Thoughts on market democracy, part 2a: Society as a spontaneous order

This is part 2a of a (hopefully) four-part series; see also part 1, part 3, and part 4. This part grew so long I’m spreading it across two posts, with the second post to follow when I finish writing it.

This post continues my thoughts on the concept of “market democracy” as described in John Tomasi’s book Free Market Fairness. In this post and the next I explore the second core idea of market democracy, that of society as a “spontaneous order”:¹

… complex productive systems [such as those that produce pencils and other goods] typically were not planned; they evolved. They are products of human action but not of human design. Friedrich Hayek argues that a free society is best thought of as a spontaneous order in which people should be allowed to pursue their own goals on the basis of information available only to themselves. (p. xii)

At the simplest level the idea of society as a spontaneous order is opposed to the idea that most or even all aspects of society can be (or should be) centrally planned on a rational basis. Central planning was discredited in theory by the arguments of Ludwig von Mises, Hayek, and others that the problem of calculating prices and allocating resources in a planned economy was intractable, and was discredited in practice by the demise of the Soviet Union and command socialism in general. So spontaneous order won the battle, QED, end of story.

Except that the story really doesn’t end there, and if one agrees with Tomasi (as I do) that society is a spontaneous order, there are still interesting questions worth exploring. First up is the issue that Tomasi addresses in the preface:

Sometimes spontaneous order is used in what I shall call an ontological sense. A society either is a spontaneous order or it is not one. … if a society is a spontaneous order, then it is sometimes claimed that whatever rules, norms, and distributions result from spontaneous processes are justified by that very fact. …

Other times, however, the idea of spontaneous order is used to denote, not a state of affairs, but a strategy of social construction. In pursuit of desired ends we have the choice of employing spontaneous orders or other types of order—typically, orders that are more direct and planned. (p. xv)

Tomasi comes down on the second side of this question: “Market democracy rejects the ontological use of spontaneous order theory. It affirms spontaneous order as a strategy of social construction.” But that immediately raises further questions: Suppose we consciously decide that society should be organized as a spontaneous order “in pursuit of desired ends”. Can we do that in any positive way, as opposed to simply taking a laissez-faire attitude to events as they unfold? If so, is it possible to “design for spontaneous order”, in the sense of creating social institutions that will maximize the beneficial possibilities inherent in the spontaneous order that leverages such institutions? Is this a one-time task, after which we can safely lean back and watch society evolve? Or are there potential pathologies to which spontaneous orders are vulnerable, and which might require ongoing revisions to societal institutions, including revisions which might restrict the economic freedoms Tomasi views as basic?

Unfortunately I think Tomasi’s discussion of spontaneous orders suffers from his use of “admittedly homey” but (in my opinion) too simplistic analogies. In particular he contrasts putting together a Lego model according to a detailed list of instructions with the crystallization of sugar in solution under the influence of general physical laws, using the former as an analogue of Hayek’s taxis or made order and the latter as an analogue of Hayek’s cosmos or spontaneous order: “Unlike the principles governing the construction of the Lego model, the principles governing the construction of the crystals are endogenous and intrinsic. … The model is made, the crystal grows.” (p. 144)

This paints a picture of the entities within the spontaneous order being swept along under the influence of physical laws, without agency or intention, with the outcome being ordained by nature. Tomasi does acknowledge the potential role of intentional design in creating the spontaneous order that is human society:

… some one or some group had to decide to create the conditions in which the candy crystals could spontaneously form. … The makers of rock candy are in this way very like the designers of a constitution to govern a liberal society. Even without being able (or seeking) to control the details of the order that will emerge, both sets of orders require a maker, and that maker’s intentionality pervades the order that results. (p. 153)

He also believes that in constructing of the foundations of a social order we can and should be guided by our knowledge of the ways in which spontaneous orders develop, and that we can and should evaluate different foundations according to criteria important to us—a way to introduce considerations of social justice into a vision that would (at least as initially conceived) seem to exclude it:

According to Hayek, the rules of just individual conduct that most effectively govern a liberal social order are rules we discover, rather than rules we attempt to create. But this … does not eliminate the role of intentionality in the formation of social orders. … It is knowledge of molecular rules that makes human intentionality effective, given some norm that allows us to distinguish good candy making from bad. … With sugar crystal orders, so too with human social orders: once basic laws are discovered we employ intentionality to tweak the system to our purposes. In the domain of political institutions, these purposes are ultimately defined by a theory of justice. (p. 153-154)

But if our task is to discover the rules promoting the creation and growth of spontaneous orders that promote justice in human society, the analogy of the sugar crystals in solution paints an overly simplistic and misleading picture. Just moving from a physical to a biological analogy would be more realistic: An ecosystem of organisms evolving through time via the mechanism of natural selection would count as a spontaneous order, and would yield more insights into the characteristics of spontaneous orders. For example, organisms evolve to fill certain ecological niches, analogous to divisions of labor within an economy, and the complexity of both organisms and ecosystems increases over time, with no need for an intelligent designer.

The spontaneous order that is the global ecosystem also has its downsides as well. One major one is the existence of parasites: organisms that live off of others and have evolved quite ingenious ways to do so, for example getting first crack at its host’s food by replacing the host’s tongue, or manipulating the host’s nervous system to redirect the host’s behavior to its own ends. It’s hypothesized that much of evolutionary change, up to and including the “invention” of sex, has been in the service of reducing the impact of parasites. Another downside is the possibility of evolutionary “stagnation” or “maladaption”: Natural selection operates on a local scale, being based on the differential reproductive success of individual organisms, and does not take account more global or long-term considerations, leaving species vulnerable to extinction as environments change.

Modeling a spontaneous order simply as a physical system (even as just a metaphor) fails even more severely when applied to a society of relatively autonomous individuals who can both act and think for themselves, not to mention join with others in collective action—in Tomasi’s terms it’s like making rock candy when the sugar molecules can think for themselves and interfere with the recipe.

To better see what “society as a spontaneous order” entails, what we need for a model is something that’s complicated enough to be realistic but simpler than looking at society itself in all its rich history and complexity. We actually have such a model, and you’re using it to read this post; more on that in a follow-up post, in which I complete my discussion of society as a spontaneous order by focusing on the design, history, and pathologies of the Internet.

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1. The term “spontaneous order” is itself of relative recent vintage; the Google Books Ngram Viewer shows no occurrences of the term before the early 1800s, a blip of activity in the 1870s (only some of which are in reference to human society), another larger blip in the late 1940s and early 1950s (no doubt associated with the initial publication of Friedrich Hayek’s works), and then a fairly steady rise from the 1970s on as libertarian ideas received more popular and scholarly attention. However the general ideas behind the term “spontaneous order” date back several centuries; see for example Norman Barry’s essay “The Tradition of Spontaneous Order”.

People worth reading: Arnold Kling and the three languages of politics

I subscribe to almost two hundred blogs, covering a wide range of topics. I thought it would be fun to highlight some of the more interesting ones, in case anyone else finds any of them interesting and also to provide some insight into the particular things I tend to blog about. First up is Arnold Kling and his “Askblog”, the tagline of which is “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”.¹

It was the attitude expressed in Kling’s tagline that actually led to my subscribing to his blog. Kling is an economist of generally libertarian views, part of a group that includes Bryan Caplan, Art Carden, Tyler Cowen, and others (many formally or informally associated with George Mason University). Economists of any political persuasion can be dogmatic and dismissive of those holding opposing views, as can libertarians whether they’re economists or not. It’s a fairly common conceit among some that they arrived at their own views by a process of disinterested reasoning, and that by implication those who disagree with them are stupid or malicious or both.

So when Kling stopped blogging at Econlog and moved to his personal blog it was a pleasant surprise to read his philosophy of blogging:

I want to model a very particular style of discourse, as indicated by the tag line “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree.” … I will try to keep the posts here free of put-downs, snark, cheap shots, straw-man arguments, and taking the least charitable interpretation of what others say. So, if what you most enjoyed about my past blogging efforts were the put-downs, be prepared for disappointment with this incarnation.

That was enough to put Kling on my list of blogs to read regularly. In reading him since then I’ve found he’s generally kept to that stance, with only a few occasions where he’s become exasperated with what he thinks are others’ shoddy and self-serving arguments.

One of the most interesting features of Kling’s blog posts is his analysis of what he calls the “three-axis model” of politics:

My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.

This is in some respects Kling’s own adaptation of the ideas of Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, who’ve argued that people are predisposed to view moral issues according one or more of several “moral foundations”. (I blogged about this previously in the context of possible genetic influences on political views. Kling has also written an excellent essay discussing Haidt’s ideas.) Thus, for example, the “civilization/barbarism” axis roughly corresponds to a combination of the “loyalty/disloyalty”, “authority/subversion”, “sanctity/degradation”, and (to some extent) “fairness/cheating” moral foundations hypothesized by Haidt et.al.

Kling has expanded on the three-axis model in a book, The Three Languages of Politics. It’s well worth reading, and you can’t beat the price. Kling has also further discussed and applied the three-axis model in a number of blog posts.

Kling frequently takes his own advice (in the essay on Haidt linked to above) to “call your own fouls”, that is, to “expose intellectual error on our own side” and “search as hard for holes in our allies’ arguments as if they were opponents’ arguments”. This often leads him to espouse what I might call (in imitation of Andrew Sullivan) a “libertarianism of doubt”. For example, in an essay on libertarianism and group norms he points out that libertarians’ emphasis on individualism leads them to denigrate the tendency people have to conform to group norms, a tendency that arguably makes modern liberal (in the classical sense) and democratic societies possible. I think on balance this willingness to “think it possible that you may be mistaken” makes Kling a more effective advocate for libertarianism than the many others who are more certain and more strident.

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1. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I had a little bit of professional interaction with Arnold Kling many years ago when I worked at Netscape and he was starting up an Internet venture. He had the unfortunate experience of trying to use Netscape’s web server product at the time when Netscape was in its manic hyper-growth phase and its products’ quality often reflected that. (Dr. Kling, if you happen to read this, my apologies for the problems you had, and for any part I might have played in your going down that road. But do note that I was not and never have been a “salesman”; I’m an SE.)

What good is economic freedom (as measured by the Mercatus Center)?

Recently the Mercatus Center at George Mason University released its latest “Freedom in the 50 States” index ranking U.S. states by their overall levels of personal and economic freedom. I happened to see it via a post on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, but it’s been referenced in a number of places. I won’t rehash the comments of others, many of which criticize the way the various types of freedom are measured. Rather I had a somewhat different question, namely whether the measures of freedom in this report, particularly those for economic freedom, actually tell us anything useful.

The blog post announcing the new edition of the index claims that “regulatory freedom in particular is associated with states‘ growth in personal income”, but that analysis is apparently part of the full book-length edition not yet released. In the meantime I’m interested in a separate question at the heart of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians project, namely whether increased economic freedom makes a positive difference to the poorest members of society, as BHLers suggest, or whether “economic freedom” is really just a code word for policies that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, as many progressives suggest. The folks at the Mercatus Center were nice enough to release the data on which the rankings are based, so I can use that data to start exploring the question.

I should stop here and note that there are people far more competent than me to do this sort of analysis; however I think it’s important not to be intimidated by issues involving numbers and statistics, and I encourage others to take the same attitude. In support of my novice attempt I’ve created a Google spreadsheet containing the following variables of interest: the Mercatus Center values for economic freedom, fiscal freedom, and regulatory freedom for each of the 50 states in 2009 and 2011, and the percentage of people in each state participating in the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (“food stamps”) in December of 2009 and 2011.¹

I’m choosing SNAP participation as a proxy for poverty because ensuring people have enough to eat would presumably be a goal of any social safety net, no matter how basic. I would include SNAP participation rates for 2007 as well, but my source for the SNAP data doesn’t have percentage figures for that year and I’m too lazy to do the calculations myself.

I’ll assume for the sake of argument that libertarians are correct, and that increased economic freedom should reduce the number of people poor enough that they need food stamps. This might occur in multiple ways: greater economic freedom could produce general prosperity that raises the prospects of the poor as well; some economic freedoms, such as the reduction or elimination of occupation licensing restrictions, could benefit poor people specifically; and greater economic freedom might reduce the extent to which government “crowds out” private initiatives, so that people get fed via charities or support from their extended families and have less need to apply for SNAP.

Now for the analysis of this hypothesis: If you want to follow along at home, download the R statistical package in your preferred version (for WIndows, Mac, or Linux) and install it, and then download my data in comma separated value (CSV) format suitable for loading into R. Start R, go to the directory where you downloaded the data file (in my case /Users/hecker/Downloads on my Mac), and load the data into the variable fs (a “data frame” in R-speak):

> setwd("/Users/hecker/Downloads")
> fs <- read.table("freedom-snap.csv", sep=",", header=TRUE)
> fs
state st econfree2009 regfree2009 fiscfree2009 snappct200912
1         Alabama AL      24.9388     -7.4383       32.377          16.8
2          Alaska AK      -4.8841      8.9700      -13.854          10.2
3         Arizona AZ      14.6838      9.5361        5.148          15.2
...

(The sep="," parameter tells R that this is a CSV file, and the header=TRUE parameter tells R to use the text fields in the first line of the file as names for the columns.)

As a first step in the analysis I’ll use the plot() function to plot the values of fs$snappct201112 (the percentage of the population in each state receiving food stamps in December 2011) against the values of fs$econfree2011 (the Mercatus economic freedom value for each state in 2011):

> plot(fs$econfree2011,fs$snappct201112)
>

R can generate very professional-looking plots but in this case I don’t need the frills, just the following simple but nonetheless useful scatter plot:

(If you’d like you can click on the graph to see a larger version.)

At least at first glance there doesn’t appear to be any relationship between the level of economic freedom in each state and the percentage of that state’s population poor enough to be using food stamps. But I have a powerful statistical package at my service, so I’ll do a little more work. In particular, I can compute the correlation coefficient between economic freedom and SNAP participation, a measure of how the two variables are linearly related:

> cor(fs$econfree2011,fs$snappct201112)
[1] 0.03106044
>

Perfect positive correlation would correspond to a correlation coefficient of 1.0; in that case SNAP participation, and thus presumably poverty, would directly increase as economic freedom increases. Perfect negative correlation would correspond to a correlation coefficient of -1.0; in that case SNAP participation, and thus presumably poverty, would directly decrease as economic freedom increases. But in this case the correlation coefficient at 0.031 is very close to zero, so my initial conclusion is that economic freedom, at least as measured by the Mercatus Center, doesn’t appear to make a difference either way.

What about if I measure the correlations with regulatory freedom and fiscal freedom respectively? Here are the results for those calculations:

> cor(fs$regfree2011,fs$snappct201112)
[1] -0.2284056
> cor(fs$fiscfree2011,fs$snappct201112)
[1] 0.1714178
>

Now I see some correlation, although it’s relatively weak: increased regulatory freedom is associated with slightly decreased SNAP participation (slightly less poverty), while increased fiscal freedom is associated with slightly increased SNAP participation (slightly more poverty). Since economic freedom is calculated as the sum of fiscal freedom and regulatory freedom, these effects (if they actually exist) cancel each other out when considering the effects of economic freedom as a whole.

Are the correlations with regulatory freedom and fiscal freedom really significant? There are statistical techniques that can address that question, but I’m not well-versed enough in statistics to do a good job of investigating it. Instead I can get a feel for how fuzzy these correlations are by creating scatter plots as I did with economic freedom above. This time I’ll get a little fancier and put real x and y axis labels on the graph, and use the two-letter state codes to label the points instead of using circles:

> plot(fs$regfree2011,fs$snappct201112,xlab="Regulatory Freedom (2011)",
+   ylab="SNAP Participation Percentage (Dec 2011)",pch=NA_integer_)
> text(fs$regfree2011,fs$snappct201112,labels=fs$st)
>

(The parameter pch=NA_integer_ causes the points to be initially plotted without any symbols displayed, and then the labels=fs$st parameter to the text() function causes the state codes to be plotted where the symbols would normally go.)

Here’s the resulting graph for SNAP participation percentages vs. regulatory freedom:

It looks as if there’s a slight tendency for states with greater regulatory freedom to have fewer people on food stamps, but still the data are all over the map in general.

I’ll do the same sort of graph for fiscal freedom:

> plot(fs$fiscfree2011,fs$snappct201112,xlab="Fiscal Freedom (2011)",
+   ylab="SNAP Participation Percentage (Dec 2011)",pch=NA_integer_)
> text(fs$fiscfree2011,fs$snappct201112,labels=fs$st)
>

Here any correlation is even harder to discern, though if I squint I can see a very slight tendency for states with greater fiscal freedom to have higher rates of SNAP participation.

I can also get a feel for how real these correlations are by looking at data for other years. In this case the only other data I have is for 2009; rather than plot it I’ll go straight to the correlation coefficients:

> cor(fs$econfree2009,fs$snappct200912)
[1] 0.02359412
> cor(fs$regfree2009,fs$snappct200912)
[1] -0.129513
> cor(fs$fiscfree2009,fs$snappct200912)
[1] 0.1000464
>

The correlations here are even smaller than those for 2011, at just over half the size. If I looked at the 2009 data first I’d be inclined to say that there’s almost no correlation at all between regulatory freedom and SNAP participation, and ditto for fiscal freedom. As before, the correlation of SNAP participation with economic freedom (the sum of the two other freedoms) is essentially zero.

To conclude, we have an index of economic freedom that was created through a fairly sophisticated process by an organization motivated to do a good job of it, given its goal to promote the benefits of free markets. And yet according to its own measures increasing the level of economic freedom in a given state seems to produce little if any improvement in the plight of the poor in that state, at least based on one plausible measure of poverty. On the other hand, progressives may be disconcerted as well: the sorts of policies advocated by free market think tanks under the banner of “economic freedom” don’t seem to be making poverty worse either.

Maybe I chose the wrong measure of poverty, or perhaps my amateur analysis is flawed in some other way. What’s the real story? Does economic freedom as measured by the Mercatus Center actually help the poor or not? I’ll leave the task of producing a final answer to that question to wiser heads than mine.

UPDATE: I replaced an incorrect image for the first scatter plot (SNAP participation vs. economic freedom for 2011) with the correct one.

UPDATE 2: I added the line to read the data into a data frame; for some reason this got garbled in the original post.

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1. The values for economic freedom, regulatory freedom, and fiscal freedom in 2009 are from rows 239, 237, and 13 respectively and columns BB through CY inclusive in the 2007-2011 sheet in the “Freedom in the 50 States” data spreadsheet [XLS]; the values for 2011 are from the same rows, columns CZ through EW inclusive. (Note that the economic freedom values are calculated in the spreadsheet as the sum of the fiscal freedom and regulatory freedom values.)

The values for SNAP participation for 2009 are from the table “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: Persons participating as share of the population” on page 4 of the December 2009 SNAP participation tables [PDF], part of the 2009 SNAP data published by the Food Research and Action Center. The corresponding values for 2011 are from the table ”Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: Share of population participating” on page 4 of the December 2011 SNAP participation tables [PDF], linked to from the 2011 and 2012 SNAP data page on the same site.

Thoughts on market democracy, part 1: Capitalistic economic freedoms as vital aspects of liberty

This is part 1 of a projected four-part series, of which the only other part I’ve completed is the first half of part 2.

A while back I read the essays in the online symposium on John Tomasi’s book Free Market Fairness at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians group blog. I’ve previously noted why I think the book and its topic are important. But what exactly is “free market fairness”? It is Tomasi’s particular take on a broader concept he calls “market democracy”:

Market democracy is a deliberative form of liberalism that is sensitive to the moral insights of libertarianism. Market democracy combines … four ideas …: (1) capitalistic economic freedoms as vital aspects of liberty, (2) society as a spontaneous order, (3) just and legitimate political institutions as acceptable to all who make their lives among them, and (4) social justice as the ultimate standard of political evaluation. (p. xv)

This paragraph packs a lot into a few words. In this series of blog posts I’ll give my personal thoughts on the idea of market democracy, not as a professional (or even amateur) philosopher or economist, but simply as someone who is interested in this general line of thought and somewhat sympathetic to it. Do not expect sophisticated arguments or penetrating insights; I have many questions and few answers.

The first sentence of the above paragraph situates Tomasi’s project in the general history and taxonomy of political philosophy. The main point of interest to non-philosophers is that there’s actually a common intellectual heritage between political “liberals” in the U.S. sense (i.e., those generally supportive of government and its associated regulatory and redistribution schemes) and those who oppose them and call for less government and freer markets. Tomasi’s goal is to draw upon that common heritage and create a hybrid philosophy that acknowledges the importance of the free market but does not dismiss the concerns of those concerned with “social justice” in the general sense. The first two ideas of market democracy come out of the “classic liberal” and libertarian traditions, and the second two from the “modern” or “high liberal” tradition.

Let’s start with the first component of Tomasi’s concept of market democracy, “capitalistic economic freedoms as vital aspects of liberty”. By this Tomasi means that the freedom to engage in typical capitalist activities—owning private property (including the “means of production”), starting a business, producing products and services and selling them in the market, accumulating wealth as a reward for one’s efforts—should be thought of as equally important as other freedoms, for example the freedom to freely speak one’s mind, to practice a religion (or not worship at all), and so on.

Tomasi and others have crafted sophisticated philosophical arguments as to why economic freedom should be viewed as equally important as freedom of speech, religion, etc. Tomasi in particular sees economic freedom as necessary to support “responsible self-authorship”:

A just society is one whose institutions respect citizens from every social class as free and equal self-governing agents. Market democracy affirms a thick conception of economic freedom … as a requirement stemming from its foundational commitment to respect persons as free and equal moral agents: responsible self-authors must be free to make a wide range of decisions in the economic domains of their lives. …

To restrict the capacity of people to make economic choices or, worse, to treat their economic activities merely as a means to the social ends of others, would violate the dignity of such persons and so would be to treat them unjustly. (p. 97-98)

Others have created equally sophisticated arguments as to why economic freedoms really aren’t basic. I’m not equipped to adequately evaluate and critique all the philosophical arguments. However I do have some questions as to whether or not most people in practice would see economic freedoms as basic, and thus would treat perceived violations of those freedoms as a moral wrong comparable to violations of other freedoms.

Here I follow the theory of “moral foundations” formulated by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, that “several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of ‘intuitive ethics’”, that people are genetically and culturally predisposed to weight these factors in different ways, and that these different weightings are associated with the “conservative” vs. (modern) “liberal” divide we see in politics. Stated in these terms the overall theory seems plausible to me, even if Haidt and colleagues haven’t (yet) got all the details right.

One of the claimed moral foundations is liberty/oppression, associated with the “feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty”. Ravi Iyer, Haidt, and colleagues recently published research claiming that libertarians form a distinct group from liberals and conservatives in their weighting the liberty/harm moral foundation as of high importance, and weighting other moral foundations low in comparison. Libertarians also show up as a coherent group expressing similar sentiments in other survey-based categorizations such as the Pew Research Political Typology. Clearly we can expect libertarians to value economic freedom and to treat it as a basic freedom. But what about other people?

One way to approach this question is to look at extreme cases in which economic freedoms are egregiously violated. Consider for example the Arab Spring, which most people now think of (if they think of it at all) as a straightforward struggle of people for democracy and against dictatorship, now potentially hijacked by Islamists seeking to translate religious belief into political power. But the original spark of the Arab Spring had nothing to do with promoting democracy or Islam. It was the anger and frustration of Mohamed Bouazizi, “a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, in protest of the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation that he reported was inflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides”. While some of the details of Bouazizi’s story remain fuzzy (was street vending actually illegal, or just obstructed by corrupt police officers in search of bribes? did the official actually slap Bouazizi or not?), there’s no doubt that the root of Bouazizi’s protest was his need and desire to provide for his family through commercial trade, and the perceived obstruction of that quest by agents of the state.

The people of Tunisia responded to Mohamed Bouazizi’s act with protests of their own, which in turn inspired protests in other countries. While the motivations of the protestors differed, a common theme was anger at governments that did not provide economic opportunities for the people subject to their rule. Bouazizi’s story arguably affected the protestors in the same general way that the death of religious martyrs or attacks on civil rights protesters have affected others. Perhaps people see the situations as morally equivalent in some deep way, and perhaps this felt sense of moral equivalence indicates that we should indeed treat economic freedom as equal in importance to other freedoms whose violations we view as morally wrong.

However I think the situation is more complicated than that, because it’s possible that the strong reaction to Bouazizi’s act was based on its invoking multiple moral foundations simultaneously. People might feel outraged because the state committed an act of aggression against him, taking his goods and preventing him from selling them (liberty/oppression moral foundation). However the outrage might also be because the state’s action resulted in Bouazizi not being able to provide for himself and his family (care/harm moral foundation), or because it prevented Bouazizi from reaping the rewards that his work might have earned him in other circumstances (cheating/fairness foundation, with an emphasis on fairness as proportionality of rewards). It’s also possible that the fact that Bouazizi was (allegedly) slapped by a woman added to the outrage felt by those in the male-dominated traditional societies of the Arab world (sanctity/degradation foundation).

One way to unravel this is to imagine hypothetical scenarios in which the effect of the other moral foundations is removed or altered. For example, suppose Mohamed Bouazizi were a prosperous merchant who already owned several successful produce trucks, so that the state’s actions might have mildly impacted his income but not fundamentally threatened his well-being and that of his family. Would thus lessening the relevance of the care/harm foundation decrease the sympathy others would have for Bouazizi and the outrage they might feel? Or suppose that Tunisia’s government were widely perceived as legitimate and its police force free of corruption, and the state’s actions against Bouazizi were based on his violating anti-street vending ordinances that had been duly considered and passed by a democratically-elected legislature. Would some people now see Bouazizi himself as in violation of moral norms, namely those related to the authority/subversion foundation?

The problem here, at least for me, is that a philosophical argument that a freedom is basic (and thus deserving of special protection) will ultimately stand or fall in the world at large on the degree to which a claimed violation of that freedom can be perceived as a moral wrong by the mass of people operating from their different weightings of the various moral foundations. An act that violates all or most of the moral foundations would likely never be seen as moral, while an act that violates none or at most one of the moral foundations could be seen as morally neutral by most of the population. Since different people weight the various moral foundations differently, and since only a small fraction of the population appears to treat the liberty/oppression foundation as primary, I suspect people are inevitably going to disagree on the extent to which restrictions on economic freedom constitute a moral wrong, and hence on whether economic freedom is seen as a basic right.¹

This is particularly true since freedoms are typically thought of as inhering to individuals, and so much economic activity is mediated not through individuals but through collective institutions, most notably corporations. Unfortunately Tomasi doesn’t really address the role of corporations in Free Market Fairness. For example, in the course of claiming that “many life experiences have a moral value that can only be appreciated firsthand”, Tomasi gives the (real-life) example of Amy, “a college dropout who has an entry-level job as a pet groomer” but through hard work and savings is able to own her own pet grooming business, Amy’s Pup-in-the-Tub: “What does it mean to Amy to walk into her own shop each morning or, when leaving after a particularly long day, to look back and read her name up on the sign?” (p. 66).

Clearly we can emotionally identify with Amy, just as we can identify with Mohamed Bouazizi, and like Bouazizi’s her experience supports Tomasi’s notion of individuals as responsible self-authors who should enjoy economic freedoms as a basic right. However Tomasi leaves unsaid exactly how the economic freedoms of Amy the individual relate and extend to Amy’s Pup-in-the-Tub the (presumably) incorporated business, and as with Bouazizi’s case it may be worth dissecting the relationship a bit.

Perhaps the fact of incorporation is irrelevant and, to echo Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as a corporation, but only individual men and women, namely Amy in this case. But this approach seems incomplete, since corporations in fact can do things that individuals cannot, such as owning property in perpetuity or taking actions without any particular individual necessarily being liable for those actions. Or perhaps corporations should be treated as persons in their own right, with their own rights to economic freedom (just as, for example, the US Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision held that corporations, unions, and other associations have First Amendment rights to free speech). If so, how does that affect Tomasi’s argument. For example, if I go down to the courthouse and register Philosophical Enterprise XLVII LLC, am I bringing a new moral agent and responsible self-author into the world?

From a moral perspective perhaps Amy’s Pup-in-the-Tub should be seen as simply a extension of Amy herself as its founder and head, just as (for example) Apple the corporation has been seen as an extension of Steve Jobs. If so, what happens when Amy sells the business to someone else (or, in the case of Apple, when Steve Jobs died and Tim Cook took over as CEO)? Are the economic freedoms of the corporation now in the service of the responsible self-authorship of the new management? What about the employees of Amy’s Pup-in-the-Tub (or of Apple)? Should their status as responsible self-authors be taken into account when considering the economic freedoms of the business employing them, or are they simply considered “factors of production” in this context? Is it specifically Amy’s role as owner of Amy’s Pub-in-the-Tub that is important—that the economic freedoms granted to a business are justified as enhancing the responsible self-authorship of its owners? What if Amy sells her business to PetSmart (NASDAQ: PETM) and ownership is dispersed among potentially millions of shareholders, many of whom may hold an ownership position for only brief periods of time?

Note that I’m not arguing that economic freedom should not be a basic right because corporations can do Bad Things. (Some of Elizabeth Anderson’s contribution to the BHL symposium reads this way.) Rather it’s just not clear to me how Tomasi’s argument based on responsible self-authorship extends from the world of individual proprietors and small businesses to the world of large publicly-traded corporations in which ownership is for the most part divorced from management, and those doing the management (especially at senior levels) amount only a small fraction of the total number of employees whose activities provide value to the firm. (Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson make a similar point in their review of Free Market Fairness.)

Where does all this leave me in my personal thinking? Here are my tentative conclusions:

First, I agree with Tomasi that there’s a difference between believing that economic freedom is of equal importance to other freedoms and believing that economic freedom is the most important freedom, or even the only freedom that truly matters. We can be liberals (in the classic sense) without being libertarians.

Second, given (what I believe to be) the evolved and innate nature of much human morality I suspect that most people will judge economic freedom as important to the extent that it supports (or does not conflict with) other moral foundations beyond liberty/oppression, such as preventing harm or ensuring proportionality of rewards. In other words, most people are not libertarians and (in my opinion) are unlikely to ever be so. As a non-libertarian myself I don’t think we have to judge all restrictions on economic freedom as equally bad, to believe (for example) that in a modern democracy the imposition of a particular regulation or an increase in a particular tax rate carries anywhere near the moral weight of what was done to Mohamed Bouazizi.

Finally, although I think the right of people to join together in corporations and other collective organizations (e.g., unions) in pursue of economic goals is an important fundamental right, I don’t think we necessarily have to treat corporations as completely equivalent to individuals in all respects. Absent a more compelling argument (which may exist, for all I know) I think we could legitimately restrict a corporation’s freedom to act, in ways that we might not consider legitimate when applied to individuals.

What I believe we do have to do, however, is to treat economic freedoms with respect, whether we consider them basic or not, and to require reasonable justifications for government actions that would restrict them. Again, we can disagree as to what exactly “reasonable” means in this context, with different people making different arguments as to what restrictions on economic freedoms count as unacceptable. My point is simply that we cannot simply dismiss those who feel their economic freedoms are being violated in various ways, any more than we can dismiss those concerned about their political, religious, or other freedoms.

This completes my thoughts on the first of Tomasi’s core ideas of market democracy; I’ll take up the second idea, society as a spontaneous order, in my next post when (if?) I have time to write it.

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1. Again, to be absolutely clear, I am not making a philosophical argument here. (Even if I wanted to make such an argument, I’m not well-versed enough in the various philosophical theories of morality and ethics to make it coherent.) Rather I’m concerned with what ordinary people might see as morally right and wrong in practice. To the extent that people engage in motivated reasoning and are predisposed to do so, even a compelling philosophical argument about morality (one based on reasonable premises and sound deductive logic) may fall on deaf ears.

From Symphony Woods to the Commonwealth of Belle Isle

For the most part I’ve stayed out of the debate over the “Inner Arbor” plan proposed for consideration by the Columbia Association Board of Directors. For the record, I think the idea of having an everyday “there there” in Symphony Woods (i.e., not just Merriweather Post Pavilion) is a good idea; I especially like the idea of building a new Central Branch library as part of an overall Symphony Woods cultural complex. Bottom line: I like the proposal, have signed the petition to support it, and encourage others to do so as well.

However I take partial exception to Wordbones’s declaration that this proposal is an example of the dictum “make no little plans”. At its heart the Inner Arbor plan basically involves constructing an office building, a couple of theaters, a parking garage, and some additional indoor and outdoor amenities. It’s big in comparison to what was previously proposed for Symphony Woods, namely a fountain and a small cafe, but it’s fairly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

For an example of truly gonzo development ideas we have to leave present-day Columbia and go elsewhere, in particular to Detroit, the symbol of American urban decay and now the proposed location of the Commonwealth of Belle Isle. Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River currently used as an urban park; at 982 acres it is about 25 times the size of Symphony Woods and almost three times the size of the area covered by the Downtown Columbia plan. Like most of Detroit it’s fallen on hard times, and the city is trying to figure out what to do with it. A local real estate developer, Rodney Lockwood, has offered the city $1 billion to buy the island and develop it. And not just any old development either—Lockwood proposes to turn Belle Isle into a separate 35,000-person “commonwealth” within the United States, with its own independent (and relatively minimal) government, an almost total exemption from Federal taxes, separate citizenship requirements, and eventually its own currency, the Rand.¹

As the name of the currency might have told you, the Commonwealth of Belle Isle is another in a string of proposed schemes to establish a libertarian society free of government meddling and dedicated to the principles of liberty and free enterprise—the successor to (among others) space colonies, seasteading, and the Free State Project. It also has connections with the Charter Cities movement promoted by economist Paul Romer, which in turn was inspired by the real-life examples of city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore.² And of course—though Lockwood goes to some lengths to deny it—the Commonwealth of Belle Isle could also function as an on-shore tax haven, the chilly equivalent of those sunny Caribbean islands where wealthy people park their assets and U.S. corporations establish shell entities to limit their overall corporate tax burden.

An ambitious plan requires an ambitious approach to promote it. The Columbia Association has provided us with a typical slide presentation, while Lockwood has written a 158-page book set 30 years in the future, as a former resident of Detroit returns to marvel at the transformation of Belle Isle and the consequent revitalization of the regional economy. Admittedly it’s not high on drama or conflict; in one fairly typical conversation the two main characters discuss the fine points of Belle Isle’s real estate tax structure (a variant of 19th-century reformer Henry George’s “single tax”). I doubt that Belle Isle the book will achieve the best-seller status of the works of Lockwood’s hero Ayn Rand.³

Lockwood’s book reminds me not so much of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead but rather Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a 19th-century tract-disguised-as-fiction in which the protagonist goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to find it transformed into a socialist paradise.⁴ Bellamy’s book was surprisingly popular; according to Wikipedia, “It was the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. … In the United States alone, over 162 ‘Bellamy Clubs’ sprang up to discuss and propagate the book’s ideas.”

All forgotten now, of course, but not written in vain: The ideas of Bellamy and others eventually were toned down, adapted, and transmuted into the welfare-state capitalism of the New Deal and the Great Society, the milieu from which an idealistic real estate developer named James Rouse emerged bearing the dream of a place that would be “not a perfect city or a utopia, but rather an effort to simply develop a better city”. I suspect the libertarian Belle Isle of 2043, like Bellamy’s socialist Boston of 2000, is a fantasy that is doomed to stay within the pages of a book. But although I’ve been a bit snarky about the concept (though not nearly as snarky as some) I’m loath to dismiss or denigrate the spirit behind it.

I think we could use more experiments in urban living and governance, even somewhat oddball ones. Columbia was a noble experiment, though I think ultimately a failed one: In an America in love with suburbia it inevitably assumed a fairly typical suburban character, and (as I’ve written elsewhere) its relative prosperity and socioeconomic equality is arguably less due to its founding ideals and more a function of its role as a bedroom community for an ever-growing Federal government presence in Maryland.

In a sense the Commonwealth of Belle Isle is a 21st century version of Columbia, projected through the lens of a free market ideology. If any part of the Belle Isle vision comes to fruition it’s possible it will simply become a gated community for the 1% and their domestic servants (or “home managers” as the book has it), a supersized and urbanized version of Gibson Island. But who knows? And if Belle Isle does turn out to be more than that perhaps it will hold lessons for the rest of us. At some point in the future Columbia, Howard County, and Maryland may find that Uncle Sam doesn’t come round with presents as often as he used to. In preparation for that day we need more and better ideas on how to promote private sector economic growth, and we shouldn’t be picky on where we look for them. If an idea is a good one then who cares where we steal it from?

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1. According to the Commonwealth of Belle Isle FAQ, individuals seeking to move to Belle Isle “will have to post a citizenship fee, which will probably be in the $300,000 range, plus have a working command of English.” In comparison the total wealth of the median US household is around $60,000, with liquid assets much lower. Although it’s not mentioned in the FAQ, Lockwood has separately proposed reserving 20% of the citizenship slots for non-wealthy but deserving applicants.

2. I should note that Professor Romer’s main foray into real-world charter cities, a proposed venture in Honduras, didn’t go too well; see for example this blog post at Reason.com. However hope springs eternal.

3. It may however be of interest to at least some Columbians: Just as the Columbia Association has been characterized as an over-grown homeowners association, the fictional government of the Commonwealth of Belle Isle resembles nothing so much as a CA on steroids, with its own police force, judiciary, tax system, and currency, but still concerned about the fine details of urban planning, down to the building materials used. This can get a bit absurd sometimes: In the course of giving his friend a tour of Belle Isle one character remarks, “Concrete doesn’t meet our aesthetic test. So we don’t allow any use of it. … In the Soviet era the Russians built the ugliest buildings in the world using primarily concrete. So we figure communism and concrete are linked. Not here! In our free-market world, we go the other direction.”

4. I realize that some may think the real-life Boston of the year 2000 was a bastion of socialism (though no paradise). All I can say to those folks is that they should read the works of Bellamy and others of that time to see the sort of system actual American socialists wanted to establish.

Free market fairness and the challenges of the 21st century

Many people recall that John Maynard Keynes characterized “practical men” as being the “slaves of some defunct economist.” Fewer people recall that Keynes accorded political philosophers equal weight in influencing the opinions of those practical men. I note this to justify why I spent several hours of my spare time reading the political philosopher John Tomasi’s new book Free Market Fairness, which according to the blurb “offers a bold new way of thinking about politics, economics, and justice—one that will challenge readers on both the left and right.” It’s also why I now feel compelled to spend a bit more time recommending it to others and outlining why I think it’s important.

As Tomasi himself notes in the book, political philosophy is not like mathematics, an exercise in pure thought divorced from everyday considerations. Politics is the mechanism by which some individuals and groups acquire and exercise power over others in pursuit of their own interests. Political philosophy in some sense is then just a special case of the general contention that we reason not to discover truth but in order to convince others: Its goal is to furnish plausible arguments as to why the institutions of society should be arranged to some people’s liking and not to others’.

However political philosophy can also serve a higher goal of pointing to more productive and congenial ways of managing those political conflicts that will inevitably arise, and more effective ways of evolving the institutions of society to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”–to quote the Constitution created by politicians influenced by the defunct political philosopher John Locke.

In general I see Free Market Fairness as being written in service of this higher goal, as part of a “research program” (as Tomasi puts it) to explore new and better ways to meet the political, economic, and related challenges of the 21st century. As Thomas P.M. Barnett emphasizes, we are partway through the decades-long project of integrating billions of people into the global economy, raising their standard of living and opening up new opportunities for personal freedom and fulfillment.¹ We also look to technological and economic innovation to help address predicted crises related to climate change and resource depletion, among others. Historically liberal democracies with free market economies have proved best at meeting such challenges, as evidenced by their surviving and thriving while other systems did not.

However such societies face their own internal challenges in mustering the political will and skill to effectively promote globalization and innovation: As more people participate in the global economy, their entry into the labor force supporting globally-integrated supply chains erodes the wage premium that many workers in more developed countries were previously able to command, contributing to stagnation in the growth of those workers’ real incomes. This trend is made worse by technological advances that enable software to increasingly substitute for people, extending the possibility of wage stagnation from unskilled and semi-skilled workers to college-educated middle-class professionals.² Finally, the global economy of “real work” is tied to a complex global financial system prone to periodic crises, crises which further increase the stress and instability placed on the bulk of the population not part of the global economic elite.

These trends imperil the project of innovation-fueled globalization: Why should people support policies that may make the world better in the long run but leave themselves worse off (at least in the short run)? And how should politicians respond to these concerns: With a simple reiteration of the joys of capitalism and a dismissal of concerns about the disruptions the future might bring? Or with a call to slow down or even turn away from globalization and economic growth and innovation? Both of these seem insufficient to the situation in which we find ourselves.

Or perhaps there is another option: Pursue growth, innovation, and globalization through policies that promote a dynamic market economy, but do so in a way that limits the stress placed on those likely to be adversely impacted by the changes associated with such dynamism, and helps ensure that changes in the global economy will benefit the many and not just the few. Free Market Fairness can be seen as providing the philosophical underpinnings for such a project.

In the coming week the folks at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog will be hosting an online symposium on Free Market Fairness. If past experience is any indication they’ll be focusing most closely on the details of Tomasi’s philosophical arguments. If I have time I’ll give my own layperson’s take on Tomasi’s ideas and how likely it is that they’ll have any impact in the real world of politics.

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1. See for example Barnett’s column “In Globalized World, Time is On America’s Side“, his book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, or the full “World according to Tom Barnett” brief on YouTube.↩

2. For a brief and relatively optimistic discussion of this trend see Marc Andreessen’s column “Why Software is Eating the World” in the Wall Street Journal; for a more nuanced book-length treatment see Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. See also Venkatesh Rao’s Forbes column “The Rise of Developeronomics” for interesting thoughts on software developers as the key factor of production in this new world.↩

Are you a “statist”?

Some people are fond of using the term “statist” to describe their political opponents. (I’ve never heard of anyone using it to describe themselves.) For example, in response to a HoCo Rising post on a fundraiser held by Howard County council member Courtney Watson, Bill Bissenas commented that both Watson and Guy Guzzone (her rumored opponent in the next county executive race) are “statists of the highest order,” in Watson’s case “despite [her] efforts to convince folks otherwise.” In response to which Dave Bittner asked Bill, “you use the term, ‘statist’ a lot. Could you define it for me?”

Bill provided his own answer, which basically amounted to an admonition to “look it up” and a recommendation to read the works of Mark Levin, Thomas Sowell, and Ayn Rand. I was going to provide my own answer in comments, but since it threatened to run long I’m posting it here. Needless to say, this is my own opinion and not an attempt to speak for Bill or anyone else.

If you go by the “ultimate authority” (i.e., Wikipedia), “statism” is simply “a term used by political scientists to describe the belief that, for whatever reason, a government should control either economic or social policy or both to some degree.” However I think in practice a lot of people use the term more loosely than that, to refer more generally to issues relating to the increased power, scope, and actions of government in lots of different areas, and in this context there are several dimensions of “statism” to contemplate.

While these dimensions are interrelated to at least some degree they are not identical, so people can cherry pick from them to suit their own political inclinations and goals. Here (in no particular order) are what I think are the major dimensions along which you could be “statist” (or not, as the case may be):

1. Supporting high (or at least higher) taxes. But you could lower taxes while at the same time raising government spending if you’re willing to run larger deficits (see items 3 and 6 below), like George W. Bush and lots of other politicians (“conservative” or otherwise) past and present.

2. Supporting such measures as warrantless domestic wiretapping and general interception of Internet traffic, attempts to achieve visibility into or even emergency control over private corporate networks, onerous security procedures for air travel, or general surveillance of suspect populations and groups without specific evidence of criminal activity or intent. For the most past these and related measures have had pretty much unanimous cross-party support since 9/11, with no signs of anything changing in the foreseeable future.

3. Supporting lengthy and expensive overseas military engagements and/or military spending that is arguably often in excess of the real needs of national security. See also item 2.

4. Engaging in “nanny-state” paternalism (see Bill’s past comments on Ken Ulman and the smoking ban in Howard County parks) and various types of interference in the private lives of citizens (see Rick Santorum and any number of other social conservatives in the GOP).

5. Promoting government interference in the economy and general market distortions of various types. This is generally considered to be a specialty of Democrats, but is far from unknown among Republicans, especially when done through targeted tax breaks and/or special protections for favored industries (e.g., copyright and other IP-related legislation).

6. Supporting high government spending and tolerating high deficits (which are often but not always associated with high spending). From a “statist” perspective this is considered especially bad if it’s spending on social programs that are at least partially redistributive in nature. Some exempt targeted tax breaks (which either raise taxes on the rest of us or increase deficits) and various corporate subsidies (see item 5) and/or high military and intelligence spending (see items 2 and 3) from being “statist”, although it’s not clear why they should get a pass here.

If you take items 1 through 6 together, I don’t think there’s a major national politician who’s not “statist,” except for Ron Paul. (And I suspect that even Paul has some “statist” tendencies here and there—though Paul supporters are free to disagree.) I suspect almost all (if not all) local Howard County politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, would also fail the “statist” test. In practice “statist” is often just used as a pejorative term for politicians and policies people disagree with—from that point of view it’s basically the new “liberal”.

Some people who use the term “statist” also come to what I think are silly conclusions, for example that Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, etc., are “socialist” countries. Canada actually scores significantly higher than the U.S. on the 2012 Index of Economic Freedom produced by the Heritage Foundation, Denmark is practically tied with the US, and both Finland and Sweden are also ranked in the top 25 countries worldwide. These countries are not “socialist” by any reasonable definition (e.g., government control of the means of production); rather they are simply capitalist countries (some of them more capitalist than the U.S.) that have relatively high spending on social programs.

The bottom line is that I discount anyone who uses the term “statist” unless they happen to be principled libertarians and are consistent in their positions on each of the dimensions of “statism” I’ve outlined above. Which is not to say that I think principled libertarians are always or even mostly right in terms of either their policy prescriptions and how they reach their conclusions, but that’s a subject for another day.

If taxation is theft, are we recipients of stolen goods?

I’m still enjoying reading and commenting on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog. Today while reading a post on the deserving vs. the undeserving poor a commenter brought up that perennial topic, is taxation theft? More specifically, many (but not necessarily all) libertarians believe that the state has no valid claim to extract taxes from people (backed up by the implied threat of physical force), and in that sense even a democratically-elected government is nevertheless the moral equivalent of Tony Soprano and his crew.

I don’t want to rehash the arguments for or against this position; the relevant Wikipedia article has a good summary. I personally believe the proposition is not really provable one way or the other, as it ultimately depends on assumptions that are more in the nature of subjective judgments than testable propositions. What I’m interested in for purposes of this post is a different question, namely whether people act in a way that’s consistent with the proposition that taxation is theft.

For example, suppose a thief or one of his confederates gifts you with a valuable piece of property, property that you strongly suspect is stolen, as in the episode of the Sopranos where Paulie delivers a big-screen TV unasked to the home of Meadow’s soccer coach. If you’re like most people you’ll probably proceed as follows: First, you might refuse the gift. If that’s not possible (as in the Sopranos episode, where refusing to go along with Paulie would be a bad idea) then you might accept the gift and then either take it to the authorities or try to return it to its rightful owner. If neither of those is possible (Paulie would be mad if the coach went to the police, and the coach has no idea from whom the TV was stolen) then you might give the gift to charity, so that you yourself would not be a willing recipient of stolen goods kept for your own use, and thus morally complicit in the original theft.

Now let’s consider taxation, and assume that taxation is morally equivalent to theft. The typical person both pays taxes and also enjoys certain benefits which are paid for through taxes: pure public goods such as national defense and scientific research, other goods such as access to public roads, and in some cases goods provided directly to individuals, such as Social Security or Medicare benefits.

It’s quite conceivable that for many people the total value of those goods received over their lives is in excess, and sometimes in considerable excess, of the total taxes they paid over their lives. (For example, for many people the amount they receive in Social Security benefits exceeds the amount they would have received had they not paid Social Security taxes and instead invested the money themselves.)

If you are (or could be) one of these people, and if you believe that taxation is theft, what should you do? In effect you may well have received stolen property, or at least the equivalent of stolen property, since the excess benefits you received were possible only because other people were compelled to pay their taxes under threat of force. Should you attempt to make restitution in some way? Certainly you don’t know exactly from whom those taxes were extracted, but perhaps morality demands that you at least make a good faith estimate of what you have received illegitimately, and donate an equivalent amount to a deserving private charity.

Clearly most people don’t do this, but then most people aren’t libertarians. Do any libertarians attempt this exercise? This is not a rhetorical question; I’m genuinely interested in how a principled libertarian might approach this problem. I can think of some possible responses. For example, it may be that there is no practical way of determining whether you have received benefits from government over and above taxes paid, and thus you have no way of being certain whether you have in fact received stolen property in the sense discussed here.

But I’m just an amateur political philosopher, and no libertarian to boot, and I haven’t thought that deeply about the problem. I’m sure there are people out there who have, perhaps even among this blog’s readers, and I’m interested in seeing what sort of responses they might make.

Bleeding heart libertarians

For those of you who haven’t heard, the Howard County local blogosphere has a new entrant, as Corey Andrews has started a new HoCoLibertarian blog, to get a foot in the door for libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives in Howard County. (Note that Andrews is also planning to run for the Board of Education in 2012; for more information see his campaign blog.) To help welcome his new blog I’m going to devote this blog post to libertarians, more specifically to Bleeding Heart Libertarians, a great new group blog I’ve been following avidly (and occasionally commenting on).

I happen to be a life-long Democrat. Why would I be interested in libertarianism? My casual interest goes back a ways to my space activist days (when I encountered a lot of libertarians) and continued through my time working for Silicon Valley IT companies (yet more libertarians) and working in the free and open source software space (ditto). However I’ve been paying more attention to libertarian ideas lately for three reasons:

• First, I’m with Thomas P.M. Barnett and others in thinking that the key to future U.S. and world security is growing the middle class in developing countries and integrating more and more countries into the global economy. That means that spurring economic growth around the world is critical, and I think that’s best done through free markets that can drive technological and business innovation and free trade that can spread the benefits of such innovation around the world.
• Second, I believe that recent years have demonstrated the power and relevance of large-scale Internet-enabled voluntary collective action, as seen in Wikipedia, the Linux and Mozilla projects, and so on. I think such activities are valuable and should be encouraged, and to do so I think we need to think outside the government vs. the market box our political dialogue is often stuck in.
• Finally, I believe that at least in developed countries we’ve reached the limit of how big government can be. Excessive public debts, entitlement costs, and high defense spending (at least in the U.S.) are going to make it harder for government to fulfill the key functions I believe it has: providing public goods (beyond just defense), working with market actors and civil society to create the rulesets needed for the smooth functioning of an advanced society, and (where it makes sense) helping make it possible for all people to fulfill their potential within such a society. That means every dollar of government discretionary spending has to be spent well, and all government efforts need to complement and not attempt to replace the free market and civil society.

This doesn’t mean that I’m now a libertarian, or planning to become one anytime soon. Most notably, I don’t share core beliefs held by many doctrinaire libertarians, such that taxation is theft and that a democratically-elected government is morally equivalent to an organized criminal enterprise. However I don’t think it’s necessary to buy into the stereotypical libertarian belief set to find many libertarian ideas worth considering as a basis for public policy.

It’s also true that not all libertarians fit the stereotype. This has always been true, but it’s become more apparent in recent years, as demonstrated in the writings of Brink Lindsey (of liberaltarian fame), Will Wilkinson, and others. And that brings us back to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog (or BHL, as its fans fondly refer to it). As Matt Zwolinski wrote in the first post,

I’ve created this blog as a forum for academic philosophers who are attracted both to libertarianism and to ideals of social or distributive justice. What we have in common on this blog is an appreciation for market mechanisms, for voluntary social cooperation, for property rights, and for individual liberty. But we appreciate those things, in large part, because of the way they contribute to important human goods—and especially the way in which they allow some of society’s most vulnerable members to realize those goods.

That’s a sentiment I can get behind, hence my interest in BHL. The BHL bloggers have been very active since the blog began less than three weeks ago, and it’s hard to pick favorites. However here are some personal highlights from my reading thus far:

• Neoclassical Liberalism: How I’m Not a Libertarian and Neoclassical Liberalism vs High Liberalism, by Jason Brennan. Historically the term liberal didn’t mean what most people mean by it today, but rather meant someone who is committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets (to quote Wikipedia). In this spirit Brennan and others are promoting neoclassical liberalism: Neoclassical liberals combine a classical liberal commitment to economic liberty with a modern or high liberal commitment to social justice. … They think the economic liberties share the same high status as the other liberties. However, neoclassical liberals also believe that this need not come at the expense of social justice. (High liberals is Brennan’s term for liberals in the common sense used today.) This was an interesting post for me because neoclassical liberalism is probably closest to my own position as it’s evolved over the years.
• Exploitation and Social Justice by Matt Zwolinski. A good discussion of the moral issues around sweatshops, minimum wage laws, and other cases where many libertarians argue that the state would better help the poor by taking a laissez faire attitude: … mutually beneficial exploitation is often something legal regimes should tolerate, and this point counts in favor of the classical liberal vision of the state and against the recommendations often made by those on the left. But whether a transaction counts as harmful or mutually beneficial depends on what we take as the baseline … One point that those on the left have often made, and which classical liberals ought to take much more seriously, is that capitalist systems as they actually exist … have often rigged the baseline to the detriment of labor and to the advantage of capital. It will not do to argue that transactions in a free market are always mutually beneficial and therefore non-exploitative.
• Overlapping Consensus Libertarianism or Why Convergence Arguments Are Cool by Daniel Shapiro. A discussion of how best to gain support for libertarian policies: … rather than looking for one or the best moral or political theory, [ground] libertarianism by showing it is compatible with a variety of reasonable approaches. … Put all your effort into showing that one kind of political theory is the correct view, and supports certain principles or institutions, then if it turns out your theory is mistaken, you have no support for your principles or the institutions you support. But if your principles or institutions are supported by a wide variety of political theories or perspectives then you avoid this problem. I like this approach, because I’ve always been annoyed by what I call I’ll prove it to you libertarians who use logical deduction from self-selected axioms to try to convince you that libertarianism is the only choice open to the truly rational person.
• What You Wish They Would Read by Matt Zwolinski. Lots of great suggestions for libertarian writings that (modern) liberals should read, and vice versa.
• Fairnessland and Economic Growth by Jason Brennan. A thought experiment to provoke thinking about questions around income inequality and the effects of economic growth. Suppose it turned out, empirically, that improving the income level of the poor at any given time by equalizing incomes eventually leads to the poor in that society having less than they otherwise would have had under a less equal but faster growing scheme. If so, which is preferable, all other things equal? A. Equalize things now so that the poor now do much better. B. Allow for growth so that the poor in the future do much better.

I could go on quoting from BHL for a while, but I’ll stop here. The bottom line is that whether you call yourself a liberal or a libertarian, if you’re not content simply to parrot the stereotypical political arguments that go with those labels then you absolutely need to be reading this blog.