why government fails. To my knowledge, we have no reason to believe that the rest of the government doesn’t fail similarly. I believe that satisfies our burden.
“But it does disprove the thesis that they cannot be rational, doesn’t it? Which disproves the turtles thesis.”
The turtles thesis is Micha’s, so my comments may be bastardizations in some sense. However, I believe that nobody has asserted that the turtles’ thesis depends on complete irrationality, just similar levels of rationality between people as consumers and people as voters. Perhaps Micha can correct me if I have it wrong.
“But it does disprove the thesis that they cannot be rational, doesn’t it? Which disproves the turtles thesis.”
Doing a word search for “rational”, I find that Micha never claimed regulators cannot be rational. In fact, to quote him: “My argument was never that all people are equally irrational. ”
So you seem to have fabricated a strawman.
Not really. Micha said:
This clearly implies the idea that the regulators will necessarily have the same level of rationality as those who appoint them. The people en masse often make dumb choices. The politicians they elect are often themselves pretty unimpressive. However, to argue from this to the suggestion that all state employees in whatever category are just the same is, in fine libertarian tradition, a sweeping and hasty generalisation. What’s more, it simply isn’t true. It is possible for the people and/or the politicians to set and insist upon a higher standard for specific groups, and indeed they actually do this.
I return to the example of the judge. Whether he is a political appointee, or a professional appointed by a political appointee, or rises through the professional ranks on merit, he remains an employee of the state. Judges on the whole exhibit a far greater degree of rationality and impartiality than that prevalent in the “market actors as well as political actors” in Micha’s thesis. So this simple empirical fact – that there are whole categories of state employees who regulate things and who are significantly more rational and impartial than the average – utterly refutes the turtles thesis. It is not, of course, valid to infer from this that ALL state regulators will necessarily be of the same high standard, and I make no such inference.
You can perform all the semantic wriggling you want, but the fact remains that the thesis is simply false because there are in the real world counter-examples which disprove it. You can twist my argument to say that I assert that all regulators are necessarily impartial – but I didn’t say this. I said they can be, there is no reason why the cannot be, it is possible to construct a system which achieves this as far as possible and, critically, that these things actually happen.
Again, a sweeping and hasty generalisation. There are numerous examples of the failure of state regulation of markets, but it is not valid to infer from this that state regulation will always fail. Perhaps the most important exception is the free market itself, which empirical historical data shows will not long remain free without state regulation, and which is in itself a result of state regulation. Prior to states enforcing market rules and requiring “actors” to observe them, all that existed was what you might call capitalist feudalism. Companies do NOT want to operate in a free market, and some form of compulsion is necessary to make them do so.
EG
“This clearly implies the idea that the regulators will necessarily have the same level of rationality as those who appoint them.”
No. I believe Micha was referring not to regulators, but to voters.
“Judges on the whole exhibit a far greater degree of rationality and impartiality than that prevalent in the “market actors as well as political actors” in Micha’s thesis. So this simple empirical fact – that there are whole categories of state employees who regulate things and who are significantly more rational and impartial than the average – utterly refutes the turtles thesis.”
You assert it’s an empirical fact that judges exhibit far more rationality and impartiality than market actors, but other than your word, you’ve given no evidence for that assertion. Moreover, even if you do have some factual evidence showing that judges are more rational the market actors–which I would be interested in, should you have it in your possession–that still does not show that the percentage of rationality in the whole of the regulator class is higher than that in the whole of the private market, which is, presumably, what you want to prove.
Incidentally, many libertarians do not oppose the judicial branch of government–it is other regulators they oppose.
“There are numerous examples of the failure of state regulation of markets, but it is not valid to infer from this that state regulation will always fail. Perhaps the most important exception is the free market itself, which empirical historical data shows will not long remain free without state regulation, and which is in itself a result of state regulation.”
I was merely shifting the burden. We have evidence of failure–I’ve yet to see any economic suggestion for why we might expect regulatory success.
To say that free markets don’t remain free and therefore they must be regulated is a somewhat mystifying comment, since regulation is the removal of freedom from the market. The treatment is the same as the disease, as you word it.
“You can twist my argument to say that I assert that all regulators are necessarily impartial – but I didn’t say this.”
I don’t recall ever asserting that. Perhaps you can point out where I did, since as I review the posts, I cannot find any such assertion. At most, our discussion was still limited to simply judges.
“However, to argue from this to the suggestion that all state employees in whatever category are just the same is, in fine libertarian tradition, a sweeping and hasty generalisation.”
Perhaps you could spare me the ad hominems, especially when you yourself generalized: “No wonder [libertarianism] is not widely accepted (even among serious economists)…”
In which case the turtles thesis is not being applied to regulators but only to the people who select them.
So, either the thesis is falsified by real world counter examples, or it does not apply to the regulators themselves. Either way, the thesis fails.
Read some court judgements. You say you’re a law student, so presumably you have a passing familiarity with several judgements. You will find that the degree of rationality and impartiality in the judgement is generally substantially higher than that exhibited by the average person. If you can’t see this, there is not much I can do about it, I’m afraid. Tangentially, I might ask that if there was the same level of rationality, what would be the need of having judges in the first place?
So if I show that A is greater than B, then I have not shown that A is greater than B? Show me where I have argued that the degree of rationality amongst all regulators NECESSARILY IS greater than that among the people as a whole.
Your argument here is absurd. You are alternately twisting my words, taking them out of context and applying strictures from a specific case to a general situation. I sense that you are clutching at straws.
But you have no evidence of general failure. You have taken the fact of failure in certain cases and assumed it will always apply. This is flat contradictory to reality. Government works – it may not work particularly well in many cases and in other cases it manifestly fails, but it is not valid to say it always fails or will necessarily fail.
The free market is generally pretty efficient (within limits), but there are times when the market fails. I’m sure you would be unimpressed if I were to argue from specific instances of market failure to a general market failure, and you would be right. Equally, I am unimpressed that you argue from specific instances of government failure to a general government failure.
Corporations do not want to operate in a free market. It is easier for them to collude, form cartels, and so on. Adam Smith knew this perfectly well and said so quite clearly. The “free market” as we know it is a creation of state regulation – without regulations compelling corporations to basically play fair and not collude, etc., the market simply would not remain free. There is nothing odd or mystifying about this, it’s just reality. With too much regulation, the market will choke – but with no regulation at all it won’t work. I repeat – corporations don’t want a free market, so one has to compel them to operate in one. This needs regulation and coercion. That’s life, unfortunately.
Libertarians often praise the earlier part of the 19th century as the closest we have come to true unregulated markets, but it is in fact the case that such a lack of regulation led in time to collusion, fraud and a tendency to monopoly. This is why regulation increased during the latter part of the same century, basically to keep the “free” market free. It is often said that libertarians overlook the development of capitalism after about 1880 and romanticise what happened before. This is pretty much true, that I can see.
It’s not an ad hominem. I assume you are aware that hasty generalisation is a fallacy in argumentation? I was asserting that your argument is no more than a hasty (and sweeping) generalisation. There is nothing ad hominem in that.
That’s fact, not generalisation. The majority of serious economists are not libertarians and certainly are not Austrians. There are of course many libertarian economists, but there are many more non-libertarian economists.
EG
Read some court judgements. You say you’re a law student, so presumably you have a passing familiarity with several judgements. You will find that the degree of rationality and impartiality in the judgement is generally substantially higher than that exhibited by the average person. If you can’t see this, there is not much I can do about it, I’m afraid.
I read a highly biased sample of court opinions–those that have been significant over the course of time, and that generally arise from the upper echelon of the legal industry. Even presuming those decisions exhibit a heightened level of rationality than the average person does, that tells us very little about the rationality of the judiciary as a whole.
Tangentially, I might ask that if there was the same level of rationality, what would be the need of having judges in the first place?
If mechanics are not more rational than the average person, does it follow there’s no need for having mechanics in the first place?
So if I show that A is greater than B, then I have not shown that A is greater than B?
No, I was pointing out that the set of all judges is not the same thing as the set of all regulators, which is true.
Show me where I have argued that the degree of rationality amongst all regulators NECESSARILY IS greater than that among the people as a whole.
I admit I can’t find such a statement.; I apologize. Do you concede then that you cannot prove that rationality among regulators is greater than among people as a whole?
But you have no evidence of general failure. You have taken the fact of failure in certain cases and assumed it will always apply. This is flat contradictory to reality. Government works – it may not work particularly well in many cases and in other cases it manifestly fails, but it is not valid to say it always fails or will necessarily fail.
I have not. I have merely presented evidence that government fails in order to shift the burden. We have empirical evidence and theoretical models that show why government fails. I await some kind of proof that government works.
It is true one cannot generalize from some failures to the whole. But nor can you generalize from some successes to the whole. As such, it is unfair to allocate the burden to our side when your side is not any stronger.
Corporations do not want to operate in a free market. It is easier for them to collude, form cartels, and so on. Adam Smith knew this perfectly well and said so quite clearly.
Quite right. And one of the main ways that the market is made unfree is by governmental restriction of it, spurred on by corporations exerting pressure.
It is true Smith said: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
But the very next line is: “It is im-possible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and jus-tice.”
The “free market” as we know it is a creation of state regulation – without regulations compelling corporations to basically play fair and not collude, etc., the market simply would not remain free.
It is that claim I would like to see supported. What exactly do you mean by “would not remain free?” If you mean remain unregulated, then you’ve presented a paradox. But I’m not sure what else you could intend.
Also, the present market system cannot rightly be called “free” since it is certainly not a laissez-faire system.
With too much regulation, the market will choke – but with no regulation at all it won’t work. I repeat – corporations don’t want a free market, so one has to compel them to operate in one. This needs regulation and coercion. That’s life, unfortunately.
I agree corporations don’t want a free market–the difference between you and I is that I don’t assume regulators want one either.
Libertarians often praise the earlier part of the 19th century as the closest we have come to true unregulated markets, but it is in fact the case that such a lack of regulation led in time to collusion, fraud and a tendency to monopoly. This is why regulation increased during the latter part of the same century, basically to keep the “free” market free.
Yes, but that does not tell us whether it was the “freedom” of the market that led to those ills, or rather the introduction of government regulation. I hold it to be the latter–as does Milton Friedman, a serious economist.
Moreover, “free market” does not imply a lack of monopoly, only a lack of regulation. You are confusing “free market” with “perfectly competitive market” which is defined by (among other things) an absence of monopoly power.
The majority of serious economists are not libertarians and certainly are not Austrians.
For one, nobody ever said the majority of economists are Austrians.
Second, 24.5% of Americans–not a majority–are Catholics. Does it follow that Catholicism is not widely accepted in the United States?
I sense that you are clutching at straws.
When all you present are strawmen, I have little else to clutch at.
From an interview with Ronald Coase:
Reason: Can you give us an example of what you consider to be a good regulation and then an example of what you consider to be a not-so-good regulation?
Coase: This is a very interesting question because one can’t give an answer to it. When I was editor of The Journal of Law and Economics, we published a whole series of studies of regulation and its effects. Almost all the studies–perhaps all the studies–suggested that the results of regulation had been bad, that the prices were higher, that the product was worse adapted to the needs of consumers, than it otherwise would have been. I was not willing to accept the view that all regulation was bound to produce these results. Therefore, what was my explanation for the results we had? I argued that the most probable explanation was that the government now operates on such a massive scale that it had reached the stage of what economists call negative marginal returns. Anything additional it does, it messes up. But that doesn’t mean that if we reduce the size of government considerably, we wouldn’t find then that there were some activities it did well. Until we reduce the size of government, we won’t know what they are.
Reason: What’s an example of bad regulation?
Coase: I can’t remember one that’s good. Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture– agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad.
Emphasis mine.
Try reading wider variety of judgements. Having said that, I can see you just about concede that there is evidence of greater rationality in at least the judgements you have read. Of course, I don’t argue that all judges are supremely rational uber-beings, only that they are on the whole markedly more rational than the average person. The ability to reason, to analyse logically and to reach impartial conclusions based on the evidence is, as I am sure you are well aware, a pretty key requirement for a judge. Almost by definition, then, judges as a whole will be more rational than the average.
False comparison.
The correct comparison would be “if mechanics were no more skilled at fixing cars than the average person, would there be any need for having mechanics in the first place?” Whether mechanics are more or less rational than the average person is at best only peripheral to their ability to fix cars. Whether judges are more rational or not is central to their ability to judge.
It is, but where did I suggest that all regulators have the same standards as judges? I agree there are far too many regulations, and hence too many regulators, and the more one has of anything the lower the average standard might be expected to be. With a small number of regulators, it is more realistic to expect that a high average standard can be maintained than it is with a very large number.
To an extent. For the number of regulators we have, the overall average level of rationality is likely not much (if any) greater than the average. For a small number of regulators selected according to highly specific criteria (such as judges), it is. Since I have never argued that there should be such a large number of regulators, I don’t think this necessarily weakens my argument. I see no reason why a small number of regulators cannot be selected according to strict criteria, as I have suggested some time earlier, and therefore no reason why this small number cannot be markedly more rational and impartial.
But I can present evidence that the market fails – cartel, adulteration and gouging all happen and are market failures. There is empircal evidence of this, and possibly there are theoretical models to explain why it happens (I know in broad terms why it happens, I’m not sure though if anyone has formalised this into a model). I don’t argue that these things always or necessarily happen, but they do happen. Regulations to prevent fraud, collusion and gouging, which have never arisen without state intervention, can be imposed to correct this. I quite accept that government regulation often fails, and on a more frequent basis than the market fails. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that it always or necessarily fails because there are instances where it succeeds (such as laws against fraud, uniform legal weights and measures, and so on). However, this only shows that (a) sometimes the market fails and the government can rectify these failures, and (b) more often the government fails, and thus should stay out of the business of regulating unless there is clear need to step in.
I don’t argue that one can prove government intervention works, nor do I argue that examples of successful regulation imply that as a principle regulation is generally successful. It doesn’t always work, so it is impossible to prove that it always does and absurd to suggest it does. Empirical evidence shows that it often fails, but other empirical evidence shows that it sometimes succeeds. I take it on a case by case basis, not on general principles – save the general principle that the case must be very strong before the state acts.
The libertarian, on the other hand, makes the bald argument that government fails and the market succeeds, and presents theories to support this. Because of the more generalised nature of the claims, and because it is widely accepted that some degree of state regulation of markets is pretty much necessary, the burden remains with the libertarian to prove his case. It is the libertarian who makes the claim that we should move significantly away from a broad consensus that holds in almost all of the capitalist world, and so it is the libertarian who must justify things.
Quite, but that is not the same as saying it is impossible to prevent them putting their plans into practice, is it? There is a difference between preventing a meeting and preventing the conspirators putting into practice what they planned at the meeting. I don’t think you can argue from these quotes that Smith opposed ALL regulation of the market on general principles.
There’s no such thing as a completely free market outside of economic theory. The term “free market” in practice does not mean a complete absence of formal regulation. It means for all practical purposes a market so arranged that anticompetitive or fraudulent practices are forbidden and punished when they happen, and where the government does not take a significant role as a participant in (as opposed to regulator of) the market. The important part is the first part.
Rules to prevent and punish fraud or (especially) collusion rarely, if ever, appear unprompted by compulsion. Much fraud and collusion goes unnoticed by the purchaser. This is especially the case with more or less essential goods such as steel, cement, plastics and other oil derivatives, etc. – there are billions of dollars sloshing around those markets, they are extremely difficult and expensive to break into, and much of western society would collapse overnight if the goods weren’t available. The temptation to collude and defraud is therefore very high, and indeed this happens. If there were no regulations, and bearing in mind that the scope for an honest competitor to set up is limited due to the huge capital investments needed, what would happen then?
The market is not free if it is dominated by a cartel, since the freedom to contract is distorted by the anticompetitive practices of the cartel. It is this freedom – the freedom from fraud and abuse – that I mean. Without regulation to prevent this kind of thing, the freedom of the market degrades. This is exactly what was seen in both the UK and the US in the later 19th century, and it is exactly this that led to a moderate degree of regulation in order to promote the freedom of the “free” market. Freedom from regulation is impossible in practice, but perhaps not in theory. Freedom from fraud, deception, collusion and other anticompetitive practices is difficult, but it can be more or less attained – but at the price of some degree of regulation.
Since the collusion, fraud and so on came before (and was the reason for) much of the regulation, it is hard to see why the regulation caused the problem. Other regulation followed, of course (and still follows today), and some of that screwed things up. But the initial regulation was a response to, not a cause of, market failures.
These things are relative, not absolute.
No, but the majority of economists are not libertarians, either.
Coase himself states that his position derives from the fact that the government is so big and regulates so much that anything extra is a screw-up. I don’t defend the status quo, I argue for reduced regulation but not a complete absence of regulation.
Doubtless you would want regulation against fraud? Do you think monopoly is a good thing? Cartel? Price fixing or gouging?
You need SOME regulation. It is quite true that in many cases the market is self-regulating, but NOT in all cases, especially where the good in question is a public good or is an essential or near-essential good.
EG
Try reading wider variety of judgements. Having said that, I can see you just about concede that there is evidence of greater rationality in at least the judgements you have read.
I did no such thing. I specifically qualified the statement with an “even presuming.”
Of course, I don’t argue that all judges are supremely rational uber-beings, only that they are on the whole markedly more rational than the average person.
And that is the claim in need of support.
The ability to reason, to analyse logically and to reach impartial conclusions based on the evidence is, as I am sure you are well aware, a pretty key requirement for a judge. Almost by definition, then, judges as a whole will be more rational than the average.
You have chosen to define judges as rational and then said that proves that they are rational. That strikes me as remarkably circular.
Me: If mechanics are not more rational than the average person, does it follow there’s no need for having mechanics in the first place?
Euan: False comparison.
The correct comparison would be “if mechanics were no more skilled at fixing cars than the average person, would there be any need for having mechanics in the first place?” Whether mechanics are more or less rational than the average person is at best only peripheral to their ability to fix cars. Whether judges are more rational or not is central to their ability to judge.
Nonsense. Rationality is key to fixing cars, too. One must be able to solve problems. Discovering a problem, figuring out the best way to fix it, reasoning through the process are all eminenty rational techniques that a mechanic must utilize. My argument for the utility of judges would be more along the lines of: the judges are specialists in the legal industry, just as mechanics are specialists in their industry–not that they are per se more rational than other people.
To an extent [I concede that I cannot prove that rationality among regulators is greater than among people as a whole]. For the number of regulators we have, the overall average level of rationality is likely not much (if any) greater than the average. For a small number of regulators selected according to highly specific criteria (such as judges), it is.
Assertion without proof, unless you count your “Go read some court opinions sometime.”
But I can present evidence that the market fails – cartel, adulteration and gouging all happen and are market failures. There is empircal evidence of this, and possibly there are theoretical models to explain why it happens (I know in broad terms why it happens, I’m not sure though if anyone has formalised this into a model).
You have very little knowledge of economics then, since market failures are usually modelled within the first month of any economics class. Dead weight loss? Positive and negative externalities? Divergence of marginal revenue curve from the demand curve in a monopolistic market? Ring any bells?
At any rate, I’m more than willing to admit the market fails–the proof I’m waiting for is the model showing how the government will tend to fix the private market failure. It is that model that is missing.
However, this only shows that (a) sometimes the market fails and the government can rectify these failures,
It is this point I would like to see proven.
I don’t argue that one can prove government intervention works
Thank you.
Empirical evidence shows that it often fails, but other empirical evidence shows that it sometimes succeeds.
Coase summed up nearly all the studies he had seen as showing that regulation was bad. If it succeeds, I would like to see the proof for it.
The libertarian, on the other hand, makes the bald argument that government fails and the market succeeds, and presents theories to support this.
As do economists of all stripes. Mancur Olson, a liberal, was one of the pioneers of public choice theory.
I don’t think you can argue from these quotes that Smith opposed ALL regulation of the market on general principles.
Of course not, Smith was not an anarchist. Nevertheless, it does show he was suspicious of regulation, even when that regulation was for such beneficial purposes as you espouse: i.e., the prevention of collusion.
The market is not free if it is dominated by a cartel, since the freedom to contract is distorted by the anticompetitive practices of the cartel.
The market is not perfectly competitive. It is free so long as regulation is absent. Usage of proper terminology will aid the discussion.
Since the collusion, fraud and so on came before (and was the reason for) much of the regulation, it is hard to see why the regulation caused the problem. Other regulation followed, of course (and still follows today), and some of that screwed things up. But the initial regulation was a response to, not a cause of, market failures.
I believe, as many do, that you have a romantic view of history. Read Friedman’s Free to Choose, and tell me what you think.
These things are relative, not absolute.
Even so, but relative or not, these things have specific definitions which you are not using.
No, but the majority of economists are not libertarians, either.
But that was not your original claim. “Widely accepted” as I understand it, does not imply a “majority.”
Doubtless you would want regulation against fraud? Do you think monopoly is a good thing? Cartel? Price fixing or gouging?
I think monopoly is a bad thing when it is a coercive, as opposed to natural monopoly–I think monopoly is particularly harmful when an institution, such as a government, has a monopoly on governing.
Put simply, I think monoplistic and oligopostic behavior are generally negatives, but given the poor track record of regulations, I think the treatment is worse than the disease. The record seems to be on my side. The burden is on the regulators.
Utopia is not an option.
Incidentally, price gouging is a patently economic ignorant term.
See Thomas Sowell’s (a conservative, I believe) column:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell091404.asp
The usage of that term, coupled with your misunderstanding of what a free market and a perfectly competitive market are leads me to believe you, when it comes to economics, know not of what you speak.