Must liberals believe in fairy-tales? Dan Klein seems to think so.

This month's Cato Unbound, centered on Daniel Klein's essay "Against Overlordship", is rather painful to read. The participants began by talking past one another, but that aside, the content verges on the ridiculous.

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I could spend a post on social-democrat Matthias Matthijs's seeming naiveté and descent into vulgarity. He writes of compulsory health-insurance in the abstract without any regard for what happened on the ground.

To Matthijs, "social democrats do not believe that you can be truly free – that is, capable of making rational and truly independent choices — without basic health considerations taken out of the picture. Social democrats are the true believers in liberty, real liberty, not the rather thin or limited kind most libertarians advocate. The social democratic concept of liberty is not encumbered by things we cannot control, like pre-existing health conditions or the financial resources of our parents." Forget that this would mean that social democrats do not make a distinction between liberty and capability, but the alternative is unclear. Is Matthijs (or Matthijs's hypothetical social democrat) proposing that humans cease being human and become disease-free? Is "liberty" contingent on being a new disease-free species? We all know that socialized medicine doesn't take away people's pre-existing health conditions, nor does it remove health considerations from the other choices we make in life. For Matthijs to claim otherwise is simply stupid.

It is as though Dworkin never wrote about "Justice in the Distribution of Health Care". Even to a leftist like Dworkin--and one who abuses vail of ignorance arguments--it was evident that the demand for health care, especially at the end of life, is infinite, and a socialized system must balance demand for this good against demand for others. Social democracy, then, does not remove health concerns so that people are somehow more free. It merely moves the choices about balancing away from the individual and towards his supposed betters. Why should the individual _not_ have to take into account his desire for future health care when making educational, business, or other decisions? How is that individual more free if that decision is instead put in the hands of others? That is how social democracy (a form of socialism) works. It is not a magical "abundance button". The individual will get sick, and will not receive infinite treatment. End of story.

Beyond that, Matthijs, even when asked about concretes, fails to acknowledge what Obama and the Democrats did. It is not just a forced purchase of insurance. Obama and the Democrats banned actuarially fair insurance pricing and required "insurance" to be issued for certainties. The bill passed earlier this year did not merely require that actuarially fair insurance policies (with or without riders) be issued to people with pre-existing conditions. It required that risk not play any role whatsoever in determination of the cost of an insurance policy. Perhaps this is what Matthijs (or his hypothetical social democrat) had in mind above. The individual need not worry about the costs of his actions: the "insurance" rates--and "insurance" is only a euphemism now--will be the same.

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But it is lead essayist Dan Klein who is the most frustrating, and the most vulgar. Hang out around dilettante libertarians enough and you'll hear someone say (usually in different words) that the state being sovereign, the law being *gasp* changeable, or there being any law whatsoever means you don't "really own" your property, that the state or someone else owns it. This is Klein's position, too.

The left may continue: “There are no natural property rights. Property is a set of permissions, a bundle of rights, determined by the government and delegated to you by the government. When a rearrangement of the bundles would be good, that’s what the government should do. ‘Your’ property rights are simply whatever permissions result from the process.”

Let’s enter into that way of thinking, follow through on it, and surface its presuppositions.

Although they may not be fully conscious of it, progressives and social democrats are saying that everything is owned by the state. Or, perhaps, that the substructure upon which topsoil, buildings, and other things sit is owned by the state. Either way, simply by being in the United States, you voluntarily agree to all government rules.

Does Klein not understand that ownership is not and never has been the same thing as sovereignty? If he is correct about ownership than nobody except despots have ever owned anything.

It gets worse. Later in the essay he writes positively about natural rights, including a natural right to property. How much more stupid can an educated man get, than to presume that property rights--influenced strongly by the English common law--are somehow "natural", or at least a natural substrate to which government has made un-natural modifications. Not only is the history of property in our legal tradition fairly well documented--that something is old does not mean that it is natural--Elinor Ostrom and many others have also made careers studying how different socities meet their respective needs with different property rights. Why Klein's ideal is "natural" but the property rights systems of e.g. American Indians, Inuit, Somalis, and many others is by implication not "natural" is left a mystery.

In light of history, comparative studies, and even the sort of theoretical work done by Cato Unbound participant David Friedman, the "natural rights" approach is intellectually untenable. Indeed it is so ridiculous, involves so much begging the question, that it is shameful. There is no alternative to viewing property rights as transferable bundles of rights whose nature depends on law and social custom. This is simply the result of serious study of what property rights are and have been. Yet Klein, in his stridence, insists that we should see property rights as "natural". It is though he is saying to libertarians that it would be better if we acted as though we were either stupid or ignorant or both, that false advocacy of nonsense on stilts is necessary and that embracing the modern understanding of property (as e.g. Richard Epstein has done) means somehow that we will magically stop owning things and surrender our liberty.

Klein's objection to the "bundle of rights" approach seems to be that property rights can change if the law changes. Why does Klein not argue that the law should never change? This is a corner into which many "libertarians" of the Randist or Rothbardist (or "non-initiation of force") variety--the sort who think that there are closed systems that give all the answers--paint themselves. If you ever want to see one squirm, pin him down on this question: given what he argues, then should the law and thus property rights never change? Bring up interesting hypotheticals and historical problems. If Coasean bargaining is the excuse, pin him down on transaction costs, endowment effects, and other non-satisfaction of the premises of the Coase Theorem. Watch the lols ensue.

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Before Will Wilkinson was purged from Cato, this vulgar nonsense would never have made it into Cato Unbound. What is certainly of no use to the cause of liberty is for Dan Klein to insist on a position best left to teenaged Rothbardites and get schooled by a social democrat. His essay makes it appear as though liberalism (libertarianism) depends on belief in fairy tales like natural property rights. That is not so.

Query about "Austrian Economics": ("Bleg".)

From the perspective of modern economic science, as opposed to a provincial "Austrian" perspective, what, if any, were the lasting contributions of Ludwig von Mises?

Yglesias presents an intelligent libertarianism. There's a problem:...

In response to a remark by Tyler Cowen, left-"progressive" 'blogger Matthew Yglesias presents an intelligent libertarianism.

It is an intelligent libertarianism, albeit a somewhat loopy one, that has libertarianism as an esoteric doctrine so as to benefit from gains from widespread belief in capitalist meritocracy. It also shows Yglesias to be either much more of a pessimist or much less versed in basic econ. than I suspected.

The trouble is, although it is an intelligent libertarianism, it's not a libertarianism in which any libertarian I can think of believes. Cowen's take on "progressivism", on the other hand, was an idealization of the real "progressive".

Most of the really vocal and obnoxious libertarians (e.g. the Lew Rockwell crowd) do not believe in an intelligent libertarianism, but those whose libertarianism is intelligent believe something quite different than Yglesias's sketch. They do believe that growth makes most concerns about the justice of the current distribution misguided. (Considering the sum of wealth to be static is perhaps the unifying error of left-wing thinkers from Rawls forward.) But they also believe that people can or ought to be able to get ahead by doing well for others--that laws and regulations ought to be ordered to bring this about--not that people merely derive benefit from believing this. Think, for example, of Mises's remark that profit is obtained by doing in the marketplace what others want.

There is, of course, more to any intelligent libertarianism (e.g. Richard Epstein's, Will Wilkinson's) than this, but it's fairly common.

A remark at the beginning of his post is independently worth considering:

It’s initially tempting to respond to that by listing the intelligent points that I’ve heard made by libertarians, and then explain how a sound progressive politics conducts by incorporating those critiques and moving forward to a higher synthesis.

This is also how a sound libertarianism is constructed. We're seeing this happen: the libertarianisms of Will Wilkinson, Tyler Cowen, Richard Epstein, and Brian Holtz (and myself) are all heavily influenced, in different ways, by the left-liberal and left-"progressive" critiques of old libertarianism. This is a major source of conflict in the movement--the old folks don't really know what to make of it. To them modern libertarianism is "watered down"--the young folks really believe exactly as they do but "compromise and conceal" it. To modern libertarians, however, the libertarianism of Dave Nolan or Jacob Hornberger is a degenerate folk-libertarianism full of ignored subtleties and cognitive dissonances. (Don't ask me in what camp to place the aretaic theories of Rasmussen and Den Uyl; I don't know.)

Epstein is at least as impressive in person.

The Goldwater Institute hosted an all too short lecture by Richard Epstein yesterday, for which I made the nearly two hour drive from Tucson.

It was well worth my while; Epstein is at least as impressive in person as in writing, lecturing off-the-cuff with dexterity and humor. The day's stated topic was "The Coming Constitutional Crisis" but the real topic was the administrative state, the substitution of experts and bureaucracy for functions better kept to the judicial and legislative branches. I took notes so as to write a full summary on Associated Content, but they wandered off while I was asking a question in person afterwards. At least one thesis was that the problem is not a lack of judicial restraint nor a complete abandonment of duty but rather that the courts tend to show restraint when they should intervene and vice versa. The opening thought, that most modern Constitutional lawyers concern themselves with questions of institutional competence, kept creeping in as, of course, did Epstein's revolutionary ideas concerning takings.

Much fun for the audience, and I got more than I expected--and by that I don't mean an autograph in my copy of Skepticism and Freedom, although that was nice, too--in answer to a question afterwards about Cass Sunstein's "libertarian paternalism". I asked whether it was a way to "Brer Rabbit" our way away from the administrative state; Epstein replied by illustrating where the idea works (e.g. pension contributions) and doesn't work (e.g. at-will vs with cause termination) and remarking on "Which Sunstein" he'd like to see in the Obama administration.

Why Will Wilkinson rocks my socks.

Wilkinson, of the Cato Institute, is well on the way to establishing himself as one of this generation's most thoughtful commentators.

Last Friday he put forth a positive description of modern classical liberalism and the place of libertarianism in the post-socialist world, that should be required reading.

Text-bite: George Phillies on anti-environmentalists

From his campaign's statement on energy and the environment:

Attacks on scientific global warming observations have substantially passed their time. Many attacks are a political waste product, resulting from 1970s feuds between Republicans and environmentalists over air and water pollution. The feuds are so ingrained that they are being recycled.

I've felt for several years like a lone-gunman in the libertarian movement. Many old libertarians have had Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer whispering in their ears for so long that they come from a different planet, where climatologists are so incompetent as to neglect solar effects, concern for the environment is a socialist ploy, and the anthropogenic global warming thesis simply Must Be Wrong: liberty depends on it. One, of late, said that talk of biodiversity loss was "eco-theology".

How can I even have an intelligent discussion with someone so ignorant, who has had at least eighteen years to learn why scientists and the educated public find such things of concern, but simply hasn't bothered? Worse still, the man's a PhD economist!

Thanks to one of the frontrunners in the LP race, or at least a well-informed campaign staffer, for easing my burnout, if only momentarily.

Is Rockwell a "creative anachronist"?

It must be a slow week, as Lew Rockwell, the Dean of Downmarket Libertarianism, had time to put together fifteen hundred words of trite bombast about "socialism", particularly the increasingly rare and comical cocktail-party socialist.

I wasn't able to spot any new insight, nor was the exposition particularly fresh, but I did learn a couple of things about Lew Rockwell: he doesn't get away from his fellow ideologues enough, and he hasn't taken Tyler Cowen's advice to heart.

Rockwell tells us neither who these cocktail-party socialists are nor why he concludes socialism is still "fashionable". Contra Cowen, we're told none of the author's personal anthropological experience with the people in question. I spend most of my time around academics and generally progressive-minded folk, I've dated quite a few left-leaning women and am marrying an ex-leftist, and for a few years until recently was rather highly involved with the ACLU at the local and state levels. I have found (and it would surprise the teenaged me) that social-democracy, let alone real socialism, is on the wane on the American left. Most leftists one encounters, at cocktail parties and elsewhere, believe that markets, in general, are desirable, and get hung up on specific instances, having never developed the intellectual capacity to devise a solution to either a market failure or a social problem that doesn't involve permanent government intervention. Lack of imagination, lack of exposure to the alternatives, and a certain lack of confidence, not a secretly believed far-left ideology, is what tends to make the leftist a leftist. If one wants concrete evidence of the shift, witness the support of many left-leading folk for carbon trading!

One could say that socialism is about as fashionable as Ben-Gay and Geritol: the major group exception to the above observation is the soixante-huitard academics and associated movement New Leftists over 60 years old. The others are trivial: maladjusted European ex-pats and angry, pathological youngsters of the sort who like to wear black, chant slogans, and pretend they're going to "drive out the Bush Regime".

Holed up with like-minded ideologues at Auburn, isolated by choice and personality even from mainstream libertarians, let alone the current political discussion, Rockwell has no way of knowing that, in the USA, parlor socialism has gone the way of Freudianism: a one-time intellectual fad now reserved to fools and the deranged.

Unlike the modern left: economic interventionists, "capabilities" theorists like Martha Nussbaum, and utilitarian soft or single-issue social-democrats, socialism is an easy target for the Austrian ideologue. Just as he fancies himself an "economist", he deludes himself into thinking that one of his own predicted--"precisely", in Rockwell's words--the mechanism of socialism's downfall. But the astute observer of Austrianism will note that, since Austrians reject quantitative work, they could not possibly have predicted such a thing, as they have no way of saying whether difficulty of economic calculation, as opposed to the socialist system's numerous other problems, would be its downfall. Moreover, historians will note that calculation was not the downfall of any of the 20th Century's socialist regimes, nor even the driver of reform in the social-democracies. Austrians may have predicted that socialism would fail, but their guess is akin to that of a kook who predicts anthropogenic global warming to be primarily caused by the cattle industry, if not to a stopped clock's twice-daily accurate time.

Easy target, indeed. Haven't we heard this same line before from the Austrians? "Socialism is stupid. It failed in Russia and the Warsaw Pact. It failed in India. Von Mises wrote a book called Socialism. He said it would fail. We like Von Mises." Does Rockwell have a program on his computer that automatically denounces either of socialism or Keynesianism? Does his target audience read these essays or merely scan them for key-words and conclude that Rockwell is still one of theirs?

I'm not a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, but if I were, I'd nominate Lew Rockwell to be its president. He's fighting yesteryear's battle, with gusto, even accurately preserving the errors of his chosen side!

Did Walter Block inadvertently illustrate the problem with Noninitiationism?

A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for an ethical philosophy to be worthy of consideration is the possibility for humans to follow it. Religions can afford to have original sins because they may also have mysteries of faith; serious philosophers cannot play such games of Calvinball.

Quite a few libertarians, with more tolerance for cognitive dissonance than myself, espouse (or think they espouse) something called the Noninitiation of Force Principle, also known as the Nonaggression Principle, Nonaggression Axiom, or Zero Aggression Principle. The trouble is that, like Derrida's deconstructionism, Noninitiationism is a mere intellectual wrecking ball, a rhetorical flourish that can be used to discredit all law as immoral and impugn, given a creative enough crane operator, all human action. Despite this, belief has become so pervasive that many confound this ethical proviso with libertarian political philosophy and some, perhaps realizing and perhaps not realizing that they would exclude Hayek and Friedman, actively attempting to redefine "libertarianism" so as to mean noninitiationism.

It's a terrible problem on the political end of the libertarian movement, as it's wielded like a club to justify the arbitrary whims of the true believers. Land ownership as absolute sovereignty is OK, shooting trespassers is OK, arrest for drunken driving is not. Bring up an idea from the academic libertarian mainstream, perhaps something straight out of Epstein or Nozick, that's unfamiliar to pop libertarianism, and it's bound to have at least one lout rambling about initiation of force, turning the rest against it. The enemies of liberty could not have invented a better way to keep a libertarian movement from gaining traction!

Prominent among noninitiationist wrecking-ball swingers are the so-called Austrian Economists. Austrian Economics as actual economics will just about die with Israel Kirzner and George Reisman, if it can't be said to have died with Hayek; what we see now is a mix of ideology, metaeconomics, and nonstandard philosophy going by the same name, rooted largely in what amounts to an argument-from -incredulity about the applicability of mathematics (and hence quantitative reasoning) to economics and a bizarre rejection of empirical, quantitative verification of predictions. In other words, the Austrians reject the notion that economics is or can be science.

Austrians are as largely and rightly ignored by mainstream economists as a Phlogiston School of Statistical Mechanics would be ignored by physicists. A few bother to take them on, mainly out of dismay at the number of libertarian-minded potential economists they attract, most prominent among them Bryan Caplan, who has in turn attracted the Austrians like an open pop can attracts wasps. In particular, Walter Block has had it out for Caplan. Given Caplan's newfound rockstar status, it was only a matter of time before Block started gunning for The Book.

In the grand Rothbardian tradition of Not Getting It, Block, in his review, takes issue with Caplan's treatment of tradeable emissions rights neither because he disagrees with the underlying economics nor because he explicitly believes that public mistrust of TERs is not primarily caused by anti-market bias, but rather because Block himself believes TERs to be immoral. To quote:

He errs by classifying opposition to tradable rights (TERs) as an instance of anti-market bias. Not so. Rather, TERs are akin to tradable rape or murder rights. Pollution is necessarily an invasion or violation of property rights. It constitutes a trespass of smoke and dust particles emanating from the aggressor to the lungs or land of another person. As such, there is not and cannot be a "right" to do so. Just because TERs "get you more pollution abatement for the same cost" does not gainsay this fact. Tradable murder or rape or assault and battery "rights" would undoubtedly function in the same manner, but this does not in any way render them compatible with libertarian theory.

How "libertarian theory" entered the picture is anyone's guess, but, back to the point: I necessarily pollute to live. Even if I were to cease using modern technology, I'd still pollute, giving off CO2, methane, and various other gases and fine particulates, some of which end up in the lungs or land of others without their consent. Furthermore, the first two cause a diffuse harm to the whole of humanity. I cannot live without being, in Block's terms, an "aggressor" or initiating force.

Thank you, Walter Block, for making clear--in a nonsequitur!--a point I've been trying to drive home to pop-libertarian ideologues for at least five years! Noninitiationist libertarianism, properly realized, is voluntary human extinction, at least down to the level where people can all seek each other's consent for every action, until a pathological character emerges who consents to nothing but being alone.

The Libertarian Meme Pool

My fiancée and I recently attended an appearance of one of the lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees, an enlightening and altogether worthwhile use of an hour on a Sunday. As is usual, it was followed by what was nominally a question-and-answer session that, we noted, turned out to be more of a statement-and-answer session. I had thought that this discourtesy was reserved to the younger generation, but most of the audience had at least 40 years on us and ranted nonetheless. Aside from my dirty looks and question pre-screening, there should be some way to keep people from taking advantage of the captive audience to say something; I came to hear the speaker, not someone off the street who doesn't have more to offer than the average Joe and can't bother to even organize his thoughts!

Radio callers, too, are tending toward this behavior. Case in point: a caller about 38 minutes into Bryan Caplan's recent appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio decided it OK to give a shout-out for Ron Paul and tell the George Mason economist (and, thanks to his book, rockstar-du-jour), that "central planning doesn't work."

Caplan, of course, isn't advocating economic central planning or even an ironic iron-fisted rule by free-marketeers. Maybe Libertarianism Makes You Stupid: pop libertarianism, of the type that has influenced the nonlibertarian Paul, loads its adherents up with clichés, this one being especially popular. Dick Clark recently replied to a message of mine suggesting he and others would be better served by thinking about the question of animal rights than merely declaring, cart before the horse, that because animals are property no moral imperatives apply, with a request to not "think like a central planner", inadvertently putting me in the same camp as Caplan! I'm flattered.

When in doubt, throw out a cliché. Central planning doesn't work! You own yourself! A is A! All rights are property rights! It's sure to make you feel really good, and give those of us whose thought processes don't consist of re-arranging our bumper stickers a headache. Mix it with the use of a Q and A session as a bully pulpit, and it becomes a migraine!