Whatever one thinks of what Rand Paul had to say about the Civil Rights Act, it's fascinating to see how the media is treating this as an issue about his "views on race."
I do not recall any interview in which he was asked if he was prejudiced or about his views of non-whites. In fact, in all the interviews I've seen, he's made it clear that he personally finds racism to be unacceptable etc..
What's under debate are his views on political economy and constitutional theory. Right or wrong, those are a separate issue from his views on race, I would think.
For example, could not an African-American think that the right to free association means that firms have the right to serve who they wish? Would that make said person a racist for holding perhaps the same views that Paul is being criticized for?
It's fine to say "Rand Paul thinks white store owners should be able to deny service to black customers." But that makes the store owners the racists not Rand Paul, yet no one wants to point that out. What's worse is that Paul, from what I've seen, thinks it would be a bad thing if a white store owner did that. He just thinks it's a worse thing to for government to interfere with people's rights of property and association to address it.
Again, whatever one thinks of that argument, it runs square in the face of most people's assumption that every social problem must be, and is best, solved by government. Thus opposing government as the solution to the problem in question must mean that one does not think it's even a problem. The idea that there are other ways to address the problem that might work better isn't even in play.
So opposing government action to redress racism means one thinks racism is fine, which makes one a racist. QED.
That's how far statist assumptions have penetrated our national discourse.
My very busy schedule at APEE prevented me from jumping in on the very interesting debate over women's liberty, coverture laws, and the more general status of human freedom over the last 150 years that was kicked off by David Boaz's column at Reason. I can't possibly point to all of the contributions to the debate since then, but I particularly liked Will Wilkinson's contribution here and Bryan Caplan provides his usual contrarian perspective here, here, here, and here.
The brief recap: Boaz argued that libertarians frequently make the mistake of being nostalgic about how free Americans were in, say, 1850 or 1880 and how the last 150 years has been a steady decline in human freedom. The mistake, he argues, is that such comparisons seem focused on the experience of (property owning) white males and forget the ways in which blacks (certainly before the Civil War!) and women and other groups were denied important freedoms by the state. In fact, Boaz argues (and with the support of libertarian historians, as opposed to economists), the last 150 years has largely involved an increase in human freedom when we properly account for the ways in which non-white, non-males have seen substantial increases in their freedom, even as all of us probably have less economic freedom than that select group of white males did in the past. Boaz argued we need to stop engaging in the "decline of freedom" narrative as it's just not true when we take into account the enormous gains in freedom for these other groups.
(For those who were at APEE, Yoram Brook engaged in precisely this rhetoric in his debate with Jim Otteson, at one point saying just how much freer we were in the 19th century. It was all I could do to not interrupt him right there!)
As Will put it:
"It’s just plain wrongheaded to cast the
libertarian project as the project of restoring lost liberties. Most
people never had the liberties backward-looking libertarians would
like to restore. I know the rhetoric of restoration can be very
seductive, especially in country unusually full (for a wealthy liberal
democracy) of patriotic traditionalists. But restoration is a
conservative project and liberty is a fundamentally progressive
cause."
I'll put my own cards on the table by reprinting a comment that I made to a discussion on a libertarian professors' email list then adding some later observations below. All are below the fold.
Supposed libertarian Glenn Beck is at it again, once again talking up explicit libertarian-basher Rick Santorum: "I really like Rick Santorum . . . This guy gets it 110 percent." (See earlier incident here.)
Glenn Beck is what would happen if Billy Mays had read a few books on politics. Whatever that is, it's not a libertarian, and libertarians should not be buying his intellectual Mighty Putty.
I don't need to say a lot about how our friends on the left are in a tizzy about what they see as the use of violent rhetoric by Tea Partiers and other conservatives. What does bear repeating, though, is the degree to which they are in utter denial about their own use of similar rhetoric, especially during the Bush presidency.
But just to make the point clear, compare the following two statements:
"You’re dead; we know where you live; we’ll get you."
and
"We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few."
Both crazy right-wingers maybe? No, actually. The first was left on Bart Stupak's voicemail, according to reports. The second, however, is from a Greenpeace activist tired of the failure of democracy to pass climate change legislation and the "you" referred to includes anyone "who [has] spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions."
Yes, the first one has a more explicit threat of violence, but the similarity of the rhetoric and the implied threat of "we know where you live and work" cannot be overlooked.
It doesn't matter whether the shirts are perceived to be brown or green, the rhetoric of threats and violence should always be called out by people on both sides, but I'm not holding my breath for much from the media or the moderate left on this one.
(UPDATE: After looking through the comments section over there more thoroughly, I'm encouraged by the way in which folks have rejected that rhetoric (although often with nasty rhetoric of their own), so I withdraw my skepticism of the moderate left at least as far as the rank and file goes. The politicians and celebrities, however, remain to be seen.)
Like a rotting Granny Smith apple, this element of the environmental movement is green on the outside but looking kind of brown on the inside.
As part of my book-in-progress on libertarianism and the family, I've read several books on parenting and the contemporary family. My favorite may well be Lenore Skenazy's book Free Range Kids. I sent her something of a fan letter that included a comment that her chapter titled "Don't Think Like a Lawyer" should have added "Do Think Like an Economist." I explained why and she asked if I'd write it up as a guest blog. That little essay has now appeared at her blog FreeRangeKids.com.
Santorum is among the worst of the social conservatives out there, not to mention an utter hawk on foreign policy issues. Beck, ought to be sued for fraud if he continues to call himself a libertarian. For a guy who claims to believe in smaller government, he's supporting a guy who would put it Americans' bedrooms as well as across the rest of the world.
Roderick, David, and I will all be escaping the cold this weekend at the International Society for Individual Liberty retreat in sunny and reasonably warm Phoenix. If you're interested in the schedule, you can find it here.
This is from IHS in the Summer of 1987 and includes quite a number of libertarian luminaries in it. Sorry for the large file size but I needed the good resolution.
The core of the IHS staff at the time is down front: Walter Grinder, Leonard Liggio, John Blundell. In front fo the porch on the right are Randy Barnett, Sheldon Richman, Jeremy Shearmur, and Ralph Raico. Students there include, that I can identify, Roderick Long, Pete Boettke, Dave Prychitko, myself, and I believe that's Emily Chamlee-Wright between Pete and Dave. I think I also see John Majewski down front and maybe Todd Zywicki as well. Folks can feel free to correct me or add names that I've missed in the comments.
The TSA has apparently put into place new rules for international flights headed to the US, including requiring passengers to stay seated the last hour of the flight. Aside from yet another attempt to stop the last attack, this will be a major inconvenience (buy some Depends stock!). To what degree have these various efforts at social control made us too passive in the face of such inconveniences? At what point do we say "enough is enough" and make it clear that the best defense against aggression in the air are alert passengers ready to come to each other's aid and not searching shoes, keeping water bottles off and making the bathrooms off limit for the last hour?
We could write various bureaucrats and politicians, but that will do little. Choosing alternatives to flying is fine, but punishes the airlines more than the TSA and isn't always possible. It seems to me some mild civil disobedience is called for. Here's my suggestion, which folks can take or leave:
If you are on a flight where it is announced that you must remain seated with nothing in your lap for the last hour, wait for the announcement to finish then unbuckle your seat belt and stand up silently for 10 or 15 seconds. Then sit down and rebuckle.
Imagine what it would look like if something like this caught on. Imagine half a plane or more doing this. What exactly could anyone do about it? Are the flight attendants going to identify everyone's seat and turn them in? Are thousands of innocent Americans going to go on no-fly lists? (Imagine how the airlines would feel when their regular passengers are not able to fly anymore.)
I'm just so sick of what is really a kabuki theatre that has little to do with real safety, and so sick of the costs it involves, that I think it's time for some sort of message to be sent that says we don't think this works and we aren't going to be treated like cattle anymore.
I'm not a great believer in re-posting old blog entries, but I'm going to make an exception today. The post of mine below originally appeared on Liberty and Power on Christmas Day 2005. Of all the blog posts I've ever written, I think this remains one of the best. Its message also seems appropriate as we near the end of the year, with many snowflakes on the ground, and as Congress seems bound and determined to ignore the core of its message. I repost it with only one minor edit to add a missing word. So for those of you who haven't read it before, enjoy "Of Social Snowflakes."
***
My RSS reader this morning brought me this post from Marginal Revolution, which contains a spectacular close-up picture of a snowflake, taken from a book of such pictures. As I hope it does for you, just looking at that photo brought me up short and made me stop in awe, reverence, and wonder. The intricacy, detail, complexity, and sheer beauty of that product of nature cannot be captured in words. And when you stop to consider the uncountable number of snowflakes that fall each year (most of them on my driveway it would seem), all of that awe is upped an order of magnitude.
When I see that snowflake, it engages my reverence for the beauty of the undesigned order of the natural world. Look at the symmetry and detail of that snowflake, and then consider that it is the product of undesigned natural processes. I find it an object of awe that natural processes can produce a thing of such detail, complexity and beauty. It is said that only God can make a snowflake. Well for those who understand the science, or who are atheists, we know that you don't need God to do so. But even to an atheist like myself, the spontaneous order of nature can (and should!) generate the same awe, reverence, and wonder that the contemplation of God generates in those who believe. Unfortunately, whenever my wonder at the beauty of nature is engaged, it is with a tinge of frustration.
The frustration I feel is that so many smart and caring people seem unable to see and appreciate the identical processes of undesigned order in the social world. "Social snowflakes" are all around us, yet precious few seem to be able to understand and appreciate them to the degree we do the snowflakes found in nature. And too many people think that these "social snowflakes" require a "Creator."
That snowflake produces in me the same aesthetic-emotional reaction I have when I begin to think about Leonard Read's "I, Pencil," or when I ponder the intricate, detailed, complex, and beautiful processes by which Chilean grapes appear in my grocery store in rural New York in the middle of winter. The pencil and the grapes are "social snowflakes": they look simple, but when we hold them still and examine them with the analogous level of detail as that photo produces in the snowflake, they turn out to be the products of extraordinarily complex and intricate social processes that were designed by no one. My aesthetic reaction of awe and wonder is a response to what Pete Boettke, in a perfect turn of phrase, recently referred to as "the mystery of the mundane." What is more mundane than a snowflake? And yet what, it turns out, is more beautiful and complex than a snowflake? And in the way their mundane surface appearances hide processes of production whose awesome complexity was the product of human action but not human design, and should equally be a source of aesthetic and intellectual contemplation, the pencil and grapes are indeed "social snowflakes."
My fervent wish for the 21st century is that more smart and caring people can begin to see and appreciate "social snowflakes." People who are so willing to accept the existence and beauty (and benevolence!) of undesigned order in the natural world should be more willing to open themselves to the possibility that there are processes of undesigned order at work in the social world too. These people know that no one can make a snowflake, but seem blind to the fact that much of the innocent blood that was spilled in the last century was because too many people thought they could intelligently design the social world. Not repeating those mistakes will require a renewed aesthetic appreciation of, and deep desire to understand, the awesome beauty and complexity of the undesigned order of "social snowflakes."
While I was at GMU last week, I got a new blogging gig. I'm now a guest blogger at PBS "Nightly Business Report," which has a blog called "XChange." Into the belly of the beast I say! Here's my first post, wondering exactly why we need a central bank.
Gauti Eggertsson uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in
arguing that the period 1933 to 1937 represented recovery from the
Great Depression, by virtue of regime change between the Hoover and
Roosevelt administrations. He claims that the Hoover administration was
defined by adherence to three “policy dogmas,” and that Roosevelt
shifted expectations for the better by making credible commitments
rejecting those dogmas. Eggertsson’s argument is wrong on several
counts. He misrepresents Hoover’s economic policies, he
mischaracterizes Roosevelt as “dogma-free” and committed to a clear
alternative plan for recovery, and he misreads the economic
consequences of Roosevelt’s policies. Eggertsson’s problems begin with
his notion of “recovery,” wherein the economy’s progression from
critical condition to prolonged infirmity is trumpeted as “recovery.”
Eggertsson’s article is entitled “Great Expectations;” I have titled
this piece “Great Apprehensions” because the Hoover-Roosevelt period
needs to be seen a whole, in which the statist trend of policy and
rhetoric created great uncertainty about the rules under which
enterprise and investment would proceed. Moreover, Eggertsson’s
narrative cutoff at 1937 is misleading and opportunistic, as the
ensuing years are all part of the same prolonged apprehension and
under-performance.
The man who saved countless millions, if not billions, of lives as the father of the Green Revolution has died at 95. If you've never heard of Borlaug, you should have. And the fact that you haven't, and that the media pay orders of magnitude more attention to dead politicians of all parties who achieved their fame by killing and impoverishing about as many of our fellow humans, is one of the tragedies of our day.
Hopefully the advances that Borlaug's work made possible will not be lost in a rising tide of radical environmentalist criticisms. The Green Revolution wasn't perfect, but no other 20th century event did more for the betterment of humanity on balance. Think of it this way: Borlaug's legacy is the counter-balance to the state-led violence of the century. Add up the millions killed by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Pol Pot. Add to that the millions killed in WW I and WW II and all the rest of the wars of the last century. Borlaug's work saved at least as many lives as all of those "leaders" and politicians slaughtered. If the term "social justice" has any meaning, Borlaug and the Green Revolution did more for it than any political activists by balancing the century's scales of life-and-death. If his more radical critics have their way, they will condemn millions to the poverty and starvation that his legacy saved them from.
In a just world, people like Borlaug would be the subject of hours of media commentary and coverage and special commemorative issues of Time or Newsweek while politicians got a cursory obit notice on the back page of the local rag.
That is not our world, sad to say, but as you sit down to your next meal, take a moment to pause and reflect on the life of a man who made it possible for a large hunk of humanity to go to bed tonight not worrying about where their next meal would come from. Contributions to humanity do not get any more praiseworthy than that.
The picture below was taken in the summer of 1986 at IHS. It was the group of us who were there as grad students that summer along with IHS staff. Some help identifying everyone would be great! I'll have an even larger picture from 1987 coming down the road.
Top row: Steve Horwitz, t1, t2, t3, Dave Prychitko, Pete Boettke
Middle row: m1, Ralph Raico, Leonard Liggio, Walter Grinder, Emilio Pacheco
Bottom row: b1, b2, b3
If you can fill in the blanks, please put the info in the comments by putting name to the identifying space (e.g: "t1 = Adam Smith"). Thanks! (I've cross-posted this to The Austrian Economists as well.)
I recently had the chance to sit down with the Motorhome Diaries guys while I was at FEE. They've just posted a section of my interview that covered the liberating effects of capitalism on the family.
I make the case he suffers from it in an op-ed in this morning's Richmond Times-Dispatch. A snippet:
Absent the signals of the marketplace, czars, presidents, and members of Congress are thrashing around in the dark in their attempts to improve upon the outcomes generated in actual markets. Top-down directives forgo the opportunity to learn from the decentralized knowledge of those actually producing the goods and services in question.
Obama's reliance on experts and czars and top-down restructuring is particularly ironic in light of his promises of change and bringing the spirit of 21st century technology to government.
The clearest lesson of the networked world is that decentralized, bottom-up collaboration works much more effectively than top-down solutions. From Wikipedia, to open source software, to the Internet itself, the 21st century is quickly becoming the century of the "wisdom of crowds."
This past Saturday night, I was the speaker at the Foundation for Economic Education's "Evening at FEE." My title was "The Great Recession of 2008-9: Capitalism Hasn't Failed, Government Has (Yet Again)." About 120 people came out on a Saturday night in NYC. Video of the talk is now up on FEE's website here. UPDATED: or you can watch it right here:
Suppose you had some high schoolers who were self-proclaimed Republicans. What would you give them to read to introduce them to libertarianism that would emphasize its differences from conservatism? (And no, Hayek's "Why I'm Not a Conservative," though wonderful, is not appropriate.)
Suggestions happily received in the comments or by email.
Those of you interested in a not-especially-technical Austrian take on the current recession might like to check out my latest Working Paper from the Mercatus Center. It was written for a volume collecting analyses of the recession from outside the economics mainstream.
Todd Zwyicki has a great op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal arguing that Obama's strong-arming of the Chrysler bankruptcy violated Constitutional protections of the rule of law. An excerpt:
The close relationship between the rule of law and the enforceability of contracts, especially credit contracts, was well understood by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. A primary reason they wanted it was the desire to escape the economic chaos spawned by debtor-friendly state laws during the period of the Articles of Confederation. Hence the Contracts Clause of Article V of the Constitution, which prohibited states from interfering with the obligation to pay debts. Hence also the Bankruptcy Clause of Article I, Section 8, which delegated to the federal government the sole authority to enact "uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies."
The Obama administration's behavior in the Chrysler bankruptcy is a profound challenge to the rule of law. Secured creditors -- entitled to first priority payment under the "absolute priority rule" -- have been browbeaten by an American president into accepting only 30 cents on the dollar of their claims. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union, holding junior creditor claims, will get about 50 cents on the dollar.
The absolute priority rule is a linchpin of bankruptcy law. By preserving the substantive property and contract rights of creditors, it ensures that bankruptcy is used primarily as a procedural mechanism for the efficient resolution of financial distress. Chapter 11 promotes economic efficiency by reorganizing viable but financially distressed firms, i.e., firms that are worth more alive than dead.
Violating absolute priority undermines this commitment by introducing questions of redistribution into the process. It enables the rights of senior creditors to be plundered in order to benefit the rights of junior creditors.
My question is for those on the left who so rightly and eloquently argued against the Bush Administration's violations of the Rule of Law, and defended the Constitution in the process, with respect to the treatment of prisoners and other elements of the "war on terror":
Where are you now? The crickets are chirping once again from where I sit. If the Constitution and the Rule of Law really mean what you said they meant when Bush was president, why don't they mean the same thing now? If the imperial presidency was wrong then, why isn't it wrong now? Where are you, you passionate defenders of the Rule of Law? Has The One blinded you to your principles, or did you never really have them in the first place?
Today's entry, courtesy of Virginia Democrat Jim Moran:
You’ve all seen them. Those ubiquitous TV ads where a simple little pill transforms a man suffering from erectile dysfunction, or ED, into a virile tiger who puts a smile on the face of his now beaming wife.
Well, Representative Jim Moran (D-VA) has seen them too, and you’d be hard pressed to see a smile on his face when he talks about the ads. “A number of people,” he says, “have come up, including colleagues, and said I’m fed up. I don’t want my three or four-year old grandkid asking me what erectile dysfunction is all about. And I don’t blame them.”
Enter H.R. 2175. That’s a bill that Rep. Moran introduced last month that would prohibit any ED ads from airing on broadcast radio and TV between 6AM and 10PM. The bill advises the Federal Communications Commission to treat these ads as “indecent” and instruct stations to restrict their broadcast to late night and overnight hours.
Yes, because parents, of course, cannot be put in to the situation of either monitoring what their kids watch or actually having to explain (or concoct a suitable white lie) what the commercial is about. Better the state should "tsk, tsk" the First Amendment in order to save the children from, gasp!, hearing about penises and sex.
Lots of Lovejoyism on display in the comments at the CNN story on his bill.
(For the Helen Lovejoy reference, go here or here.)
Sheldon Richman and I were part of a FEE conference on the current recession at Western New England College back in mid-March. Those talks were videotaped and are now available on the web. My talk can be found here. Sheldon's can be found on the links on the right.
In between my various DHS-monitored extremist activities, I managed to sneak in an hour interview on Dr. Mike Beitler's "Free Markets" internet radio show. The show airs at 10am EDT on Thursday (4/16). You can find it here. It's chock full of Austrian-y and libertarian-y goodness. (You can also download an MP3 for later listening.)
Several libertarian-oriented blogs have had interesting discussions of whether the Obama administration is taking us down the road to (economic) fascism. Tom Palmer, Will Wilkinson and David Henderson have all raised the issue.
Paying attention to that discussion is National Review's Jonah Goldberg, whose book Liberal Fascism caused quite a stir when it came out last year. Goldberg has a blog post exploring what he sees as sudden libertarian interest in this question even as many libertarians were lukewarm to dismissive of his book.
I reviewed the book for The Independent Review and was more favorable to it than many libertarians. The review is not online yet, but will be in a few months here. In a later post, Goldberg and I exchange thoughts on why libertarians might have been so lukewarm to his book, with me arguing that it was because the book didn't sufficiently recognize the fascist tendencies on the contemporary right. A number of libertarians have drifted farther from the right in the last decade (recall the number of libertarians who said they'd vote for Obama), and I would argue that it's because Big Government conservatism under Bush began to unfurl some fascist tendencies of its own.
Feel free to enter the conversation here or at the other blogs noted at the outset.
Those of you who are interested in some of the more policy-oriented issues raised by children and families, especially how they relate to anarcho-capitalism, might find the ongoing discussion at Positive Liberty (a terrific blog by the way) of interest. See here, here, and here.
So the big news today is that the governor of Illinois has been caught doing explicitly what most politicians do with more subtlety every single day: selling off their power to the highest bidder. I can't help but note that yet another politician is indicted on corruption charges at the very same time we are handing over unprecedented power to the political class as we partially nationalize the banking system and, apparently, the Big Three auto companies.
I simply do not understand how those who are in favor of giving government all of these new powers because they sincerely believe that doing so will work out the way their blackboard designs intended can keep a straight face. What kind of cognitive dissonance must it take to believe that the people YOU are handing power over to are "not like" Ted Stevens or Rod Blagojevich? How deeply must one be in denial or engage in rationalization to believe that they are "different?" How blind must one be to think that trillions of dollars in bailout money won't go to the highest bidder (as the lobbyists line up on K Street...) in a process different only in its wink-and-a-nod courtesies than Blagojevich's auctioning off of a Senate seat?
For me, the key insight of public choice is the same insight that underlies Austrian economics: it is the institutional framework that is the key to understanding the choices people make and the unintended outcomes they produce. As I said to a class last week: "Governments can't act like businesses because businesses only act like businesses because they operate in the institutional environment of private property, monetary exchange, and competition." In the same way, getting politicians to stop selling off their power isn't a matter of ethics or psychology, rather it's about changing the rules of the game such that they do not have as much power to sell. Unfortunately, the current bailout mania is changing those rules in utterly the wrong direction.
Look at it this way: the bailouts are already becoming just a legal form of the essentially the same behavior for which the governor has been indicted.
Why should we ever accept "Oh, but he's different" as an answer to the claim that explicit bribery and selling off power are just a less subtle form of politics as usual?
We all know Godwin's Law of the Internet: all discussion threads will eventually invoke Hitler and the person invoking him in an invidious comparison is deemed to have lost the debate. Invoking Godwin's Law has become a way to dismiss one's interlocutor as being a crazy crank.
Godwin's Law having been just invoked against me on another blog because I referred to the NRA as "fascist," despite the fact that I provided evidence and citations to back up my claim, I hereby announce Horwitz's Corollary to Godwin's Law:
"When people invoke Godwin's Law in the face of a serious, relevant argument about Hitler or Fascism made with evidence and citations, it reflects their own inability to respond rationally to the claim being made and thus they should be deemed to have lost the discussion."
Rauchway perceives me, rightly, as a New Deal critic and he is on a mission to combat what he sees as wrong-headed criticisms of the New Deal. So in addition to taking me to task for my use of "fascist" to describe the NRA (which only echoes FDR's and other's explicit statements that they borrowed from the Italians - one might also consult Luigi Villari's "The Economics of Fascism" for a description of the Italian system and see the similarities for oneself), he presents some additional context to the Schechters' story that he seems to think undermines my argument. The context comes from the historian Andrew Cohen's discussion of the Schechter case. You can read the whole thing there, but the gist seems to be this:
The Schechters were not a small immigrant business, but rather a very successful corporation. Moreover, they gained that success by out-competing (hence the points I raised in my original post) their unionized rivals by keeping prices lower due to lower labor costs. This infuriated the unions, who responded at first by targeting the Schechters with violence: "The tough guys who ran these organizations tried to bully the
Schechters into submission, on one occasion putting emery powder in the
crankcase of their trucks." Cohen then points out that when the NRA was created, it was the union leadership who was empowered to write the codes and they used that power to, presumably, get back at the non-union firms in the various industries, including the Schechters and poultry. Cohen then reads the Supreme Court's rejection of the NRA not as a matter of such regulation in general being unconstitutional, but rather that it was being driven by the wrong people: " It’s not just the power the state possessed, but who wielded it."
I'm not enough of a constitutional scholar to say for sure, but I'm pretty confident that the decision was not decided quite so ideologically, after all as Ilya Somin points out, all nine justices signed on, including the very liberal Brandeis, to the claim that Congress had execeeded its ability to delegate power under Article I. And nowhere in the actual Supreme Court decision are the issues Cohen raised ever mentioned. (But of course historians with their own axes to grind can always find their own ideological views about anti-labor hatred lurking in the background if they search hard enough.)
Bottom line, perhaps the Schechters weren't quite the small immigrant businessmen Shlaes and I portrayed them as. But that doesn't change the underlying points at all: they were targeted for specific reasons, including the fact that their observation of Kashrut and their skill as businessmen ran them, pun intended, afoul of the NRA, specifically the union organizers who helped write the codes. The fact that they survived attempted union violence and they became targets of those very same unions only enhances the main point of the story, and, in my eyes anyway, their heroism.
It also puts a new twist on the complaints of them competing too hard and paying wages less than NRA code: both of these were pissing off the union bosses in the rest of the industry. Giving those unions the power to help write the codes (in good fascist worker-corporation cooperative fashion, I might add) gave them an opportunity to even the score. Cohen and Rauchway perceive this as rough justice being served and thereby making the Schechters into the villians of the piece. That's a value/ideological judgment on their part and to suggest my history is sloppy and ideological because I see it the opposite way is more than a bit ironic.
Those who live in glass chicken coops....
UPDATE: According to a commenter at the Volokh Conspiracy: "A member of the Schechter family has told me that shortly after the
ruling Schechter Poultry went bankrupt. The family claims that the Jews
of New York found out that the Schechters has run afoul of their
beloved President Roosevelt and therefore stopped giving their business
to the company." I have no idea if this is true, but if so, it only adds to the strange relationship between Jewish Americans and FDR.
In preparation for my spring senior seminar on the Great Depression, I’m currently reading Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man. The book is a wonderful history of the Great Depression, written by a journalist who knows enough good economics to tell the story well. In reading it last night, I had the wonderful experience of learning something new that made me think about a whole bunch of interesting questions I hadn’t considered before. As a scholar, there really isn’t a better feeling and it’s one I wish I could convey better to students so they would see that what appears to be the dorkiness of their professors is really our desire to share one of life’s most profound joys. What I learned was the story of the Schechter brothers of Brooklyn, NY.
Stossel's producer called this evening: the ABC execs viewed the show and thought it needed to add a segment on the current crisis, so they killed the Wal-mart/Katrina stuff to make room. The ironies there are so rich: the state screws up the economy so I don't get to talk about how the state screws up the economy.
However... Stossel will be on Good Morning America Friday morning (7-9am EDT) and the producer is hoping to use some of that footage there. So we shall see.
John Stossel's annual special, this year titled "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics," will include some of the footage from an interview I did with him back in July on my work on Katrina and Wal-Mart. It's on ABC on Friday Oct 17 at 10pm EDT., assuming we aren't under martial law and watching government propaganda by then. Tune in and enjoy.
Well with the economy going nuts, there's always time for a little fun and frolic. In a recent blog post, Will Wilkinson quotes this lovely nugget from Naomi Klein, arguing why Milton Friedman and his ideas are still responsible for the crisis and other evils of corporatism even though he rejected said corporatism:
Now, I admit to being a journalist. I admit to being an investigative journalist, a researcher, and I’m not here to argue theory. I’m here to discuss what happens in the messy real world when Milton Friedman’s ideas are put into practice, what happens to freedom, what happens to democracy, what happens to the size of government, what happens to the social structure, what happens to the relationship between politicians and big corporate players, because I think we do see patterns.
So Friedman and his ideas are guilty because people who supposedly believed them put them into practice in ways that utterly contract them, but that are nonetheless, in her warped logic, predictable applications of said ideas.
Well I'm glad to see that it's now fair game to pin the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th century on Marx. After all, just substitute Marx for Friedman in the above and then just add "and leads to 100 million innocent dead" and see if it isn't just the same.
Even on Klein's own whacked, but now even playing field, I'd say Milton still comes out ahead.
On my web page, I have posted an open letter to my friends on the left that attempts to persuade them that the current financial mess is not the product of free markets but a whole variety of government intervention. I further attempt to persuade them that, for reasons they might share, solutions that bailout the lenders and ask for more regulations will be counter-productive. I hope this letter also serves as a kind of "one-stop shop" (a Wal-Mart Super Center perhaps?) for a variety of examples of the role government intervention played in generating this crisis. It's about 3000 words, covering a whole number of related positions I've heard these friends argue for in the last couple of weeks.
If you have additional ideas, let me know, as I am more than willing to update the letter to cover things I might have missed. Other feedback is welcome as well, either in the comments or by email.
Those are the sound of the crickets coming from the world of Naomi Klein (link to the worst book of the decade not provided) and friends as the real truth about the relationship between crises and political economy is now right in their faces, providing exactly the evidence against the "shock doctrine" that some of us pointed out right away: crises cause the state to grow and the free market to shrivel. Disaster Socialism is back in business.
On a related note, will folks on the Left attack the Paulson bailout plan for the naked violation of the rule of law that it is? From the proposal:
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
This abrogation of the rule of law, after all, is precisely what the Left has correctly opposed about the Administration's conduct in the "war on terror," so why not continue the same opposition here? Anyone want to take a guess at the odds of that happening?
I interrupt the ongoing socialization of US credit markets with a temporary subject change (and not because my subject is necessarily more important).
I spent yesterday morning attending a memorial service for the mother of a colleague here at SLU. One element of the SLU campus is that we have a large (for our size) and vibrant gay and lesbian community within the faculty, of which the colleague in question is a member. Watching her long-time partner grip her hand as they walked in and watching one member of a gay faculty couple with his arm around his long-time partner during the service (not to mention another long-time lesbian couple two rows behind me) got me thinking about the same-sex marriage issue.
This is a beauty. Obama on how he needs to get beyond empty rhetoric in his acceptance speech Thursday night:
"I'm much more concerned with communicating how I intend to help middle-class families live their lives."
Oh gee, thanks Obama, but I'll pass on your "help." I'd prefer the empty rhetoric, if that's okay with you.
The elitism that suggests that middle-class families need his "help" in living their lives is exceeded only by the hubris of him believing he knows what it is that they supposedly need. I'm pretty sure most of the middle-class, more and more of whom are moving up and out of the middle class, can figure out how to live their lives on their own, thankyouverymuch.
It's a sad state of affairs that as bad as Obama is, he's probably not quite as bad as the other major party candidate.
"The vast amount of human activity ought to be none of the government's business. I don't think it is the government's business to tell you how to spend your leisure time."
might actually be worth the effort to vote for! Where's a pen to write him in?
Better yet, it was in the context of his introducing "a proposal to end federal penalties for Americans carrying fewer than 100 grams, almost a quarter-pound, of the substance."
Is it too much to hope for that Rep. Frank includes economic activity other than drug purchases in the things that are in that "vast amount of human activity" that are none of government's business?
Critics of markets often argue that corporations manipulate images, both still and moving, to "trick" buyers into purchasing their products. Of course, in the market, if said products don't deliver, buyers have alternatives.
Not so in politics, where such manipulation is plentiful as well and where the decisions of the state give us no alternatives.
In my post yesterday, I mentioned NASA scientist James Hansen's Torquemada impersonation in his call to try oil executives for crimes against humanity. This morning, I read an account over on Planet Gore of Hansen's first testimony on global warming 20 years ago and the way in which several members of Congress and staff manipulated the visual scene to create support for Hansen's testimony. Here's an excerpt from the account linked above:
Specifically, the PBS series Frontline aired a special in April 2007 that lifted the curtain on the sort of illusions that politicians and their abettors employed to kick off the campaign.
Frontline interviewed key players in the June 1988 Senate hearing at which then-Senator Al Gore rolled out the official conversion from panic over “global cooling” to global warming alarmism. Frontline interviewed Gore’s colleague, then-Sen. Tim Wirth (now running Ted Turner’s UN Foundation). Comforted by the friendly nature of the PBS program, Wirth freely admitted the clever scheming that went into getting the dramatic shot of scientist James Hansen mopping his brow amid a sweaty press corps. An admiring Frontline termed this “Stagecraft.”
Sen. TIMOTHY WIRTH (D-CO), 1987-1993: We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify.
DEBORAH AMOS: On Capitol Hill, Sen. Timothy Wirth was one of the few politicians already concerned about global warming, and he was not above using a little stagecraft for Hansen's testimony.
TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn't working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.[Shot of witnesses at hearing]
WIRTH: Dr. Hansen, if you’d start us off, we’d appreciate it. The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.[nice shot of a sweaty Hansen]
JAMES HANSEN: [June 1988 Senate hearing] Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.
Next time someone accuses capitalists of using manipulative images to persuade people to buy something, you might bring this little incident up and point out that at least we have choices in the market.
In an earlier post I offered some thoughts on environmentalism as religion and later offered David Suzuki as an example of someone out to punish the heretics. Lest you think he was the only Torquemada, I give you James Hansen.
In today's Guardian we find a story with the following lead paragraph:
James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
I'm sure that my good friend Gus is going to tell me that these folks aren't representative of the mainstream of environmentalist thought or that just because people say things like this, we shouldn't dismiss the environmentalists' concerns completely. I am in agreement with the latter, but I'm increasingly doubtful of the former.
James Hansen "heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York." and is often noted as "Al Gore's science advisor."
Just how much more mainstream can you get?
More important: who will have the courage to name such demagoguery for what it is?
Like the child who murders his parents and then asks for pity because he's an orphan, the Federal Reserve has a long history of asking for more regulatory powers to clean up messes for which its action or inaction is the primary cause….
The history of banking in the United States and elsewhere does not show that the industry is beset by market failures that require regulatory intervention. To the contrary, almost every major crisis faced by the banking system has been the consequence of already-existing regulations, many of which came about as responses to previous crises caused by older regulations. Countries, like Canada, where some of the worst of these regulations were absent, have not had the same history of crises as has the United States. Perhaps this time we will learn from history and avoid a new regulatory regime that will create new threats to an already somewhat shaky U.S. financial system.
My friend Jeff Ellis at The Thinker takes on a book called "Why Mommy is a Democrat" and offers a short and sweet take on "Why Daddy is a Libertarian" aimed at kids, tongue firmly in cheek, as he says.
Julie Novak is reporting at her blog that Liberty and Power's Sudha Shenoy has died after a bout with cancer. Julie's obituary provides all the relevant information on Sudha and her career. Sudha was everything Julie says she is and more. She was truly one of the founders of the Austrian revival. Although she never published with the frequency of many of the rest of the stellar group of young scholars who attended the first revival conference in South Royalton, VT, she was active, including her contributions here at L&P. Her knowledge of history, especially European economic history, seemed endless and her training as an Austrian economist enabled her to see things in that history that others often overlooked. She was also one of the loudest classical liberal voices against the American imperialism of the last few years.
But above all of that, she was "old school" in all the best senses of the term. She was a scholar and a gentlewoman, and she was fun to be around. Last November at a Society for the Development of Austrian Economics session looking back at the early years of the Austrian revival, Roger Garrison told a hilarious story (as only he can) about an early conference in California that included Sudha taking an unplanned dip in the pool. My own favorite memory is what a good sport Sudha was when a group of us at an SDAE meeting a few years ago decided to go out to dinner at a barbecue place. It was decidedly not her scene, but she came along, found some things she could eat, and had a great time I think. It was also one of the few chances I really had to chat with her one-on-one as we sat at the same end of a long table. It was a great experience.
Rest in peace Sudha and thanks for all that you have done to help put Austrian economics where it is today.
The Society for the Development of Austrian Economics is happy to announce the creation of a new scholarly listserv dedicated to the discussion of Austrian economics. Information follows below:
The AustrianEcon listserv is a scholarly discussion list sponsored by the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics (SDAE). It is devoted to the ideas of the Austrian school of economics and related contributions to the understanding of human action and its consequences. We aim for as broad a discussion as possible across any disciplines or schools of thought that relate to Austrian economics. It must be emphasized that the listserv is not a forum for political discussion except to the degree that such issues have a direct connection to the scholarly contributions of the Austrian school both past and present.
Membership in the list is subject to the approval of the list manager. Membership will be limited to those affiliated with universities, think-tanks, or other scholarly/intellectual organizations. Exceptions for those not so affiliated will be granted on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the list manager. SDAE members are automatically eligible for membership. You can join the Society at http://it.stlawu.edu/sdae . You can request to join the list by emailing the list manager Steve Horwitz at sghorwitz@stlawu.edu .
We strongly encourage members to use the list as a vehicle for the dissemination of their current scholarship. In particular, discussion of working papers is a very valuable use of the listserv. Any members wishing to make a paper available for discussion should contact the list manager and the paper will be posed at the SDAE website for list members to access. Austrian analyses of current contributions to the mainstream economics literature are also strongly encouraged as is discussion of current work in related disciplines (e.g., evolutionary psychology, political science, history, etc.) or traditions in economics (e.g., constitutional political economy, public choice, or various “heterodox” schools etc.) of which members might be less aware.
AustrianEcon is a moderated listserv. All posts require the approval of the list manager.
I've largely been quiet about the FLDS case in Texas where state authorities seized over 400 kids from a fundamentalist Mormon ranch on the grounds that the group was abusing the children, either physically or sexually via forced marriages/coerced sex between older men and girls in their mid-teens. The authorities found a number of girls who had either already had children or, in two cases, were currently pregnant (6/2 UPDATE: David Friedman points out in the comments that both of these "girls" were in fact not minors - they were 18 and 22). As a result, they argued that all of the children were in danger, presumably the boys because they were being raised in an environment in which they were groomed to be rapists, at least in an institutional sense. In the wake of yesterday's Texas Supreme Court decision upholding an appeals court decision that ordered the children returned to their parents, I thought I'd share a few thoughts.
Cases like these do pose difficulties because they raise an interesting conflict of legitimate rights. Children surely have a right not to be physically or sexually abused and in the non-anarchist world, it's legitimate as part of the state's job of protecting rights to respond to genuine cases of such abuse (noting that what constitutes physical abuse isn't always crystal clear). But parents have rights as well, both at the state level and in terms of the federal constitution. And those rights include the right to make decisions about how to raise and educate their children. We might not like what parents teach their kids, but unless there's evidence of actual abuse, parental beliefs alone are not sufficient grounds to deny them their rights. Yes, this group's practices might threaten the rights of some of their girls, but the state's action definitively denies the parental rights of the adults and libertarians, it seems to me, must account for both sets of rights, even as we might recognize there are trade-offs and imperfections all around.
Back in October, I posed "Two Questions for Naomi Klein," in response to her then-new book Disaster Capitalism, which argues that "free market ideologues" have consciously created crises as opportunities to force their unpopular policies on unsuspecting populations, both in the US and elsewhere. Specifically, she sees Milton Friedman as the source of all of this evil.
My two questions were a drop in the bucket compared to the total and utter takedown of the book administered by Johan Norberg in a new Cato Policy Briefing entitled "The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics."
I'm not going to snippet it as the whole thing deserves to be read as a masterful, well-footnoted, response to Klein and others like her. If you have friends who are talking about Klein's book, send them Norberg's piece.
Thanks to the generosity of the Koch Foundation, we have inaugurated a Visiting Speaker Series in Political Economy here at St. Lawrence. Our kickoff speaker in March was Chris Coyne, who did a fantastic job with a talk on After War. Last night was our second speaker for the semester, Pierre Desrochers of the Geography Department of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Many of you are probably familiar with Pierre's work.
As I did with Chris, I gave a brief introduction that both said something about the speaker but also talked about the issues each was addressing. I tried to pick themes that illustrated the ways in which libertarianism shares the values of the left. In Chris's case, I talked about the anti-imperialist tradition of classical liberalism. For Pierre last night, I talked about the parallels between the War in Iraq and the calls, especially in the current issue of Time, for a "war on global warming." I share a slightly revised version of my thoughts on those parallels below.
In my relentless attempts at self-promotion, I'm happy to announce that my policy study for the Mercatus Center on the role of the private sector (and the Coast Guard) during Hurricane Katrina, focusing on Wal-Mart, is now available on the web. This study is part of Mercatus' larger project on Katrina, all of which is well worth perusing. Here's the link and the executive summary:
Many assume that the only viable option for emergency response and recovery from a natural disaster is one that is centrally directed. However, highlighted by the poor response from the federal government and the comparatively effective response from private retailers and the Coast Guard after Hurricane Katrina, this assumption seems to be faulty. Big box retailers such as Wal-Mart were extraordinarily successful in providing help to damaged communities in the days, weeks, and months after the storm. This Policy Comment provides a framework for understanding why private retailers and the Coast Guard mounted an effective response in the Gulf Coast region. Using this framework provides four clear policy recommendations:
1.Give the private sector as much freedom as possible to provide resources for relief and recovery efforts and ensure that its role is officially recognized as part of disaster protocols.
2. Decentralize government relief to local governments and non-governmental organizations and provide that relief in the form of cash or broadly defined vouchers.
3. Move the Coast Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) out of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
4. Reform "Good Samaritan" laws so that private-sector actors are clearly protected when they make good faith efforts to help.
If disaster situations are to be better handled in the future, it is important that institutions are in place so that actors have the appropriate knowledge to act and incentives to behave in ways that benefit others. The framework and recommendations provided in this paper help to provide a good understanding of the appropriate institutions.
Just finished watching Obama's response to the Rev. Wright controversy. He gave a very good talk, both in terms of content and in terms of him trying to extract himself politically from the situation. The text can be found here (at least for the time being).
The one comment I'd make off the top of my head is that his rhetorical strategy of invoking, in a positive way, the Founders and the Constitution and suggesting that their general vision was right even though it was corrupted by slavery, will lead some to (rightly I think) compare this talk to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. King's use of Biblical imagery as well as references to the Founders gave that document much of its rhetorical power by calling whites to account by their own value systems.
To be clear, I'm not saying that it is the equivalent of King's Letter, just that this rhetorical element may bring forward those comparisons.
Obama's explicit comparisons between the anger of Wright's generation and how it plays out in African-American churches and the anger of white Americans about ongoing economic change (which Obama has misdiagnosed, but that's another story) or perceptions of reverse discrimination seem to come from a similar sort of place: I understand why you are angry and you need to understand why we are angry and, by your own ideals, you should want to recognize the source of our anger and join in addressing it.
In any case, the speech will continue to get talked about and we'll see if my prediction about comparisons to King's Letter hold up.
From today's Detroit Free Press comes this story of a 13 year old boy (with Asperger's no less) who had to endure humiliating and manipulative interrogation by suburban Detroit cops in response to utterly false claims that his father had sexually abused his 14 year old sister, who is autistic.
In threerecentposts, I offered some thoughts about the parallels among environmentalism, religion, and authoritarianism. I want to continue that line of discussion for a moment with a weather report. It's been a very snowy winter here in Canton, over 100 inches actually, which is 50% above our average of about 66. Ottawa to our north has had over 400cm, or 157 inches. We are both nearing our snowiest winters ever. It has been cold, though none of those -30F nights that we usually have a couple of each winter. Still, it's been a "real" winter like we haven't seen for years up here. Thus it's tempting to make all kinds of snarky remarks about global warming. But I'm not going to do that because I'm always quick to criticize people who use every heat wave or warm summer to make claims about a phenomenon whose reality is a matter of decades or centuries, not weeks or years. However, this winter does raise another point that I will get to below.
The January/February 2008 issue of The Freeman is now available online. I have an article therein entitled "Free-Market Money: A Key to Peace," (PDF) based on this blog post. I argue that the classical liberal concern with keeping money production out of the hands of the state was, and is, a means by which its anti-imperialism could be effected. Without recourse to the printing press, the State is that much less likely to be able to afford foreign aggression. In fact, most central banks have grown out of the need for surreptitious forms of revenue, especially for war. The free bankers and the peaceniks need to get together and see their common ground: if one believes in peace and opposes the warfare-imperialist state, one needs to consider seriously the arguments against central banking. The beast needs to be starved.
One of the great things about having the time to blog this year (thank you SLU for your generous sabbatical/leave policy) is that it really can be a platform for first drafts of other things, or just a space to organize your thoughts in a less than fully formal way. The transformation of a blog post into a Freeman piece is precisely why blogging is, or at least can be, really productive for a scholar.
"It seems to me therefore clearly not desirable that generally higher education or research should be regarded as legitimate purposes of corporation expenditure, because this would not only vest powers over cultural decisions in men selected for capacities in an entirely different field, but would also establish a principle which, if generally applied, would enormously enhance the actual powers of corporations."
Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. The subject is almost sacrosanct and those who indulge in criticism are labeled as Marxists, socialists, fundamentalists and worse. These labels are used because alternatives to democracy cannot be perceived! Support for Western democracy is messianic as proselytised by a President leading a flawed democracy
There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties. It is not that liberal democracy cannot react once it sees a threat, for example, the speedy response to a recent international financial emergency. If governments can recognise a financial emergency and in an instant move heaven and earth (and billions of dollars, pounds sterling and euros) to contain it, why are they unable to do the same in response to a global environmental emergency? Quite simply our system is seen to live and breathe by the present economic system; the problem is that living and breathing within the confines of the world ecological systems is contrary to the activity of progress and development as defined within liberal democracy.
The Chinese decision on shopping bags is authoritarian and contrasts with the voluntary non-effective solutions put forward in most Western democracies. We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. It is not that we do not tolerate such decisions in the very heart of our society, in wide range of enterprises from corporate empires to emergency and intensive care units. If we do not act urgently we may find we have chosen total liberty rather than life.
That we must choose between "liberty" and "life" puts a whole different spin on the whole "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" thing now doesn't it? Evidently, when you have the Truth, it must be imposed upon the non-believers whether they want it or not.
Goldberg adds a line from the guy's co-authored book page: "[T]he authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power." Has inter-war era scientism ever been more plain in our own time than this?
For Goldberg, by the way, this is a nice bit of evidence for his new book Liberal Fascism, which argues that modern American liberalism, deriving from Progressivism, shares some important features with the political economy of 20th century fascism. Modern liberalism, he argues, is fascism with a smiling face. Their underlying philosophy and many of their institutions are similar to those of the fascists, but their intentions are much more noble. The op-ed above certainly fits that description. Having started reading the book last night, and having seen a draft of the chapter on economics, I can tell you that it's a serious piece of intellectual history that should be taken seriously by precisely the folks who are going to dismiss his argument without reading the book.
Lest you believe that the notion of heretical behavior and other elements of the worst of organized religion within the environmentalist movement are hyperbole, check out what the Canadian scientist David Suzuki had to say about politicians who question the science of global warming (HT: Ron Bailey):
Toward the end of his speech, Dr. Suzuki said that "we can no longer tolerate what's going on in Ottawa and Edmonton" and then encouraged attendees to hold politicians to a greater green standard.
"What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act," said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
"It's an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years."
Deny the faith, go to jail. All the more ironic that he was a former board member of a civil liberties organization. Whatever one's views on climate change, suggesting jailing those who dissent should be beyond the bounds of reasoned discussion and smacks of the mentality of witch hunts, pogroms, and forced conversions.
I give you the subject header of an email that just came across our faculty/staff listserv, courtesy of the Chaplain's Office:
"Christian Ash Wednesday: Why not give up carbon for Lent?"
Now the idea was not literally to "give up carbon" altogether, although that would make Rand's characterization of environmentalism as "death worship" much less hyperbolic than I've always believed it to be. Rather, it was an exhortation to reduce energy usage on the margin.
Still, it does serve as a reminder of what many have seen as the disturbing parallels between much of organized religion and popular forms of environmentalism. Seeing them explicitly combined in such a "logical" way makes these points even more telling:
I blogged about this over at The Austrian Economists and never mentioned it here. I shall remedy that now.
This month's "Cato Unbound" symposium is on "Can Marriage Survive?" and includes a several very good essays, especially the lead by Stephanie Coontz and the follow up by Betsey Stephenson and Justin Wolfers. Check out Coontz's reply as well. Coontz is one of the best scholarly writers on the family around and recently made an argument in the NY Times for getting the state out of the marriage business.
Among the more curious arguments made in the wake of the Ron Paul newsletters affair is the charge that those libertarians who decried the racism and homophobia of the newsletters are revealing their underlying statism. The most complete version of this argument is here. You can also see it here, where I've been declared a "Libertarian War Criminal" for "Siding with the State’s Thought Control in the Ron Paul Newsletter Affair." It has also been made in different forms, or cut and pasted from the first blog, into a number of comments threads at Hit & Run and elsewhere. A representative sample from the first link:
Political correctness is a very strong signal of statism. In the mind of a statist, something is either required or banned. Either homosexual behavior is banned or it is required that everybody respect homosexual behavior.
In the statist world of the “cosmopolitan libertarians,” only cosmopolitans get to satisfy their preferences and tastes (or as some others choose and should be free to choose to view them, vices) in the marketplace. Statists in their guts, the “cosmopolitan libertarians” view any differences in values as political threats. Suburban and rural preferences and tastes, whether vices (like racism and homophobia) or otherwise must therefore be shouted down and banned, and even the most ardent libertarian like Ron Paul for whom it is suggested might hold any such values they view as a political threat.
I'm not interested in a line-by-line fisking of this stuff, although I will ask where anyone has said it is "required" (i.e., presumably at the barrel of a gun) that everybody "respect homosexual behavior" or that vices should be "banned." All I've ever said is that we should name those things for what they are, shame those who use such rhetoric, and decide whether we as libertarians wish to continue to associate with them. I also said it was a decision that each of us had to make as individuals, though I still think we'd be better as a movement without it. It's funny that folks who shout so much about the "right of association" are so upset about others making calls to choose not to associate with them.
I’m catching up on some of the reaction around the libertarian blogosphere this morning as a windstorm knocked out my internet connection yesterday (though I did get tons of reading done!). There’s too much good stuff out there to link it all, but I do specifically commend Radley Balko’s piece at Reason’s Hit & Run, especially this bit:
Of course, Paul was never going to win. So the real concern here is what happens to the momentum for the ideas his campaign has revived. The danger is that the ignorance in those newsletters becomes inextricably tethered to the ideas that have drawn people to Paul's campaign, and soils those ideas for years to come. You needn't be a gold bug or buy into conspiracies about Jewish bankers, for example, to see the merit in allowing for private, competing currencies (what PayPal once aspired to become). You needn't believe blacks are animals or savages or genetically inferior to believe that the welfare state's perverse incentives have done immeasurable damage to black families. You needn't be a confederate sympathizer to appreciate the wisdom of federalism. You needn't be an anti-Semite to wonder about the implications of the U.S.'s broad support for Israel.
Some of these ideas have always faced a certain hurdle in the national debate. To argue against welfare, hate crimes laws, and affirmative action, libertarians (and conservatives) always have to clear the racism card first. To argue for ending the drug war or knocking out huge federal agencies, we always have to clear the "'I'm not a kook" card. Today's news, combined with Paul's high profile, I think carries the potential to make all of that a little more difficult.
What has surprised me, I must admit, is the fact that so many fairly prominent libertarian commenters are surprised by all of this. First of all, these newsletters have been brought up before, though perhaps not as many examples, nor as many really offensive ones. But more important, those of us who have been paying attention to the libertarian movement for the last 15 years knew that the paleo element was growing and was associated with all kinds of unsavory views from the ugly segment of the hard right. Did all of these supposed observers of the libertarian scene not pay attention to the appearances that Paul has made at all kinds of fringe events? Did they not pay attention to the links between people associated with Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute (Paul’s intellectual home) and racists, anti-Semites, Holocaust skeptics, homophobes, Confederacy praisers, and conspiracy theorists of all types, all of which have been ably discussed and documented by Right Watch and Tom Palmer, among others? Perhaps the under 35 crowd doesn’t have the longer-run history that those of us in our 40s do.
Well the long-awaited Jamie Kirchick hit piece on RP is up at The New Republic. The Paulites are already drilling him a new one in the comments. Kirchick argues that all of RP's old newsletters show he's a racist, homophobic, anti-semitic, cranky loon. We've been down this road before of course, and Paul and the campaign has responded to some of this stuff.
Just a few reactions of my own:
1. Like many of the RP supporting commenters, I'd like to see scans of the actual newsletters so the full context can be seen.
UPDATE: the scans are here. (HT: Jason Briggeman.)
2. Some of what those newsletters say I would call racist etc., but certainly not all of it and perhaps not even the majority of it. Criticism of Israel is not ipso facto anti-Semitic and I see nothing in the piece that I would call anti-Semitic. Name calling isn't the same thing as racism - Barbara Jordan frequently did play the victim and was, arguably, a socialist. Some of what Kirchick sees as ugly is also just policy disagreement. Some of it is bad though.
3. I found it interesting that Kirchick made an explicit connection to the Mises Institute and distinguished their "brand" of libertarianism from the more "urbane" of Cato or Reason. That will increase the fund raising at the Mises Institute for sure! As someone more sympathetic to the Cato/Reason brand, I do think differentiating those products is important and I'm glad Kirchick did so.
4. Kirchick's attempt to turn the Mises Institute's work on secession into ipso facto evidence of racism is really pathetic. In and of itself, of course, secession is very much a noble libertarian tradition. I guess it's naive to think that journalists are not so simple-minded as to be unable to separate the general principle of secession from the particulars of the Civil War. A smear job is a smear job. Of course the charge he's leveled here is an obvious risk when the same organization talks about secession and then also engages in Civil War revisionism and Lincoln bashing, and offers kind words about the Confederacy and the culture of the South.
In general, this is a mostly recycled set of charges that the campaign has dealt with before. My own view is that RP is not nearly as guilty as Kirchick would have it but he's also not innocent either. If you have a newsletter with your name on it and you have byline-free commentaries, some of which say some nasty stuff, you best be prepared to be called to account for it. As I said in my earlier series of posts, RP has walked the line with this stuff for a long time, so it's no surprise that it would be fodder for smear job that mixes unfair charges with accurate ones.
Addendum: at some level, the very fact that Paul has a background such that these newsletters and their comments exist is the real problem here. Imagine what a libertarian candidacy without his baggage might have done.
Via Radley Balko, some lions, lots of buffalo, and an alligator. Obligatory libertarian content: The buffalo sure seem to have a very effective citizens' militia to repel aggressors!
Over at Cliopatria, Timothy Burke complains that Jonah Goldberg's forthcoming new book abuses the word "fascism" in describing modern US liberals as heirs of the fascist tradition of the earlier 20th century. Putting aside whether Goldberg is right or wrong for the moment (though having seen a draft of one chapter on the economics of fascism, I thought his argument was good enough to require a serious response from the left, rather than the comparisons to Ann Coulter it is drawing in Matt Yglesias's comments), I think it's probably a good thing for those on the left to have to deal with what they perceive to be misleading or inaccurate terminology about their beliefs that is damaging.
After all, libertarians have been dealing with everything from Pinochet to Halliburton described by leftists as "the free market," when neither authoritarianism nor corporatism are what libertarians stand for (the latter is closer to fascism, Italian style, in my view). And let's not forget Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine in which Milton Friedman and capitalism more generally are linked to torture and the intentional destruction of communities for political purposes. Then there's Michael Moore blaming the "free market" for the problems with US health care, an industry in which almost half of the expenditures are made by government. The left has practically made a movement out of blaming every social outcome they don't like on "capitalism" or "the free market" (regardless of the actual institutions and policies in place) and/or calling everything that conservatives or libertarians do that they don't like "fascism." It's hard to drum up a ton of sympathy when the current victims have been guilty of the same sorts of sins.
So now that the worm has turned, and a conservative is seen to be abusing the language in describing the views of the left, perhaps folks on the left will be more circumspect in their own use of language when talking about the positions held by conservatives and libertarians, or in labeling the institutions of the very mixed economy as being "free market" or "capitalist." At the very least, I hope they are more empathetic to libertarians when we complain about such abuses.
Libertarians and other advocates of the right to bear arms have long argued that the presence of law-abiding but gun-toting citizens might well reduce the number of large-scale shooting incidents, both by discouraging them in the first place and stopping them before they get out of control.
The second of the church shootings yesterday provides another example to bolster this point:
A New Life parishioner acting as a security guard shot and killed the gunman who entered the church Sunday afternoon after he had gotten no more than 50 feet inside the building, Boyd said.
Boyd said the female security guard was a hero in preventing further bloodshed, rushing to confront the gunman just inside the church.
"She probably saved over a hundred lives," Boyd said of the guard, whom he said is not a law enforcement officer and used her personal weapon.
I hope there's nine Supreme Court Justices about to hear a case on the DC gun ban who read the paper carefully. Respecting the right to bear arms is more often than not a way to reduce violence.
UPDATE: she was a former Minneapolis police officer, but was in attendance as a private citizen on Sunday.
LATER UPDATE: the shot that killed the gunman was self-inflicted, but only after multiple shots from the woman had put him down.
David Gordon and Stephan Kinsella raised questions in the comments to my last post that require a long enough reply to be a post of their own. After this reply, I'm going to try to restrain myself from further replies for awhile, at least long ones, as I do have "real" work to do. For those just jumping in, my previous posts can be found here and here. And for those who didn't see it, there was a piece in The Nation on the Paul campaign in the last few days that explores the internal libertarian debates over the campaign. Worth a look.
After reading the Gordon/Johnson exchange that Roderick links to below, I see that David Gordon is responding to my original post here, though I'm so irrelevant and/or evil that he can't mention my name (who am I? Voldemort?). I want to use this chance to follow up on a few things, especially given the dozens of comments that followed here and the many more on other blogs. I'm a glutton for punishment, as I suspect this is not going to quell my critics.
In a post a couple of weeks ago, I argued that the left, especially the anti-war left, should take libertarian criticisms of the Fed, and central banking generally, more seriously. On The New Republic's site on Wednesday, Alvaro Vargas Llosa has a nice short piece raising the whole question of why we need central banks. Good to see a moderate-to-left magazine ask the question. What appear to be a good number of Ron Paul supporters are among the commenters.
David calls out the Paul skeptics here at L&P. As one of them, I'll answer the bell.
First, let me say I consider myself a very staunch libertarian, and I have been for more than 25 years. I worked on the Ed Clark campaign in 1980 as a cherub-faced 16 year old. As I've argued here before, I consider myself a libertarian of the left in the senses that 1) I believe that libertarian policies will better achieve most of the aims of the left than will their own preferred policies and 2) libertarians should be joining forces with the left on cultural issues, e.g. feminism and gender issues. Even if we don't agree with them that more state intervention is the way to address the problems, we should be more willing to recognize the problems and talk about both policy and cultural solutions to them. It will then come as no surprise that I'm a Paul skeptic.
Paul may be the most libertarian of the bunch from either party, but I do indeed have concerns about several of his positions. Before I launch into them, let me just say that I'm in strong support of a number of his more controversial positions: getting out of Iraq ASAP, getting the state out of the monetary system (see my post on the relationship between these two positions here), ending the Drug War, and generally de-regulating the US economy. Nonetheless, here are my concerns:
One of the pervasive economic myths of our time is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, especially the second half. Like all myths, it has a kernel of truth to it - if you do a comparative statics of the percentage of income going to each of the income quintiles, most data do suggest that the rich have a higher percentage than they used to, and the poor a lesser percentage.
However, the comparative statics ignores the issue of mobility: the people who comprise the quintiles change from year to year. If we really wanted to know if the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer, we should ask two different questions:
1. What are the odds that a poor household in year X is no longer poor in year X+Y? That is, how likely is it that people can move up (or down!) the income ladder? It could turn out that the gains of the top 20% reflect more poor folks moving up the ladder and that the losses of the bottom 20% reflect an influx of lower-skilled immigrants during the time period being analyzed.
2. What do poor people have in their houses? If those who are poor in year X+Y are far more likely to have, for example, basic consumer goods, than were the poor in years before, we can probably dismiss the claim that the poor are getting poorer.
Well the data support answers to both questions that would suggest that the poor are indeed not getting poorer.
One of the interesting things about the Ron Paul candidacy has been the reaction to two of his most controversial proposals: withdrawing US troops from Iraq (and elsewhere) as soon as possible and returning to the gold standard or some form of private money. The right, of course, howls with derision at the former, while the left (and some on the right) do the same at the latter. What few if any seem to realize is that these two positions have a deep and important historical connection:
If you want to make it harder for the US to act like an imperialist bully you need to find ways to reduce the resources available for it to do so. Getting the state out of the money creation business eliminates its ability to manipulate the monetary system to raise funds surreptitiously for the war machine.
Well you just never know where Ol' Ron's gonna show up. Check out the upper right corner of the front page of the always-useful TinyURL.com.
Whenever a tinyurl is generated, that little Ron ad appears in the upper right corner of the page that the user generates. (Generate one for this page and see). That's a lot of free publicity there. It probably also comprises more evidence for Ron's constituency being heavily weighted toward the young and technophilic.
The closing of LFB is very sad indeed, but it does contain a bright spot I'll note below. LFB served two important purposes in my development as a libertarian and as a scholar, one as a college student and one as a professional.
As a college student, it was THE intellectual lifeline to libertarianism in the pre-internet days. These young whippersnappers with their Internets, and Googles, and online resources have it so easy today when they want to have libertarian ideas at their fingertips. In the old days, we had to actually wait for a paper catalog, dial a dial phone and wait for delivery in the regular mail! More seriously, without LFB, my ability to find, read, and digest libertarian ideas in college, when they were scarce in the curriculum, would have been much reduced.
As a professional, LFB's willingness to carry academic titles at reduced prices served me well both as a reader and as an author. Price discrimination is a beautiful thing and LFB made it work for both authors and readers. If nothing else, this will be one of the great losses of its demise.
Finally, we can take some comfort in the fact that LFB is going out of business because of the technological and institutional improvements that more competitive markets have brought forth. Losing LFB hurts, but the book market is much better than it used to be and libertarian books are very accessible through other means. It is the very ideas that LFB has promoted over the years that are the indirect cause of its demise. Ignorant critics of libertarianism would call that "ironic." I would call it progress, with the recognition that all economic progress brings losses in its wake.
Thanks for everything LFB - Howie, Andrea, Kathleen and, of course, Roy.
On CNN.com we find this story reporting that 6% of Brits surveyed admitted to pulling out their own teeth with pliers self-treatment because they could not get care through the NHS.
And for the understatement of the day award, I nominate:
Sharon Grant, chair of the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health, which commissioned the survey, said: "These findings indicate that the NHS dental system is letting many patients down very badly.
Where the state promises care and can't deliver, people will, literally in this case, take matters into their own hands. Like the Canadian women who are being told to go to the US to give birth because Canada's vaunted single-payer system has no beds or insufficient equipment or facilities, the inability to find NHS dentists demonstrates that if prices don't ration care, something else will. And those with the fewest resources and least access to power are likely to suffer the most.
Promises of "free care for all" are wrong about all three terms: "free", "care" and "all."
Update: As Mark points out in the comments, I didn't represent the results quite accurately. The 6% figure was general "DIY dentistry" not the subset of that group who admitted to pulling out their teeth with pliers. Even so, I think the overarching point remains.
There's much buzz on the Web about Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." (For an overview, see Tyler Cowen's spot-on review today.) Klein argues that "free market ideologues" have consciously created crises as opportunities to force their unpopular policies on unsuspecting populations, both in the US and elsewhere. Those undemocratic moves toward "free markets" have themselves ended in disaster, or so she argues. She manages to link the "shock doctrine" of post-Soviet reform with War on Terror torture (shock... get it?) and lay it all at the hands of... Milton Friedman. She does so, based on Friedman's 1962 quote that goes as follows:
"Only a crisis produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."
Some L&P readers may be following the Justin Wolfers guest-blog over at Marginal Revolution, where he's been discussing the Census Bureau data on divorce. See here and here. Justin, who has done some excellent work on the economics of marriage and divorce, is arguing that the US divorce rate, contrary to popular perception, has flattened, if not declined. There's some discussion of the details of the underlying data, but in the second post, Justin provides a link to an Excel file with the 2004 data.
Here's a few tidbits: Of men's first marriages begun in 1965-69, the percentage that reached a 10th anniversary was 76.9. The percentage of men's first marriages begun in 1985-89 that reached a 10th anniversary was 76.4. For 15th anniversaries, the percentage of the 65-69 group was 67.4, which compares to men's first marriages begun in 1980-84's rate of 65.3.
Sheldon mentioned this in the comments on an earlier entry, but I wanted to bring it up here. My essay "Capitalism and the Family" is now available on the FEE website and will appear in the July/August issue of The Freeman. Here's the opening:
It is hard to think of a human social institution that has undergone more change in less time than has the family in the last several decades. Although the magnitude and rapidity of those changes are exaggerated by the unusual stability in the family from just after World War II until the mid-1960s, the 40 years since have seen a continuing evolution in a variety of ways. The changes in the form and functions of the family have provoked an assortment of responses from the political left and right, with the former largely tolerant or sympathetic to those changes and the latter critical of them.
What has been lost in the standard left-right debate is the crucial role played by the market economy in many of those changes. The result is that many on the right who offer at least lip service to the market order continue to resist the cultural changes that it has made possible (and that cannot be undone). Meanwhile, those on the left who embrace the dynamism of culture refuse to see or credit the dynamism of the market for making those changes possible and sustaining them. Those of us who value the dynamism of the free market and its power to expand the range of human freedom could do well to apply those ideas to the recent changes in the family and begin to see the ways in which those changes have resulted from the creative powers of the market and have thus expanded human freedom.
As my time as an administrator has now come to an end, I've been able to write a couple of short commentary pieces about some of the issues I dealt with while running a first-year seminar program. Two of them have recently been published on the web.
Over the last year, I've been following pretty closely the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax. For those who might be interested, the single best source on the case is our HNN/Cliopatria colleague KC Johnson's "Durham-in-Wonderland" blog. KC and Stuart Taylor from National Journal have a book on the case that is now available at Amazon and elsewhere entitled "Until Proven Innocent."
This case fascinated me for a whole bunch of reasons, not the least of which was the generally deplorable behavior of 88 Duke faculty and several members of the administration. However, the deeper fascination was much the same as I had with the Dan Rather memos case from a few years ago. In re-reading a long blog post of mine on that case this morning, I realized how much I wrote then was just as true of this case. In particular, my theme of the "blogosphere" being an example of liberty checking power seems just as, if not more, applicable to this case. Bloggers like KC (and there were others) dug deep while the mainstream media swallowed the hoax hook, line, and politically-correct sinker, and were a significant part of the process by which the three accused young men were declared innocent. No doubt they had great legal representation, but even the lawyers were reading the blogs to keep up with new events.
Just when you think Helen Lovejoy is satire, you find her worldview appearing in a serious piece of social science. In The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality by Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson (p. 200), we get the following:
Yet, in the end, children are a collective resource, and their needs should take precedence in our national agenda.
I can't decide which is worse: the treatment of children as "collective resources" or the hubris of claiming that their needs (as interpreted by the authors of course) should trump all else in the supposed "national agenda."
A worse brew of collectivism and hubris will be hard to find on any day.
Update: I wonder whether the authors would feel okay if someone substituted the word "women" for "children" in that sentence. Would they be okay thinking of women as "collective resources" in particular? If so, then welcome to Gilead where women are, in Offred's words, "national resources."
I was going to put this in the comments on Gus's post, but it got too long. This is really a reply to Gus and it is probably something he's said himself somewhere.
The libertarian camp has always contained some folks who see themselves as "on the right" and others who reject that, either by saying "my heart is more on the left" or rejecting the dichotomy altogether. Before 9/11, those two groups could largely co-exist, except perhaps on the very fringes.
Since 9/11, and especially since Iraq, the distance between those two groups has grown much larger. Like an iceberg splitting in half and leaving two pieces floating on the water, and slowly drifting apart, the libertarian movement seems to be dividing over these issues.
For those who haven't seen it, Randy has responded to the general criticisms over at VC. He has also posted excerpts from Aeon's and Roderick's papers from the "War and Liberty" symposium in Reason Papers.
As was the case two years ago, Glen Whitman, Tom Bell and I are teamed, this time along with Jan Narveson and John Majewski. We won't have Flossie with us, but we'll have fun. I'll try cross-post some here.
Stealing a meme from Tyler Cowen, here's the best paragraph I've read this morning. It's Cato's Timothy Lee making the case for why libertarians should be supportive of free, open-source software initiatives. He argues that they represent the kind of de-centralized voluntary cooperation that libertarians should support and criticizes some libertarian tech folks for labeling them overly "communal" and the like. In making that argument he writes:
So libertarians are right to criticize policies aimed at accomplishing communal goals via coercive means. But some libertarians have gotten so used to defending the market against those who want to impose collectivism that they start criticizing purely voluntary efforts to organize people on more communal lines. They are forgetting that libertarianism is not necessarily about increasing the role of for–profit enterprise in every aspect of our lives. Commercial activity is one alternative to statism, and an extremely important one. But it's just one possible mode of cooperation, and it's not necessarily the best choice in every situation.
His opening paragraph applies this argument to co-ops as compared to commercial grocery stores. Lee is quite right here and over the years libertarians have become better at distinguishing being "pro-market" from being "pro-business." That's a good thing. But perhaps we now need to be even more careful and make the distinction between being "pro-market" and "pro-voluntary cooperation."
As an intellectual paradigm, post-WWII classical liberal/libertarian thought has not paid nearly enough attention to forms of voluntary social cooperation that exist outside of the market. Our esteemed colleague David Beito's book is one obvious notable exception of course. But beyond that, what have classical liberals had to say about the myriad ways in which humans organize their lives that do not involve the realm of monetary calculation? My own work on the family is my own small attempt to fill this gap.
Long ago, Mises argued that economics (or what he called "catallactics") was just a subset of the broader study of society that he termed "praxeology." (In a more intellectually ideal world, it would be called "sociology.") He suggested that there were other branches of praxeology yet undeveloped. In the 21st century, libertarian thinkers need to begin those explorations. We, I would argue, have a glut of economists and a shortage of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and political scientists looking at these other forms of voluntary social cooperation.
Meet Kevin Craig, a candidate of the Libertarian Party for Congress in Missouri who thinks it's perfectly fine for individual states to declare homosexuality a crime. That's, as Jason notes, a big step backward from the LP being the first party with an anti-sodomy law plank in its platform.
Also note the link on the left to the "Institute for Historical Review," a well-known Holocaust Revisionist site.
I personally want to express my deep gratitude to Mr. Craig for his humane agreement with Jefferson that capital punishment for homosexuality was too strong. I know many, many gay and lesbian friends of mine are eternally grateful for his compassion and humanity in taking that bold and brave position. I suppose my gay male friends should be happy that he seems to think castration would be okay because Jefferson appeared to support it. After all, it's better than the death penalty.
If you'd like to see more on Mr. Craig's views on homosexuality, go here.
Here he is on porn. Yes, he says "no censorship," but when your policy links are all to the Family Research Council, it's hard to take that seriously. Read the entry on AIDS at your own risk.
For someone like me, who thinks libertarians ought to be part of a broader, more cosmopolitan, progressive political movement, having LP candidates like Mr. Craig is enough to make me stop calling myself a libertarian.
Our colleague Jason has a great post over at Positive Liberty arguing that libertarian policies would not "take us back" to the 19th century and a world of unlimited corporate power, as his leftist interlocutor believes. I think Jason is dead on in his analysis, particularly about how libertarians have long objected to corporate abuse of state power, but he missed one opportunity to drive the point home further. He writes:
Yes, we libertarians sometimes do take the corporations’ side, as we do with antitrust law.
Perhaps that was a rhetorically necessary concession given the spanking that Jason lays on, but I think it gives away too much. Jason rightly notes just afterward:
The principle at work here, in every case, is that no citizen may use the government to live at the expense of other citizens. It makes no difference whether he represents a corporation or not; the state is not to be used as a private piggy bank. Libertarians have always opposed such efforts, even when this stance has made us politically unpopular.
Unfortunately, he never connects the dots: one of the reasons many libertarians object to antitrust laws is that they provide an opportunity for some corporations to use the power of the state to punish other corporations and, in the process, punish consumers as well. The majority of antitrust cases arise because one firm objects to the behavior of another and wishes to use the state to get them to knock it off rather than legitimately out-competing them for the consumer dollar. Antitrust is a form of corporate welfare. Such behavior was in fact the origin of antitrust laws. Jason rightly points to libertarian analyses of rent-seeking, but doesn't link that back to his concession on antitrust.
Bottom line: libertarian support for abolishing antitrust law is a perfect example of our willingness not to privilege corporations. Corporations who make an honest living and provide the benefits that Jason nicely delineates are not being "favored" if we abolish antitrust. We're just letting them do their job in serving the consumer. The corporations who should fear abolishing antitrust are the ones not "serving the public" because they choose to try to earn a living by using the state to coercively eliminate their competition.
Leftists who worry about corporations using the power of the state to enrich themselves should be right in the trenches with libertarians calling for the abolition of antitrust and other similar laws. Perhaps if more libertarians were also more vocal about decrying the same sorts of corporate behavior in the context of the war machine (what is Halliburton if not classic corporatism?), the left might take us more seriously on antitrust as well. In any case, there's no need for us to give ground on the antitrust question. Jason could well have said "antirust is yet another example where libertarians are objecting to the corporate-state alliance," rather than framing it as taking the side of the innocent corporation making an honest living. Given the rhetorical situation of his reponse to a leftist, it seems like a missed opportunity.
Now that grades are in, time to catch up on my reading and blogging.
I just received the new Cambridge Companion to Hayek edited by Ed Feser, and including contributions from a number of luminaries in the Hayek literature. So far, the collection is a generally excellent introduction to Hayek’s thought. I am, however, in the mood to pick on one point in Ed’s introduction to the volume.
In the context of discussing how Hayek insists we must learn to live in “two worlds at once,” and that this means we can never completely overcome the lack of common purpose and deeper community that characterizes the anonymous Great Society, Ed rightly points out that there are still ways in Hayek’s framework to capture elements of that intimacy. He writes:
Hayek’s promotion of a mild Burkean moralism and religiosity would seem to be his way of taking the bite out of this unhappy situation, as far as that is possible; a stolid bourgeois allegiance to what is left in the modern world of the traditional family and the church or synagogue would seem in his view to be all we have left to keep us warm in the chilly atmosphere of liberal individualism and market dynamism (emphasis mine).
My question is what work the adjective in the italicized phrase is doing.
For many years, I've wondered why so many libertarians seem so willing, if not eager, to align themselves with mainstream conservativism, especially as it manifests itself in the Republican Party. I've certainly never seen the principled reason, but I've never been convinced by any strategic alignment arguments either. And with the horrific record of the Bush Adminstration (bad on civil liberties, bad on economics, and all whooped up for that old health of the state - war), the case seems even more pathetic now.
But when I think I can't abide by conservatives one more moment, they do something to top themselves.
In addition, here is the mission statement of "Save Our Constitution":
We are deeply concerned about the assaults on the U.S. Constitution, a document animated by the highest ideals of human freedom. The Constitution has survived a Civil War, two World Wars, and the Cold War. In war and in peace, generations of Americans of all backgrounds have struggled (and in many cases died) to defend it, improve it, and extend its protections to all.
Although September 11, 2001 was a traumatic event, we do not want future historians to say that the events of that day sparked the end of constitutional democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law in this country. In the interest of avoiding such an outcome, we feel a profound call to stand up now and strengthen our defense of democratic principles. To this end we are organizing teach-ins and other events to alert the public to these threats and to facilitate discussion about how to save our Constitution at a time when it is under unprecedented attack.
My talk is not in as polished a form as Gus's is, but I'll try to post a summary or the Word document sometime tomorrow.
I will add that the degree of collaboration of faculty, staff, and students with varying politics in this project has been very nice to see.
This LA Times story about Wal-Mart entering into a partnership with the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce provides a good example of a trying to create controversy where there is none and insufficient critical thinking by the reporter.
The theme of the story is best summarized in this sentence: "But not all of its usual supporters — nor some gay activists — welcomed the announcement." This first part is a reference to conservative groups who normally support Wal-Mart now being upset by their "anti-family" stance in partnering with the NGLCC. No surprise there. But what about the "gay activists" opposing the partnership? On what grounds would they do so?
Very interesting post by Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy about the intra-libertarian division over the war in Iraq. L&P gets a mention as a leading voice on the anti-war side. Worth a read, and worth a comment if you are so inclined.
My "Gilead Watch" idea has proven to have some legs. Jason Kuznicki offered a new one the other day. I've also received two "submissions" directly. One from regular commenter Lady Aster points us to an article about "Purity Balls." Excerpt:
Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys, but rather fancy creepy dress-up rituals taking place in towns like Colorado Springs and Tucson and Zoloft Jesusville, in which Christian dads rent a bad tux while their daughters, mostly teenagers but many as young as 6 or 7, get all dolled up in gowns from JCPenny and they all drive out to the airport Marriott and prepare to, well, lose their minds.
It begins. At some point the daughter stands up, her pale arms wrapped around her daddy, and reads aloud a formal pledge that she will remain forever pure and virginal and sex-free until she is handed over, by her dad (who is actually called the "high priest" of the home), like some sort of sad hymenic gift, to her husband, who will receive her like the sanitized and overprotected and libidinously inept servant she so very much is. Praise!
Would that I were making this up.
The dad -- er, high priest -- in turn, stands up and reads his pledge, one stating that he will work to protect his daughter's virginal purity that he has so carefully and wickedly drilled into her since birth, since she was knee-high to a disturbing dogma, that he will protect her chastity and oversee it and help enforce its boundaries, which might or might not involve great amounts of rage and confusion and secret stashes of cheap scotch, although his pledge claims it's with honor and integrity and lots of bewildering Godspeak. Which, in many households, is essentially the same thing.
And my friend Nicole Youngman passes on a piece from the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporting on a Louisiana bill to force couples with minor children to wait a year for a divorce. It even includes a reference to the Gideon Christian Fellowship.
This morning I want to offer the first entry in what I hope will also be a regular
"feature" of my blogging here. I'm going to call this series
of posts the "Gilead Watch"
in honor of Margaret
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
For those
who haven't read it, the book is a work of feminist science fiction that depicts
a future US in which the religious right has created a theocracy (The Republic
of Gilead) in which women have, in essence, become state property. Those
who are able to
conceive
and
bear children are put to work as "handmaids" of elite couples, there only to
be a uterus and justified by biblical injunction. Other women are assigned
to very specific roles within the household, and the whole society has restricted
sexual freedom and civil liberties in a variety of ways. The book is
in the tradition of other dystopian "warnings," rather than a prediction of
how
things might go. Written in the mid-80s, her perspective is understandable
with the rise of religious conservatives during the Reagan years.
During the current administration, with its own deep connections to religious
conservatives (who in their most radical form certainly have theocratic ambitions),
a number of proposals, policies, and actual legislation have appeared that
resonate with the world of Gilead in Atwood's novel. I keep seeing
these echoes in various places and have wanted to call attention
to them on a regular basis, and this inaugural post is my first attempt to
systematically do so.
Those of you who enjoyed my post on "social snowflakes" will enjoy this wonderful essay by Dan Klein on the roller rink as illustrative of many aspects of the concept of spontaneous order. It's clear from this essay what a great teacher Dan is as well.
This morning's LA Times has a story of the astounding rates of economic growth being produced in the developing world and attributes this growth to the expansion of free trade. Shocking, I know, from the LA Times, but perhaps the facts are finally the facts. A brief excerpt:
The global economy is on a growth streak that is shaping up to be the broadest and strongest expansion in more than three decades.
Rising spending and investment by consumers and businesses worldwide are boosting national economies on every continent, pushing down unemployment rates in many countries and lifting business earnings and confidence.
Of 60 nations tracked by investment firm Bridgewater Associates, not one is in recession — the first time that has been true since 1969....
The trend is being driven by free trade, which has created millions of jobs in emerging nations in recent years, fueling stunning new wealth in those countries.
Unfortunately, a subtext of the story is that this growth worldwide is accompanied by stagnation for US workers. This earlier post of mine suggests the reality is otherwise and that traditional aggreate measures of economic well-being miss the real gains for average Americans. The LA Times piece also (wrongly) places blame on the trade deficit for supposed "stagnation," and refuses to see how state intervention is responsible for high unemployment rates in Western Europe.
Still, any time a major media outlet argues that free trade is making billions of lives better off across the world, I'll forgive a few mistakes.
I have just returned from our university's annual Passover Seder, a holiday that celebrates the freedom of Jews and the freedom of all people everywhere by recounting not just the Exodus from Egypt, but also all the various times that Jews have had to struggle for their freedom against both the state and the sorts of tropes about Jews that legitimize that state power. Juxtaposing the most libertarian of Jewish holidays against my reading in the "Quiz Time" thread things written by people who I know are lovers of freedom, and who I deeply respect, that are endorsements of a paper that repeats the very same tropes that have been the cause of so much denial of human freedom throughout history, I can't help but be deeply depressed and confused.
And, frankly at this point, I don't care what others think of what I'm saying here (and I'm waiting for the first person to question my libertarian credentials and/or call me a closet Neo-Con). So I will say it again, and tie it to the title of this group blog: To endorse M&W's paper is to endorse a paper that makes use of tropes about Jews that have, for centuries, been used to legitimize the systematic use of state power to deny liberty to Jews (and others!).
Endorsing the paper does not make one an anti-Semite, but it does, in my view, mean that you are endorsing modern versions of views that have a long history of justifying the denial of the very freedoms you otherwise passionately support. If some of my friends and colleagues who I really do deeply respect can't see that, I guess I'm going to have to live with it, but I will continue to loudly and frequently point it out. And I promise to do so in ways that do not call their good faith into question. In the conversation so far, I'm not sure that I've lived up to my self-imposed standards about doing so, and for that, I apologize.
"The crucial factor in President Bush's decision to attack [Iraq] was to help Israel."
Is the source of this quote the much debated Mearsheimer and Walt article or an essay on the Holocaust revisionist Institute for Historical Review website?
Tough one, eh?
It's the latter, and it appears as part of a pair of neo-Nazi flyers that made the rounds on walls at Harvard this week. The author of that IHR piece notes that he "makes some of the same points as are made in the 81 page paper by [Kennedy School Academic Dean M. Stephen] Walt and [University of Chicago professor John J.] Mearsheimer." He further notes that he was untroubled by the fact that his essay was paired with a second flyer from the neo-Nazi National Vanguard, which describes itself as "an intelligent and responsible organization that stands up for the interests of White people." Throw in David Duke's endorsement of the M & W paper and it's a crackpot jackpot.
Might it be a huge strategic mistake for libertarians to align themselves with authors whose views are "some of the same" as, and endorsed by, a nice variety of neo-Nazis? I certainly think it is.
Congrats to the George Mason Patriots for their Cinderella run to the Final Four. Many of us (MA 1987, PhD 1990) here on L&P have GMU connections, not to mention HNN our host.
I might have the ultimate double, however. My undergraduate alma mater, the University of Michigan (AB 1985) is in the final four of the "other" college basketball tournament, the NIT. By a week from tomorrow, I could be the graduate of both tournament champion schools!
Of course should Mason make the championship game, I, along with a good number of other Mason economists and econ alums, will be in Las Vegas at the APEE conference when they play. I can think of no better environment to watch that game than with a bunch of Masonites at the sportsbook at one of the Strip hotels.
Maybe the problem is that democracy per se isn't the desideratum. What's needed is _liberalism_. Democratization of tyrannical regimes can lead to liberalization, but doesn't necessarily do so. I think many political leaders and their speechwriters confuse the two, but I suspect Eugene knows the difference, and isn't in favor of pure majoritarianism, either as an export or as a domestic product. I'd wager that what Eugene favors is limited government. Democratic institutions are often a part of that, esp. when the regime used to be a dictatorship, but the demos also needs to be limited, typically by some codified rights theory. Then there's no contradiction.
I think Aeon's distinction between the exportation of "liberalism" and "democracy" is right on target. The problem with much of the talk about "fixing" the Arab world, especially from the current administration, is that it is focused on exporting "democracy," as if that were the panacea. Of course what the Rahman case forces us to confront is "what if the 'demos' votes in the theocrats?" For those who talk only of democracy (and I certainly don't mean Eugene here), what possible objection do they have to this? Until and unless people start talking seriously about liberalism, they will not have much of an argument against what's happening in Afghanistan. For smart folks like Eugene, they understand this point even if they don't always use the words as carefully as they might. I'm much more concerned about the folks in the administration as well as the general public who perhaps don't see this distinction in the ways we wish they would. (I find myself on the first day of class in Comparative Economic Systems having to make the democracy/liberalism distinction for my students, many of whom have never thought about it before.)
Four jobs I’ve had
1. library clerk
2. replacement window telephone salesperson (don't shoot me)
3. bookkeeper
4. college professor
Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (no other movie so engages my sense
of wonder)
2. Moonstruck
3. Touch of Evil
4. Life of Brian
Four places I’ve lived
1. New York
2. Ann Arbor, Michigan
3. Virginia
4. Oak Park, Michigan
Four TV shows I love
1. Star Trek: The Next Generation
2. The Simpsons
3. Seinfeld
4. The Twilight Zone (original)
Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven’t seen (much of)
1. Battlestar Galactica
2. Sopranos
3. Lost
4. Curb Your Enthusiasm
Four places I’ve vacationed
1. Marco Island, FL
2. Lake Tahoe
3. London
4. Cannes
Four of my favorite dishes (only 4?!)
1. Any sort of fish chowder
2. Buffalo wings, medium-hot
3. Linguine with shrimp in a really good arrabiata sauce
4. Beignets and hot chocolate from Cafe du Monde
Four sites I visit daily
1. Cafe Hayek
2. Division of Labour
3. Bitch PhD
4. DeanDad
Four places I’d rather be right now
1. At a blackjack table in Vegas, up several hundred dollars
2. In my season tickets seats at center ice in Joe Louis Arena
3. At my university's property on upper Saranac Lake on a cool, clear summer
evening
4. At a Rush concert in a very small venue with 200 of my closest friends
Four new bloggers I’m tagging
1. Chris Sciabarra
2. Rob at Big Monkey
3. Glen Whitman
4. David Youngberg
Actually, Mark, I thought this piece by Michael Neumann
at Counterpunch was much better. Having attenuated free speech in our
own societies in the name of protecting people from being offended, we are
hardly in a position to be outraged by the Muslim response to the cartoons.
Hoisted on our own petard, as they say. Key paragraphs:
I cannot say whether the official Western culture of piety, enthusiastically
promoted worldwide, played a role in the reaction to the cartoons. I do know
that Western piety has left the West without a leg to stand on in this dispute.
It is no good trumpeting rights of free expression, because these rights
are now supposed to have nebulous but severe limitations. From the moment
Western countries started criminalising topless posters in locker rooms,
hate speech, emotional abuse and many other sins of impurity, free expression
was at the mercy of Western piety. It cannot be invoked against piety of
another sort.
The point here is not that the West is hypocritical. Maybe it is; maybe
it is just inconsistent: who cares? Hypocrisy is among the most harmless
of sins; indeed that it has become such a fetish is one more indication of
a culture of piety. The point is rather than the West has put ideological
weapons in the hands of those it now wants to repel, and thrown away the
weapons that might have proved useful in such an effort. The most basic notions
of the rule of law -- that you should not be punished for what you cannot
help, like the feelings you have, that no one should be expected to obey
laws so vague that the criteria of obedience are mysterious -- were thrown
away years ago. They cannot be picked out of the trashcan and held up as
shiny Western ideals just because it is now convenient to do so.
In my email this afternoon, I received the Association of American Colleges and Universities' new statement on "Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility." It's not short, but I'd be curious to see folks' reaction to it around these parts. Over the years, I've been a skeptic of conservative claims of deep bias in the academy (or, alternately, I've been a defender of what I see as some "best practices" in pedagogy, as I think "political correctness" is just bad teaching) and the AAC&U is certainly a left-leaning organization. I'm happy to say I think this statement is largely excellent, and would be interested in others' takes on it.
A week or so ago, I started a series of posts about the ways in which life for average Americans continues to get better, at least economically. Today's entry concerns, actually, the lives of the poorest Americans. This piece from The Christian Science Monitor/MSNBC provides some data on the consumer items owned by the poorest of Americans.
Two-thirds of those in poverty had air conditioners in 1998, up from 50% in 1992. Personal computers have grown increasingly ubiquitous. Where fewer than 20% of homes had them in 1992, nearly 60% did in 2002 (more than own dishwashers).
Still, by almost all measures, the data show rising well-being for all of society. And while the wealth gap may not be narrowing, the rich-poor gap in lifestyles has narrowed substantially since 1992 when measured in many of these tangible items.
Census survey: percentage of items owned
Item
1992
2002
Item
1992
2002
Refrigerator
98.7%
99.2%
Dryer
68.5%
77.1%
Stove
98.0%
98.3%
Stereo system
57.3%
72.55
Color TV
94.7%
98.2%
Computer
18.6%
59.3%
Auto, truck, van
85.1%
85.7%
Dishwasher
48.7%
58.1%
Microwave
76.8%
93.2%
Garbage disposal
37.3%
47.0%
VCR
68.1%
86.9%
Freezer
32.8%
30.8%
Washer
75.0%
80.0%
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey Interview Data, 1992 and 2002; Rich Clabaugh, Christian Science Monitor
See the original piece for more data.
If, at the end of the day, how we "rank" the desirability of a society can be proxied by how well its poorest members are doing, then the US is doing pretty well, and continues to do better. Whatever noise is made about widening income and wealth gaps (which may or may not be what they appear to be), we are doing well by our poorest citizens.
A large hat tip to Will Wilkinson and I commend his discussion of the wealth-happiness angle in the original story.
I'm spending New Year's morning cleaning out my office at home and found a Dell catalog from May 2001 when I bought the computer before this one. As has often been observed, we've been paying the same nominal prices for computers for 20 years (e.g., my original 128K Mac in 1984 cost about the same nominal amount as the machine I'm currently using - 2.8ghz, 1gb RAM 120gb hd) and we keep getting better and better stuff for it. This old Dell catalog certainly bears that out.
However, two other points often overlooked:
1. The new products that appear year to year. This catalog from 01 was very light on photography and video, for example.
2. The rapidity with which new technology becomes a mere "add-in." In my current Dell catalog, a 17" LCD is the standard basic included monitor, with high-end systems including a 19" LCD. In May of 2001, there was a "new" item in the monitor section: a 15" LCD monitor for the bargain price of ...... $540. In 4 to 5 years, that same item isn't as good as the "toss-in" on new systems.
You can buy a 15" LCD for just over $200 at Dell today (or $178 at PC Connection), but even their "bargain" systems include a free 15" LCD. For example, you can buy a whole system for $499 that is at least twice as good as what I bought in 5/01 and get included FREE a monitor that cost more in 5/01 than the whole computer including the same monitor does today!
How we account for these improvements in product quality and the falling real cost of such products when we talk about economic well-being remains a tricky business, but there's no doubt about the reality. Real worker compensation may be growing very slowly, but what you can buy with it continues to grow significantly.
Since things seem to be hopping here at L&P this week, I thought I would take this chance to inaugurate the first of what I hope will be a number of posts in the upcoming months that track the ways in which the economic circumstances of average Americans are, contrary to the media and other prophets of doom, getting better and better. The media are very good at giving us the bad news, or what they think is the bad news, so I'm hoping to continually catalog the good news that they overlook or that, in the case of today's item, they sometimes stumble across.
I start with, of all places, the front page of today's New York Times (hat tip: Cafe Hayek), with a piece that opens with:
Despite a widespread sense that real estate has never been more expensive, families in the vast majority of the country can still buy a house for a smaller share of their income than they could have a generation ago. A sharp fall in mortgage rates since the early 1980's, a decline in mortgage fees and a rise in incomes have more than made up for rising house prices in almost every place outside of New York, Washington, Miami and along the coast in California.
It continues:
Nationwide, a family earning the median income - the exact middle of all incomes - would have to spend 22 percent of its pretax pay this year on mortgage payments to buy the median-priced house, according to an analysis by Moody's Economy.com, a research company. The share has increased since 1998, when it hit a low of 17 percent before house prices began rising sharply in many places. Although the overall level has reached its highest point since 1989, it remains well below the levels of the early 1980's, when it topped 30 percent.
There are several reasons for this, including the noted increasing incomes (again, contrary to popular myth), but the key is certainly lower interest rates that have enabled monthly mortgage payments to fall as a percentage of income. And, as one interviewee points out, houses today are bigger on average (and he neglects to mention that they have a lot more and better stuff in them - more have central a/c, better building materials, hard-wired smoke detectors, etc.), so families are getting more for their money. Changes in lending practices are noted as another causal factor, as lower down payments have made ownership possible for some even in the face of higher list prices, and efficiencies in the mortgage market are mentioned as well. Home ownership remains at record levels (69 percent) as a result.
This part of the American dream remains within reach of more and more average Americans.
As the "War on Terror" has pushed libertarians to declare their relative dovishness or hawkishness, it's worth remembering, as Mark Brady so admirably and often reminds us here at L&P, that classical liberalism's commitment to free trade was part and parcel of its broader opposition to imperialism and war. Cato's Dan Griswold gives a nice overview of both the argument and the evidence that increased free trade has reduced the frequency of conflict over the last few decades. He concludes:
"Advocates of free trade and globalization have long argued that trade expansion means more efficiency, higher incomes, and reduced poverty. The welcome decline of armed conflicts in the past few decades indicates that free trade also comes with its own peace dividend."
Now, if only those on the left who are both anti-war and in favor of limits on free trade could see how the latter undermines the former...
My RSS reader this morning brought me this post from Marginal Revolution, which contains a spectacular close-up picture of a snowflake, taken from a book of such pictures. As I hope it does for you, just looking at that photo brought me up short and made me stop in awe, reverence, and wonder. The intricacy, detail, complexity, and sheer beauty of that product of nature cannot be captured in words. And when you stop to consider the uncountable number of snowflakes that fall each year (most of them on my driveway it would seem), all of that awe is upped an order of magnitude.
When I see that snowflake, it engages my reverence for the beauty of the undesigned order of the natural world. Look at the symmetry and detail of that snowflake, and then consider that is the product of undesigned natural processes. I find it an object of awe that natural processes can produce a thing of such detail, complexity and beauty. It is said that only God can make a snowflake. Well for those who understand the science, or who are atheists, we know that you don't need God to do so. But even to an atheist like myself, the spontaneous order of nature can (and should!) generate the same awe, reverence, and wonder that the contemplation of God generates in those who believe. Unfortunately, whenever my wonder at the beauty of nature is engaged, it is with a tinge of frustration.The frustration I feel is that so many smart and caring people seem unable to see and appreciate the identical processes of undesigned order in the social world. "Social snowflakes" are all around us, yet precious few seem to be able to understand and appreciate them to the degree we do the snowflakes found in nature. And too many people think that these "social snowflakes" require a "Creator."
That snowflake produces in me the same aesthetic-emotional reaction I have when I begin to think about Leonard Read's "I, Pencil," or when I ponder the intricate, detailed, complex, and beautiful processes by which Chilean grapes appear in my grocery store in rural New York in the middle of winter. The pencil and the grapes are "social snowflakes": they look simple, but when we hold them still and examine them with the analogous level of detail as that photo produces in the snowflake, they turn out to be the products of extraordinarily complex and intricate social processes that were designed by no one. My aesthetic reaction of awe and wonder is a response to what Pete Boettke, in a perfect turn of phrase, recently referred to as "the mystery of the mundane." What is more mundane than a snowflake? And yet what, it turns out, is more beautiful and complex than a snowflake? And in the way their mundane surface appearances hide processes of production whose awesome complexity was the product of human action but not human design, and should equally be a source of aesthetic and intellectual contemplation, the pencil and grapes are indeed "social snowflakes."
My fervent wish for the 21st century is that more smart and caring people can begin to see and appreciate "social snowflakes." People who are so willing to accept the existence and beauty (and benevolence!) of undesigned order in the natural world should be more willing to open themselves to the possibility that there are processes of undesigned order at work in the social world too. These people know that no one can make a snowflake, but seem blind to the fact that much of the innocent blood that was spilled in the last century was because too many people thought they could intelligently design the social world. Not repeating those mistakes will require a renewed aesthetic appreciation of, and deep desire to understand, the awesome beauty and complexity of the undesigned order of "social snowflakes."
One of my interests these days is defending Wal-Mart against the misguided barbs of its critics. In the last year, I've participated in two different public forums on Wal-Mart, one defending putting a Supercenter in the next town over and the other as a "responder" to the new anti-Wal-Mart documentary "The High Cost of Low Price." I have posted my remarks on the latter on my website. My apologies for some of the local references there, but the audience was leftist students and local community members.
When I did that forum, however, I wish I'd had access to this paper (PDF) by Jason Furman. (Hat tip to Don Luskin at the Krugman Truth Squad.) Some of this was reported on in a Washington Post op-ed, but the paper has tons more good stuff in it. One item not noted in the op-ed is this:
Wal-Mart is relatively unusual in that it offers health insurance both to full- and part-time
employees. By comparison, only 60 percent of firms economywide offer health benefits and
only 17 percent of firms offer health benefits to part-time workers. Target, for example, does not
offer benefits to people working less than 20 hours per week. Wal-Mart, however, has longer
waiting periods for eligibility for benefits than many other firms, 6 months for full-time workers
and 24 months for part-time workers.
It never ceases to amaze me how many distortions people have created around Wal-Mart, as well as the level of sheer fear it creates among certain folks, both right and left. Perhaps, much like the BDS ("Bush Derangement Syndrome") coined by Charles Krauthammer, we need a WMDS for those who seem to froth at the mouth at the mere mention of Wal-Mart. If so, let me take credit for first coining "Wal-Mart Derangement Syndrome" as the acute onset of paranoia, irrationality, and/or economic ignorance in otherwise normal people in reaction to any one or more of the policies, the practices, the prices, the products, the aesthetics, if not the very existence, of Wal-Mart.
In this morning's local paper (the Watertown Daily Times if you must know) is a story of 15 gas stations in New York state being charged by the attorney general's office with "price gouging" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The story is full of the usual problems with the term, including the arbitrariness of any definition of gouging and AG Elliot Spitzer's call for a federal investigation. But the best part is the detail on the charges against a station here in St. Lawrence county about 10 miles up the road from me.
Joining in the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I wanted to let L&P readers know that my article "The Functions of the Family in the Great Society" has been published in the September issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics. You can access a PDF version here.
This article represents what I hope to be the first of many on classical liberalism and the family. Those of you who read my piece on Rand and Hayek that appeared in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies have a sense of the approach I'm taking to these issues. The CJE paper is an attempt to articulate a more full-blown Hayekian approach to the social institution of the family. Peter Lewin and I have a couple of working papers on a more narrowly (Austrian) economic approach to the family that we hope to return to soon. In the meantime, the CJE piece lays out the framework.
The family has been a neglected institution in much classical liberal thinking, lying as it does in the realm of civil society rather than market or state. Thinking about the role the family plays both as an institution central to forwarding the morality of a free society and as an evolving discovery process of its own accord has proved to be endlessly fascinating for me. And working from a libertarian perspective on the more narrow question of the proper extent of parental rights (e.g., should deeply religious parents be allowed to withhold traditional medical treatment in favor of prayer for an ill child) has left me with far more questions than answers. Investigating the economics, sociology, and public policy of the family should be an area ripe for ongoing intellectual and political debate among libertarians.
As always, feedback from L&P readers on the CJE piece, whether public or private, is welcomed and encouraged.
Here's one of the best pieces I've seen on how the "little platoons" of civil society are out-shining Big Government in responding to the aftermath of Katrina. I think Anne Applebaum gets it just about right. It continues to amaze me that this whole things is read any other way than a massive failure of government, for all the reasons that libertarians have talked about for years. What Applebaum does well here is to point out how civil society has succeeded in responding. Though never said explicitly, it's pretty clear that the ability of smaller, more local institutions to respond in more flexible and less bureaucratic ways, through decentralized coordination, is the reason why.
This is a delightful little glimpse of the future of pizza delivery, once we have National IDs, state-run health-care, and a host of other unpleasant state activity. I'd say "enjoy" but you won't.
My long-time friend and partner in Austrian crime (and L&P contributing editor)
Pete Boettke has a nice new entry at The
Austrian Economists blog. Pete is addressing James Buchanan's contributions
to political economy (and runs down a great list of Buchanan aphorisms that
generations of grad students have tried to take to heart). Specifically, Pete
talks about
the varieties of socialism that have been threats to economic and political
freedom over the last 100 years. He notes that the 21st century version of
socialism
has a new twist to it, according to Buchanan:
But Buchanan claims in his essay "Afraid to Be Free: Dependence as
Desideratum" that the new threat in the 21st century comes in the form
of:
(4) parental socialism --- where the individuals invite the government to
meddle in their lives to protect them from themselves and provide security
in their lives from the vagaries of a life left to their own making.
That's my emphasis, which is to distinguish this form of socialism, which
involves individuals asking to be saved from themselves (parental) from
forms where elected leaders or self-appointed
elites simply believed they had to save others from themselves (paternal).
Pete
argues
that
Buchanan believes parental socialism has arisen because:
Autonomy is losing its appeal. The learned helplessness we have acquired
by living in a political culture of preferential treatment and protection
from ourselves may have left the modern mind incapable of accepting the responsibilities
of freedom. We are instead afraid to be free.
I think there's much truth to this, but I want to take it a step further.
It's not just the political culture that creates this demand to be
saved from ourselves, but other aspects of the culture as well. In particular,
I want to talk about parenting and the family.
Just a quick note to point out that Cafe Liberty is now on the L&P blogroll. Cafe Liberty is a group blog started by the students at the IHS seminar I lectured at this summer (and live-blogged here on L&P). I've also been participating over at Cafe Liberty and, so far, it's been a fairly active and interesting place. That's what happens when you get smart, articulate students like we do at IHS seminars. What's even better is to see the intellectual and political diversity among them, as the comments at the blog bear out. If you have a few minutes, check it out.
From today's Detroit Free Press comes an interesting story about University Bank in Ann Arbor offering "Islamic Mortgages." Traditional interpretations of the Koran prohibit the charging of interest, making traditional mortgages not in Sharia (compliance with Islamic law). University Bank, like a small number of other banks around the country, offers a lease-to-own arrangement that has the same practical effect as a mortgage but without the explicit charging of interest. Because the overhead costs are higher than traditional mortgages (mainly because there's no secondary market, thus banks have to manage them in-house), they are slightly more expensive, but apparently devout Muslims are willing to pay that premium.
These mortgages have also posed some complications for regulators and insurance companies, who have to be persuaded to treat them like standard mortgages (the key difference being that the bank really does own the property not the residents). However, these seem to be getting resolved.
I'd argue that this sort of thing is an excellent example of how market capitalism is not a destroyer of unique cultures creating one "McWorld," but rather a flexible, dynamic set of institutions that can adapt to changes in the culture. It is only within the dynamism of the market that one can adapt ways of doing business that are "traditional" to one culture to the needs of another culture when those needs arise. So not only do we have US banks altering their practices to accommodate a distinct minority demand (something defenders of markets have long argued as one of their strengths), we also have a potential blueprint of how market institutions and practices can emerge in Muslim societies with very different ethical principles.
The best part to me is that these sorts of changes can happen in the market in small pockets and spread through imitation. They don't require extensive discussion and debate. They don't require a political voting process where the majority has to be persuaded to agree with the change. Can you imagine what it would take to make such a change in a world where banks were run by the state? The ecosystem of the market makes it much easier for a thousand flowers to bloom, and to accommodate the needs of a religous group whose numbers remain pretty small within the US.
Oh yeah, it's also another example to combat the belief that Muslims are being systematically discriminated against post 9/11.
The Society for the Development of Austrian Economics is please to announce that submissions for the Don Lavoie Memorial Graduate Student Essay Competition are now being accepted. Submissions will be accepted from students enrolled in a graduate program in economics or other relevant disciplines anywhere in the world. Essays should make use of and forward the work of the Austrian school of economics. Three prizes are given, each worth $1000, to be used to pay expenses to attend the Southern Economic Association meetings this November in Washington, where the winners will present their work on a special panel. Prize awards are contingent on attending the SEA meetings and the SDAE’s annual business meeting and awards banquet.
The prize committee consists of:
Peter Boettke, George Mason University
Emily Chamlee-Wright, Beloit College
Steven Horwitz, St. Lawrence University
David Prychitko, Northern Michigan University
Deadline for submissions is September 1, 2005. Decisions will be made by September 15.
All questions and submissions should be sent, either electronically or by mail, to:
Peter Boettke
Department of Economics
George Mason University, MSN 3G4
Fairfax, VA 22030 pboettke@gmu.edu
I know that many L&P contributors and readers knew and admired Don. Feel free to pass this announcement on to other blogs or websites, or communicate it to colleagues and students at your schools.
Our final formal lecture of the week is Tom Bell talking about "Living Lives that Respect Liberty." Tom's theme is whether "the political is the personal." That is, does the libertarian understanding of the ideal political order also apply to our personal and family lives? Can we apply the ideas that we've been exploring all week to solve inter-personal problems in what Hayek called the "micro-cosmos?"
This is a question that I find to be particularly fascinating. In a recent contribution to a symposium on "Ayn Rand Among the Austrians" in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I tried to argue that Hayek's work suggests that the organizations of the micro-cosmos (like firms or families) not only are, but in some sense should be, organized along collectivist, altruistic lines. This differs from Rand's belief that the principles of individualism and self-interest should go "all the way down."
This article shows that therapeutic advice for behavior within the family is to create a functioning property-rights system and to emulate voluntary transactions within a competitive economic market. The optimal organization of the family requires that relations are structured so that non-cooperative game playing is minimized and transaction costs are reduced. The article employs economic analysis to explain why 'setting limits' is preferred to punishment (Pigouvian taxes). It also explains why there is conflict between children and their parents even when the parent's utility is the present discounted value of the child's utility function.
That abstract undersells how good this article really is. I read this article and said "Yes!! This perfectly articulates my own tacit understanding of why I parent the way I do." Wittman's running example is the middle school kid who keeps forgetting his lunch every day. The "punishment" parenting strategy is to yell at the kid or take something away, but only after bringing that lunch to school for him. Wittman argues that a more efficient and effective solution is to simply say "you forget your lunch, you don't eat," which internalizes the cost back on the child and relieves the parent of having to bear the costs of bringing the lunch and enforcing the punishment, all of which are deadweight losses in comparison to the "Coasean" solution. It should be noted that more "libertarian" sorts of parenting strategies are more effective the older the child is. The "Coasean" solution requires children of an age to understand the costs and benefits of the choices in front of them.
Tying it to Tom's lecture, Wittman is arguing that the libertarian political also works in the personal. To be clear, Tom is not saying that it is always the case that the political works in the personal, but that we should at least think about the ways in which it might and might not.
As my week here at the IHS seminar in California enters its last 24 hours, I just wanted to say that I hope that L&P readers have enjoyed my live-blogging, or at least found it useful or informative or thought-provoking. I've had a great time here and much fun doing this. IHS seminars remain one of the great experiences in libertarian thought, both for us as faculty and for the students who attend.
If you want to follow the live-blogging of my colleagues here, you can follow the whole show (including their thoughts on MY lectures) over at Agoraphilia.
This morning's first talk is Steve Davies on "Are We Still Living in Western Civilization?" And what he means by that is that we have shifted to a more global/modern civilization from a distinctly western one. He argues that our modern civilization first appeared in the west, but is not really that "western" and is becoming less and less "western" as time progresses. The key differences between the "west" and "modernity" include:
* the transformation of family life (from being a political/economic unit to an emotional one)
* the shift from a "Christian civilization" to a civilization with a lot of Christians in it
* the shift from agriculture to industry
This lecture nicely brings together a number of themes from Steve's previous lectures as well as ones by the other faculty here.
Steve is wrapping up with some of the implications for our current global situation. Right now, he's addressing the sort of conservative critique of modernity (money is icky, there are no chances for true "heroism", etc.). This resistance to modernity also characterizes fundamentalist Islam, and Steve has just sketched the connection between the historian Werner Sombart (one of those opponents of modernity) and that Islamic tradition.
He's now nicely pointing out that "modernity" does not equal "the west." Or better yet, "modernization" does not equal "westernization." Having said that, he notes that there are elements that are necessary to modernity, while others may be optional. Specifically, any attempt at modernization must include these three elements:
* rule of law
* personal liberty
* critical rationalism
This is, to me, a crucial point. As we talk about the "spread of western ideas" and as libertarians talk about a desire to see other parts of the world enjoy the freedoms we aspire to in the US and elsewhere, we need to walk a careful line in distinguishing the sine qua nons of a free society from those elements that can vary. It is when libertarians come across as trying to make every other society look just like the west (even when not through military force!) that we might find our message falling on deaf ears. If we can find ways to clarify what is needed and to also encourage local/indigenous variations on those themes, I think our ideas will be more successful.
Steve Davies is currently working his way through a very informative history of the individualist feminism of the 19th and early 20th century. I love this lecture and I think it's one of the most fascinating for the students as few of them really know this history. Introducing them to the Grimke sisters, Harriet Martineau, Josephine Butler, and all the rest is really important to both understanding a key piece of the history of libertarian ideas and to realizing that articulating a modern-day libertarian feminism is a worthy and important project. My Liberty and Power colleague Roderick Long has done great work on this front, and I'm hoping that my own work (PDF warning) on the family can contribute to such a project as well. Opposition to the war is not the only place libertarians can find common cause with elements of the Left.
What's especially nice about Steve's lecture is that he links together the early feminists' critique of state intervention in the market, their support for voting rights and other forms of political equality, and their opposition to the "traditional" marital relationship under which men were the complete and total masters of the household. In all cases, women were treated as second class citizens, comparable to slaves, and saw these changes as providing them with the demand for equal treatment that is at the bottom of the first wave of feminism. In the US, as Steve points out, the individualist feminist movement was linked with the abolitionists, often via Quakerism.
For me, teaching history, or listening to it being taught, is a form of magic, as modern students are often so ignorant of elements of history that have direct bearing on their current beliefs and you can literally see their eyes and minds opening up when they learn things of which they were previously unaware. This is particularly true for libertarian students, who have often suffered through college courses where the parts of history that offer information about, and support for, their own intellectual traditions are frequently omitted or caricatured. Good history gives students something the desperately need: intellectual ammunition (to use an old Randian phrase). Frankly, if I were a student at an IHS seminar, the history lectures would be the ones I'd be paying rapt attention to, jotting notes furiously, as a way of preparing for returning to campus with new material for class discussions and research papers. Even as a faculty member, I always come home from these seminars with new bits of history that I previously didn't know.
Tom is wrapping up his talk now, which has been very good. I think he's given us a new meme though. In expressing his frustration with the Kelo decision, he looked skyward, clenched his fists, and nearly screamed "Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelo!!!!!" Of course, there was only one possible reference for that action. You might go here too (turn down your volume).
Right now, Tom is singing the "Interstate Commerce Blues", complete with guitar, to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun". And we're now getting a new verse, in French, dealing with the EU.
Like Jason, I'm going to close comments on an earlier thread, as things seem to have spun out of control during my off-day. Unintended consequences happen, as they say.
Posted on Wednesday, July 13, 2005 at 10:35 AM | Top
James is doing a wonderful job explicating J.S. Mill's defense of free speech in On Liberty. He's now turned to what I think is one of the best of Mill's arguments - that free speech is required because, as a student just said, "no one has a monopoly on the truth." Given human fallibility, we need free speech to discover the truth. Competition among various views of the world will generate a better approximation to truth than would happen if any limits were imposed upon speech. Thus our ignorance becomes the justification for freedom, as freedom allows us to generate knowledge that would otherwise go undiscovered. Mill is very clear on this point.
Of course this argument is precisely parallel to the Hayekian/Austrian argument about the way in which the market works as a discovery process. (See Hayek's essay "Competition as a Discovery Procedure.") What I find especially interesting about this is that the Hayek essay was written in the late 1960s (although embryonic versions of the ideas were around earlier), after Hayek had been engaged in his fairly deep study of Mill. Hayek long admired Mill and edited a collection of Mill's letters with Harriet Taylor. In the early 50s, he and his second wife took a European vacation that retraced some steps that Mill had taken.
Given Hayek's admiration for Mill, I wonder how much of what emerged in the 1960s in Hayek's thinking about competition came from his study of Mill and Mill's argument for free speech in On Liberty? Furthermore, some contemporary Austrians, myself included, have argued that markets are extra-linguistic communication processes, so one way of seeing the parallels in Mill and Hayek is to argue that all forms of communication should be free because all forms of communication, whether speech or markets in this case, are ultimately discovery processes that are socially necessary to overcome our structural ignorance.
I think this same argument can be extended to Darwinian evolution as well. Evolution via natural selection is a very similar sort of discovery process as markets and free speech. The implied vision of human natural and social life as being an interconnected set of evolutionary discovery processes is, for me, quite inspiring. We are all connected in our biological, social, economic, and intellectual evolution by similar sorts of discovery processes.
James Taylor is working his way through J. S. Mill's "Harm Principle." There was a brief exchange with a student about how Mill defined an "adult" for the purposes of the "rational adult" in his theory. James' response was that, in fact, "rationality" defines adulthood. We know an adult because he or she is rational. Ignoring the complexities of determining rationality, I'm more interested what this means in a society where adolescence has been extended in the ways that it has been in our own. Would Mill's rationality test have likely included more children of younger ages than would be the case today? Would a 13 year-old chosen at random been more likely to meet the rationality test in the mid-19th century than today?
Well, James Taylor has just broken new ground in IHS seminars by asking the students how far they are willing to extend Mill's harm principle. He started by going over various state laws on sexual practices. Then he moved to say "well, one reason I'm interested in this topic is that I'm a member of a persecuted sexual minority, where my 'love' is illegal in every state. To show you, I've brought my partner with me today." He then proceeded to pull out, from behind the podium, a large toy stuffed sheep. His beloved "Flossie." Much hilarity has ensued, but it's also a great way to push Mill's argument about rationality and consent.
The students are resisting that bestiality should be legal by arguing that animals can't consent. James's response is to ask them if they are vegetarians. "You are willing to kill animals brutally to eat them - all I want to do is make sweet love to one beautiful sheep." That's a brilliant response in my book. It's really pushing them to get at what our objection to bestiality really is. Is it just that it's "icky?" Of course the real danger is that rather than get them to rethink bestiality laws, he might turn them all into vegetarians!
Now we've gone to adult, consensual incest and then to necrophilia. We should have some interesting lunch conversation.
I also need to mention the he told us that the state of Idaho has a law against anal sex, the punishment for which is life in prison. James noted the irony of using life in prison as a way to deter men from engaging in anal sex.
A student just asked Steve why so many libertarians are pessimistic about the direction of the world, given that he just gave a whole lecture on how the world's getting better. His answer was that political activists tend to overestimate their ability to change the world and are thus disappointed when things don't change. Steve also asserted, and I agree, that the world is currently headed toward more liberty rather than less (even accounting for the war and Patriot Act). Over the medium run and long run, we are much better off.
My own view is that a substantial subset of libertarians are "contrarians." Whatever the "mainstream" view of a topic is, they take the opposite, somehow justifying the way in which their heterodox view of the topic is the "real" libertarian position. I will provide examples if requested. I find this "Libertarian Contrarianism" to be both trememdously annoying and horrifically bad strategy, not to mention frequently wrong about what is and is not "libertarian." I keep meaning to write a long essay on it, but just never seem to find the time.
Steve Davies is our after dinner lecturer tonight, giving a wonderful talk on what he calls "The Age of Funk." This talk explores the way in which human life has never been better than it is right now and then compares that to the various chicken littles on both sides of the political spectrum who are constantly telling us how bad things are. It's really an extended riff on Easterbrook's The Progress Paradox.
He just made the huge point that many children prior to the 20th century were not raised by both parents - women frequently died in childbirth and men at work, leaving children to be raised by stepparents, especially stepmothers. The modern obsession with the problems of single parenthood or stepfamilies is hardly new. The mom-dad "traditional" family that we've invented in our nostalgia frequently didn't exist back then either. Yes, now it's due to divorce more often than death, but the breaking up of the marital dyad and the consquent adjustments to new parenting arrangements are hardly only post-war phenomena. It's always been the case that children have had to deal with changes in family form/structure.
It's worth asking whether it's worse for children of divorce today to have, potentially, 4 parents, ideally, interested in their welfare, two of whom are their biological parents, or worse historically, when there would be two parents, at most, only one of whom was biologically related. Is divorce worse than the death of a parent? Are two remarriages better than one? Interesting questions.
Tom is beginning his talk on the orgins and nature of the law by reminding us that the "law" is not encompassed by the actions taken by the state. Rather the law includes all the sorts of contractual agreements and rules that govern our lives. He just used the word "enterprise" to describe the process of generating these rules. The law is "not a set of commands given by a supreme ruler," rather it's a service industry. Not surprisingly, he's now using Lon Fuller's wonderful definition of law: the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules.
Much like the way public choice gives students a framework for systematically understanding political activity, so does the Fuller insight give students a framework for thinking about the way in which rules, not just state-made law, serve to coordinate human choices. Tom is starting to use this insight to talk about "polycentric" law, or the idea that multiple forms of law can overlap within the same geographic area. Law need not be, and in fact is not, a monopoly within a specific geographic region.
Glen has just mentioned one of my favorite "economic ways of thinking" - every good and service is really a bundle of qualities, or has "multiple margins of choice." When regulations make it hard to adjust one margin of choice, sellers or buyers will move to other margins. Glen used rent control as an example, where the restrictions on the official price lead to landlords compensating by reducing quality or by finding other "fees" (e.g., a key fee). I've made the same argument about minimum wage laws - employers may respond to a minimum wage by reducing the amount of labor they hire, or they might respond by reducing various non-monetary benefits, or making working conditions marginally less comfortable. Glen's point here is that regulators cannot imagine all of the possible margins of choice, thus any attempt at regulating the conditions of sale are likely to create all kinds of unintended consequences that frustrate the intended goals of the regulation.
Glen has now shifted over to talking about "The Two Things". For economics, Glen argues that the two things are "Incentives matter" and "There's no such thing as a free lunch." I've thought a lot about this one and I'm not sure those are the two I would pick. I'd probably keep TANSTAAFL, but I might swap out the incentives one for something about the dispersed and tacit nature of knowledge and the role of economic/social institutions in making that knowledge socially usable.
He also has two really good examples about how incentives matter. The first is the, presumably apochryphal, story about the American elementary school class who raised money to buy African children out of slavery as a way to reduce the total amount of slavery. His point was that this raised the price of slaves and encouraged more people to "reallocate" children into slavery to capture the now higher returns. (For the econ-geeks, the demand curve shifted up and to the right, raising the price of slaves, leading to an increase in the quantity supplied.) Incentives matter and they often create unintended and undesirable consequences. The other example was increased security at airports leading people, on the margin, to drive instead of fly, which is, of course much more dangerous. Thus the attempt to increase airline safety backfires and causes more problems. I've made this same point about proposed legislation to require all small children on planes to be in carseats. Kids who currently fly free on a parent's lap would now have to be charged as the carseat takes up a paying seat. That additional expense will lead some folks on the margin to drive, dramatically increasing the danger to the child.
He's now talking about his Wal-Mart and Mexican labor regulations example he mentioned here.
Glen's characterization of the economic way of thinking as Goals filtered through Constraints leading to Choices makes for a nice set-up for extending economic analysis to "non-economic" choices. Right now, after walking them through how that framework applies to consumers and producers, he's having them think through how you can understand political action using it as well. His bottom line, as it is with economic choices, is that we cannot make the world submit to our wishes. We always face constraints and we always must make choices, and those choices have costs.
Making these sorts of public choice arguments to libertarian students is like shooting fish in a barrel, at least in the sense that they are strongly predisposed to being cynical about political actors. What public choice can do is to give them a theoretical framework for understanding and explaining the perverse outcomes of the political process without assuming that politicians are irredeemably evil.
James just said "Utilitarians don't believe in rights." Glen and I just grunted in unison. It may be that utilitarians don't believe in natural rights, but one can be a utilitarian, in the broadest sense, and still argue that a particular set/bundle of rights will lead to the greatest good, or put better, will have consequences that (virtually) all will think are good. Or put somewhat differently, it may be that a system in which individuals have very strong rights is a system that generates the best consequences (i.e., is best from a utilitarian point of view). The rights, and their strength, are derived from the consequences they generate, which requires significant dollops of empirical/historical evidence about what "works" and what doesn't.
James just got pretty close by saying that utilitarians might believe that people should act "as if" they have natural rights if such rights, empirically, lead to the maximization of happiness. Why not just say people have "rights" (strong rights) rather than pretend "as if" they are natural?
This is fun. Glen and I can carry on a conversation sitting next to each other without talking! Interesting that he pointed out that natural law is compatible with consequentialism. I just read a paper at the History of Economics Society meetings that argued that one effective way of understanding Hayek is that he was strongly influenced by the natural law tradition. In particular, the paper argued that spontaneous order theory can be seen as a version of natural law.
I have to admit that I used to love the sorts of deductivist natural rights arguments James is putting forward, until they got beat out of me as an undergraduate. My latter-day consequentialism doesn’t find these as interesting or persuasive as my earlier-day quasi-Randianism.
And I swear, if James makes one more haggis joke... and now he's decided to pick on me as the example for his "heavily-armed" economist mugger. Oops, now he's had me shoot Glen! The good news for me is that Glen's will left me his spot on Agoraphilia.
Cross-posted at Agoraphilia, along with Glen's original post.
I’m at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA this week at an Institute for Humane Studies Liberty & Society seminar for college students. With me here are the pair of fun fellows behind the Agoraphilia blog, Glen Whitman and Tom Bell. Joining the three of us are Steve Davies, a historian, and James Stacey Taylor, a philosopher. We’ve decided to live-blog the week at Agoraphilia, so do check in over there to see what we’re up to, what we’re thinking about, what students are curious about, and the general fun and frolic that ensues when you confine 5 faculty to cell-block style dorm rooms and awful institutional food.
My friend Will Wilkinson has an excellent piece about charges of "Social Darwinism" against policies designed to increase ownership at The American Spectator. One highlight, referring to a recent talk by Barack Obama:
Modern market societies -- ownership societies -- are the paradigm of interdependent, mutually advantageous cooperation, and are as far as can be imagined from the society of atomistic predators Obama invokes to stir the disdain of the fresh-faced graduates of Knox. Market societies -- ownership societies -- are wealthy because they rely on and reinforce a high level of social trust and norms of cooperation.
Along the lines of using Kelo as a way to talk to the left about the importance of property rights, emphasizing the cooperative nature of markets is another possible strategy.
Since Darwin just missed making the now infamous Human Events 10 Most Harmful Books list, I suppose it's on topic with recent shouting matches around here to note that the attempt to teach "intelligent design" in public school science classes continues apace. The latest story comes from Michigan.
What struck me in this piece was the wisdom of a local pastor:
"It wasn't until creationism was ousted from public schools that intelligent design was brought in," said Mark Jennings, a Gull Lake Community Schools parent and pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Richland. "I've always thought the school should leave teaching about God to the church and we'll leave science to the schools."
Indeed. At the risk of invoking a libertarian cliche, it remains worth noting that controversies like this are the near-inevitable result of taxpayer-funded school systems. Often times the separation of Church and State can be accomplished quite effectively by the separation of School and State.
Charles, Charles, the boxers-briefs debate is as false a dichotomy as left-right, so I'm surprised libertarian types are buying into it. Aren't we all about challenging the status quo? Aren't both choices really fundamentally flawed? And don't those flaws come together in the extreme? (Castro probably wears briefs, and how different is he really from Saddam?)
Libertarians should be challenging the old categories. For the underwear anarchists, there's always "commando" ("The only thing between him and us is a thin layer of gabardine"), but for those who wish not to commit to anarchism, yet still wish to blow up the old binaries, there's this university administrator's underwear of choice: boxer-briefs.
Like libertarianism is to "left" and "right", boxer-briefs take the best of both worlds and use them to form a consistent underwear worldview. The comfort of the boxer, the support of the brief. Libertarian underwear nirvana, and the choice of binary busters everywhere.
My employer (and Gus's I should add) is back in the news as the challenge of new media and freedom of speech collides with the desire to "protect" students. Here's the link to the Inside Higher Ed article . For the record, even though I was a target, multiple times, I opposed the blocking of the blog and I'm equally uncomfortable with the lawsuit. For the further record, I find these students (and a couple are now alums) to be reprehensible intellectual cowards, but the best remedy for that is sunshine. I'd be interested in what others think.
As many feared, one big cost of the War on Terror and Other Stuff We
Don't Like has been the violation of civil liberties under the pretext
of national security. For what appears to be another example of
this phenomenon, take a look at this
story (brief registation may be required) out of Louisiana:
For 27 years, Willie Fontenot has had
a unique job in the office of the Louisiana attorney general. As a
community liaison officer, he has helped residents living next
to polluting industries learn more about the environmental problems
plaguing them, helped them set up numerous nonprofit environmental
groups, and helped them maneuver their way through the paperwork
necessary to complain to public officials. He's also helped
reporters and various groups from across the
nation find the right people and places in Louisiana to explain its
environmental problems.
Two weeks ago, while accompanying one of those groups, this one of
15 university students from New England, on a tour of a Baton Rouge
neighborhood being bought out by the ExxonMobil refinery, the group was
stopped and questioned by law enforcement concerned about homeland
security after taking pictures of the plant. Fontenot was asked to
collect the student's driver's licenses and
refused, saying he wasn't leading the trip. On Monday, Fontenot, 62,
said he was told to retire or face a disciplinary hearing that would
end in his firing. Concerned about the loss of his pension and health
insurance, he chose to retire.
Kris Wartelle, spokeswoman for Attorney General Charles Foti,
denied Fontenot was forced to retire, but could confirm that he was
retiring....
The students from Antioch New England Graduate School in New
Hampshire were touring the state to learn about environmental racism,
and the photographs were to be used in PowerPoint presentations
required for their class, said Abigail Abrash Walton, a professor who
led the trip.
"We had just met with (Baton Rouge) Mayor Kip Holden and went out
to drive around and look at the industry in the area," she said. "We
came to a house directly across from the facility and Willie let us
know that the woman who lived there had decided not to relocate.
"So we pulled the van over on a side street and the students got
out and took photos," she said.
"Two or three minutes later, two security vehicles showed up," she
said, and off-duty Baton Rouge police and East Baton Rouge sheriff's
deputies pulled the van over and demanded the licenses of those inside.
I have no great sympathy for the set of ideas that falls under
"environmental racism" (although a good public choice/libertarian class
theory analysis of corporate-state partnerships in creating these
situations is long overdue), but if it is true (and there's more detail
in the link) that this guy was fired for doing what appears to be his
job in the name of "homeland security," then something seems very
wrong. One need not believe that the Patriot Act etc. are intentional
plots by the dreaded neo-cons to silence the ideas of the left to be
outraged by the use of homeland security rationales to, apparently,
target uppity activists from anywhere on the political spectrum.
One other comment: when you present cases like these to many
conservatives, they wind up saying things like "well, that was just
some over-zealous individuals and really doesn't represent what the
policy is all about." Funny how similar that sounds to "all those
stories about problems with public education are really just about a
few bad teachers or out-of-control administrators/bureaucrats - there's nothing
fundamentally wrong with the system." When you give people
political power to do what you think they should, don't be surprised
when they do what you think they shouldn't. And don't blame the
people, blame the power.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention: Fontenot is also blind and a cancer
survivor, for whatever that's worth.
Not that a contest for dumb comments by politicians wouldn't bring in a lot of
good entries, but Rep. Ed Markey D-Mass jumps out in the lead in this
analysis of talk of extending Daylight Savings Time a month in each direction as part
of an energy bill:
"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said
Markey
I'm very curious to hear how the two-month extension of DST will actually
create MORE daylight. Congress indeed has many powers, but altering the
rotation of the earth or its angle to the sun are not, last I checked, among
them. Markey has clearly never heard the joke about daylight savings
being akin to cutting six inches off the end of a blanket and sewing it on
the other end in order to make it longer.
And, yes, I know what he meant was something like "more light at times of
the day when more people are up and about." Even so, what this extension
of DST would mean for me here in the North Country is November sunrises at
around 815am, and sunrises as late as 900am in western parts of the Eastern
Time zone. No thanks.
So one part of my administrative job is working with my colleagues in Student Affairs to do programming, particularly for first-year students. Through a process I don't yet understand, we had the great good fortune to have 3 DEA agents visit campus to converse with us about how they could do educational programming for our students on a recent rise in cocaine use on campus. What's interesting about this is that the Student Gov't was all thrilled with this idea. Suffice it to say, I was not. Drug education is one thing, but bringing the DEA to do it? Nah. It's like getting tax advice from an IRS agent.
But what really pissed me off was something more subtle. In describing what sort of program they might do, they wanted to include a former/recovering drug user of college age to talk about his/her experience. Okay fine. But they kept referring to this person as "the victim!" Not "the addict," which has problems of its own, nor even the "former user" or "former abuser" but the "victim." It was all I could do not to leap out of my seat and yell at these people:
"They're only victims because of YOU bastards!!"
The rhetorical power of calling a former user a "victim" is just fascinating. Then, of course, the DEA is just saving victims all over the place. It would have been rude of me to ask "if they are victims, who has victimized them? Please point to the person or people who harmed them." Of course the answer will be those evil drug peddlers... as if "victims" are helpless robots in the face of illegal drugs.
"And yet, I find the specter of the most powerful people in the only superpower drop[sic] everything to focus on the destiny of a single badly disabled woman edifying."
I could not disagree more. Whatever one thinks of the merits of the husband's case, the idea that our esteemed legislators are concocting a bill to save the life of one woman, and calculating the electoral benefits thereof in the process, is precisely what I dislike about democracy. This is just the kind of abuse of Congressional power that gives democracy a bad name. It is antithetical to any reasonable understanding of the rule of law, not to mention the tax dollars being spent as lawmakers rush back to DC to vote on this bill while procedure allows them to.
And the notion of using the subpoena power to resolve a case of this sort is hardly what one thinks of when one thinks of the merits of democracy - at least not the type framed by a meaningful constitution.
A quick question for any wiser constitutional scholars than I: The Constitution expressly prohibits "Bills of Attainder," which are laws targeted at a specific person. Historically, of course, they were targetted in a negative way (e.g., declaring person X a traitor or such), so the Schiavo case may be different. Still, if Congress passes a law designed to save the life of a specific, named, person, isn't that an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder?
My quick bit of "legal research" suggests that the definition normally includes "punishment without trial," so that it's not just about naming a specific person, but about doing so for a nefarious purpose.
Even so, the notion of the whole Congress being called in to adjudicate a family tragedy like this really does step way over any line of the legitimate powers of the state, whatever the real meaning of a Bill of Attainder is.
If anyone ever imagined that the current GOP was anti-government, one look at the crucifixion of Mark McGwire (as if he were a child-molesting crack user) and the entire freakin' Congress called into action to intervene in a state court issue in the Schiavo case, ought to disabuse them of that dream. How people who prattle on (two cents to Rand) about overreaching government and the virtues of federalism can look themselves in the mirror after bringing the full power of the state to bear on the use of legal medications and a family dispute over one woman's life is just unfathomable.
The apocalyptic tone of Kathryn Lopez in NRO's The Corner, and their near total focus on the Schiavo case, is like watching a car wreck. I think I'll go read something by Ward Churchill to cheer myself up.
Those of you who read the Wall Street Journal may have seen this piece today, which I think was supposed to be a funny introduction to libertarians, but was both unfunny and insulting at the same time. I can't tell you how much I hate the "libertarians are Republicans who want to smoke pot/have an abortion/watch porn" line of thought. Aside from the obvious fact that it's simply not true, why aren't we equally "Democrats who want to make a buck"? Or "Democrats who believe in capitalist acts between consenting adults"?
I'd be tempted to blame the media here, but I think it's the fault of too many libertarians who are, unfortunately, too comfortable with the "pro-choice Republican" label, precisely because it fits. When libertarians who feel comfortable with the GOP are going to wake up and smell the imperialism, Keynesianism, and theology remains a good question.
UPDATE: At least the WSJ author was trying to be funny. As Lisa points out in the comments, this author on the HNN main page was not. I think the notion of President Bush as having any libertarian leanings is the funniest thing I've heard all month. The guy who has presided over increases in both the welfare and the warfare state? Is that the guy we're talking about? Yeesh.
As folks may have seen in the news yesterday, a NY state judge has ruled that
NY City must give marriage licenses to same-sex couples (barring the inevitable
appeal). Jonathan Dresner has
a few thoughts nextdoor.
You can find a PDF of the full, long decision here.
I took a quick skim through the decision this morning and I think it's a pretty
good piece of legal reasoning, although I don't know the NY state constitutional
precedents in the way I know the federal ones. I just wanted to highlight two
parts of the decision.
The phrase "the traditional institution of marriage," which
defendant quotes from Justice O'Connor's concurring opinion in
Lawrence (539 US at 585), appears to refer not to marriage as a “
traditional institution” (a formulation that would leave the nature
of marriage open to new forms thereof), but rather, to the traditional
form of the institution of marriage [SH – emphasis mine] - confined
to opposite-sex
couples. In dictum, Justice O'Connor implied that the preservation
of that traditional form could be a rational reason to bar same-sex
marriage. Id at 585. The issue of same-sex marriage, however, was not
before the Court. Nonetheless, the three justices who dissented in
Lawrence, and who were the only justices to address Justice O'Connor's
parenthetical remark, pointed out that the phrase "‘preserving
the
traditional institution of marriage’ is just a kinder way of
describing the State's moral disapproval of same-sex couples." Lawrence,
539 US at 601 (Scalia, J., the Chief Justice, and Thomas J. dissenting) (emphasis
in original). It is clear that moral
disapproval of same-sex couples or of individual homosexuals is not
a legitimate state purpose or a rational reason for depriving
plaintiffs of their right to choose their spouse. See Romer v. Evans,
517 US 620 (1996). In weighing the significance of the traditional
institution of marriage, one must take into account the Supreme
Court’s rejection of the elements of distaste or moral disapproval.
See Lawrence, 539 US at 583.
First, note the references to Lawrence, the last sentence in particular. Scalia's
dissent remains prophetic about the ways in which the Lawrence decision would
be used to bolster the case for same-sex marriage even though Kennedy's opinion
explicitly says it shouldn't have any such implications. See my earlier posts
on these issues here and here.
Second, I can't help but note the highlighted passage where Judge Ling-Cohan
makes the distinction between the functions of marriage as an "institution"
and the various forms marriage might take, which is one that I have
been harping on in earlier posts (here and here)
as well as in
my scholarly work and teaching on
the family. It will be very interesting to see what happens with this decision.
Finally, Jonathan's post on this topic included a link to an excellent piece
in the Harvard
Magazine that explores these issues of the evolution of the
American family very effectively.
1. I tend to call myself a "radical libertarian" as well. I prefer
that to "anarchist" or "market anarchist" or even "anarcho-capitalist" for
two reasons. One has to do with the rhetorical problems the anarchist label
raises, but the other is that whether or not I'm an anarchist depends upon
my mood that day. More seriously, I don't think the case for anarchism is completely
convincing. My disposition is to accept it but I'm not completely convinced
enough to use that label (rhetorical problems aside). Understand, of course,
that I think the set of issues where government might be justified is pretty
small, hence my comfort with "radical libertarian." The fact that
I see myself as a person of the left who happens to believe that markets and
other voluntary institutions are the best means to the left's ends also makes
me comfortable with the "radical" label. (Having been called a "PC
libertarian"
and a "neo-conservative," not to mention a fraud
and a liar, in the last 48
hours, labels are kind of fun these days.)
2. In my "Comparative
Economic Institutions" course, I spend part
of a very early class day explaining why I will NOT use the terms "capitalism" and "socialism" in
that class (a promise I keep to a large degree). My reasoning is Hayek's -
the terms were both invented by those sympathetic to socialism. Moreover,
the very terms bias the debate. To add some more meat to Chris's argument,
look at the words themselves. "Capitalism" suggests a "belief in capital" and
it puts capital as the central organizing principle around which the system
is built, or at least around which "the goods are delivered." By contrast,
"socialism" suggest a "belief in society as a whole" and puts society as the
central organizing principle or recipient of the benefits in that system. I
would suggest that both implications are incorrect (i.e., capitalism [truly
free markets] doesn't primarily benefit capitalists, and socialism benefits
the few at the expense of the many).
More important, though, is that neither term speaks to the institutional
arrangements that each system requires. Thus, I prefer the language
of "markets" and "planning" to "capitalism" and "socialism." Although these
are not without their problems, they have the advantage of allowing us to
talk about how social coordination will take place in each system and
what varieties of arrangements those fundamental coordination processes might
produce. For example, we can talk about markets in which there is worker
ownership or not. And with planning, we can talk about the differences between,
and challenges facing, democratic planning institutions versus more centralized,
autocratic ones. This dichotomy forces us to ask questions about how social
coordination takes place and what sorts of institutions forward it. It should
lead us to ask "how do/would markets work?" and "how does/would planning
work?"
It also gives us room to talk about real world systems as being neither purely
markets nor purely planning, and to explore whether the coordination processes
can be combined, or whether one will tend to crowd out the other (or at least
cause unintended undesirable consequences) when they are significantly mixed.
It provides an institutional analytic framework for doing applied work, including
exploring economic history.
In any case, Chris's post is right on, both as a question of how to talk to
the Left and as a really serious question of how libertarians understand our
own worldview.
Over at the new blog The
Conservative Philosopher, my fellow Hayek scholar and
frequent sparring partner Ed Feser raises some interesting questions about
conservatives,
libertarians, and the family. Ed's a smart guy and has made some
of the best cases I've seen for reading Hayek in a conservative way, although
I think
those cases ultimately fail. I want to respond to some of Ed's argument
here. Ed writes:
Still, since conservatives also tend to hold that there are natural ties
between human beings far deeper and more important than the sort of contractual
ties definitive of market society, they do not make a fetish of the market.
This often distinguishes them from libertarians, who frequently exhibit
a tendency to want to reduce all human relations to the contractual or
economic sort.
Well, "frequently" and "tendency" fudge things a bit, but I'm not convinced
this is as true as Ed thinks.
Chief among these non-contractual ties are those definitive of the family,
and the family is that institution that conservatives are most keen to conserve,
for they not only regard it as a natural institution, but as the arena within
which the fellowship human beings need for their well-being exists, or ought
to exist, to the fullest extent. ... The family is
the place where we learn, or ought to learn, that we have obligations that
we did not choose and needs that cannot be satisfied if we insist on having
things our own way. It is where we learn that there are greater things in the
world than our own narrow interests and a greater good for us than the mere
pursuit of those interests.
One can be a libertarian, including with respect to the family, and believe
that people have bonds and obligations "deeper" than the sort that
appear on the market. One can, from a libertarian perspective, and specifically
a Hayekian perspective, argue that families are, and should be, hotbeds of
altruistic commitment in just the way Feser describes. What Feser says
here might be
true of the sub-species libertarianus Randianus, but need not be of the species
more broadly. In fact, in a paper forthcoming in The Journal of Ayn
Rand Studies, I
compare Hayek's and Rand's views of the family. An online excerpt can be found here.
I think the problematic place Ed goes with this argument below is the weight
he puts on the family being a "natural' institution. For example:
This is why conservatives and libertarians are, I believe, increasingly going
to part ways in coming years. If you believe that the family is an institution
we did not create (either because it has a divine origin or, a la Hayek, a
cultural evolutionary one) and have no right to tinker with; that our deepest
obligations are those we do not choose to take on but are given to us by nature;
and that a good and happy life requires a humble submitting of oneself to those
obligations, then you are going to take a decidedly conservative attitude toward
matters of public policy concerning the family.
Note several things here. First, saying that family is an institution
we did not create does not mean that it is a static institution. The
whole point of the Hayekian argument is that it's about cultural evolution. The
family, as we know it today, did not appear from nothing; it evolved
over time as well. We would surely never make parallel arguments about
other institutions we did not "create," e.g., money, law, the market. Money
as we know it today has evolved and changed in a variety of ways (and would
have even if government had been absent). The mere fact that we didn't
"create" something doesn't mean that it is or should be static. (What
about the evolution of language? Don't
we expect that language will continue to evolve, just as perhaps the family
has and might?) And the use of the word "tinker" is interesting as well: is
any change "tinkering"? After all, from a Hayekian perspective,
these institutions are the result of human action but not human design. Is
Ed arguing that human action is ruled out of court, lest it change the institution? Ed's
static perspective here seems to equate even marginal evolutionary changes
with social engineering.
Second to note is the invocation of the "natural." Is natural
here meaning "part of any human society" or is it more literal, in the
sense of our biology implies certain obligation and institutions? Is
the "natural" the raising of children inside a family unit (certainly all human
societies need an institution to do that), or is it something more? Is
it that certain familial arrangements are "natural" because biology "made us
that way?"
One way to frame this is that Ed is sliding here between function and form. There
is no doubt that the functions families serve need to be tackled by some institution
in any human society. In that sense, the family is a "natural" institution. However,
the question of whether any particular form of the family is uniquely
suited to perform those functions is a very different question. That
question is even more interesting when linked to the historical fact that the
family has evolved and changed over time. Might those changes (which
certainly have been affected by government policy)
be changes in form that have resulted from social and economic changes
that have
affected
the
functions families can, or have to, perform? That is, perhaps the changes
in the form of the family we've seen are responses to changes in other institutions
that
"we did not create." If so, why is it okay for those other
institutions to change and evolve (be tinkered with?) while not the case for
the family, especially if such changes are responses driven by the changes
elsewhere?
My take on the functions of the family, from a Hayekian perspective, are in
a paper forthcoming in the Cambridge Journal of Economics that can
be found here.
Ed ends with:
And while it is true that conservatives and libertarians have much in common
where the defense of the market and the critique of big government are concerned,
it is also true that for conservatives, issues touching on the family and
its well-being must necessarily always trump issues of tax policy, government
spending, and even war and peace. Tax rates, government programs, wars, and
the like come and go, and however long-lasting and significant are their
effects, they simply cannot equal in their significance radical changes to
the structure of the family. The family is forever, and far more basic to
human well-being. For the conservative, if we don’t get that right,
nothing else matters.
And
here, Ed gets to the heart of the matter by talking of "radical changes to
the structure of the family." Two points to make in response. First,
at least now we know what we're talking about. It's all about structure. Note
that Ed doesn't say that he's concerned about changes in the functions that
families perform, or, directly, how well or how poorly they work. Rather
he is concerned about "radical" changes to the "structure," which seem to be
equivalent in his mind to a loss of functionality. If we radically change
the form of families, they will function less well. But why identify form with
function? What's missing here is the argument
that says that changes in the structure will reduce functionality. To
me, that argument is non-obvious. It's a case to be made and Ed doesn't
make it, at least not here. The implicit premise that the (current? recent?
how recent?) structure of the family is the most/only functional one is unargued
for.
Second, what radical change is he talking about here? Again, it's not
named, but it seems clear it's same-sex marriage, though perhaps other things
as well. The
use of "natural," the notion that marriage/family is all about self-interest
and contract, and the use of the word "radical" are all evidence of that view,
especially given that the stereotype of the selfish, libertine homosexual is
as old as the hills. I
feel no need to rehash arguments on these questions that have been raised in
other places by many others. However, I do find it interesting that, if same-sex
marriage is the real driving issue here, Ed has hitched libertarianism to that
star. The underlying suggestion is that libertarianism is ultimately
a form of libertinism, and because same-sex couples are really only interested
in their own pleasure not the obligations of a family, the common cause between
libertarianism and the advocacy of same-sex marriage is, shall we say, "natural." In
a cynical reading, it's an attempt to smear libertarians in the eyes of conservatives
by painting us with the same caricature of self-interested libertines that
has been used by conservatives use for gays and lesbians. I don't necessarily
think that was Ed's intention, but it is not an implausible reading of the
text.
Of course, why we should care about what conservatives think about libertarians
in general, and especially if they are accepting of the insulting view of gays
and lesbians that this argument rests on, is a whole other question.
I actually find much of what Arthur says here compelling, if what he's
saying is the following:
Any argument that says all differences are due to biology is
silly.
Any argument that says that the mere existence of any
biologically-based differences is grounds for simply accepting such
differences as unremediable is silly.
The evidence on the degree to which biological differences
explain different social outcomes is very complex and should be
interpreted judiciously.
Agreed Arthur. But I don't believe that Larry Summers was making
either of the silly arguments in 1 or 2. Nowhere do I see him
saying all
differences between men and women in math and science are biologically
based, and nowhere do I see him saying that if there's a biological
component to the explanation of difference, we should do nothing about
it. I agree that his presentation was very "loose" and the
context of his role as an administrator should have made him far more
judicious than he was. As such, I didn't find his comments
offensive or beyond the pale. I found them to be within the realm
of intellectual plausibility, though presented so sloppily and so
unaware of his rhetorical position, that they left him open to the
objections that have been raised, even if I find the objections of the
Hopkins sort to be problematic.
But the bottom line is that he didn't say either of the silly things in
1 or 2.
Question: is the following argument the intellectual equivalent
of creationism or intelligent design?
"There is some scientific evidence that differences in the mathematical
and scientific abilities of men and women, specifically the
underrepresentation of women in these areas, may be due to differences
in the brain biology of men and women. We can't be sure that
these differences aren't the result of culture (i.e., culture might
actually cause changes in brains), but there is some evidence that
these differences appear very early in life. If such differences
exist, they do not justify any discrimination against individual
women. In fact, such differences should lead us to look for
additional ways to encourage those women who do show real potential in
math and science to pursue those fields, thus treating them as
individuals of ability rather than members of a group who might, on
average, not do as well in these areas."
Let me note my own agnosticism on this issue, due to my own lack of
reading in these areas. However, the argument I lay out above
seems to me to be in the bounds of legitimate discourse.
If, like me, you think the Warner Brothers animated shorts of the 30s through the 50s are some of the best comedy American has ever produced, you need to head over here and enjoy yourself. Be prepared to kill serious time.
For, being cognizant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against
him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers - knowing that
he has sought for objections and difficulties instead of avoiding
them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject
from any quarter - he has a right to think his judgement better
than that of any other person, or any multitude, who have not gone through
a similar process.
UPDATE: Folks should also see Wil Wilkinson's neologism "pulling a Hopkins":
pull a Hopkins
intr. v.
1. to become faint or nauseated upon hearing a statement contrary to one's ideology or dogma.
2. to leave the room, usually dramatically, because of such faintness or nausea.
3. to feign such faintness or nausea as part of a ploy to establish or reinforce a social convention about the limits of acceptable discourse.
I'm rereading Mill's On Liberty
in preparation for teaching it for the first time in a couple of years. Early
in the chapter on the liberty of thought and discussion, he argues:
First, the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly
be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course, deny its truth; but
they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for
all mankind and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To
refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false is
to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
Over at his wonderful blog, the economic anthropologist Grant
McCracken
has had several posts about the economics and culture of food.
He poses the apparent contradiction between the growth in high-end, sophisticated
tastes in food and the growth in fast food consumption, wondering how both
might be true. He argues, in part:
But there is another, more interesting, possibility: that good food and
bad food are happening to the same people. In this view, Americans are growing
more sophisticated in their knowledge of food. They are stocking better kitchens
with better food. But by and large, they are eating prepared food.
There was a time when we would have hunted out the “cognitive dissonance” this
sort of thing causes. But not anymore. I think we may be looking at a “virtual
consumption” as a result of which people “consume” the
knowledge and image of good food and the stuff and substance of bad food.
They eat what they eat: food that is prepared out of the house, often by
fast food suppliers. But they consume what they read in magazines and cook
books and watch on TV.
This approach would help explain how it is people can spend so much on kitchens,
cook books, and cooking shows and so little time on cooking itself. This
is what is going on in the Martha Stewart phenomenon, when people watch the
show with pleasure without ever making or thinking to make the dining room
center piece. In a sense, Martha’s making it for us. Martha’s
making it so we don’t have to. Martha’s making it because, let’s
be honest, we don’t have the time.
I'd like to propose an alternative hypothesis:
From an economic perspective, this isn't that odd. It may be that higher incomes
have enabled us to indulge in the Martha Stewart fantasy and sometimes even
live it out - we can afford to purchase the fine wines, fancy olive oils, and
fresh exotic vegetables to make those slow cooked meals in our remodelled kitchens.
At the same time, the "substitution effect" of the various pressures
on our time pushes us to consume fast food, or even fast casual, on a more
frequent basis.
In my own house, we tend to eat "fast" in various ways during the
week, but indulge ourselves either eating out more fancy or cooking more slowly
on the weekends, or between semesters, or on days when neither my wife nor
I have late afternoon work commitments, all of which are when we have the time.
So it may be true that we are "virtually" consuming the concept of the high-end
kitchen stocked with top-flight stuff, but it also may be true that we use
it as our time permits. If higher incomes are associated with more valuable
time, the apparent paradox of the Martha Stewart kitchen in which McDonald's
is being consumed may vanish a bit.
McCracken also uses sushi as an example of the changes in American eating
habits:
In the words of Darrell Corti:
Ten years ago, to eat sushi you had to go to specialized restaurants and
even in big cities you’d find only a few. Today sushi is an industrial
commodity. (87)
I live in a town of 7000 in a rural county in NY state. As of December, we
now have an Asian buffet with very good sushi. It's both an economic and cultural
phenomenon
- costs are lower and people are more aware of sushi as an enjoyable meal.
Adam Smith had it right - the division of labor is indeed limited by the extent
of the market, and that "extent" continues to grow as costs fall
and cultures intermingle. The lower costs of production make getting sushi
to the middle of nowhere more possible, and precisely the sort of cultural awareness
prompted by the rise of the Food Network and other media attention to creating
the "good food image" McCracken talkls about, have altered the "extent of the
market." And those of us in the boonies are all the better for it.
Let me just respond quickly to William Marina's points.
For me, Rockwell's
piece was
worthwhile
more
for
its
general
argument
than
all
of the details. I'm the first to object to the bandying about of "fascism" as
a synonym for "whatever I don't like." And his use of "almost
totalitarian" to modify "statist nationalism" is hyberbolic
(although "statist
nationalism" is right on).
What he's quite right about though is the "takeover" of US conservativism
by its statist/nationalist/"statecraft" wing as opposed to its more
libertarian leaning one. When the religious conservatives, and the hawks, and
the George Wills and Bill Bennetts are all on the same page, and that page
is one that is about the glorification not just of the nation but of the state,
particularly its military, you know we're in trouble. It's more troubling that
a number of self-described classical liberals have gone down the hawk/nationalist
path as well. It's not just that the more libertarian-leaning conservatives
were out-numbered or out-maneuvered for power in the movement, it's that a
good number of them swallowed the Kool-Aid.
In addition, conservativism appears to be much more bound up, as Rockwell
says, in the belief good leadership rather than in institutional checks and
balances or reform. Just
as W
believes
that because his intentions are good, he has made no mistakes, so do many
conservatives appear to believe that if the right people are in power, all
will be well.
It is supremely ironic that conservatives would adopt the same logic that
Keynes did in his "response" to Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.
More generally, Rockwell's point that the threats to liberty are increasingly
coming from the right, and that libertarians should be looking leftward for
coalition building, is one that I think is correct, even if he somewhat overstates
the size of the threat and the promise of real cooperation from the left.
I guess I'm just really tired of seeing libertarians bending over backward
to make excuses for modern American conservativism. In the mid-90s, that was
at least plausible when the more libertarian-leaning elements of the conservative
movement were more at the forefront, but now, with the statist-nationalist
elements clearly in control, it is not clear at all what libertarians gain
by any alliance with conservatives (and Sudha
Shenoy's comments on my original
post are very much to the point here). In the world we now live in, it may
well be true that on the margin, libertarians have more to fear from an increasingly
militarized right than a weakened and drifting left.
Those of you who know me or have seen some scattered comments on L&P before know
that I have, suffice it to say, little love for the Mises Institute crowd. However,
I
calls
'em as I sees 'em and when they get it right, I'll be the first to acknowledge
it.
In
that spirit, I offer today's column by Lew Rockwell, with the great title of
"The
Reality of Red-State Fascism."
One money quote:
The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while adopting
an ideology – even without knowing it or being entirely conscious of
the change – that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality
turns out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept.
For a long time, we've tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming
from the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from
the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that
there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the
other that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced
the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.
What is the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we face in our
time? It is not from the left. If anything, the left has been solid on civil
liberties and has been crucial in drawing attention to the lies and abuses
of the Bush administration. No, today, the clear and present danger to freedom
comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people who are
pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management
of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use a messianic and
belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.
The whole piece is well worth reading.
And let me add a wish for a very happy new year to my co-bloggers here and
the readers of L&P. May 2005 be filled with more liberty for all of us.
Here's a very cool website to check out. It takes about 8 minutes, but if you're
at all interested in the intersection of media, technology, and blogging, as
well as futuristic scenarios, it will be well worth it. I'm curious to see what
L&P contributors and readers think of how plausible this is as a possible future.
(Hat tip, Jonah
Goldberg.)
Julian
Sanchez over at Hit & Run has
picked up on a piece in Psychology
Today that I read awhile back and had thought about blogging on, but never
got to. The article is called "A Nation of Wimps" and explores the multiplicity
of ways in which parents of young people today are so over-involved and over-protective
that kids are simply not used to failing and coping with that failure. I can't
really capture all the nuance of the piece, but I heartily recommend it for
anyone who deals with adolescents and college-aged students. You will find
much in this
piece that explains the behavior of your students, and especially some of the
changes that those of us teaching for a decade or more have seen.
It certainly helps to understand the heightened demand for counseling services
and mental health medication by this generation of students.
One of the more interesting observations in the piece is the role played by
cell phones (and I would add Instant Messenger and text messaging) in keeping
a sort of digital umbilical cord between students and parents. As the author
says:
Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow
up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice
they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced
with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become,
in a way, all the wise adults we've had the privilege to know. "But
cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do," says Anderegg. "They've
never internalized any images; all they've internalized is 'call Mom or Dad.'"
I would further add that it also provides an excuse for first-year students
to not have to get out and make new friends and new connections on campus.
Between the cell and IM, they are still in touch with their friends from home
and in touch with them through the same media as they were when they were geographically
closer. The effects of this technology on their ability to adjust and deal
with the realities of college life, especially on a residential campus, are
just beginning to be felt. (Add to this the problem that the vast majority
of incoming college students have never had to share a bedroom before college,
and you can only imagine how hard it is for many students to adjust to life
in a college residence hall.)
The Psychology Today piece is long, but well worth the effort. Share it with
your friends, especially those who are parents.
A little more on my ongoing favorite subject of the causes of leftist numerical
dominance of academia:
Some of you may have seen this Jonathan
Chait LA Times piece (requires
quickie registration and hat tip to PrestoPundit).
There are some decent points in this piece, but this paragraph caused me to reach
for the Maalox:
The main causes of the partisan disparity on campus have little to do
with anything so nefarious as discrimination. First, Republicans don't
particularly want to be professors. To go into academia — a highly
competitive field that does not offer great riches — you have to
believe that living the life of the mind is more valuable than making a
Wall Street salary. On most issues that offer a choice between having
more money in your pocket and having something else — a cleaner
environment, universal health insurance, etc. — conservatives tend
to prefer the money and liberals tend to prefer the something else. It's
not so surprising that the same thinking would extend to career
choices.
Of course the notion that conservatives/libertarians are so strongly interested
only in their financial well-being and don't care anything about a cleaner
environment or better health care, etc., is offensive enough, but we've seen
that before.
What strikes me more this time is that Chait and other lefties
tempted to make this argument need to remember the other side of their brain's
focus on the "vast right-wing conspiracy," which is full of all of
these "corporate-funded" think
tanks all over the place. Well just who the hell is it who is working at those
places for $30K/year? Lots of people who would prefer the world of ideas and
policy to the business world and its higher incomes. Those of us here know many
of them. Numerous conservatives and libertarians have chosen the world of ideas
(and its associated relative poverty), but they didn't make that choice in
academia. The world of the think tanks (and the blogosphere) are among the
most intellectually
exciting places I've ever been, and are filled with people committed to the
importance of intellectual activity without being too concerned about how it
increases their bank accounts.
Not only is Chait's answer wrong, he's not even asking the right question.
The question to be answered is not why
are there no conservative and libertarian intellectuals, but why they are engaged
in
that
activity in
places other than academia. Whether it's accurate or not, the perception of
many of those folks is that academia is not open to them, and it's not because
they don't have the "chops."
I don't think I've seen anyone here mention the new Left2Right
blog. It's a lively discussion among a number of high-powered folks in political
science, law, philosophy, and even economics. (It's also heavily represented
by my alma mater, The University of Michigan, including two former profs of mine
- Don Herzog and Peter Railton.) It's worth a visit to see what's going
on. I also think it would be a great site for libertarians to enter serious
conversation with those folks. In particular, those of us with Hayek expertise
might find their commitment to revisiting and rethinking the liberal tradition
to be a useful starting point for some good dialogue. Check it out.
Can someone explain to me how conservatives can look themselves in the mirror
after they say things like this?
What was determinative is that the two political parties view the American
people very differently. The Republican Party has become the party of individualism,
believing that free enterprise, market economies, and individual choices
give people the best chance of a good life; that if ordinary Americans are
left alone to make their own decisions, they will generally be good decisions,
so they--not the government--should have the power to make them.
That's Pete Du Pont in today's Wall
Street Journal. It's beautiful rhetoric, but too bad it has little
to do with the reality of most Republicans today.
Aside from the obvious fact that government has grown enormously in the last
four years, and that very few Republicans have actually supported clear moves
in the direction of more free enterprise, I'd sure like to know when the Republicans
have let me alone to decide what substances I can ingest, whether to continue
a pregnancy, who I can marry, whether or not my tax dollars should subsidize
God's presence in the public schools, what sorts of things I can watch/listen
to on broadcast TV or radio, not to mention that whole "war is the health of
the state" thing.
In a point I've made before, the wall that conservatives attempt to build
between the market and the culture is completely a product of their imagination. If
you really believe in free enterprise and individual choice, then
you have to recognize that the growth of wealth and evolution of the marketplace
is bound to produce cultural change in their wake. In the example I know
best and seems most obvious, the changes in the American family, from the increase
in female labor force participation rates to the increased visibility of gays
and lesbians, to the current debate over same-sex marriage, to the higher divorce
rate, are all to some large degree a consequence of the dynamic change that
a market economy generates. (I'll be happy to spell out those arguments
in detail if anyone wishes.) To imagine that one can unleash the unpredictable
forces of economic change yet turn back the cultural clock is utopian in the
worst sense of the term.
For this reason alone, we should all doubt claims
by social conservatives to be champions of the marketplace. They simply
cannot have it both ways: either you really do believe in free enterprise
and thus recognize and accept its unpredicatable feedback on the culture, or
you really believe in "traditional values," which entails that you attempt,
probably
in
vain,
to
intervene in
the market to squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube. I think this is
just another way to cut Virginia
Postrel's "dynamist vs. stasist" framework.
Of course this argument is also a challenge to those on the left to recognize
the "capitalist underpinnings" of cultural change. So much
of the cultural change that the left applauds has been made possible by the
growth in wealth that can be, in my view, attributed to the forces of free
enterprise. Capitalism is, on this argument, a highly progressive force,
while attempts to squelch it are ultimately reactionary. One good piece
to read on this, for my friends on the left, is John
D'Emilio's "Capitalism and Gay Identity." In that essay,
he gets at why capitalism has made gay identity possible, yet spends
the last two pages with the obligatory "of course, this doesn't mean 'we' should
support capitalism" and he then goes on to the usual laundry list of bogus
problems with capitalism. (Here's another nice blog piece that includes
some discussion of D'Emilio's argument.)
What's nice about Postrel's "dynamism" is that
it gives us a language to start to build conversation and coalitions across
the usual ideological boundaries that could help those who claim to support markets
see why they of necessity produce (desirable) cultural change and help those
who like the changes see why this a crucial good thing that markets do and
that other economic systems can or do not.
In the meantime, someone hit Pete Du Pont over the head with the ever-expanding
Federal Register and the FCC fine list.
This little thesis is developed nicely, with the following wonderful, and
I think oddly apropos, punchline:
"Of course, by this model, libertarians suddenly become godless, amoral
hedonists and Marxist gender-theorists become elitist, puritannical killjoys."
Indeed. I'm proud, in fact very proud, to proclaim myself a godless
amoral hedonist with respect to both sex and commerce (and rock and roll for
that matter)!
Seriously, I do find this an interesting way to cut the issues and it does
explain the way in which I find both the Left and Right to be "puritans" of
one sort or another.
It's been awhile since I blogged about bias in academia. Some of you
may have already seen the story in today's New
York Times in links from Hit
& Run or Volokh. The focus is a
study by Dan Klein and Charlotta Stern (yes, the Dan Klein that many L&Pers
know and love) that explores the voting patters
of faculty and finds the usual lopsided results favoring Democrats. Whatever
one thinks of the causes and seriousness of the problem is one thing. What
galls me is the transparent hypocrisy of faculty and administrators in either
dismissing or explaining the findings. For example there's this from
the Chancellor at Berkeley:
"The essence of a great university is developing and sharing new knowledge
as well as questioning old dogma," Dr. Birgeneau said. "We do this
in an environment which prizes academic freedom and freedom of expression.
These principles are respected by all of our faculty at U.C. Berkeley, no
matter what their personal politics are."
Every single one of them? Every single one? Might be worth asking
the students behind the conservative newspaper there if they agree.
But what galls me even more is this comment:
A Democrat on the Berkeley faculty, George P. Lakoff, who teaches linguistics
and is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives
Think," said that liberals choose academic fields that fit their world
views. "Unlike conservatives," he said, "they believe in working
for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for
their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about."
This is the sort of attempt to monopolize the moral high ground that drives
me insane. I'm sorry Professor Lakoff, but American-style liberals do
NOT hold a monopoly on caring about the public good and social justice (in
the
most
general sense), nor on caring about knowledge and art for their own sake. There
are numerous conservative and libertarian academics who care deeply about all
of those things. We just think the policies and institutions that serve
the common good and help those who need it most are not the same ones you do. And
we're in the teaching business because we care deeply about knowledge.
After all it's precisely more and better knowledge that will help us
to discover whether your ideas or ours will better serve the public good.
Instead
of trying to rule us out of the discussion by definition, how about actually
engaging in dialogue with us about which policies and institutions do, in fact,
better serve the common good? Members of the academic left who claim
a monopoly on the moral high ground avoid the
need
to ever
bring
their
ideas
into debate with those who see the world differently. If that isn't a
good definition of "dogmatic," I don't know what is. How hard
is it to believe that those you disagree with believe the things they do with
the same good faith and concern about the world that you claim for yourself? If
you really believe they don't, then your credibility in claiming that hiring
and tenuring practices in academia are unbiased is near zero.
From my perspective, the only worthwhile definition of "political correctness"
is precisely this sort of attempt at monopolizing the moral high ground. I
don't care about how many faculty come from what part of the political spectrum,
or whether conservative students aren't brave and confident enough to speak
up in class. What I care about is having the legitimacy of libertarian
and conservative ideas ruled out a priori by this sort of argument. I'm
totally confident that my world view can hold its own in any good-faith dialogue
with any colleague. What I'm not confident about is how many can sincerely
enter such a dialogue.
I suppose I should weigh in on this whole election thing, eh? It's tomorrow,
right?
More seriously, I'm probably closest to Chris's position here. Historically,
I've been a conscientious abstainer. It does indeed "only encourage them." I
did vote LP in 1984, the first year I could vote, but have not voted in a presidential
election since. As this week's brilliant South Park put it (hat tip to
Glen
Whitman for the dialogue):
MRS. MARSH: How was school today, Stanley?
STAN: It was ridiculous. We have to have a new school mascot and we're supposed
to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
MRS. MARSH: What did you say?
MR. MARSH: Did you just say that voting is ridiculous?
STAN: No, I think voting is great, but if I have to choose between a douche
and a turd, I just don’t see the point.
MR. MARSH: You don’t see the point? Oh, you young people just make
me sick!
MRS. MARSH: Stanley, do you know how many people died so you could have the
right to vote?
STAN: Well Mom, I just don’t think there’s much of a difference
between a douche and a turd. I don’t care.
Yes indeed, not much difference at all between a douche and a turd sandwich. But
why not vote LP? Historically, I've believed that the whole process of
voting, even if I voted LP, was akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It's
not just that my individual vote doesn't matter, or that it doesn't matter
whether a douche or a turd wins (both of which I believe to be true), but that
the real problems we face as society are so deep and profound and are at the
levels of the intellectual and the institutional, that voting as a process has
little effect. We need to make other more fundamental changes first. Like
the sheep who get to decide which wolf will eat them, choice is cold comfort.
I should add that my conscientious abstention drives my left-liberal colleagues
far more batty than any particular position I take as a libertarian. I
find that so interesting. It's not as if I'm not engaged politically. Aside
from the fact that my classroom is a place where I see myself helping students
become informed and articulate citizens, I'm a total political junkie, not
to mention my recent appearance at a
local town forum on Wal-Mart (I was pro). But to my colleagues, there's
something so fundamental about the act of voting that not doing so, even with
good clear reasons, just cannot be abided.
This election, however, has tempted me more than any other recently, if only
because the incumbent is so, well, turd sandwich-like. As I've said before
here, I'm "rooting" for Kerry, but I cannot force down my bile long enough
to vote for him, as douche-y as he is. Were I to vote, and I still might,
it would be for Badnarik, and for largely the reasons David, Rod and Keith put
forward. However, although he's neither a douche nor a turd sandwich,
he is a wingnut (even by LP standards). I so agree with David's point
about the LP putting forward a candidate with name recognition who I could
really get behind (Penn Jillette is perfect), but I do see the argument for
voting LP to keep the "remnant" moving forward. It's just so
hard to pull the lever for a wingnut, even with the lackluster alternatives.
So, I'll probably sit this one out. Of course that decision is harder
and harder to explain to my kids, especially since if they tell other people,
the Village of Canton might ride me out of town on a horse, stranding me at
the local PETA compound, where I can begin to understand what it truly means
to love animals and die a horrible death at the hands of Puff Daddy (go watch
the whole South Park episode...)
Here's a great example of the spontaneous generation of a social institution
to solve a problem - in this case, a problem created by government road-building
policy:
"Slugging"
is the name, and beating the system is the game.
Just a quick clarification James: I completely agree that sometimes the division of labor in the household that puts more of the work on the woman is the best solution to the particular situation that home faces. I say this as someone whose wife was out of the labor force for almost ten years when our kids were younger. Two points seem key to me:
1. We have to recognize that families have to solve these often complex intersections of economics and values according to their own lights. From a Hayekian perspective, no one else has the knowledge or the incentives to do it better than those intimiate with the situation. (I should note that this is also the start of a libertarian argument for parental rights, but that's for another day.)
2. At the same time, we can work to help both men and women understand that this decision should be a conscious one, rather than just doing what they perceive to be as "tradition" or women just giving in to male power. I'm fine with women (or men!) who make an eyes-wide-open choice to stay home and sacrifice wages in the process. Any gender wage gap that results from this is not a social problem to be remedied. I just want that choice to be made with as much knowledge and in as great a situation of equality of power as possible.
Rod has given us a hunk of economics and social analysis to chew on. I
am largely in agreement with what he has to say, but I think there are some
issues to clarify and expand upon.
Women on the job market make, on average, 75 cents for every dollar men make
for the equivalent jobs.
Actually, this is only real problem in the piece. The famous 75 cents
figure is NOT based on "equivalent jobs," rather it's based on the average
wage for
working
women and working men. It does not take into account the kind of jobs
people have, the training and education they have, their family situations,
whether they work full-time or part-time, and so forth. Studies that
control for these sorts of variables continually narrow the gender wage gap. Even
just taking age into account changes matters: the wage gap for men and
women in their 20s, not controlling for any other variables, is notably smaller,
with women earning over 90 cents on a dollar for men. Not surprisingly,
the gap is largest for older women. Why "not surprisingly?" The
key is that younger women were more prepared to enter the job market - they
are more likely to have college degrees etc.. Older women frequently
found themselves employed when they didn't expect to be at a younger age, making
it less likely they acquired skills that would make them productive.
According
to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, in 1968, 28% of white
women age 14-24 planned to work at age 35. In 1980, more than 70%
of them were in the labor force. In 1979, 75% of women age 14-21 planned
to work at age 35. The women who were in that age group in the late
60s found themselves at age 35 and later in the workforce but underskilled. They
are still catching up. Younger women haven't faced that problem, hence
their wage gap is lower. And note that this was about white women -
the wage gap between black women and black men has always been narrower because
black women have had higher labor force participation rates and have had
greater expectations of working as adults, not to mention the various problems
that lead to low wages for black men (war on drugs, crappy public schools,
etc.).
Studies that have controlled for all the non-gender factors that might affect
wages show much smaller gaps. For example, a late 1990s study by June O'Neill
showed that the gap for all people aged 27-33 without
children was 2% in 1994. And recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data show the
gap was 8% for never-married workers in 1999. So, the reality here is
that a good hunk of the gender wage gap is explained by the differences in
labor market characteristics of men and women, everything from human capital
to whether or not they are married or have kids. Bottom line: two
workers in their 20s or 30s identical in every way other than gender will make
just about the same wages. A gap still exists but it is under 10%, and
perhaps much smaller. My point is simply that markets are already doing
a pretty good job of eliminating labor market discrimination in the sense of
making sure that equally qualified people get paid the same for the same work.
Rod's critique of the neoclassical story of why competition will perfectly
eliminate descrimination-based wage gaps is excellent. An Austrian perspective
would emphasize the prospective nature of the value of a worker's
marginal product and gladly admit that employers can and do get it wrong. I
heartily recommend the work of W.
H. Hutt for a really good Austrian view of
labor markets. Austrians
would rely on the "rationality" of markets as processes, not the foresight
of individual firms, to explain why there is a tendency for workers to get
paid according to what they contribute to production. And Rod's points
about the comparative ability of markets and governments to set wages (both
imperfectly, but markets less imperfectly) are right on as well.
Nonetheless, a wage gap remains. Is that the result of discrimination? Possibly. As
Rod rightly notes, sexism may be a consumption good to some managers and they
are willing to sacrifice profits to be biased against women. Even recognizing
this point doesn't necessarily point to state intervention as the solution. Why
would we expect less sexism among male bureaucrats and politicians,
and especially when, absent profit and loss, they lack both signals and incentives
to alert them to such behavior and to encourage them to correct it? It's
one thing to say firm managers will see and ignore the unprofitability of sexism,
but how likely is gender equality to be when such signals and incentives aren't
even there to be seen or ignored?
The wage gap also remains because even if men and women are equally capable
of most or all work, cultural norms and expectations affect men and women differently
and this has implications for wages. As Rod nicely puts it:
The fact that the wage gap does not get whittled away by competition in
this fashion shows that the gap must be based, so the argument runs, on a
real difference in productivity between the sexes. This does not necessarily
point to any inherent difference in capacities, but might instead be due
to the disproportionate burden of household work shouldered by women -- which
would also explain why the wage gap is greater for married women than for
single women. (Walter Block makes this argument also.) Hence feminist worries
about the wage gap are groundless.
I'm not sure why this argument, if successful, would show that worrying
about the wage gap is a mistake, rather than showing that efforts to redress
the gap should pay less attention to influencing employers and more attention
to influencing marital norms. (Perhaps the response would be that since wives
freely choose to abide by such norms, outsiders have no basis for condemning
the norms. But since when can't freely chosen arrangements be criticised
-- on moral grounds, prudential grounds, or both?)
I could not agree with this more. Let me phrase it somewhat differently
though: the gender wage gap that exists after human capital etc. is taken
into account may reflect discrimination/sexism but that discrimination is not
the fault of labor markets. For example, if it is women who are
expected to raise the children or do a disproportionate share of the household
labor, this will make them less productive in the labor market, leading to
lower wages. (They will more likely want part-time work, or jobs with
scheduling flexibility, both of which tend to pay less, ceteris paribus. They
will also be more likely to interrupt their consecutive years at a specific
job or in the labor force generally, both of which, ceteris paribus, lower
earnings.) The problem here is that the sexism is occuring "before" people
get to the labor market: in the distribution of household production
or in educational processes or more generally in cultural expectations of men
and women. Markets may reasonably accurately reflect productivity, but
other sexist social processes produce differences in productivity that lead
to wage differentials. For me, it's perfectly possible to argue both
that markets will reduce discrimination much
better
than the
state
or
other
systems
and
that sexism still causes women to get paid less than men, all else equal. As
a libertarian, one can, as Rod says, criticize the voluntary choices of individuals,
especially when one thinks they lead to pernicious social consequences.
And I also am in deep agreement with this point of Rod's:
That's one reason I'm more sympathetic to the labour movement and the feminist
movement than many libertarians nowadays tend to be. In the 19th century, libertarians
saw political oppression as one component in an interlocking system of political,
economic, and cultural factors; they made neither the mistake of thinking that
political power was the only problem nor the mistake of thinking that political
power could be safely and effectively used to combat the other problems.
One of the things I talk about when I teach this material is that if women
(and men!) want to continue to narrow that wage gap, they need to, as it were,
get their own houses in order. When the burden of household production
is more equally shared between men and women, the gap between their wages will
fall as well. Obviously, neither Rod nor I am recommending state-sponsored
re-education camps for lazy men, but there are all kinds of non-coercive ways
to convince people to change their behaviors, and to call upon moral norms
of fairness and equality in doing so.
Will the gender wage gap ever be
eliminated totally? Maybe not, but as libertarians, we can do more than
just say "well, markets eliminate any 'real' discrmination" and be done with
it. It's about both liberty AND power (duh!). We can be part
of social movements that work for equality in the home and workplace (power)
as well as under the law (liberty).
The buzz in the blogosphere this morning is Ron
Suskind's piece in yesterday's NYT magazine on the "faith-based presidency" of George
W. Bush. The overarching theme is that this president not only brokers
no disagreement, but prefers no contact with reality on the basis of his faith-inspired
certainty and confidence. The
quote that's getting the most attention is this one:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the
White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen
Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White
House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't
fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the
Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based
community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured
something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's
not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire
now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying
that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.
We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study
what we do.''
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of
the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic
and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime
before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican
senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said:
''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one
of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going
to debate it with you.''
Several bloggers, including our own Gene
Healy, are now taking to proudly
calling themselves members of the "reality-based community." I
concur. In fact, it would be pretty cool to start a web banner campaign,
or pick a ribbon color that's not taken, to publicize that we are members of
said community.
Frankly, after reading Suskind's piece, I'm more tempted than ever to not
just root for John Kerry, but to in fact vote for him. There may not
be much that's new in that piece, but it brings together lots of stuff under
a common theme that scares the living daylights out of me.
Another explanation of Bush behavior can be found in this
excellent analysis by Julian Sanchez.
I think he's got it right: for W, it's all about the nobility of one's
intentions, not the consquences, especially the unintended consequences, of one's
actions. Money quote:
This would also go a long way toward explaining Bush's visceral reaction
to criticism. If one is in the habit of separating intent from outcome, not
every mistake is shameful. Things can turn out badly even though one behaved
as well as could be expected. When they're inextricably linked, however,
every allegation of error rings like the accusatory cop-out of the failed
revival healer: "It only works if your faith is strong." To accuse
Bush of having made a bad decision is, if this is indeed his mind-set, in
effect to call him a bad person, to question the quality of his heart no
less than his judgment. Admitting error, acknowledging that things haven't
panned out, becomes impossible.
Isn't it much more likely that the "bulge" is some sort of personal protection vest? I would think that any time the president is out in public that he's wearing Kevlar or some such thing, and the debate would be no exception. I have no doubt that Rove et. al would love to be able to push words at W, but to attempt that in the most public of forums with hundreds of cameras and millions of viewers seems to involve a degree of stupidity that runs in contrast to the "evil genius" persona that Bush-haters attribute to Rove.
To be honest, this whole bulge flap (sounds like a body part on some sea creature...) seems to be an instance of what Charles Krauthammer has called "Bush Derangement Syndrome." BDS is when otherwise sensible rational people are driven to preposterous claims about Bush as a result of their, perhaps understandable, hatred of the man. All comparisons of Bush to Hitler, in my book, qualify as BDS symptoms.
UPDATE: Or maybe the bulge is this. (Hat tip to ScrappleFace.)
Rod's recent posts here and here on
the Mises-Cato "wars," as well as the conversation on Tom Palmer's site here,
here, and here,
prompts me to say a few words about a problem I see with
elements
of contemporary libertarianism, including and especially the folks at the Mises
Institute.
There seems to be a view out there, and perhaps I'm attributing intentionality
where there is none, that libertarians are, or should be, consistent "contrarians."
That is, if the mainstream currents of the intelligensia believe "A," libertarians
should adopt beliefs in contrast to A. This is surely understandable for those
of us who strongly believe that the free markets are superior institutional
arrangements than the alternatives, including the status quo. The intellectual
defense of capitalism, particularly in its more laissez-faire forms, is indeed
a contrarian position to take. But it's also a theoretically and empirically
defensible position to take (in my view, of course).
What seems to have happened is that many libertarians, fueled by the fury
of the outsider that comes from having to defend laissez-faire against a dominant
intellectual environment that is hostile, transfer that same attitude and energy
to other sets of beliefs that are "outsider" beliefs. If "everyone thinks"
capitalism is wrong, but you think it's right, why not start to draw the conclusion
that other things that "everyone thinks" are true might be wrong? The result?
You begin to question the "received wisdom" on slavery and the civil war and
then perhaps begin to find yourself associated
with defenders of the Confederacy, not all of whom have the purity of your intellectual interest. You begin to flirt with controversial
theories on race (see Hoppe's
citation of Phillippe Rushton in the 5th note) that many others
have branded as racist. You begin to flirt with the anti-Semitic right, conveniently
forgetting to mention the
Holocaust in a discussion of how many people Hitler
killed as compared to Stalin or finding intellectual common cause with the
Institute of Historical Review's Holocaust denials. (Note: opposing US aid
to Israel or Zionism more generally does not ipso facto qualify as
anti-Semitism. It's perfectly possible to be anti-Israel and not anti-Semitic.)
And maybe theocracy doesn't seem so awful, because people have misunderstood
the role of religion in the defense of liberty. I have also had conversations
with self-described libertarians who are skeptics of Darwinism. And, of course,
you become a fanatical opponent of "political correctness," without ever even
asking how real the phenomenon is and whether
it is so antithetical to libertarianism as that opposition suggests.
My point here is that it sometimes seems that libertarians who adopt these
contrarian positions do so almost out of a principle. By that, I don't
mean that they don't do any intellectual homework. Instead, it's more like
the points I raised in the
Dan Rather affair: one's intellectual priors lead
one to look for evidence in some places and not others, and to read the evidence
you do find through the lens of those priors. In this case, a lens that values
contrarianism will lead one to particular places.
The irony of this to me is that it is people like Hoppe who accuse the left-libertarians
of starting from a prior of juvenile
anti-authoritarianism (see note 23) and
deducing their political views from there. Could not one say that Hoppe et.
al. suffer from a form of unreflective intellectual anti-authoritarianism that
leads them to falsely reject mainstream intellectual views that may well be
correct? If tradition and authority are sometimes right in the social world,
can't they be right in the intellectual world as well? More important, isn't
it truth we are after, not our own version of "political correctness?"
If the
historical
truth
seems
to
run
contrary
to
our
politics, then it's time to either rethink our politics or rethink whether
that truth is really so contrary (or do better history - "better" history,
not "libertarian" history).
As libertarians, we do ourselves no good by being contrarians for contrarianism's
sake. It seems like that's where some self-described libertarians are ending
up these days. Sometimes mainstream intellectuals are right, sometimes they're
not. Our commitment to
intellectual
values of
openness
and
scholarship
must
come
first.
I hate it when this happens. The wonderful "home
computer" photo I linked to
the other day is a photoshop that appeared on Fark.com (a wonderful site, by
the way). So what's a reporter to do? Well, I guess I'll pull a Dan Rather/NY
Times: "Sure
the photo is faked, but the underlying story is accurate."
In my comments
in the infamous sci-fi thread, I
noted that the failures of most sci-fi are not
purely "technological" but social, in that they can't get right the ways in which
technology will be integrated into daily life. Well here's a
good example of scientists
not getting the future very right, precisely because they underestimated the
power of their own disciplines and the speed of technological advance. It's also
a good cautionary tale about extrapolating from the present to the future when
we cannot even imagine the sorts of changes that will occur in the interim. Competition
as a discovery process indeed.
I can't resist one more comment on the CBS memos thing. In the New
York Times this morning, we have a lawyer for Bill Burkett, the Texan thought by
some to be the source of the memos:
Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush's military
service, Mr. Van Os said: "If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone
else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as
some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in
the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they
believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 - which Bill Burkett has absolutely not
done'' - then, he continued, "what difference would it make?"
Is it me, or is this just an unbelievably cavalier attitude toward what constitutes
evidence and an utter disregard for how one establishes truth? (Not to mention
the "without much evidence" line. Tell me again how this is
"not much?") Again,
I'm pretty sure that W had help in and out of the Guard - just like lots of
other folks at the time. But if you want to prove it, you better have
the goods. Saying that we "know" he didn't fulfill his obligations so
that the fact that the evidence for it might have been constructed ex post isn't important, just doesn't wash. Memo to Dan Rather: Orson Welles's
character in Touch of
Evil concocted evidence, often against genuinely guilty folks,
but ended up swimmin' with the fishies by the time the curtain fell on that
great piece of film noir.
I've been saying this over and over, but it bears repeating: no matter
how right folks might be about Bush, the injustice of the War in Iraq or anything
else, concocting evidence or playing Moore-like with the truth does more
harm than good. The truth is bad enough - it doesn't need friends like
this.
My apologies for reposting a big hunk of this, but I added some material at the end and wanted it all in one place. It also made cross-posting easier.
I want to weigh in with some thoughts about the whole National Guard documents/CBS
forgery issue. This story has consumed me for the last two days. I'm far less
interested in the whole question of what Bush and/or Kerry did or didn't do
during the
Vietnam
Era
than I am
about
what
this
particular
incident has to say about liberty and power. I'm also assuming that everyone
has some cursory knowledge of the whole issue. If not, the best places to go for
summaries are Instapundit or Powerline.
Let me also say that I am completely convinced that these documents, or at
least 2 of them, are forgeries. If I'm
wrong, this little essay's going to look pretty stupid, but I'm willing to
take that chance. Let me also say that it doesn't matter to me where they came
from and how they got
to CBS. What I care about is how these memos got on the air and what the near-instant
demolition
of them by the blogs and "new media" means socially. And as I've
argued before in this space, I have no love for the incumbent, so my point
is not to destroy Kerry or support Bush. Finally, people will call this "blogosphere
triumphalism"
but so be it.
With that said, it seems to me that this incident is a triumph of liberty
over power. For years, we've heard from both Right and Left that the "Big Media"
are a problem. Each group thinks they are the handmaiden of the other group.
What both appear to agree on is that they are near-all powerful entities who
are growing unchecked like some electromagnetic cancer upon the land. The Left
has long had the small alternative press, which tried to counter the power
of the Big Guys, but with limited success, and it had academia. The Right,
since the 80s anyway, has had the think-tank world (which I've always viewed
as the alternative university for libertarians and conservatives who perceived
themselves, perhaps wrongly, as being closed out of academic by what they saw
as leftist power). However it had no real media of its own (Jim and Tammy Faye
don't count) until the advent of the Internet. There's a reason the earliest
and
most well-known blogs lean conservative or libertarian: there was a latent
demand for their services.
The net finally reduced the cost of publishing to near zero, at least on the
margin, and radically democratized the knowledge production industry,
especially investigative reporting. By eliminating both political (think broadcast
licenses) barriers to entry and the huge start up costs of publishing, the
Internet widened the sphere of liberty for those who wished to be producers
of information. The result, as we've seen so clearly the last 48 hours, is
that the strength of Big Media power has been radically reduced. Average Americans,
with their knowledge of typewriters, military procedure, or fairly obscure
terms like "kerning," were able to compete with, and effectively neutralize,
one of the most powerful organizations on the planet. The Internet has demonstrated
itself to be one of the most powerful (yes, powerful), power-checking institutions
ever. By opening up the lines of communication to nearly everyone, it has forced
us to rely on actual arguments, facts, history, and evidence precisely because
the intensity of competition and the value of reputation is so high. The work
that was done in demonstrating, at least to my satisfaction, the forging of
those documents is a tribute to the power of truth that comes from liberty.
There's no "trust me, I'm <Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite>", rather
you're only as good as your arguments and evidence and your experts (and the
persuasiveness of the latter can also be determined with a quick Google search).
None of this should be surprising to those of us raised on Hayek. After all,
this is nothing more than the intellectual version of "Competition as a Discovery
Procedure." Or better yet, it is Michael Polanyi's work on "The Republic of
Science" transferred to current events. Even in the blogosphere, the commentary
has talked about the "distributed
intelligence" of the Net, or "open
source journalism," or even
the "hive
mind"
(a
bit too
Borg-ish
for my
taste, but it makes the point). The Hayekian lesson is that it is through the
ability to enter the market and compete that knowledge gets created and made
socially available to others. Just as in economic competition, where the process
will tend to allocate resources better than alternative processes, so in the
competition to produce news does the process tend to produce the best approximation
to "truth." Markets are in that way examples of liberty defeating power. The
very openness and competitiveness of markets makes any momentary hold on power
tenuous, requiring that those who possess it continually act affirmatively
(e.g. innovating, serving consumers well) to keep it. CBS and other Big Media
simply have never had to face this sort of environment before and have become
sloppy as a result.
I should add here one or two comments on how this all might have happened.
I don't believe that CBS or others exhibit deliberate, conscious bias against
conservatives. I don't believe (although it could be true) that Dan Rather
said "I need to destroy Bush, so I'll take shortcuts to try to do so." Instead,
as others have argued, the problem is more bias-induced laziness. Assuming
CBS was duped and not complicit, I'm sure they saw these memos as fitting their
priors about Bush and political issues more generally and simply didn't see
any reason to investigate further because the memos, in some sense, just had
to be true. All the head-scratching about why it took 12 hours for the blogosphere
to see the obviously shoddy forging job while CBS missed it can be explained
by the differences in behavior induced by both different political priors
and the differening perceptions of the rules of the game held by bloggers
and
Big
Media. Political priors will frame what sorts of things require "investigation"
and
what sorts
do not. The competition generated by the advent of the Internet has widened
the range of things deemed to be worthy of investigation (on all sides: think
of the ways in which blogs have attempted to undermine the case for the War
in Iraq). In addition, when one sees oneself in an environment of competition,
as bloggers do, one cannot afford to be lazy and everyone has to start
checking their premises.
This
is
not,
as
this
recent piece argued,
an
attempt
to police
people's politics. Rather it is competition doing what it does best: holding
everyone accountable to the "constitutional rules" of the Republic of Science.
And as good Hayekians know, when the rules are right and access is open, the
truth will out.
Finally, I appeal to my friends on the Left to take the right lesson from
this whole event. Again, this is a triumph of democracy, liberty, and the common
person over some of the most powerful institutions in America. That aspect
of this event, again assuming the memos are forged, should be cause for celebration
on the Left. It's possible that this could further doom the Kerry campaign,
but don't let that obscure the sunshine. To all who argue that monopolized
unchecked corporate power is a problem, the outing of CBS, and the advent of
the new media on the Internet more generally, should be a cause for celebration.
More power to the people and all of that. The way in which competition takes
advantage of distributed knowledge and mobilizes it through the rules and procedures
of the competitive process is the key to toppling power, whether economic,
political, or intellectual. It works in markets just as well as it works in
the world of the new media. I'm sorry if you don't like the particulars, but
if you call yourself a person of the Left, this is a moment you should have
been waiting for. Orwell just got that whole technology and power thing ass-backwards.
The democratization of knowledge production and the ability of one person with
a computer to check the power of the major social institutions
is here, and it is the technology of the telescreen that brought it to us.
Left, Right, Libertarian, or whatever, liberty has once again defeated power
by redestributing it back to the people.
Two additional thoughts that I wanted to add:
1. To respond to Jonathan Dresner's
comments: Yes, the reach of the Big Media remains large, as the Malkin
incident shows. But we are, I think, in a period of transition the final
result of which might be something different. As for the Net's ability to
propagate urban legends, etc., no argument there. But that just means that
in the same breath that the technology has democratized the production
of knowledge it has also democratized the evaluation of knowledge.
In the day when news was only produced by a few sources, there wasn't as
much need for the average person to engage in "source evaluation," especially
when the sources were largely telling the same story due to a lack of competition.
In the new media world, not only can everyone be a publisher, everyone has
to make decisions about the validity of what they read. Yes, this means we'll
get a lot more crap that gets passed on via the Internet, but I think they
are outweighed by the benefits in terms of more good things getting through
(although the net effect
on the signal to noise ratio remains an open question) and in terms of it,
one would hope, leading people to be more critical and skeptical of everything
they hear.
As an academic who has spent many years teaching first-year undergraduates
how to write research papers, and developed what I think is fairly effective
pedagogy to do it, I'm keenly aware of the problem Jonathan points to. Where
my students are weakest is where they need to be strongest - evaluating the
trustworthiness and validity of the millions of sources they might use. I can
think of no task more central to liberal education and a prepared citizenry
than the ability to evaluate effectively sources of information. The Internet
has made this task a lot harder and more important.
2. I want to expand on a Hayekian theme from the original post. Part of what
the blogosphere does is to mobilize the information necessary to address the
issues at hand by taking advantage of the disperse and specific knowledge of
millions and millions of people. Look how quickly experts on typewriters, typesetting,
computing and the like "miraculously" appeared out of nowhere to provide "testimony."
How did this happen? Well someone reads a blog and they know someone who knows
something about typewriters, who knows a guy who heard about a woman who has
a collection of old Selectrics, etc.. In minutes or hours, the necessary knowledge
is mobilized through these sorts of networks. This is one reason why the "blogosphere"
is a wonderful metaphor. Like a sphere, as the ability to communicate information
at low cost expands, it expands its "surface area" and comes into contact with
more people who know more and different things. This expands the network of
knowledge and increases its ability to react quickly when knowledge is "needed"
at one point or another in the blogosphere.
Many years ago, in his very under-appreciated book National Economic Planning:
What is Left?,
the late Don Lavoie talked about the principle of mass communication among
animals (termites specifically) and used that as an analogy for how
markets mobilized knowledge without a central authority. Well the Internet
is another example of the same phenomenon. Faced with hurricane damage, generators,
lumber, and ice appear in Florida in quick succession (and would do so even
without FEMA - I saw it up here during the icestorm of January 98) because
prices provide the relevant signals and incentive to mobilize human networks.
("I know a guy who buys generators from some guy in Atlanta, let me see what
he has.")
What we saw happen so quickly, and apparently so effectively, with the critique
of the CBS memos is precisely this sort of Hayekian "use
of knowledge in society." And as many of us Hayekians have been arguing
for years, it's exactly this feature of markets which makes them such wonderful
processes by which liberty can check power.
I want to weigh in with some thoughts about the whole National Guard documents/CBS
forgery issue. This story has consumed me for the last two days. I'm far less
interested in the whole question of what Bush and/or Kerry did or didn't do
during the
Vietnam
Era
than I am
about
what
this
particular
incident has to say about liberty and power. I'm also assuming that everyone
has some cursory knowledge of the whole issue. If not, the best places to go for
summaries are Instapundit or Powerline.
Let me also say that I am completely convinced that these documents, or at
least 2 of them, are forgeries. If I'm
wrong, this little essay's going to look pretty stupid, but I'm willing to
take that chance. Let me also say that it doesn't matter to me where they came
from and how they got
to CBS. What I care about is how these memos got on the air and what the near-instant
demolition
of them by the blogs and "new media" means socially. And as I've
argued before in this space, I have no love for the incumbent, so my point
is not to destroy Kerry or support Bush. Finally, people will call this "blogosphere
triumphalism"
but so be it.
With that said, it seems to me that this incident is a triumph of liberty
over power. For years, we've heard from both Right and Left that the "Big Media"
are a problem. Each group thinks they are the handmaiden of the other group.
What both appear to agree on is that they are near-all powerful entities who
are growing unchecked like some electromagnetic cancer upon the land. The Left
has long had the small alternative press, which tried to counter the power
of the Big Guys, but with limited success, and it had academia. The Right,
since the 80s anyway, has had the think-tank world (which I've always viewed
as the alternative university for libertarians and conservatives who perceived
themselves, perhaps wrongly, as being closed out of academic by what they saw
as leftist power). However it had no real media of its own (Jim and Tammy Faye
don't count) until the advent of the Internet. There's a reason the earliest
and
most well-known blogs lean conservative or libertarian: there was a latent
demand for their services.
The net finally reduced the cost of publishing to near zero, at least on the
margin, and radically democratized the knowledge production industry,
especially investigative reporting. By eliminating both political (think broadcast
licenses) barriers to entry and the huge start up costs of publishing, the
Internet widened the sphere of liberty for those who wished to be producers
of information. The result, as we've seen so clearly the last 48 hours, is
that the strength of Big Media power has been radically reduced. Average Americans,
with their knowledge of typewriters, military procedure, or fairly obscure
terms like "kerning," were able to compete with, and effectively neutralize,
one of the most powerful organizations on the planet. The Internet has demonstrated
itself to be one of the most powerful (yes, powerful), power-checking institutions
ever. By opening up the lines of communication to nearly everyone, it has forced
us to rely on actual arguments, facts, history, and evidence precisely because
the intensity of competition and the value of reputation is so high. The work
that was done in demonstrating, at least to my satisfaction, the forging of
those documents is a tribute to the power of truth that comes from liberty.
There's no "trust me, I'm <Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite>", rather
you're only as good as your arguments and evidence and your experts (and the
persuasiveness of the latter can also be determined with a quick Google search).
None of this should be surprising to those of us raised on Hayek. After all,
this is nothing more than the intellectual version of "Competition as a Discovery
Procedure." Or better yet, it is Michael Polanyi's work on "The Republic of
Science" transferred to current events. Even in the blogosphere, the commentary
has talked about the "distributed
intelligence" of the Net, or "open
source journalism," or even
the "hive
mind"
(a
bit too
Borg-ish
for my
taste, but it makes the point). The Hayekian lesson is that it is through the
ability to enter the market and compete that knowledge gets created and made
socially available to others. Just as in economic competition, where the process
will tend to allocate resources better than alternative processes, so in the
competition to produce news does the process tend to produce the best approximation
to "truth." Markets are in that way examples of liberty defeating power. The
very openness and competitiveness of markets makes any momentary hold on power
tenuous, requiring that those who possess it continually act affirmatively
(e.g. innovating, serving consumers well) to keep it. CBS and other Big Media
simply have never had to face this sort of environment before and have become
sloppy as a result.
I should add here one or two comments on how this all might have happened.
I don't believe that CBS or others exhibit deliberate, conscious bias against
conservatives. I don't believe (although it could be true) that Dan Rather
said "I need to destroy Bush, so I'll take shortcuts to try to do so." Instead,
as others have argued, the problem is more bias-induced laziness. Assuming
CBS was duped and not complicit, I'm sure they saw these memos as fitting their
priors about Bush and political issues more generally and simply didn't see
any reason to investigate further because the memos, in some sense, just had
to be true. All the head-scratching about why it took 12 hours for the blogosphere
to see the obviously shoddy forging job while CBS missed it can be explained
by the differences in behavior induced by both different political priors
and the differening perceptions of the rules of the game held by bloggers
and
Big
Media. Political priors will frame what sorts of things require "investigation"
and
what sorts
do not. The competition generated by the advent of the Internet has widened
the range of things deemed to be worthy of investigation (on all sides: think
of the ways in which blogs have attempted to undermine the case for the War
in Iraq). In addition, when one sees oneself in an environment of competition,
as bloggers do, one cannot afford to be lazy and everyone has to start
checking their premises.
This
is
not,
as
this
recent piece argued,
an
attempt
to police
people's politics. Rather it is competition doing what it does best: holding
everyone accountable to the "constitutional rules" of the Republic of Science.
And as good Hayekians know, when the rules are right and access is open, the
truth will out.
Finally, I appeal to my friends on the Left to take the right lesson from
this whole event. Again, this is a triumph of democracy, liberty, and the common
person over some of the most powerful institutions in America. That aspect
of this event, again assuming the memos are forged, should be cause for celebration
on the Left. It's possible that this could further doom the Kerry campaign,
but don't let that obscure the sunshine. To all who argue that monopolized
unchecked corporate power is a problem, the outing of CBS, and the advent of
the new media on the Internet more generally, should be a cause for celebration.
More power to the people and all of that. The way in which competition takes
advantage of distributed knowledge and mobilizes it through the rules and procedures
of the competitive process is the key to toppling power, whether economic,
political, or intellectual. It works in markets just as well as it works in
the world of the new media. I'm sorry if you don't like the particulars, but
if you call yourself a person of the Left, this is a moment you should have
been waiting for. Orwell just got that whole technology and power thing ass-backwards.
The democratization of knowledge production and the ability of one person with
a computer to check the power of the major social institutions
is here, and it is the technology of the telescreen that brought it to us.
Left, Right, Libertarian, or whatever, liberty has once again defeated power
by redestributing it back to the people.
Even though I promised to stop addressing Jonathan's argument directly, I
want to get one more entry in on the same-sex marriage issue. Some of you might
have seen this
piece by Jonah Goldberg over at NRO that offered a critique
of Jonathan Rauch's
Hayekian case for same-sex marriage (SSM). Thanks to some
previous correspondence with Jonah over this issue, he had asked me for my
thoughts on his piece. I reprint those below. They are in the form of an email
to Jonah, with some minor editing since:
In any case, here's a few thoughts. I think you have indeed hit on a key question
for Hayekians - how fast should that "correction" process of unjust
laws take place given that institutions have to be rooted in actual human practices
and that such institutions have, themselves, often emerged over many generations?
How do we balance the claims of justice against the potential social discoordination
that a change in an institution might provoke? (Note that this parallels "liberty
vs order" debate that runs through so much of the libertarian/conservative
divide.) All of these are very good questions, and the answers to them can
probably not be found "a priori" and may well differ from case to
case.
But that's not my big problem with your argument. I want to challenge a core
premise, namely that same-sex marriage reflects a revolutionary change in the
institution of marriage. Whether ones sees the change as revolutionary or evolutionary
may well depend on whether one is focusing on the form of marriage
or the functions. Like many conservatives, your argument is, at least
implicitly, focused on the form in arguing that we are so fundamentally changing
the institution
that it's likely to cause major social confusion and discoordination (e.g.,
your traffic light analogy, which I will return to). What I would argue is
that the functions of marriage and the family are what really matter, and that
changing the form that marriage can take need not (and would not in the case
of SSM) fundamentally alter what marriage is for and what it/the family does.
(Rauch's chapter on "What is Marriage For?" is excellent in
just this way).
Over human history, the forms and functions of the family have changed as
other social institutions have changed - in our own time, often within a generation.
In previous years we've gone from women as chattel to women as full partners
(thanks to capitalism and the rule of law/contract, I would argue) and now
to single parenthood. I'm not arguing that all form changes are function-neutral,
but the question should be "how do they affect the function?" Too
many conservatives start making arguments about how marriage/the family has "been" or "done" <insert
family form or function here> "for
centuries." It's simply not true in most cases. The idealized vision of
the family implicit in much conservative rhetoric is a peculiarly modern, industrial
revolution and later phenomenon. Marriage and the family have evolved in crucial
ways in both form and function throughout human history, sometimes in small
steps, sometimes large. (Imagine, for example, the momentousness of the notion
that women were no longer men's property.)
Anyway, my point is that SSM is much more about a change in form than in function.
Changes in form are much easier for people to adjust to than changes in function.
For example, if we suddenly went all Plato and decided to collectivize child-raising,
then your argument about going slow would make more sense (obviously,
I'm not arguing that such
a change would be good), because it was a fundamental change in what the institution
does. SSM is about who can be married, not what being married means
or what marriages and families do. Institutions are about functions.
Yes, function and form can be related (i.e., different forms might function
better
or worse under one set of circumstances or another), and they have been with
families, so it's an empirical question about whether or not SSM would
really affect
functioning.
I should
note that
for Hayek, it was the function of institutions that mattered. The whole point
of the Hayekian argument is that institutions do things that we sometimes
can't fully comprehend.
And the form/function distinction is why the analogy to Loving v. Virginia is
in play. I don't find the simliarities to be about "civil rights" per
se, although that's important, but that both interracial and same-sex marriage
are about the who not the what of marriage. They are changes
in the form that
marriages/families can take but not about their functions. Given that
form changes are easier to digest, it would make sense in such cases that the
law can be
more ahead of public opinion. As SSM advocates note, Gallup polls two years
before Loving showed 42% of Northern whites and 72% of Southern whites
thinking interracial marriage should be outlawed. The comparable number from
January
2004 on SSM is 55% thinking it should be illegal, with 38% thinking it should
be put in the Constitution as illegal. Seems to me those numbers are in the
same ballpark, and perhaps even suggesting more social acceptance of SSM than
interracial marriage in the 60s. Combine my argument that this is not a revolutionary
change, but part of an ongoing evolution in the form that marriage and family
take,
not in their function, with the fact that the public is no less and perhaps more
accepting of this change than they were of interracial marriage in the 60s,
and the argument for going slow disappears. (Either that or you're going to
have
to
say Loving was premature, which is hard to argue given the lack of social confusion and
upheaval it brought in its wake.)
This is also where the traffic light analogy breaks down. Traffic lights have
evolved too. If you watch old films or newsreels (or, like me, The Three
Stooges)
you'll note that the earliest signals simply had two wood or metal signs saying "stop" and "go" that
flipped down at the right time. And other early ones just had red and green.
In both cases, there was no equivalent to yellow. Later on, the
third color was added, specifically when the automobile became more common
and faster. The
form
of the yellow was unnecessary if traffic was sufficiently
low and low-risk. When the context in which traffic lights operated changed,
the form needed to change so that the functions could be applied to the new
context. I would argue that this is a reasonable analogy to where we find ourselves
with marriage - a new context of social acceptance of homosexuality leading
to a change in form that allows the functions to be applied to a new context.
(Just to show that even the red and green were likely not arbirtrary, my
psychologist teaching partner Cathy Crosby-Currie noted to me that: "the
colors red and green may have been chosen due to the strong ability of the
human eye
to detect
red and
green wavelengths
which are
also opponents of each other, i.e., neurons which are excited by red are inhibited
by green and vice versa.")
Did this fundamentally alter the "institution" of the traffic light?
I'd say no. Did it require some social adjustment? Sure we all had to understand
what yellow meant and how long it would stay on etc.. I"m sure there were
some problems when they were first used, but nothing major. The addition of "yellow" to
the signalling function of traffic lights allowed more information to be available
to users, which, if anything, enhanced its functioning as an institution by
better aligning with how people wished to use it. To me, SSM is like adding
yellow to the red/green system. It brings something in and widens (and perhaps
improves, if you take the justice argument seriously) the institution without
undermining its functioning. It simply applies the functions of marriage to
a new context. It's evolutionary not revolutionary, thus it doesn't require
generations.
Of course, many conservatives, especially of the religious sort, might not
care about functions and just say "God/Nature
said man and woman." But for a Hayekian, who sees institutions as evolving
because they perform certain functions that enhanced the ability of a society
to survive socially, function is the question at hand. I'm convinced by the
social
scientific evidence about homosexuality and same-sex couples parenting
that SSM will do no damage to the social fabric, and might even improve it
by creating more loving homes for children.
Even Hayek understood that sometimes the judge or the legislator can see,
at the system level, contradictions, inconsistencies, or injustices that can
be remedied in ways that don't completely reconstruct institutions and that
do bring them more in line with the fundamental principles of the society and
the underlying function of the institutions. That to me is what SSM is about.
It is not a chaos-inducing change in the signals associated with a social institution,
rather it is an evolutionary change in an institution that applies its functions
to a different form.
Sigh. We have a wonderful debate about same-sex marriage and all kinds of good stuff
about 527s, but Aeon posts a thread on sci-fi and it gets the largest number
of comments I've seen since I've been on L&P. Don't get me wrong, I love
sci-fi, but we might have reached new heights of geekdom - and living up to libertarian
stereotypes!
A few responses to Jonathan then I'll let this one go. (I'll also note my
last name has one "o" in it.)
I do indeed recognize the state/private distinction and that distinction is
at the heart of why I think, in the world of the second best of state-sanctioned
marriage, same-sex couples should be included in the institution (and why,
short of that, state universities and governments should extend the benefits
they provide for their married employees to same-sex couples).
I guess it also bothers me to have this issue reduced to the power of the
gay lobby group. Of course, there is a lobby group component to this issue,
but characterizing it as primarily that obfuscates the real human beings and
their real desire to partake in the institution of marriage that comprise those
arguing for same-sex marriage rights. In this way, the movement for same-sex
marriage shares elements with other civil rights movements of the past. Note,
I'm not equating them; I'm simply suggesting they share some elements. Yes,
there are material benefits involved, but I think most of the folks who really
want this to happen, and who stood in line in Massachusetts to get a license,
are much more concerned about being able to call themselves married and to
be recognized as equal in the eyes of the law then they are with that second
driver discount on the auto insurance.
As for the polygamy question... I won't rule out the possibility that polygamous
marriage should be recognized by the state, but I think there's strong reasons
to believe they are different from two-party marriages, and Jonathan
Rauch's new book makes this case better than I can. If polygamy can reach the same
status of tolerance or acceptance in civil society as have homosexuals and
same-sex relationships, then let them make their case. But given some of the
power issues involved, many of which doomed the institution historically, such
relationships are less likely to survive.
Two last things. One, the slippery slope argument doesn't fly. It's certainly
possible that extending marriage to same-sex couples would lead to further
calls for legal intervention that libertarians wouldn't like. So what? If extending
marriage is the right thing to do on libertarian grounds, then do it and deal
with the other problems when they arise. Is the eventual emergence of forms
of affirmative action that libertarians object to an argument for not ending
slavery or not extending blacks the right to vote because that got the ball
rolling?
Second, there's this paragraph:
And, you skirt the issue of monogamy entirely: The classic argument is that
monogamy makes for social stability (no unhappy mate-less males or females,
as in polygamous societies). Another argument
is that it is better to have two parents raise children; this is supported
by social science research.
What's to skirt? Is the claim that gays and lesbians are less likely to be
monogamous than straights? If so, let's hold that thought until the comparison
is fair - when gays and lesbians have real legal marriage to be bound to. Comparing
the monogamy of married straights to unmarried same-sex couples proves nothing,
other than perhaps that marriage would increase the level of monogamy among
same-sex couples. And of course it's better ceteris paribus to have
two parents raise children. The social science research also strongly suggests
that the parents need not be of the opposite sex. One argument for same-sex
marriage is that it creates more two-parent couples to raise children.
(This doesn't even address when ceteris isn't paribus - better
a stable one-parent family than a constantly conflictual marriage.)
I think it's possible for libertarians to simultaneously argue that the state
should get out of the marriage business and that, given that it's in the business,
the state should extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. I might think
the state should dramatically reduce the level of taxation, but also believe
that at the given level, taxes should be administered non-discriminatorily,
even if that means some folks' taxes are higher.
I wanted to take a moment to respond to Jonathan's
argument below, but I didn't
want to stick it in the comments. First, Rod's point in the first comment
is right on target - why should anyone who self-describes as a libertarian (whether
as a pure noun or as an adjective modifying conservative) care how the state
defines marriage? If the recognition of same-sex relationships is the
right thing to do, it's the right thing to do.
Jonathan also argues:
First, the people proposing the same-sex model as an analogue to heterosexual
marriage don't normally respect the model (if they did, our welfare state
would be much smaller!).
As one of those not only proposing but supporting the same-sex "model" as
not just an "analogue" to heterosexual marriage but as a legitimate form
of
marriage
itself, and as a flaming heterosexual, happily married for almost 16 years
with two children, and none of us being on welfare, I find that argument more
than a little bit problematic. There are many of us out there who believe
in the importance and value of heterosexual marriage, and who practice it,
and that's precisely why we want to open the institution up to those who wish
to, but LEGALLY cannot, participate in it. (Society has opened the institution
up before, after all.)
But the big point here is that Jonathan's arguments about the problems involved
in non-marital same-sex relationships (how long does an affadavit last? the
poor incentives to report relationships accurately, etc.) just prove too much. These
are precisely the reasons to expand the institution of marriage to
same-sex couples. Yes, the state of Illinois hasn't done so, but institutions
such as firms and universities all across the country have extended benefits
to same-sex partners and no one's turned into a pillar of salt yet, nor have
fake same-sex relationshps driven up heath insurance premiums everywhere. We're
not talking about a lot of people here, and organizations can find relatively
non-intrusive ways of making the world of the second or third best work. Of
course, just opening up marriage would solve all of these problems (and a few
others
as well). Or getting the state out of marriage altogether....
Given the state's involvment, however, Jonathan is right in raising
the question of why heterosexual non-married cohabitants can't also get a piece
of the benefits for cohabitants action. Why
exclude them? But
this too proves too much. As Jonathan Rauch and others have long argued,
arrangements for same-sex couples short of full marriage will have a difficult
time excluding heterosexuals, and in the process, will undermine heterosexual
marriage. If you believe, as I do, that marriage is a desirable social
institution, then why not both extend it to others who wish to participate
in it and avoid undermining it with what Rauch calls "marriage lite?"
For those of us who think that including same-sex couples in the institution
of marriage is both a matter of justice and something with net positive
social benefits, the move to extend employment benefits to same-sex couples
by firms, universities, non-profits, etc., is one very good way to move
toward that goal. It's bottom up, decentralized, and responding to local
preferences. I would argue that the increased support for same-sex marriage
over the last decade has to some degree been the result of the increasing recognition
and inclusion of same-sex couples in civil society in just these sorts of ways. Frankly,
I applaud your university for moving in this direction, and I think it's one
that libertarians should support - again, at least as the right thing to do
in the world of the second best.
Blogging on post-hurricane price-gouging is quite the rage these days. My
friends, and in the first case, former professor, Don
Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek and Glen
Whitman at Agoraphilia said most of what I'd say. However,
I do want to make one more point. I find it interesting that most of the charges
of "gouging" involve those who sell material goods, such as lumber or shingles
or generators. Both Boudreaux and Whitman only give examples involving physical
goods.
What
you
almost
never
hear are any
complaints
about
gouging
when
the very same sorts of supply and demand considerations raise the wages
of carpenters, carpet-layers, lumberjacks, etc.. Evidently, it's okay for sellers
of labor services to benefit from emergency conditions of supply and demand,
but not people who sell material goods. That observation then leads me to wonder
why the difference. Certainly, the belief that "people like us" are the direct
beneficiaries of higher wages while higher prices for "stuff" is seen to mean
profits for nameless, faceless corporations might explain a lot of it. (Of course
the profits to those firms means higher incomes for owners, who include "people
like us" directly for small businesses and indirectly for stockholders and those
with stock-driven retirement funds.) Perhaps there is something about the directness
per se that leads folks to be more sympathetic and not see higher wages as "price gouging." It
may also be that individuals are just more sympathetic than institutions in general.
It would be interesting indeed to see some attorneys general start proceedings
against carpenters who start earning twice their normal wage in the wake of
a hurricane. I'm not holding my breath.
Well, I guess I better be an economist here for a little bit. In hitting that
stagflation link, I couldn't help notice that there was not one mention
of the money supply in all the discussion of "inflation." As is often the case,
the media confuse "increasing prices in several sectors due to higher
oil
prices"
with
genuine inflation.
If oil prices are going up, that's certainly going to cause some prices to
rise. And it wouldn't be surprising, with this good now relatively more scarce,
that
growth would suffer as well. But that is not stagflation of the sort
we saw in the 1970s, where the Fed was jacking up the money supply and genuinely
causing across-the-board inflation. It's a simple
point but increasing prices of some goods due to a scarcity (whether real or
contrived)
is not inflation, thus the stalling out of growth that results is not stagflation.
The only thing that deserves to be called inflation is a true across-the-board
increase in prices which can result, with only very few highly idiosyncratic
exceptions, from an excess supply of money.
In addition, note the subtext: the whole term "stagflation" emerged because
people thought, for a few decades, that higher rates of inflation would reduce
unemployment and increase growth (what economists called the "Phillips Curve").
If true, this would make the notion of simultaneous high inflation and high
unemployment to be a puzzle. When it happened in the early 70s, the financial
press had to invent a word for it - "stagflation."
Of course the Phillips Curve trade-off was an illusion from the start, as
Friedman, Phelps and others demonstrated theoretically and as the 70s showed
empirically. Other economists had long argued that inflation in and of itself reduced growth,
so that the notion of high inflation and low growth was completely comprehensible
and to be expected. We don't need a word for it, rather we just need to better
understand inflation. (I should note that the "costs of inflation" are a particular
interest of mine - see my article "The Costs of Inflation Revisited" in the
March 2003 issue of The Review of Austrian Economics, or the chapter
on inflation in my 2000 book.)
Bottom line: I'm not worried about "stagflation" until I see the relevant
money supply figures.
Now, as for which candidate would do a better job on monetary policy... good
question. Do keep in mind that whomever is running the Fed, the biggest constraint
on the Fed's behavior these days is the speed and ease of international financial
transactions. The Fed simply can't afford to inflate because people can leave
the dollar much more quickly and easily than 30 years ago. International competition
has a great deal to do with the reduction in the US inflation rate (although
Greenspan deserves credit, as does his predecessor), and that competition will
face any new Fed chair regardless of who is president. There is a lot more
consensus in the economics profession about the real costs of inflation, or
at least its inability to produce any real benefits, than there was 30 years
ago, so I'm less concerned about it than earlier.
I will give one caveat, though:
as the deficits and debt continue to grow, the benefits from inflation to
the central bank begin to grow, particularly where central banks are
not so independent. It's not out of the question that continued high deficits
in
the US would up the political pressure on the Fed to monetize some of that
debt. And that would give us inflation and, likely, stagnant growth.
Oh sure, Chris... drop a little tempting tidbit like that and expect me to ignore
it. For those who wish to read it, my own contribution to the symposium on progressive rock,
Rush, and Ayn Rand that was in Chris's journal can be found here: Rand,
Rush,
and De-totalizing the Utopianism of Progressive Rock
. Here's the abstract:
The music of Rush can legitimately claim to be progressive rock, both during
the mid-70s when their music was most clearly related to that tradition and
in their less obviously progressive work in the 80s and 90s. Rush's libertarian/Randian
lyrics do not, as several authors argue, reduce their claim to progressivity
because libertarianism can be viewed as a progressive, utopian social philosophy.
Rush's career parallels the rise of libertarian thought, and the band's move
away from large, long-song structures parallels libertarianism's critique
of the totalizing, centralized utopias of much leftist thought.
And, I should note, Rush is currently on
tour celebrating their 30th anniversary.
How many bands have made it through 30 years and 18 studio, 5 live, and several
compilation albums without any drug arrests/rehab stints, divorces, or major
conflicts, all while maintaining the same personnel? This one has and they
are still kicking the asses of bands have their age. They put on as good a
live show as you'll ever see. For those in NYC, they are at Radio City Music
Hall (yes, you read that right) on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Go check
'em out. I'll be in Montreal on Saturday night (my third show of the tour).
We now return to the non-musical portion of the blogging program.
Well, another step on the road for legal equality for gays and lesbians as
a
Washington State judge has ruled the state's definition of marriage as
between a man and a woman violates the state constitution's protection of substantive
due process. The actual
decision (PDF) is a very solid piece of legal reasoning
that also makes good use of the social scientific arguments against heterosexual-exclusive
marriage. And I'm always heartened by the invocation of substantive due
process and fundamental, yet unenumerated, rights arguments. Three cheers
for the Ninth Amendment!! Let
us hope we see thsoe arguments extended to economic issues, as in the Lochner era. I'll
plug Randy
Barnett's new book on these issues, while I'm at it.
And yes, for my radical libertarian friends, perhaps the state should be out
of marriage altogether, but in the world of the second best, it is a violation
of equality before the law, also a key libertarian principle, that gays and
lesbians are denied the same right to marry that heterosexuals have.
At the end of a story about Marines who dislike Kerry, the NY
Post throws in this little
comment:
In Harrisburg, Kerry noted that there was more bad news coming out of the
financial markets yesterday, with oil prices reaching new highs and economic
growth limping along at three percent.
"Limping" along at three percent? Yes, that was short of the 3.7 percent that
was the consensus prediction by economists who make their living predicting
stuff like this, but "limping"? Most countries in the world would kill for
three percent annual growth, and that growth rate dwarfs the average annual
growth rates throughout human history, even throughout the last 200 years. It is about dead average for US history.
It's fine to say that three percent is "disappointing" compared to expectations,
but it is still a robust rate of growth that, if continued over time, would
significantly enrich any country who had it in fairly short order. Income and output would double in just under 25 years at that rate.
Now if "limping" was Kerry's word, then I suppose I could say that's just
politics, but I'm not willing to let him off that easily. Again, disappointing
and limping are two different things and some historical context is always
useful. If the word was the Post's, well then, I'll just let that be.
Interesting discussion about the effects of minimum wage laws shooting around
the blogosphere. The big question seems to be why so few, at least recent,
studies show any major effect of increasing the minimum wage. I think Tyler
Cowen has it right in arguing that employers have multiple margins to adjust
on when forced to pay higher monetary wages. To break it down a bit more
precisely than Tyler does, imagine that an employee's total compensation consists
of monetary wages plus various forms of non-monetary compensation. This is
obvious to salaried workers who get health benefits, vacations, etc., but it's
true even
for minimum wage workers if you, as Tyler credits Gordon Tullock with doing,
expand the category of compensation broadly enough.
The example Tyler uses is turning up the air conditioning (i.e., making it
not as cool in the workplace). If you have to pay more in wages, rather
than firing workers, you might choose to save in other ways. Other examples
here could range from reducing employee discounts (no more free Big Macs),
making employees pay for their own uniforms, increasing the level and intensity
of monitoring so as to produce more output at the higher monetary wage, creating
stricter rules about using company resources (such as phones, computers, or
office supplies) for personal use, etc.. There are numerous ways in which
firms can adjust to a mandated monetary wage hike so as to leave either their
total compensation costs unchanged, or to squeeze more productivity out of
workers without laying them off. Note that if governments pass mandated non-monetary compensation
laws (forcing all firms to provide health insurance for example), we would
see the same sorts of marginal adjustments elsewhere, this time including
lowering monetary wages perhaps.
The big point here is that for some significant number of workers, the series
of changes kicked off by the imposition of a higher minimum wage makes them
worse off. If you imagine compensation as a bundle of goods, mandated
benefits (whether monetary or not) adjust that bundle in ways that are very
likely not to match the preferences of both employers and employees. (The
old economist's counter-factual is that if people really wanted the new bundle,
they could have negotiated for it. I don't buy that as being correct
for everyone.) The
bottom line is who knows better which bundle of compensation is more mutually
satisfactory: decentralized
negotiations between employers and firms or government trying to impose a one-size
fits all solution? In that way, the argument is a good application of
Hayekian knowledge considerations.
I've been thinking a lot about the Kerry v. Bush question, especially given
the discussion between Aeon
Skoble and Jacob
Levy, both of whom I think highly of.
Let me start by saying that I'm a "conscientious abstainer," and that if I
were to vote, I would still vote Libertarian. However, if I was coerced into
voting
and could only vote for one of the two major party candidates, I think at this
point I would, in fact, vote for Kerry. Or perhaps more accurately, as of now,
I'll be rooting for the Democrats to win come November. This line from Andrew
Sullivan is as
good a place as any to start my argument:
But what is a "Bush Republican"? I think it has to be a combination
of the social policy of the religious right (the FMA, bans on embryo research,
government support for religious charities, etc), the fiscal policy of the
Keynesian left (massive new domestic spending combined with "deficits
don't matter"), and the foreign policy of liberal moralism (democratization
as a policy in the Middle East).
There it is: Bush has governed as a social conservative and a fiscal liberal
- precisely the opposite of what a libertarian would like to see (couched in
the language of conventional politics). Add on to it a war that looks increasingly
problematic, and you have a bad package.
From where I sit, Kerry will be no worse on fiscal matters including health
care (and, as Tyler
Cowen points out, possibly better if he is gridlocked with
a Republican
Congress). He can't possibly be worse and will likely be better on many of
the social issues where Bush is in bed with the religious right. And, best
as I can tell, his position on the war (or is it positions, plural?) is more
or less indistinguishable from Bush, making that a wash. Kerry is grown-up
enough to more or less recognize the seriousness of the terrorist threat, but
hopefully less willing than Bush to go find it where it isn't. In the end,
I think a
world with Kerry as president and a GOP-controlled Congress is the
least
of all evils. Gridlock rules!!!
Let me finally add a caveat that Jacob raises as well: the trade issue. Edwards
is really bad on trade and if the Democrats run as protectionists,
my earlier calculus is upset. Protectionist policies could survive
a divided goverment (apply your good old public choice here) and would have
devastating consequences not just for Americans but for so much of the rest
of the world who really needs free trade a lot more than "we" do. I would have
a hard time even verbally supporting a presidential ticket that was willing
to keep the third world immiserated for the sake of a few votes in swing states.
Consider this an argument for just how bad the Bush administration has been.
I so cannot stand both Kerry and Edwards on a personal level - the thought
of a smarmy, elitist, faux-child of the 60s paired with a greasy, blow-dried,
trial lawyer is making me reach for a bucket - that the idea of even verbally
supporting their victory fills me with immense psychic trauma. (Only Al Gore
would be worse.) However, my analytical side tells me that little could be
any worse than the incumbents and
that the 90s showed the power of gridlock. So I swallow hard and silently root
for a split decision. For now.
I won't go off on a total Michael Moore tirade, other than to note that those
of us who are in opposition to the war to one degree or another are better off
relying on the awful truth of the Bush Administration than Moore's paranoid fairy
tale, but this item made me think even more of Pete
Townshend
than I already did.
I'm in the midst of re-reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
for a roundtable discussion at the History of Economics Society meetings next
weekend. What a wonderful, prescient book. It's also very interesting to
see, as Hayek
notes
in his introduction to the 1976 edition, how much that was in there foreshadowed
later work he engaged in. The chapter "Why the Worst Get on Top" has always
been one of my favorites, and it remains so after re-reading it. Given the
recent
events in Iraqi prisons by both Saddammites and the US military, I couldn't help but note this passage (pp. 150-1),
which I reprint
here:
But where a few specific ends dominate the whole of society [e.g., the War
on Terror or a cult of personality - SH], it is inevitable that occasionally cruelty may become a
duty; that acts which revolt all our feeling, such as the shooting of hostages
or the killing of the old or sick, should be treated as mere matters of expediency;
that the compulsory uprooting and transportation of hundreds of thousand
should be come an instrument of policy approved by almost everybody except
the victims.... There is always in the eyes of the collectivist a greater
goal which these acts serve and which to him justifies them because the pursuit
of the common end of society can know no limits in any rights or values of
any individual. ....
There will be jobs to be done about the badness of which taken by themselves
nobody has any doubt, but which have to be done in the service of some higher
end, and which have to be executed with the same expertness and efficiency
as any others. And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves,
and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant
to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and
power.
The chapter on "The End of Truth" also is well worth reading in light of the
War on Terror.
Nah, the War on Terror isn't violating anyone's civil liberties. Why that's all
a bunch of paranoid lefty hoo-hah. Or maybe
not.
An artist wants to do a display on genetically-modified crops and the FBI seizes
his materials and starts talking bio-terrorism charges? Damn well better be anthrax
in there and not corn.
Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, I found this
story on a group of fundamentalist
Christians who are trying to get 12,000 followers to move to South Carolina
in order to change the political face of the state and eventually secede, creating
their own little Christian country. (Do they have enough literary sense,
and too little sense of irony, to name it Gilead?)
Two quick comments:
1. Reading this story is a good reminder of what some folks on the Christian
Right really think about how the world should be. Gays, alcoholics,
fornicators, and secular humanists beware:
"Well on one hand I kinda favor a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. But
should homosexuals speak up, they should be deported, sanctioned, or held
in jail," said one person, discussing whether their new "country" should
endorse or permit lifestyles they believe go against biblical teachings.
Other visitors had ideas on what laws might be applicable in their new South
Carolina home. "No alcohol sold on Sundays at all. All entries into
the town would be policed with random checks for alcohol abuse, breathalyzers
mandatory. No places of business open on Sundays. All schools, public, private
or otherwise would teach creation, have the Ten commandments placed and say
prayer before classes start. No landlords allowed to rent to couples just
living together ... Abortion would not be legal in any circumstance."
As the news report is careful to note, these sort of views were not uniform
among those discussing this idea, but those folks are out there. When
I teach first-year students how to use and evaluate Web sources when doing
research, I tell them that because they can only know so much about who's behind
a website, they should always assume the worst until they have evidence for
the better. That's my attitude about the Christian Right as well, and
it's why I've never understood for an instant why libertarians/classical liberals
see anything to gain by cultivating relationships with those folks. (Okay
fine, I'll give you school choice, but that's about it.) When I hear
"Christian Right," I'll think of those who want to "deport" gays from their
new country until I see convincing evidence to the contrary.
2. As the reporter also notes, this is very similar to the Free
State Project where libertarians are moving to New Hampshire in order
to remake it in their own image. One difference is that the Free State
folks don't want to secede from the US (yet?), while the Commanders and their
Wives
do. Still
the parallels are there, and the Free Staters might have been an inspiration.
I've never found the Free Staters' argument the least bit compelling. As
deeply as I care about making the world a better place by making it a more
libertarian one, what ultimately matters for creating a meaningful life is
one's family, friends, and work. I'm not about to uproot from a job I
love, with co-workers and friends who mean much to me, in order to try to make
a political statement of that sort. I respect those who have made that
commitment, but count me out.
It does, however, say something interesting that the Christian Right and radical
libertarians both feel so disaffected from American politics and policies that
they would contemplate such eerily similar solutions.
While I certainly agree with Arthur's general concerns here, I've never found
the Rumsfeld quote about the "unknowns" to be the least bit problematic.
It not only makes sense to me, I think he's right. It's a core observation of
modern Austrian economics, for example, that there are things we know we don't
know and things we don't know we don't know. For example: if I look up a friend's
phone number in the phonebook, I know that I don't know his number. However,
if while doing so I happen to notice that another friend has a new number that
I was unaware of having changed, I have discovered something I didn't know that
I didn't know.
Mainstream economics has a lot of answers for how we attack the first - namely,
the idea of "search." But it has fewer answers for the second: how
do we "discover" that which we don't know we don't know. The Austrian
argument is precisely that markets are better at the second than the various
alternatives.
Distinguishing between the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns is a very
important step in any decision making process, as is thinking about the best
methods for making either type of unknown into a known. I have no love for
Rumsfeld, but making fun of him for that comment isn't fair. He is making perfect
sense.
Spending this lovely Sunday afternoon on the deck catching up on some reading
(and getting axious about my Pistons getting blown out by the Lakers tonight),
and came across this outstanding
essay by Nobel Economist Robert Lucas (in the 2003 Minneapolis Fed Annual
Report) on
the
industrial revolution and economic growth.
There's a lot to chew on here, and it's very readable to non-economists. I'd
be particularly interested in the response to it by my historian colleagues
here and over at Cliopatria. Lucas
focuses on the role of economic growth in leading to a demographic transition.
More precisely,
industrialization raises the returns to human capital, which, in turn, encourages
families to invest more in the quality of their children than the quantity
(an old Gary Becker point). The result of this is the levelling off of population
growth at the same time annual rates of production growth begin to increase.
It is that combination that leads to the remarkable increases in per capita
income
we've seen in the last 50 to 100 years. Lucas points out that it is characteristic
of non-developing countries that they respond to ehanced production technologies
by having more children, not fewer. It is only when the industrial
revolution comes along and provides serious opportunities to enhance the
return to human capital, which
pre-industrial technological advances normally didn't, that the response
is fewer children, and an upsurge in per capita income.
I reprint Lucas's last paragraph here, because I think he makes a point often
overlooked by those who write about these issues:
Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive,
and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.
In this very minute, a child is being born to an American family and another
child, equally valued by God, is being born to a family in India. The resources
of all kinds that will be at the disposal of this new American will be on
the order of 15 times the resources available to his Indian brother. This
seems to us a terrible wrong, justifying direct corrective action, and perhaps
some actions of this kind can and should be taken. But of the vast increase
in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in
the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none
of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich
to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding
different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to
the apparently limitless potential of increasing production.
I can't help but make one comment on Reagan: I never voted for the man,
and I disagreed with him more than I agreed with him, but...
I have always admired him for having the courage of his convictions, for
not caring too much what others thought about him, and most of all, for
maintaining his sense of humor and optimism about himself and the world
around him.
Too many conservatives, and libertarians for that matter, are seen as,
and some really are!, humorless or pessimistic (see Robert Bork for
example). Reagan convinced many that it was possible to be a happy,
optimistic, and funny conservative. That alone was probably responsible
for a tremendous shift in the perception of conservativism in the US and
the rise of the current generation of baby boom conservatives. He was
also a man of ideas. He was much better read than people have given him
credit for, and more important, he believed in the power of ideas.
That sets him apart from every president since World War II, at least.
The combination of idealism and optimism and humor was also important in
getting things done despite significant opposition. He was, for better
or for worse, a good model of leadership.
I have often used a quote that Reagan kept on his desk, although he
didn't write it: "There's no limit to what a man can do or where he can
go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." Another fine model for
leadership.
Love him or hate him, he changed the world, and he'll be the last man of ideas
to run for president.
Well two items of news from small-town America today. First is that today was
the official start of summer in Canton, with the Dairy Princess Festival and
Parade. You really haven't experienced small-town America until you've had a
Kraft caramel hurled at your head by a 10 year-old girl in a cow costume.
Second is the apparent arrival of a Wal-Mart Supercenter to the Canton-Potsdam
area. There are non-Supercenter Wal-Marts 20 and 40 minutes away in other towns,
but this will be their first store in either of the two college towns in the
area.
The
usual
suspects (e.g., the faculty at the four colleges) are already wringing their
hands for the "loss" of "their" town, forgetting that
they came to teach here (it it really "theirs"?). They are also in the top 20% of
the income bracket in the poorest county in New York state, which perhaps leads them to forget
that the
rest
of
the
county, especially those for whom this new Wal-Mart would mean substantially
less driving to visit, would really like to have 400 new jobs and access to
good merchandise and notably cheaper prices. And that doesn't even count the
beneficial competitive pressures this would place on other local stores. It's
also worth noting that the anti-Wal Mart crowd has the time and influence to
go raise hell with the local planning boards and media, as well has having
easier access to travel and the Internet, both of which afford them more shopping
options. Subsistence farmers in the rest of the county are a little too busy
to protest FOR Wal-Mart, and don't often get to the big-city malls, or can't
afford internet access, to get what they need.
What's most interesting to me is that some of the "usual suspects" are starting
to get it. Sort of. I wrote to the station manager of our local NPR outlet,
offering my services if they wanted a pro-Wal Mart voice (I did this the last
time this
issue came up). Her response to me was interesting: she recognized the benefits
Wal-Mart would bring, but then said she wished they weren't "such a pig of
a company." Presumably, the "piggishness" refers to their anti-union stance.
What's funny about this is that she can't see the connection between the fact
that Wal-Mart is not unionized and their ability to create jobs and provide
cheap goods to the area. If unionization succeeded, and pushed up wages/benefits
accordingly, the result would be some combination of fewer jobs and higher
prices. It's a story as old as the hills: self-interested behavior leads to
unintended benefits for others. When we try to put political power over the
liberty to be "piggish," we wind up hurting precisely those we are trying
to help. I find it fascinating when I read such an obvious example of not seeing
the work of unintended consequences.
One of these days, I'm going to write a long essay, or even a book, that's
a tribute to strip malls and Wal-Mart, emphasizing the ways in which they have
substantially enhanced the well-being of so many Americans, at the price, perhaps,
of our aesthetic sensibilities. Call it "An Ode to Suburbia." That'll sure
make me lots of friends on both the Left
and
Right.
...and raise you a hammer and sickle. I can't find the pictures at
the moment, but the old Soviet symbol has been making a return in posters and
banners on my campus, presumably as some sort of class solidarity sign. I
hardly need to say what would happen if swastikas suddenly appeared on banners
as a symbol of national solidarity. The ignorance of students (and
faculty?) who think it's perfectly fine to use the hammer and sickle in a positive
light given the truth of 30 million innocents murdered in a fashion indistinguishable
from Hitler
goes beyond amazing into the incomprehensible. Have they never studied the Soviet
atrocities? Or have they, and they choose to ignore them in the name of
some greater (?) cause? I'm offering my comparative economic institutions
course next spring, and I will spend a little more time than usual on this issue. In
the past, I've preferred to talk about more narrowly economic concerns, though
certainly discussing the barbarism, so as to really focus on the failures of
socialism as an economic system. But given the ignorance I've seen on display,
it's time to shift the focus.
Don't know about others, but I'm refusing, on principle, to see the eco-disaster
flick The Day After Tomorrow. I'm not in the mood to drop money in the
hands of folks who are clearly trying to score political points with highly dubious
science. Same reason I've never watched a minute of Bowling for Columbine
(although Moore is worse for not acknowledging his film is fictional).
Were I to say to friends that I'm not seeing the movie on principle, I can
already hear them saying "Oh come on, it's just a movie." That response just
drives me crazy. No it's not "just" a movie; it's ideas in the form of a narrative,
and those ideas matter. Perhaps it's the old Randian in me, but whatever the
cause, I just cannot abide supporting forms of art that project ideas that
I find fundamentally in error, or morally wrong. To think that I could somehow
shut off the "ideas" part of my brain and just "enjoy the action" strikes me
as so anti-rational and anti-intellectual that I don't know where to begin
to respond to it. It's the same way I feel when I'm in class and talking about
serious, if abstract, ideas, and the students give me the "roll of the eyes"
look like "here he goes again...". I guess I expect more from adults, but having
had the "oh, it's just a movie" reaction before, I'm sure I'll get it again.
In the comments section of my prior post there is supposed to be a link to a
NYT
Magazine article. The article in question is a piece by Susan Sontag on the
Abu Ghraib pictures. Normally, Sontag is too over the top for me, but this piece
is about right. What's most interesting is her discussion of the way in which
digital technology and the net has changed the kinds of things soldiers can do.
They are, as she says, as much tourists as warriors. Combined with a culture
of "shamelessness" and an internet to spread them and the green light from above,
you get these pictures. And they won't go away. There will be more of them, speaking
the reality of what's happening there.
This seems a particularly appropriate example of where Orwell got it so wrong.
Rather than technology leading to the centralization and monopolization of
information, particularly during war, it has led to the precise opposite. Technology
has been democratized by being so cheap, and as a result, information flows
from thousands and millions of points. The role of blogs in circumventing the
major media, for both the left and the right, is one example, and the Abu Ghraib
pictures are another. Though Sontag doesn't go quite this far, one way to view
this whole sequence of events is fairly positive - the truth is coming out
and the pressure of those pictures on our involvement there cannot be put back
in the tube. Technology will continue to put limits on what the state can do
and will continue to force open that which has been closed. The pictures of
Saddam's torture have long existed, and now it's "our" turn.
Maybe next we'll see what goes on inside prisons in the US too. They could
use some sunlight.
I haven't blogged much about the war here because my opposition to it is less
strong than most of my co-bloggers. I described myself as "marginally opposed"
to the War in Iraq from the start, with the "marginally" mostly due to not
wanting to be associated with the variety of other questionable causes of the
anti-war
movement. I did and still do share the skepticism of many of you about the
ability of the US gov't to rebuild a nation when it can't even deliver the
mail. However,
I also believe that the demise of Saddam Hussein, taken in isolation, was a
significant step forward for human freedom, and was willing to be convinced
it might be worth it. I also have more sympathy for the plight
of Israel in the turmoil of the mid-east than perhaps others here do (obligatory
note: that does not let Israel off the hook for its many wrongdoings).
In the last few weeks, however, I find myself becoming increasingly radicalized
in my opposition to the war. It's not just that the costs of the activity that
deposed a dictator are rapidly increasing, especially the body counts of both
American soldiers and innocent Iraqis, nor prison abuses in and of themselves,
nasty as they are. It's more a sense that this whole operation was done on
the fly, with no framing ethical or philosophical concerns (of course why I
or anyone should expect war to have such concerns is a good question, as I
awake from my slumbers...). Now, as more prison abuse stories come out (see
especially
this one on
the treatment of women prisoners), I'm more and more convinced that we don't,
and never did, know what we're doing there, and the result of that ignorance,
as it frequently is with state action, is that the "worst get on top" to paraphrase
a chapter title from Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. In the absence of
the requisite knowledge to do what is "right," those with a comparative advantage
in the making of war without concern about what's "right" will rise to the
top. When agents of the US government begin to use the same sorts of justification
for
the inhumane
treatment of prisoners that totalitarian regimes do, even if it's only a small
fraction of the military as a whole, then it's time to step back and ask just
what it's all about. If this is the road away from serfdom... no thanks.
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!
Every time I've taught my Comparative
Economic Institutions course, my favorite class day is the one where I ask
precisely the question William does below: if Stalin's (and Mao's) crimes were
worse than those of Hitler (at least the body count was several times higher),
why are we so fascinated and stuck on Hitler as the symbol of totalitarian, murderous
evil? I have my own set of 3 or 4 not mutually exclusive answers to that question,
some obvious, some maybe not. The students always have interesting ideas, but
what's more interesting is how they've never even considered the question before,
nor really knew how bad Stalin really was. The latter point is the most troubling.
Just a brief note to mention the brilliant cover of this month's Reason magazine.
The cover of my issue says "STEVE HORWITZ: They know where you are!" above
that is a satellite shot of Canton with my street circled in red. You can pick
out my house. Inside the front cover is a customized intro letter from Nick
with all kinds of data about Canton. They did this for all 40,000 subscribers
as part of a feature on databases and privacy etc..
It is very, very cool, and just a tad scary.
Hat tip to David
Post at Volokh, whose post caused me to actually look at the cover after
I threw it on the coffee table with the rest of the mail.
Let me be precise: my point about Moore was not specific to this particular incident.
From my reading of this one, Miramax agreed to funding but made no promise of
distribution, and Moore knew that. I'm not claiming that he did this all intentionally
as a publicity stunt, although that wouldn't be out of character for him. My
point was more general: given the man's past patterns of being very loose with
the truth, there's no reason to accept anything he says at face value. Ever.
For those who haven't followed the controversy over whether Bowling at Columbine should
have been considered documentary or fiction, a good place to start is David Hardy's very
thorough page.
If you prefer something about Moore's more recent book, try Spinsanity.
I should also note that there are times I agree with Moore, but nothing serves
a good cause less than the sorts of intellectually dishonest and ethically
challenged things Moore does to make his points. He's welcome, of course,
to make whatever
books and movies he wants, but no one should ever treat them as nonfiction.
He's a damn fine saleman, but a really morally questionable human being.
He hasn't linked it here yet, but Radley has a GREAT piece in Tech
Central Station this week on globalization and
free trade. This nicely complements the two others noted hear
earlier.
In response to Pat's post below, let me plug an essay of mine on the subject
of free trade. I hope it
hits the same level of passion that Pat desires, and that John achieves. It was
published online for awhile, but the site is gone,
so it rests on my homepage. I'm hoping to find a good home for it - all suggestions
welcome. After circulating this link on our faculty listserv, I got several invites
to classes of lefty colleagues to give the pro-free trade side of things. Fun
for me, good for students, and, one hopes, educational for colleagues as well.
Don't know if anyone's been following the story of the Wisconsin-Madison student
who was the subject of much news attention for having, apparently, been abducted
last Saturday. Well, it turns out that it looks
to be a hoax. There are inconsistencies
in her story, she apparently was caught on camera buying the materials she said
her abducter used, and someone used her computer to search for wooded areas and
check the weather while she was supposedly abducted. I find this story interesting
coming on the heels of the story out of Pomona
College about the faculty member
who faked a racist attack. And some quick searching on the web will find you
a variety of similar stories, often at small schools but not always.
It's interesting to think about what might motivate stuff like this. There's
the obvious explanation that some folks are just crazy, but when we see these
things clustering in a way they appear to be, and when they seem to cluster
around race/gender/ethnicity, then there might be larger forces at play. I
saw a forensic psychiatrist on CNN talking about the Wisconsin woman and suggesting
that it was designed to generate the sympathy and emotional reaction of the
community. Perhaps. It may also be a way of pleasing people who share your
concern about the issues the hoax calls attention to. For example, if you
are taking a course on racism and hanging out with other students and faculty
who have a deep political commitment to fighting racism, staging a racist attack
could be seen as a way to please those folks by providing evidence for their
beliefs. This would appear to be particularly powerful on a small campus like
Pomona where a student or faculty member would have intense relationships with
peers/faculty and where being the victim of a racist incident would be perceived
as one way to establish the legitmacy of the cause and to gain esteem in their
eyes.
It also seems plausible that these are intentional political
acts designed to call the community's attention to some urgent issue, e.g.
racism on campus, gender-based violence on campus, etc.. This
piece from the
Claremont Colleges student newspaper (brief registration may be required)
comes close to defending doing just that:
With its greater context in mind, what implications should students draw
from such an event? First, it would be incorrect to make assumptions about
Professor Dunn's mindset or her goals if she did in fact vandalize her own
car. Instead, students should keep in mind that faking a hate crime is not
necessarily the work of an irrational person. In addition, if students and
the administration interpret this hoax correctly, as an extreme expression
of legitimate grievances, this disturbing scandal does not have to negatively
affect on-campus dialogue on race nor hinder the progress of activist organizations
like SLAM.
(Note the idea that there is a "correct" interepretation of this event. Evidently
student journalists at Claremont have learned from their faculty that the belief
that reality isn't objective and multiple interpretations are possible doesn't
apply if the cause is noble.) This paragraph comes after one
analogizing the professor's hoax to W's claim about
the Iraqis
buying
uranium
from Niger,
concluding:
"Although
manipulating
popular opinion through deceit is unethical and unjustifiable, it is not a
new phenomenon." So if it's good enough for the president....?
In any case, this just feels to me like a disturbing trend that ultimately
will backfire on those involved. If more hoaxes are uncovered, the often legitimate
causes to which the hoaxers are calling attention will suffer from the problem
of "crying wolf." Ultimately, the fight against racism etc. is best fought
with the light of truth shining brightly. There's enough real racism, gender
violence,
etc. around that there's no need to threaten to undermine the legitimacy of
those concerns by making them up where they aren't. If that's what these events
are about, it's a shame on multiple levels.
With all due respect to William's experiences, I simply don't believe the
data support the sort of negative picture of the economy that he and Wendy
are painting.
Again, I'm not a Pollyana here, and I can think of a whole bunch of ways the
Bush administration has made matters worse than they could be (e.g., out of
control spending, trade barriers, resources devoted to destruction here and
abroad), and I can think of lots of ways things could get worse down the road,
but the bigger picture right now isn't that bad. Responding to a couple of
specifics:
The market basket that comprises the CPI does get adjusted from time to
time, but not nearly as quickly as individuals can react to price movements.
Additionally, in composition of the basket always lags behind the real consumption
choices of households.
And yes, the Fed continues to increase the money supply. As someone whose
professional work has been one long sustained critique of the Fed, including
calling for closing its doors, I'm hardly a Fed fan. I've also written
a great deal on the costs of inflation. I also agree that increases in the
money supply during the 90s had much to do with the dot.com
run-up and collapse,
especially during the last few years. However, at the moment, the growth rates
in M2 are
not
particularly high. During the last quarter of 2003, M2 actually fell in absolute
terms. As of February 1, it was growing at an annual
rate of 4.19%, hardly
rampant inflation although higher than it probably should be.
The claim that the job situation has led people to exit the labor force has
some truth to it. The number of people not
in the labor force is up by 1.8
million from last February to this February. Is that "many persons?" That's
a subjective call. Is there "considerable" unemployment? Again, a subjective
call. The current unemployment rate of 5.6% is more or less precisely what
it was during 1995 and early 1996, when that rate was considered "dangerously"
low.
Economic data can't deny the reality of people's personal experiences of the
economy, but if we're going to talk about the economy as a whole, and particularly
if we're going to propose policy or assess credit/blame, then we need to get
beyond individual experiences to look at the larger picture.
It's easy to find lots of economic problems to
blame on over-reaching government, but I think the issues raised by Wendy
are more complex than the overall tone makes it appear.
First, when we talk about prices going up, we also need to consider wages.
As the work of Cox and Alm and others has argued, the prices of nearly all
goods and services have been falling when calculated in terms of the labor-time
needed to purchase them at the average industrial wage. Stuff's never been
cheaper, including food and all the rest. This is, of course, a long-term trend,
but even as wages rise in the short run, and the costs of production of goods
fall, things get cheaper. A hundred years ago Americans spent about 75% of
their income on food, clothing, and shelter. It's half that today.
Second, there is a long-standing belief among many economists that the official
measures overstate inflation because the fixed market baskets that
are used to measure it do not take into account the real-world substitution
that people engage in when prices rise. If the price of chicken rises, people
switch to pork or beef. Keeping chicken in the basket will then overstate its
impact on consumers. The general belief is that the CPI overstates inflation
by about 1%. Both of these points are address in the "Economic
Myths" section
of my website.
Third, calling what we have "stagflation" reflects a pretty short historical
memory. The current unemployment rate of 5.6% compares to an average annual
unemployment rate of 6.2% during the 1970s, and an annual average of 5.4% during
the first half of the 70s. Calling that "elevated" is really questionable.
The inflation rates of the 1970s were:
Even if 2.05% understates the real inflation rate, it's hardly in the range
we saw during the "stagflation" years.
Bottom line: yes the economy could be performing better, but by historical
standards we are hardly in bad shape. Considering that we're still, in some
sense, in the recovery phase after the dot-com boom, things could be a lot
worse. Comparisons to the really bad old days of the 1970s are, in my view,
really far-fetched.
I'm not a big believer in posting links to web stories, because one's appreciation
of them is so subjective. However, this
narrative, with pictures, of a motorcycle
ride to the ghost town near Chernobyl that remains frozen in time when it was
evacuated on April 26, 1986, is nothing short of amazing. Perhaps it's been posted elsewhere on the web before, and if so, my apologies for treating it as brand new. You can make political
points about the state's, especially the Soviet state's, inability to manage
a nuclear facility, but the human tragedy here is compelling as is the narrator's
appreciation of it, broken English aside. I'd say "enjoy" but that's not the
right word. Just take a look at it.
Just a quick plug for the summer seminars put on by the Institute
for Humane
Studies, in particular the Social
Change
Workshop if there's any graduate students
among L&P's crazed fanatics. All the seminars are a great experience, and grad
students will get a great deal out of this one in particular. You can find out
more at Wil
Wilkinson's blog.
[Full disclosure: I have taught at IHS seminars for a decade now, but that shouldn't discourage anyone.]
I just wanted to follow up on the whole bias in the classroom incident on
my campus by noting that the academic dean and the president issued a campus-wide
email today articulating their position on the whole affair. I
quote below the relevant parts:
This memorandum has two goals: to remind us of our shared commitments as
a university to freedom of speech and to the maintenance of a climate of
open inquiry; and to put recent campus events and discussions surrounding
the weblog of Prof. Robert Torres into that context.
....
St. Lawrence has a single purpose. As a liberal arts college we are a community
of learners. Teaching and learning require unfettered thought, inquiry, and
expression. A vital campus is one where ideas meet, mix, conflict, engage,
and emerge changed by the interaction.
Genuine dialogue is a difficult, even fragile, human endeavor. It entails
both speaking and listening, articulating views and earnestly considering
those of others. We believe it is our duty to protect the rights of all members
of our community to think and speak freely and to foster the conditions that
make dialogue possible. We expect members of our community to be passionate
about ideas; in fact, we would be troubled if they were not. But passion
and commitment only serve our purpose to the extent that they promote lively
engagement, not shut it down, to the extent that they foster compelling expression,
not impede the capacity to listen.
To this end, we will continue both to defend the campus as a place of free
inquiry and exchange and to encourage modes of discourse that respect the
basic human dignity of all engaged in its mission. As members of a university,
we all know how much words matter. Words can be chosen to open dialogue or
to shut it down, to encourage thoughtful listening or strident counter-point.
There have been legitimate questions raised about Prof. Torres’ offensive
characterizations of college Republicans in his weblog. Though not directed
specifically at St. Lawrence students—it is clear from the context
that he is referring to those who wrote the recruiting manual on the national
level—it is reasonable for our own SLU Republicans to feel included
in his characterizations.
In a statement Prof. Torres shared with the St. Lawrence community last
Friday he made clear that he takes his “responsibility of fostering
an open classroom environment seriously,” and that he seeks to “respect
differing views regardless of political orientation.” He went on to
say that: “I will continue to provide an open classroom environment,
and continue to respect different political views. Freedom of speech and
the room that it provides for dissent is essential to democracy and to critical
inquiry.” That is exactly right, and we believe that view is at the
very center of commitments all St. Lawrence University faculty share.
Although some of that is surely what they "have to" say, I do think they get
it right: we must defend free speech but encourage modes of discourse that
invite in, rather than shut out, and that respect rather than denigrate. Whether
or not Prof. Torres can follow through on his commitment to an open classroom
is one thing, but my dean's and president's defense of free speech and recognition
of the problematic nature of the original blog entry remind me why I remain
proud to be part of the administration of this particular university.
1. William Marina's link to the anti-Israel
screed on antiwar.com reminds
me why I always go to that site with great trepidation. One can be opposed,
even strongly opposed, to the war in Iraq and the US presence in the Middle-East
more generally (not to mention critical of some/many Israeli policies) without
turning Israel into the Great Satan, and without imagining the Jewish-Republican-neoconservative
conspirators lurking around every corner and under every bed. Pieces like
Pilger's are a good example of giving a good cause a bad name.
2. With a hat tip to Hit & Run,
here's an interesting piece from
Slate on the domestic economic policy views
of the victorious Socialists in Spain. All I can say
is "where's a platform like that in the US?!" Viva la revolution!!!
Of course it only goes to show that, at the end of the day, Mises and Hayek
were indeed right.
Well, at some great risk, I'm going to try my hand at constitutional law for
a few minutes. Those of you who read The
Corner and Andrew Sullivan's blog may
have seen today's discussion of the constitutional status of the right to marry
(Andrew affirming it as a constitutional right and the Cornerites being significantly
more skeptical). The issue here boils down to whether or not all constitutional
rights are actually in
the Constitution. The conservatives are, of course, insisting that if it's not
in the text, then it's not a right (the ghost of Roe
hovers in the air). Not surprisingly, I am not convinced.
I've emailed the participants with an argument something like the following:
both conservatives and libertarians presumably agree that parents have
constitutional rights with respect to their ability to raise their children
as they see fit. Both groups (and many liberals as well) would want to see
those rights protected against state intervention on some number of issues.
(It's worth noting that liberals and conservatives
will defend those rights for some things and not others, while libertarians
are
generally
more
willing to defend them across the board.) But the question is: where do those
rights come from? Like marriage, parenting is not mentioned in the document
itself. Nonetheless, there is a history of Supreme Court decisions defending
those parental rights. A useful list can be found here.
I call your attention specifically to the 1922 case Pierce v. Society of
Sisters where Justice McReynolds wrote:
Under the doctrine of Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 , 43 S. Ct. 625, 29
A. L. R. 1146, we think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably
interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing
and education of children [268 U.S. 510, 535] under their control. As often
heretofore pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be
abridged by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose
within the competency of the state. The fundamental theory of liberty upon
which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of
the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction
from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state;
those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with
the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.
Subsequent case law has upheld this formulation, althoughPrince
v. Massachusetts in 1944 attenuated it with a recognition of what today we'd call a "best interest
of the child" exception.
The Lawrence case
from last year cited these parental rights cases as examples of "broad statements
of the substantive reach of liberty under the Due Process Clause," and then
suggested that the most pertinent recent case was Griswold v. Connecticut.
So there is a clear line in Kennedy's mind from parental rights through contraceptive
rights and perhaps to the right to abortion in Roe that recognizes that there
are some fundamental liberties that are constitutionally protect that are not explicitly described
in the document itself. As I understand it, this is more
or less Randy
Barnett's approach to constitutional interpretation and the "presumption
of liberty." It also seems consistent with the sort of Lochner revisionism
that David
Bernstein has engaged in. (And the arguments in Pierce would make a great
starting point for the constitutionality of school vouchers and other choice
programs.)
So, coming back to my original point, if one believes there is a constitutionally
protected set of parental rights, which includes the right to raise one's children
as one sees fit, then the same logic should lead one to believe there is, or
at least could be, a constitutionally protected right to marry the person of
one's choice. If you don't believe me, read Scalia's
dissent in Lawrence, as he saw the line from the court's logic
there to the legalization of same-sex marriage. Scalia finds that a bad outcome
of course, and I don't, but he understood the line of thought.
The question for conservatives is how they can rescue any notion of a constitutionally
protected set of parental rights yet deny a completely analogous constitutionally
protected right of marriage. Whether the latter right extends to person's of
the same gender is another question, but establishing the right to marry at
the constitutional level (which I believe one can under the line from Meyer to Pierce to Lawrence)
should be the starting point.
May libertarian law professors everywhere have mercy on my soul if this makes
no sense whatsoever.
With so much depressing stuff in the news recently, time for some Spring Break
cheer. Check out this piece from The
Economist that provides some much needed
perspective on the hand-wringing about the US economy (hat tip to Instapundit).
One money quote:
Median income of American households, commentators often say, has been stagnant,
though census figures give a rise of one-fifth since 1980. Lou Dobbs, on
CNN's “Lou Dobbs Tonight”, is just one media fabulist who makes
his living by claiming that, as America is being “exported”,
so the well-being of middle Americans is in a parlous state.
It is a good story, but false on many levels. For a start, this slow growth
in median income overlaps with a scale of immigration into America outpacing
all immigration in the rest of the world put together. Many immigrants have
come precisely to take up the lowest-paid jobs. As a result, in the 20 years
to 1999 some 5m immigrant households were added to those defined as below
the poverty level. Yet among native-born Americans, poverty rates have declined
steadily since the 1960s. In the case of black families, median incomes have
recently been rising at twice the pace for the country as a whole.
Strip out immigrants, and the picture of stagnant median incomes vanishes.
Indeed, for the nine-tenths of the population that is native-born, middle-income
trends continue their improvement of the 1950s and 1960s. For these people,
inequality is not rising, but falling. Gregg Easterbrook cheekily points
out in his excellent recent book, “The
Progress Paradox” (Random
House), that if left-leaning Americans seriously want better statistics about
middle-income gains, then they should simply close their borders.
I'm not sure I've ever recommended this book since I've been blogging here,
but W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm's Myths of Rich and Poor remains
the single best book on this subject written in the last five years. If you
want to counter the "decline of American well-being" rhetoric of the left,
this is the book to read.
I've been following the controversy over Bush's use of 9/11 imagery in his
campaign ads, and I really don't get the objections. Let me preface this by
saying that I can imagine some uses of 9/11 that would cross the line,
but talking about 9/11 and using short, non-graphic images as part of a re-election
campaign is totally in-bounds. However much I might disagree with decisions
he has made, Bush has the right to run on what he perceives his record to be.
If that includes his supposed leadership post-9/11, then so be it. As many
have noted, if he didn't do that, he'd be the first president not to
use his leadership of an ongoing war as a campaign issue.
What's bothering me more, however, is the way the objectors are couching their
objections - specifically, the claim that 9/11 is a "national tragedy" and
should not be "politicized." As Col. Potter might say: "Horsehockey!!" Although
it's a "tragedy" in the dictionary sense, using that language drains the event
of any moral dimension, as if it were just another example of "shit happens."
The reality is that 9/11 was an act of mass murder and that mass murder was
a politically-motivated act (again, whatever one thinks of what Bush has done
since). To say that it is a tragedy that we can't even discuss but in tones
of reverent wallowing in collective grief enables us to avoid asking the really
tough questions about why it happened, how to prevent a repeat performance,
and what if anything we should do to those who did it. It can't not be
politicized - it was a political act. And, therefore, political actors in the
US have every right to use it as part of their campaigns, within reason of
course.
The attempt to stop reasonable discussion and use of 9/11 in favor of our
collective self-pity is just one more sign of the "Oprahization" of American
discourse, political and otherwise.
Well, my earlier blogging on the classroom bias issue here and here, has come
home to roost. My own campus has now made the national press on this topic.
Today's WSJ has
an opinion piece by John J. Miller on the topic that is hooked
by an incident here where a junior faculty member went after the national college
republicans in his blog (run on his own server using his own equipment, but
accessible through a couple of links from the Sociology department web site)
in terms that
were, shall we say, less than flattering.
Miller's piece is the usual conservative complaint piece about left-wing faculty
bias. My two complaints in turn are 1) he said nothing about the fact that
several campus conservatives responded by putting up posters around campus
calling the faculty member a "reverse racist." A number of faculty called for
them to be punished for doing so including claiming it was a form of harassment,
but the administration (of which I guess I am a part) has held very firmly
to free
speech on both
sides
of this
issue;
and 2) it misses the bigger picture here which is, as my own experience suggests,
a place that is pretty friendly to out libertarians who are engaged in the
world of ideas and campus life. I just hate seeing us lumped in with places
where
someone like me really wouldn't have been treated so well.
Another point to make here is that the faculty member at the center of this
is the only hard-left faculty member on campus who has ever assigned
an article of mine and then invited me to class to talk about it. In a 200-level
class on the sociology of development last fall, he assigned a piece of mine
defending free trade and
then gave me a full 90 minutes of class to talk about it, with him present.
It was a very civil and productive class. Is it possible
to be an angry name-calling hater of college republican fascists in your blog,
yet be open-minded enough to invite the opposition to class and treat conservative
or libertarian students fairly? Good question. Interestingly, in the wake of
some faculty email exchange on this incident in which I called attention to
the faculty member having invited me to class, I now have two more invitations
from leftist faculty to do guest lectures. I think this is a good thing, but
I have jokingly suggested to my dean that I need to renegotiate my teaching
load!
In any case, I'm just really sad this morning. I love this place and it's
been very good to me and I hate to see a story that takes a very particular
incident and uses it as part of a broader picture that simply doesn't so easily
apply here.
My March 2004 *Freeman* arrived today (and thanks to new FEE president Richard Ebeling for getting back the original name), complete with a short tribute to Leonard Read that Hayek wrote in 1968. The piece is called "The Defense
of Our Civilization Against Intellectual Error." I am going to quote at length from the last two paragraphs because it is a call for civility and the assumption of good faith in political argument that is often absent these days.
It seems to me that the worst mistake a fighter for our ideals can make is to ascribe to our opponents dishonest or immoral aims. I know it is sometimes difficult not to be irritated into a feeling that most of them are irresponsible demagogues who ought to know better. But though many of the followers of what we regard as the wrong prophets are either just plain silly, or merely mischievous troublemakers, we ought to realize that their conceptions derive from serious thinkers whose ultimate ideals are not so very different from own and with whom we differ not so much on ultimate values, but on the effective means of achieving them.
I am indeed profoundly convinced that there is much less difference between us and our opponents on the ultimate values to be achieved than is commonly believed, and that the differences between us are chiefly intellectual differences. We at least believe we have attained an understanding of the forces which have shaped civilization which our opponents lack. Yet if we have not yet convinced them, the reason must be that our arguments are not yet quite good enough, that we have not yet made explicit some of the foundations on which our conclusions rest. Our chief task therefore must be still to improve the argument on which our case for a free society rests.
As Chris noted when he introduced me to this wonderful corner of the blogosphere,
among my interests is an almost fanatical devotion to the rock band Rush.
It's not just that they are without question the most libertarian rock band
of all
time, but they are also one of the most supremely talented, both musically
and lyrically. They have also largely avoided the rock cliches of sex, drugs,
and bad boy behavior - they play rock with the mentality of professional jazz
players. This is hard rock for those
who
appreciate
musical complexity and challenging musicianship. The reason I bring this up
is that
the Volokh
Conspiracy's
"Sunday Song Lyric" this week highlights one of Rush's best and
most libertarian
sets of lyrics, those from "The Trees."
What Juan Non-Volokh doesn't note is that the theme of the song, while clearly
borrowing from Rand and other anti-egalitarians, is most closely related to
Vonnegut's wonderful story "Harrison
Bergeron." Check it out. And check out
Rush when the 30th anniversary tour rolls into your town this summer.
Well, how synchronistic of David to take up the
family issue today. I feel like such a blogger because I'm on the
road in Scottsdale, AZ at the meetings of the American Psychology-Law
Society presenting a paper titled "John Stuart Mill and the Teaching of
Social Science and Law" with my teaching partner, which grew out of our
work together in our First-Year Seminar course on Public Policy and the
Family. Grant Gould's
observations in the comments are very much to the point, and I'd like
to expand on them here.
Grant is quite right in saying that the education of women, and the
resulting higher wages available to them in the market, has made the
dual-working family an increasing reality. It also creates the
wealth that enables families to solve the problem posed by two working
parents: how to accomplish the tasks of household
production? Who is going to cook, clean, raise children,
etc? The answer, of course, is that families now purchase those
services on the market in increasing numbers compared to years
past. People eat out more, they use dry cleaners more, and they
use day care more.
In language I use elsewhere,
families have certain functions they need to perform, and they can
either apply their own labor directly to meeting those goals, they can
purchase market substitutes for them, or they can rely on social
networks/civil society institutions (as David's wonderful book points
out). What's happened over the 20th century is that some of the
functions of the family have shifted from "domestic labor" to the
market, while other functions have shifted toward the state, as David
and Grant acknowledge. However, I would argue that even had the
20th century been a libertarian one, many of the shifts in the family
we've seen would have taken place. In fact, I'd argue that a
libertarian society would have accelerated them because a) we would
have been that much wealthier; b) state-created barriers to
female education and employment would not have existed; and c)
various government policies (e.g., the tax treatment of secondary
earners, various subsidies that artificially enhance the demand and
supply of "suburbia") that support the so-called "traditional" family
would not have existed.
The last century saw the shrinking of many of functions families
perform with their own labor. Some of that shrinkage has been
good, on the assumption that substitutes for direct labor are no worse
than direct labor (and I'd argue that's the case). Some of that
shrinkage has been bad, to the extent the state is an inferior
substitute for direct labor, civil society, or the market. The upside of this
shrinkage is that it has opened up space for families to devote more of
their time and energy to some of the psychological/emotional needs of
their members. Rather than being predominantly economic units, as
they've been through most of history, families are now spaces for love
and emotional satisfaction. This also helps to explain the
increased visibility of homosexuality in society - one need not be
connected to a "traditional" family to be able to survive
economically. It also relates to the same-sex marriage debate in
that once marriage becomes predominantly about emotional satisfaction,
rather than economic survival or procreation, the demand for inclusion
by same-sex couples is a natural, and understandable, consequence.
It also shows one of the odd aspects of modern conservativism:
the very same people who rhapsodize about how marriage should be about
love and commitment between partners, and deride the quickie
meaningless heterosexual marriage, can't seem to see why homosexuals
might ask for the same thing. But the bigger irony for
conservatives is that the reality of marriage as predominantly about
romantic love, and the corresponding demand for same-sex marriage, is
the product of the forces of capitalism. The Right has to
recognize that the forces of the market cannot be "firewalled" off from
cultural change. The wealth created by capitalism and the
resulting dynamism of the market inevitably spillover to the
culture. Ultimately, the attempt to defend the "traditional"
family is an attempt to stifle the market.
Having said all this, I do not believe the family will ever, or should
ever, disappear. Families cannot be replaced, and expecting the
"village" to raise children will have roughly the same results as we've
seen when "the village" runs agriculture or industry. Parents
have, in Hayekian terms, the knowledge and incentives it takes to raise
their children, and no other institution can do better. Yes,
other institutions can help or hinder that process, and families can't
do it all themselves, but the family is ultimately irreplaceable.
Yes, it will continue to evolve, but that makes it no different from
any other social institution.
Robert Campbell's post raises all kinds of good questions for discussion. Being
somewhat sympathetic to the argument Gus DiZerega made in the comments, I'd like
to add a thought or two.
My sympathy for Gus's argument is really about how I see myself: I've always
thought of myself as "on the left" but believing that economic freedom was
a better means to many of the left's ends than was interventionism or socialism.
Perhaps this is the result of being in academia and finding that I'd largely
rather hang out with my leftist colleagues than free-market conservatives of
the policy world sort. I find too many conservatives less tolerant of difference
than I might like them to be; too quick to demonize the left in the very same
ways they object to being demonized by the left; and generally too
dismissive of the world of academia, both as it is currently structured and
inhabited,
and as a vocation/avocation. Hayek's classic essay "Why
I'm Not a Conservative" captures a few more of my complaints.
In the way that leftists describe libertarians as "conservatives without the
sex and drugs hangups," I'd prefer to describe myself as a "leftist without
the capitalism hang ups."
Of course none of this, I think, changes the substance of my libertarianism.
Robert is quite right in describing the substantive issues, and I do agree
that there are things equal to or greater than defeating George W. Bush on
the libertarian
priority list. (Although I will note that if I was coerced to vote and had
to vote for one of the two major parties, as of right now I'd vote for Kerry.
Bush is the worst of both worlds - fiscal profligacy and bad on civil liberties/rights,
not to mention that whole war thing.) Still, I bristle every time someone calls
me a "right-winger" or says that libertarianism is "on the right." Yes, it
tries to explode the simple binary opposition of left-right (one of the few
binary oppositions that sophisticated French-influenced leftist cultural theorists
are not passionate
about deconstructing), but if I have to choose, I'm on the left.
A few weeks ago I said that
the Democratic presidential candidates would be forced to do some fancy dancing
with respect to the same-sex marriage issue so as to
navigate between the more radical wing of the party and its appeal to moderates.
They have to support gay rights but not gay marriage, however one does that.
One reading of Bush's proposed constitutional amendment is that it was a brilliant
political tactic to squeeze the Democrats into a corner. If one assumes the
amendment allows for state-by-state civil unions (and it's not clear it does),
then those
who say they oppose gay marriage but favor civil unions, and
who also voted against the Defense of Marriage Act because they believed it
was unconstitutional
now have to explain why they oppose the FMA as a way to fix the constitution
such that one state can't "impose" same-sex marriage on the rest. The Bushies
are just smart enough to have thought this through. And if you want to see
the results, and a very fancy dance indeed, here's John Kerry on the hotseat
during
the most recent presidential
debate thanks to Ron Brownstein of the LA Times:
BROWNSTEIN: Let me ask you, Senator. I want to sort of burrow in a little
bit and understand your views of exactly what the role of Washington is,
Senator Kerry.
You say you oppose gay marriage. You also oppose the constitutional amendment
to ban -- federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Do you think Georgia and Ohio, or any other state, should have to recognize
a gay marriage performed in California or Massachusetts? And if not, why
did you vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, designed to prevent that,
in 1996?
KERRY: I said very clearly -- I could not have been more clear on the floor
of the United States Senate. My speech starts out expressing my personal
opinion, that I do not believe -- you know, I believe that marriage is between
a man and a woman.
But notwithstanding that belief, there was no issue in front of the country
when that was put before the United States Senate.
And I went to the floor of the Senate and said -- even though I was up for
reelection, "I will not take part in gay bashing on the floor of the
United States Senate. I will not allow the Senate to be used...
(APPLAUSE)
... for that kind of rhetoric."
BROWNSTEIN: But you also said in that statement...
KERRY: But let me just finish.
BROWNSTEIN: You also said in that statement that you believe the Defense
of Marriage Act was fundamentally unconstitutional. And if the Defense of
Marriage Act is unconstitutional, isn't President Bush right, that the only
way to guarantee that no state has to recognize a gay marriage performed
in any other state is a federal constitutional amendment?
KERRY: In fact, I think the interpretation -- I think, under the full faith
and credit laws, that I was incorrect in that statement. I think, in fact,
that no state has to recognize something that is against their public policy.
And for 200 years, we have left marriage up to the states. There is no showing
whatsoever today that any state in the country, including my own -- which
is now dealing with its own constitutional amendment -- is incapable of dealing
with what they would like to do.
And I believe George Bush is doing this -- he's even reversed his own position.
He's reversed Dick Cheney's position. He is doing this because he's in trouble.
He's trying to reach out to his base. He's playing politics with the Constitution
of the United States.
(APPLAUSE)
BROWNSTEIN: But let me just nail down one thing very quickly.
So are you saying that, now that gay marriage is on the table in a place
like California or Massachusetts, that you would support the Defense of Marriage
Act?
KERRY: No, because...
BROWNSTEIN: That it's not...
KERRY: ... the Defense of Marriage Act is the law of the land today.
KING: And you would support it today?
BROWNSTEIN: And you would leave it...
KERRY: ... no votes to take it back. And I think it's more important right
now to pass the employment nondiscrimination act, hate crimes legislation,
and begin to move us forward so we have on the books those laws that will
allow us to protect people in this country.
(APPLAUSE)
If he loses the presidency, he can give dancing lessons.
And let it not be said I don't give props where props are due. Shortly afterward,
here's Al Sharpton on the same issue:
KING: Al?
SHARPTON: I think is not an issue any more of just marriage. This is an
issue of human rights. And I think it is dangerous to give states the right
to deal with human rights questions.
SHARPTON: That's how we ended up with slavery and segregation going forward
a long time.
(APPLAUSE)
I, under no circumstances, believe we ought to give states rights to gay
and lesbians' human rights. Whatever my personal feelings may be about gay
and lesbian marriages, unless you are prepared to say gays and lesbians are
not human beings, they should have the same constitutional right of any other
human being. And I think that that should be...
(APPLAUSE)
BROWNSTEIN: How would you effectuate that? How would you do that?
SHARPTON: I would say that they have the constitutional right to do whatever any...
(CROSSTALK)
KING: So you would have another amendment?
(CROSSTALK)
BROWNSTEIN: You would have a constitutional amendment?
SHARPTON: No, I wouldn't -- first of all, I think we've got to deal with a lot of constitutional amendments. If Bush wants to deal with it, let's get to ERA. Let's deal with a lot.
Of course he manages to avoid
giving a concrete answer that demonstrated some knowledge of how Washington
works (anyone see his answer to the question about the Fed a few debates ago?).
Still, he's right on target with this one from my view.
I'm not a big fan of either Justin Raimondo or David Horowitz, but I think Justin
just nails him in the piece David
links to below. I can't help but note that I
made a similar argument about the victim mentality of many, but not all, campus
conservatives and libertarians here.
Just a quick thought to add to William's
post about senatorial stock portfolios: Yes, some of that might be explained
by senators trading on superior information, but consider a different argument.
It could also be that if Senator X buys a particular stock, and if her purchase
of said stock becomes known, investors assume that the industry in question,
if not the particular firm, might be the benefit of favorable legislation, thus
leading to a speculative politically-based run up. So what we see is not superior
information causing a run-up in price, but senatorial purchases being signals
about the possibility of legislatively-generated profits.
I think both explanations are in play, and that neither one is very comforting.
The United States: Crony capitalism here, and abroad.
Just to follow up on Chris's spot-on
observations, I find it amusing that conservatives, who are supposedly the
defenders of a constitutional republic,
now are the biggest
supporters of direct democracy. Here they
are complaining that the Constitution
puts limits on what "the people" can do at the ballot box. Voters decide that
marriage means a man and a woman. Suppose the Supreme Court says otherwise,
implying that there are some rights that the ballot box can't override. What's
the problem? Isn't this the
whole point of having a constitution, so that legislatures do not
have total power? And let us examine the shoe on the other foot: where's the
applause when "the
people"
decide that
the right
to bear arms should not be rammed down people's throats by activist judges,
or
that Fifth Amendment protections for property rights shouldn't be forced on
people by the courts? I hardly think conservatives would rejoice in hearing
"the people's voice" the next time the democratic
process produces laws at odds with those
constitutional rights.
Yes, one can have a legitimate debate over whether the Constitution's equal
protection and due process clauses make the case for same-sex marriage (I think
they do), but to cheer on legislative attempts to define fundamental rights
seems a tad at odds with conservatives' self-professed love of a constitutional
republic.
For those of you, like me, who love words, here's a site you should check out:
the online version of the Visual Thesaurus.
Click on the "online edition," wait for the java, then enter a word in the upper
left. It gives you a spatial "map" of words similar in meaning to the one you've
entered. You have to see it to see just how cool it is. It's a great teaching
tool also, especially for students who are visual learners.
I'm going to break my own promise about the left-bias issue and make one more
observation (and it's better than those creepy economists Radley linked to...
{shiver}). I suggested that I would engage in a more detailed response to Ed
Feser's two-part series on the subject at Tech Central Station. Well part
two is out, and I'm going to pass. Ed, who I've met and respect as a Hayek
scholar, but with whom I've tangled over cultural issues on the Hayek list, has
descended into traditionalist madness in this second part. His argument is that
"Leftism" has become a "counter-church" responsible for the supposed cultural
decay of western society. He goes so far as to argue that Leftism amounts to
little more than intellectual rationalizations for the welfare state and pornography:
That is why Leftism has gotten, with the passing decades, ever closer to
sheer lunacy; and also why, as such lunacy has permeated ever more deeply
into modern Western society, the ideas of conservative thinkers have come
to seem to the common man increasingly romantic, unrealistic, and unattainable.
If the typical contemporary Westerner does not quite resonate to the ravings
of Marxists and postmodernists, neither is he much drawn to the doctrines
of Thomists, Burkeans, or Hayekians. He is too far gone for that. He wants
his conservatism heavily watered down, at least enough to leave room for
a Federal prescription drug benefit and easy access to pornography, should
the mood for it strike him. If this makes for inconsistency… well,
he's happy to let the professors worry about such things.
And if what they tell
him is that he ought to discard the conservatism altogether and opt instead
for a worldview specifically designed to justify the benefits
and the porn, he is, with the passing years, ever increasingly ready to listen.
If this is what it's come to, I'm out of sympathy for conservative critics
of academia. Granted, Ed's view is an extreme one, but it serves to confirm
the worst nightmares of the Left (that the critics are trying to resurrect,
no pun intended, St. Thomas Aquinas himself) and in so doing, it tars the more
reasonable criticisms of bias. Thanks but no thanks Ed.
At the risk of being a one-note Charlie, here's the single best thing I've read
yet on the bias in academia question, by Tim
Burke (hat tip to Ralph
Luker at
Cliopatria). Money quote number one:
On the other hand, collegiality is a powerful cultural force in many colleges
and universities, and its stultifying or comforting effects (take your pick)
often have nothing to do with politics in any sense. A conservative or libertarian
who is a mensch about his or her views and research may well be admired,
even beloved, by liberal or left colleagues, and fondly regarded as valuable
because of their views. On the other hand, someone like Daniel Pipes who
is running around picking broad-brush fights with everyone whom he perceives
as a bad academic, usually based on a paper-thin reading of their syllabi
or even just the titles of their research, is going to be loathed, but as
much for his behavior as his political views. A liberal or leftist who plays
Stalinist Truth Squad in the same way is going to be equally loathed and
avoided.
Money quote number two:
12. Kieran Healy rightfully observes that conservatives talking about this
issue are making an interesting exception to their general tendency among
conservatives to assume that results in the market are probably based on
some real distribution of qualifications rather than bias or discrimination.
It might be fair to assert in response that academic hiring is a closed or
non-market system, and this is precisely what is unfair about it. But if
so, it requires that one demonstrate that there is a class of potential,
qualified individuals who are being discriminated against at the time of
hiring, or that these individuals are being discriminatorily weeded out at
the time of initial acceptance for training. If not, then the argument that
conservatives are being discriminated against in academic hiring practices
is exactly comparable in its logics and evidence to the logic of most affirmative
action programs and many other antidiscrimination initiatives, that there
is a subtle systemic bias which is producing unequal results that prevents
a “normal” sociological distribution of candidates in particular
jobs. It behooves conservatives who want to claim this to either concretely
explain why this argument only applies to conservatives in academia, or to
repudiate the standard conservative argument against affirmative action and
other public-policy programs designed to deal with subtle bias effects.
13. On the other hand, most of the people mocking or disagreeing with the
claim that conservatives are treated poorly in academia seem to me to be
equally at odds with many standard representations of bias effects that are
widely accepted by liberals or leftists, namely, that bias is often subtle,
discursive, and institutionally pervasive, and that “hostile environments” can
exist where no single action or statement, or any concrete form of discrimination
can be easily pointed to as a smoking gun. Most of those claiming a bias
against conservatives in academia are pointing to exactly these kinds of
hostile-environment incidents and moments, and seeing them as causing the
same kinds of psychological and inhibitory harms that this type of discrimination
is said to cause in other contexts. I accept that people edging away from
you in an elevator is a type of bias-effect that is harmful—an often
cited instance of the kinds of subtly pervasive discrimination that African-Americans
may suffer from in mostly-white institutions. I’ve never experienced
myself because I’m white, and had I not read of it in the personal,
anecdotal accounts of many African-Americans, I truthfully would never have
noticed it. Same here. I don’t understand why it is so hard to accept
that self-identified conservative undergraduates, graduate students, and
faculty report experiencing many similar forms of pervasive, subtle bias.
What I'm seeing from many of those who dismiss these claims is a collective
eye-rolling, a sort of "big deal, so your professor sneered at you,
get over it". And yet few of those doing that eye-rolling would say
the same to a student of color or a woman reporting similar experiences.
The grounds on which many critics are doubting that such bias exists would
have to, in all honesty, extend to all anecdotal, experiential or narrative
claims of bias. The only way to salvage such claims would be if they could
be profitably correlated with quantifiable evidence of discrimination—but
in this case, we have some evidence to that effect. The only other way to
salvage this point is to say, "It's wrong to be biased against people
because of their race, gender or sexual orientation, but not because of their
politics". A few seem willing to say just that: I can only say I think
that's a big, fat mistake on a great many fronts.
Here's another unhelpful piece on why
academia leans left. If I were a left-leaning
academic, I would find this one rather insulting myself. Maybe it's just me,
but suggesting
that academics live in a world of "freedom without responsibility" and that
the one responsibility we have, teaching, is one we are constantly trying to
reduce
at all costs, is both insulting and wrong. Once again, people are generalizing
about "academic life" from a picture that holds true, at best, at Research
I schools, when the vast majority of academics, including those who
lean
left, work in very different institutions. In those institutions there are
people actually committed to teaching and serving the institution, and producing
scholarship
too, who also are to the left politically. Not to mention those of us who have
carved out academic careers as libertarians or conservatives who have somehow
risen above the fray and overcome the structural incentives of "freedom without
responsibility." How can Kling explain the lean to the left of faculty at primarily
teaching institutions, where said faculty often are more than willing to take
on responsibility for the institution? What explains all the left-leaning deans
all over the place if all people want to do is explore their pet French post-structuralist
du jour? Explanations of this phenomenon are going to have to do better than
this.
Anyone
who wants to write about this issue should at least have spent some serious
time
among
the
natives,
and should
do so in
a
variety
of
their
differing
communities. And they probably ought to start with something a little more subtle than his two-part political quiz.
One good point: the small picture of Hayek with the "oy vey" look on his face
with Hitler, Lenin, and Marx in the background is now my new wallpaper.
On the subject of intellectual diversity on college campuses, I call your
attention to this lengthy piece by Ed
Feser at Tech Central Station. I don't have the time to tackle Ed's various
arguments
about why academia leans to the left, and I should wait until Part II comes
out before I respond anyway. For now, I'll just say that I think he raises
some interesting arguments, only a few of which ring true for me. The one that
rings
most true
is this one:
Here we have in effect the ideal of the "philosopher king" and
with it another possible explanation of why intellectuals tend toward the
Left, viz. the prospect that increased government power might give them an
opportunity to implement their ideas. As F.A. Hayek suggests in his essay "The
Intellectuals and Socialism," for the average intellectual, it just
stands to reason that the most intelligent people ought to be the ones running
things. Of course, this assumes they are in general capable of running things
better than others are, an assumption many of these purportedly always-questioning
minds seem surprisingly unwilling to question. Yet there are very good reasons
for questioning it, some of which are related to the failure of socialism
discussed above.
As Hayek himself has famously argued, large-scale social institutions are
simply too complex for any human mind, however intelligent, to grasp in the
amount of detail necessary to create them from scratch or redesign them from
top to bottom in the manner of the socialist economic planner or political
or cultural revolutionary. The collapse of the French Revolution into bloody
chaos, its immediate Napoleonic sequel, the long decay and sudden collapse
of the Soviet empire, and the institutionalized lunacy that was communism
in general are only the most vivid and undeniable confirmations of this basic
insight.
Still, the intellectual is forever a sucker for the idea that things would
be much better if only everyone would just go along with the vision of the
world he and his colleagues have hashed out over coffee in the faculty lounge
and in the pages of the academic journals. As Hayek put it in The Fatal Conceit, "intelligent
people will tend to overvalue intelligence," and they will even find
it scandalous to suggest that intelligence is the sort of thing that can
be overvalued. But of course it can be, as long as it has limits, which even
the most brilliant human being's intelligence does. To see this requires
nothing more, though also nothing less, than simple humility -- something
intellectuals tend to have in short supply, especially if their intellectual
accomplishments are great.
I do think that many intellectuals overvalue book-smarts. This is an attitude
I do see in many of my colleagues, and one of the beautiful things about Hayek's
vision of the catallaxy is that it is "fueled by" the bits and pieces
of often inarticulate knowledge possessed by anyone and everyone. The engine
of economic
growth, and the spontaneous ordering processes of society more broadly, is
knowledge, but not intelligence. In an academic world where knowledge is valued
if it is rational, "scientific," articulated, and defended with explicit
arguments, it's easy to understand why intellectuals might distrust the spontaneous
ordering
processes of the market and culture that are based on knowledge that is frequently
tacit and "unscientific," and believe that they can construct institutions
that would improve upon their
admitted
imperfections.
And, as
Feser points
out elsewhere in his essay, such intellectuals are apt to be contemptuous of
the claim that traditions and institutions can embody important social knowledge
that we will lose if we attempt to ignore or reconstruct them. To me, this
is the supreme irony of the post-modern Left: if they really believed what
they say about the "subjectivity" of knowledge and the limits to rationalism
and scientism, they ought to be reading Hayek and recognizing the market as
the embodiment of how knowledge is really discovered and communicated. But
for some reason, they aren't.
One way this overvaluing of intelligence plays out is in the critique of Bush
based on his grades at Yale. Without defending his policies, it is certainly
plausible
that
the
president
is not particularly book-smart (compared to Gore and maybe Kerry), but nonetheless
has the kind of knowledge that leadership requires. Certainly that description
would apply to many CEOs and many shop-floor folks as well. Again, not saying
this is true of Bush, but lord knows I'd prefer a politician full of common
sense knowledge and trust in the same knowledge of the citizenry than one who
has lots of book-learnin' but not much horse sense.
I've been thinking about the issue Radley raises
about the same-sex marriages
in San Francisco as well. And I think he's put his finger (or Insta's I guess)
on the puzzle for me too: is it a legitimate form of civil disobedience for
an agent of the state to violate a law he or she has sworn to uphold when he
or
she believes that law to be immoral? My own view is that the constitutional
principle at stake trumps the importance of the "rule of law" in such cases.
If the Mayor of SF genuinely believes that the current law that prohibts same-sex
marriages is unconstitutional, then I see nothing wrong with him attempting
to
violate that law, peacefully, to make a point. Radley's race analogy is very
telling.
But here's another fly in the ointment: As Rod
Dreher points out in The Corner, what precisely is the difference between
this situation and Judge Moore's refusal to remove the Ten Commandments from
his courtroom? Surely Judge Moore perceived himself in exactly the same situation
as the mayor: caught between obeying the law as written or obeying a more abstract
moral/constitutional principle. My own view of the constitution leads me to believe
that the mayor is right and Moore is wrong, but that judgment rests on my reading
of equal protection and separation of church and state. In some objective sense,
I'm not sure there is a difference between the two cases.
In my prior post, I promised some
unoriginal theorizing about the heightened interest in the classroom bias issue.
As the example I used there suggests, I think much of it is related to 9/11.
What 9/11 did was to blow the lid off of the politics of many faculty, and make
those politics clear to the broader public. Those of us in academia have always
known what many/most faculty thought about the US and its foreign policies, but
I doubt that Joe and Jane Sixpack did. The events of 9/11 changed all of that.
The combination of a perceived "blame American first" on the part of faculty
with an "America, love it or leave it" instinct on the part of students, made
for a dangerous brew. The result is that many conservative students all of a
sudden felt the perceived classroom bias more palpably and, more important, they
found support for their reaction in the media, both print and electronic.
The bias was in their face, and their perception of it found sympathetic ears
elsewhere.
Now feeling empowered that their perception of bias is right, conservative
students have gone on the offensive. I don't think this is a bad thing, in
and of itself. Of course, it's even a really good thing when it translates
into more than just whining and complaining and maybe even leads to real intellectual
and political activity. I'm willing to predict that this issue will not go
away. I think we're entering an era of a widening gulf between the mean political
position of college students and that of their faculty. This gulf might have
been wide 30 years ago, but with students on the left and faculty on the
right! Now, the positions are reversed and I'd argue the gulf is even wider.
I think another factor in the rise of the classroom bias issue is the Internet,
and the blogosphere particularly. Students can more quickly identify support
for their perceptions of bias, and the outrageous examples can more easily
get press coverage. Groups like FIRE are
doing great work in shedding light on real problems. In addition, students
who wish to take advantage of it can easily and quickly find arguments and
evidence that contradict what they are hearing in class. This enables them
to label things as "bias" much more frequently than has been the case in years
past. Thinking back to my days at Michigan, if I wanted to prove some faculty
member wrong, it would have required some serious research at the library.
Today, a student can just Google up a bunch of material in 30 seconds. Part
of me would like to think that left-leaning faculty are more frequently being
challenged in substantive ways by well-informed conservative students. I'm
not sure though. If not, there's no excuse for conservative students not trying.
The information is out there for the taking.
If I had the time and energy, I'd set up a web site that served as an information
clearing house for students (of any political persuasion) who wanted a perspective
on an issue that differed from what they'd heard in class. The kid who wants
a history of the Middle East that doesn't turn the Israelis into Nazis and
the Palestinians into innocent victims could go to the site and get an info
sheet and/or links to other well-respected scholars and writers. Same for the
kid who wants to defend same-sex marriage at a religiously-oriented school.
One last thought: it's easier to use the classroom for "indoctrination" when
your institution doesn't put much weight on teaching, and especially when it
doesn't talk about teaching very much. If nothing else, a politically correct
classroom is really bad pedagogy. If, and it's an if, we really do care about
student learning, then staying away from the forms of bias that are the subject
of so much discussion today is a very good idea. Students learn best when the
classroom atmosphere is both open and full of intellectual challenges, from
faculty and from peers. Another prediction (who says Austrian economists can't
predict?): if American higher education paid more attention to the quality
of undergraduate instruction, concerns about political correctness and classroom
bias would begin to fade away fairly quickly.
This whole issue of classroom bias is one that I think about a lot. Having survived
The University of Michigan as an "out" libertarian, and then doing graduate work
at George Mason, I've both been the outsider and the insider politically. And
now being at a small liberal arts college whose faculty is probably near the
mean in terms of their "leftiness", I get to see these issues from both sides:
leftist colleagues and conservative/libertarian students who complain to me.
Let me start by saying that I have no doubt that there are faculty whose goal
in the classroom is to get students to think like they do on a political level.
I also have no doubt that there are faculty who evaluate their students work
based on the same criterion. However, I do think that such faculty are not
as common as the conservative press, and blogosphere, often makes it seem.
Moreover, I don't think that all the complaints that conservative students
have about liberal bias in faculty are always legitimate. We've recently had
a re-formation of our College Republicans group on campus, and it has drawn
several dozen students to meetings. For us, that's an unbelievable level of
political participation for ANY cause! And the one issue that's drawing them
is "classroom bias." I have a theory about why this has become such an issue
recently, but I'll save that for another post (it's not that original
anyway).
But when I talk to these students, what they say is that they feel "silenced"
in the classroom. (You can see that they in fact HAVE learned from their professors
about the power of the rhetoric of being silenced; after all, certain groups
on the Left can be very loud about how they've been silenced.) When I prod
them as to what this means, they say "I don't feel like I can say what I think."
Okay, why not? "Well when I do, I get attacked." Now what exactly constitutes
an "attack?" Are they being called names and being told they're stupid? They
say no. What they report is that some students will challenge them and faculty
will respond to them with more questions and requests for evidence.
Often, what it sounds like to me, is that the conservative students are being
forced to articulate and defend their views in ways they haven't had to in
the past. I think this is especially true with respect to war-related
issues. They hear a prof, or another student, argue against the war, or argue
that US policy bears some real blame for 9/11, and they feel like the US is
being attacked. They love America and they try to respond. The prof, or the
students, push back, suggesting some evidence to the contrary and asking for
the same from them. But perhaps they can't provide it. They know what they
believe, and they know it's not what the prof believes, but they struggle to
articulate it. (I should add that I think this is the broader problem with the
conservative students on my campus - they are notoriously non- or anti-intellectual.
I cannot think of more than 2 or 3 conservative students who I would call intellectual
in any real sense of the term. All the student-driven intellectual energy on
campus - and it's not a lot - comes from the Left.) In their inability to articulate
their views and provide evidence, they feel silenced and attacked.
The first speaker that the CRs brought to campus was this guy Dan Flynn to
speak on his book Why
the Left Hates America. The guy was embarrassingly awful. Just terrible.
The campus lefty students showed up en masse and were polite to a fault. They
asked him great questions and more or less showed him to be the uninformed
anti-intellectual that he is. (Some lefty students also defaced several of
the CR's posters, which led me to think we'd have a nastier situation during
the talk, but they behaved themselves.) He was so bad that the CRs privately
apologized to some of their friends on the left for bringing him. The question
for me is why they didn't think to bring a serious conservative or libertarian
intellectual. Dinesh D'Souza spoke on campus a couple of years ago and was
treated very respectfully by students and colleagues. The answer, I fear, is
that most conservative students (at least here) are just not intellectually
engaged in the ways my colleagues and I would like them to be. That's the real
problem.
As I said, I have no doubt that there is classroom bias that is real, but
I also believe that conservative students too often adopt the very victim mentality
that they complain about in other venues. If the CRs came to me for advice,
I'd tell them to forget about bringing guest speakers and to spend their time
in some reading groups that can help them learn what they need to know to at
least try to level the intellectual playing field with leftist students and
faculty. I know I'd much rather teach a room full of smart, well-read lefty
students than one full of anti-intellectual country club conservatives. And,
if my colleagues are to be believed, they'd rather have a room full of smart,
well-read conservatives, than one full of apparently leftist students who are
just parroting what they heard from other faculty.
So my 12 year-old son and 8 year-old daughter were in the room while I was watching
some political talk show and my son says "So tell me again what a libertarian
is?" And I answered "someone who thinks the government should interfere in people's
lives as little as possible." My daughter says "that's mean!" I replied "why
is it so mean for government to bother people as little as possible?" She says
"oh, as little
as possible. I thought you said as much
as possible. That's different! That's not mean at all."
Another generation....
Well King, I never said it was "always and everywhere." I've seen stuff like
that here too, but it's never become institutionalized or part of the culture
in ways that have been a problem for me. And yes, better listening skills ain't
gonna help in that case. But it does seem like a perfect example of the sort
of "argument of bad intentions" that I think can be combatted by an equally loud
shout back questioning the premise. We don't always have to listen or shut up,
but we should also follow the old adage about mud-slinging: if you're gonna fight
in the mud with pigs, the pigs will likely win.
I also wanted to add a few comments about the KC
Johnson post that Dave noted earlier.
I was at this year's AAC&U meetings and saw Stanley Fish's talk. It was about
as entertaining a piece of rhetoric as I've ever heard at a professional conference.
I was there with a group of 5 other St. Lawrence folks, including my dean and
president, and all agreed that it was a brilliant talk. Of course, as one colleague
put it, "he's totally wrong of course, but it was a brilliant talk." The context
was AAC&U's push for bringing "civic engagement" into liberal education. The
idea being that the work that's done in the classroom has to be connected to
"real world" concerns about democracy, participation, etc.. Fish eloquently
argued that all we should be concerned with is truth, qua academics, and nothing
else. (Disclaimer: my campus has had several AAC&U grants and has been a participant
in many of their events. I'm on the organizing committee for an upcoming
one this fall.)
I'm sympathetic, of course, to Fish's position, especially when a concern
with "civic engagement" becomes using the classroom for political advocacy
(a trend that has become very explicit pedagogy among a few colleagues here).
There is a line, I think, between trying to get students to understand that
classroom knowledge should matter for making the world a better place and making
advocating a particular vision of what constitutes that "better place" part
of one's pedagogy or part of what it means to succeed in the course in question.
I don't object to the claim that the classroom is, in the broadest sense, a
political place and that none of us can be truly unbiased as teachers. What
I do object to is when this point becomes a rationalization for claiming
a monopoly on the moral high ground (my own definition of "political correctness"),
or for evaluating students based on their conclusions not their arguments.
One can have a strong point of view in the classroom but not engage in advocacy
and not grade students based on their politics. If one views "civic engagement"
as being about helping students to connect their learning to developing a
concern about the broader world and the potential role they might have in improving
it (whether through politics, education, or even business), then I'm all
for
it. Of course, my reading of "civic engagement" is not the same as many of
those involved in the AAC&U project, hence the link to the issues of intellectual
diversity and advocacy pedagogies.
For me, the issue of campus intellectual diversity isn't to be addressed by
hiring more non-Leftists. As Duke political scientist Michael
Munger put it:
"The solution is not to have 15 Republicans and 15 Democrats in one
department. If everybody forced students to write papers based on a faculty
member's particular perspective, that's still not diversity," he said.
Rather, he said, the classroom, not the department, must be depoliticized.
That last sentence is the key: those of us who resist Leftist orthodoxy must continually ask
our colleagues to check their premises and continually challenge
their claims to a monopoly on the moral high ground. We have to turn our differences
into debates over the means and not the ends. We need to
find our shared values and then engage over the best ways to achieve them.
No one, I think, likes poverty. We'd all like to reduce/eliminate it. How we
do so, however, is another story. And to the extent we can never let our Leftist
colleagues forget that we care too, perhaps we can make some headway toward
diversifying colleges classroom by classroom, rather than by changing hiring
practices in ways that threaten both academic freedom and our sense of justice.
It's difficult for me to make too compelling a case that libertarians are
victims of political correctness on college campuses when I've not only never
had a problem on my campus with such things, but I've been continually rewarded
for my work both in the classroom and in my discipline. To throw out a somewhat
more provocative claim: campus conservatives and libertarians are not always
very good at being good colleagues and, as Rod
suggested earlier, they aren't
often good at actually conversing and listening to their Leftist colleagues.
This doesn't mean you have to kiss up to them, but it does mean you have to
know something about their interests and conversations and be willing to be
a part of them. And, at places like mine, being a good teacher helps a lot!
Just a very loud "second" to Rod's
last post about libertarians and environmentalists.
Economy and ecology share more than some alphabet letters, and Rod has it just
right. Many years ago, as part of a team-taught course, I had to read Aldo Leopold's Sand
County Almanac, a classic in ecology. There are a number of passages where
if you substituted "market" for "ecosystem," you'd have sentences that could
have been right out of Hayek. Or me, for that matter!
And a second "second" to Rod's call for more conversation and listening between
libertarians and the Left.
Well, the hardest-working law prof in the blogosphere, Eugene
Volokh, has an
interpretation of the Federal Marriage Amendment that is closer to Andrew Sullivan's
than my own. I generally respect Eugene's take on these things, even when I don't
agree with him. I'm thrilled to have yet one more reason to oppose the FMA.
Well, Robert has raised a number of good questions in the post below about academia.
I want to focus on his ending questions:
Perhaps a Tier II liberal arts college is less likely to hire (or retain)
deans with monstrous egos than a middle-level state university with top 20
ambitions. Perhaps, too, such a college is more likely to involve faculty
in evaluating deans, and less likely to deep-six faculty complaints about
their performance. But have the liberal arts colleges avoided adding administration
over the past couple of generations? Or has administration at least grown
more slowly at such institutions than it did at bigger universities?
I can say a few things about my place relevant to this question. If we're
talking about administrators only within the Academic Affairs division, in
the 15 years I've been here, we've actually cut one associate dean's position
and not created any others. All of those positions qualify as administrators
by Robert's definition: 50% or more of their time spent managing people. What
we have added is a slew of "director" level positions, just below
associate dean. These are faculty who have course reductions of one sort or
another to run various programs (our University Writing Program, Academic Advising,
etc.). We do have more of these than we used to, but they vary in just how
much course release they get. Some may be just at 50%, others spend less than
half their time "managing." None are full time. My own view of my campus is
that one of our biggest problems is that we have too many majors/minors/programs.
We're headed toward a world where every faculty member has his or her own very
narrow major! We simply cannot keep up with these from an administrative point
of view, and some of them serve so few students as to be just silly (which
of course suggests their real purpose - serving faculty desires). Of course,
these new majors/minor vary greatly in their, from my perspective, academic
weightiness.
However... there is no doubt that the overall presence of administrators on
campus is much greater than in the past, when one includes the Student
Life division, as well as Finance and Development. We've hired tons of new
people in our "University Advancement" office in the last few years. One might
argue these are "revenue-producing" expenditures, as private schools like mine
depend greatly on alumni and external grant support. On the Student Life side,
we have a much bigger (and more professional) staff than we used to. Are they
all necessary? Good question. Students want more services (Counseling, Health
Center, Career Services, Student Activities, etc), and co-curricular education
is the buzzword these days. Competitive pressures are
tough to resist.
In my associate dean's job, I work a great deal with these folks and they are,
for the most part, sincere and professional, and really want to see themselves
as educators. Do they bring in benefits in excess of their costs? Hard for
me to answer when we just opened a $15 million new student center last month.
So if we're talking about academic administrators, I think we've grown a bit
since I've been here, although not a lot and most of it is being driven by
curricular initiatives. If we're talking about
non-academic administrators, we've grown a ton. Is that bad? Not so clear.
I can say this about my place: we are financially better off and have notably
better students and faculty than we did when I arrived in 1989. We are on the
cutting edge with several pedagogical and curricular innovations (including,
he said modestly, the First-Year Program that
I administer), and I think we take pretty good students and do very good things
with them. We could do more, if we could only get more of them focused on the
classroom and not alcohol. Hope that's helpful Robert.
Need some help here from those who like intricate constitutional law and logic
problems... This morning, Andrew
Sullivan goes after a New
York Times story
about the proposed constitutional amendement to "protect" marriage. Sullivan
complains
that the NYT reporter misses the fact that this amendment would make even civil
unions for same-sex couples unconstitutional. The key clause in the proposed
amendment, for Sullivan, is that in italics:
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and
a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor
state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status
or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
Sullivan argues that this would make same-sex civil unions unconstitutional.
I'm not so sure (and do keep in mind I think this amendment is a really bad
idea - my point is just that AS is misreading this element of it). What that
second, tangled, sentence says to me is that state or federal courts cannot
read into the US or any state constitution a requirement that marriage
or something like it be extended to "unmarried couples or groups" where such
a requirement is not there explicitly. This seems to me to be an attempt to
prevent the "imposition" of civil unions or
full-blown
marriage for same-sex couples through what the right perceives as "judicial
fiat." It leaves open that states could allow civil unions through constitutional
amendment or some other legislative process that would expressly permit it.
The key phrase is "construed to require." That phrase seems to get at the right's
fear of judicial imposition of civil unions and still allow a legislative enactment,
which it, I guess, could live with.
Sullivan seems to believe the language of the amendment would also prevent
the enactment of civil unions through the state legislatures, in contrast to
the NYT reporter saying that route is still available. My reading is that the
NYT is right and AS is wrong. Am I crazy? (Well, I'm no crazier than folks who think that a constitutional amendment that cuts same-sex couples out of marriage is a good idea...)
I suppose I should talk about economics from time to time, so here's an excellent
piece on outsourcing by
Bruce Bartlett.
The various debates over free trade and globalization continue to remind me how
important a longer-run historical perspective is. So much of what's happening
today in the poorer parts of the world parallels
similar processes during the growth of the West 200 or more years ago. As well,
the movement from manufacturing to information/services in the West, parallels
the movement away from agrarianism in the West 100 or so years ago. Lastly, the
nationalism that pervades this debate (and the immigration one!) also bothers
me a great deal. The argument for the free movement of goods, services, and people
is that it makes everyone better off, not that it makes Americans better
off. If American workers suffer some short-term losses so that Indians can substantially
improve their well being through outsourced jobs, or that Mexican immigrants
can do the same by coming to the US, then let's go for it. The US will benefit
over time, of course, but that shouldn't be the primary concern.
...that The Beatles landed at JFK and that I was born in a hospital in Detroit. Hitting 40 gives me
a chance to think back over my adult life a bit and prompts me to make a couple
of remarks about the liberty half of liberty and power.
I first got interested in libertarianism around the time of the Ed Clark campaign
in 1980. How I got there is a story for another time, if I am so requested.
I was in high school at the time and had no idea what I wanted to do with either
my new-found politics or the rest of my life. I enrolled at the University
of Michigan in 1981, planning to do something in computer science. Thanks to
taking economics on a bit of a lark (I needed a fifth course, and I figured
I should know some if I was going to keep having to defend this liberty stuff),
those plans soon changed. But my life story is not the issue here...
At that time, and then in four years of grad school at George Mason, the future
of liberty seemed dim indeed. The Berlin Wall still stood, and the intellectual
breakthroughs that would happen in the 80s were underway but had yet to filter
down to the rest of the intellectual structure of production. It was also the
early days of the so-called "PC" movement on college campuses (we fought off
an early speech code at Michigan). And while Reagan sometimes talked the talk,
there wasn't much sense he walked the walk on free markets, and certainly not
on social issues. Of course there were some positive signs - I'm proud of the
fact that two of the first published pieces I ever wrote were in the first
few issues of The Michigan Review, one of the first papers intended as alternatives
to campus leftism.
Even in grad school, my colleagues and I were generally pessimistic about
the future of our ideas, both libertarianism generally and Austrian economics
specifically. Of course my good friend Pete Boettke had a 50 year plan, but
we figured that was the product of his "engine of creativity without a clutch"
(to borrow from Kenneth Boulding's description of Frank Knight). And we were
all concerned about whether, as out of the closet Austrian economists, we could
even find tenure-track jobs in economics.
But here I am at age 40, and almost everything we worried about has not come
to pass. The intellectual world has changed mightily and free market, libertarian,
and Austrian ideas have a respect and legitimacy that I don't think any of
us imagined they would. Pete and I and others who were at GMU in that period
have all, more or less, found great jobs and have tenure, with many of us having
various administrative or programmatic responsibilities, suggesting a level
of trust in our abilities that transcends any concerns about ideology. Libertarian
academics have published and made contributions not just to libertarian thought,
but to their own disciplines and research areas in ways that I don't think
any of us would have dreamed possible in the early and mid 80s. Libertarian
and related ideas have spread beyond their early narrow life in economics,
political science, and philosophy to the other social sciences and humanities,
as well
as the
arts and sciences. There is a virtual tidal wave of work on Hayek that's coming
from all over the intellectual map. These are amazing developments that have
exceeded what were my most optimistic expectations as an undergrad and grad
student. And I do think the world is a freer place, in total, than it was 20
years ago when I began my career.
When I look at my own career to this point, I actually have the same feeling
of having exceeded my own expectations, but I think that success is at least
as much about very good changes in the world that have made that success possible.
I am by nature an unrelenting optimist, about both people and the future.
I'm also convinced that we live in the best of times right now. We are, I would
argue, freer, more prosperous, and more secure than any time in human history
(despite the threat of terrorism, etc.). If I could raise my children at any
time in human history, it would be right now.
Forty, shmorty. There's no time for moping when there's a world to enjoy and
more progress to be made.
Just a few hours after I noted how the Democrats will start to dance and waffle
on same-sex marriage, along comes John Kerry with some fancy footwork. From today's
WSJ Best of the
Web:
In a statement on Wednesday night, Mr. Kerry clearly sought a middle
ground. He said he believed in protecting the "fundamental rights of gay and lesbian
couples, from inheritance to health benefits," but added that he believed
the answer was civil unions.
"I oppose gay marriage and disagree with the Massachusetts court's decision," he
said.
To be sure, Kerry has tried to have it both ways on the issue of same-sex
marriage, as Ed Gillespie, the Republican National Committee chairman, notes
in the Times:
Mr. Gillespie . . . noted that Mr. Kerry voted against the 1996 Defense of
Marriage Act, barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages, a measure
that was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
Mr. Kerry said at the time that while he opposed same-sex marriage, he
was voting against the bill because "I believe that this debate is
fundamentally ugly, and it is fundamentally political, and it is fundamentally
flawed."
Well, thanks to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, same-sex marriage moves from
simmer to full boil. It nothing else, the spectacle of Bush attempting to appease
the Religious Right by head-faking toward a constitutional amendment while managing
to never really go that way and alienate the majority of Americans will be equalled
only by the spectacle of the Democratic nominee (whichever one is deemed "electable"
this week) trying to appease the left wing core activists in the party by supporting
"something" for same-sex couples but not having the guts, or risking
the same votes Bush risks, by actually being in favor of calling it "marriage."
In but a few years we've gone from what "is" is to what "marriage"
is. Progress? Eh.
In the WSJ this morning, Mitt
Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, has an op-ed that exemplifies one
of the main problems with the conservative position on this issue: its historical
ignorance. He writes:
Contrary to the court's opinion, marriage is not "an evolving paradigm."
It is deeply rooted in the history, culture and tradition of civil society.
It predates our Constitution and our nation by millennia. The institution
of marriage was not created by government and it should not be redefined by
government.
Yes indeed, it does predate "us." But in that long and lovely history,
marriage has taken many forms, and the participants in marriage have had a dizzying
array of rights, options, and roles. And cross-culturally, we are all, I think,
aware of the range of arrangements that constitute marriage. So, Mr. Governor,
marriage IS an evolving paradigm. If it hadn't evolved, we'd still be back at
women as chattel and same-color only, just to mention two contemporary examples.
And yes, it wasn't created by government, but the question at hand is who
is redefining it? Heterosexuals have, over even just the last 100 years, significantly
redefined marriage and governments have normally, though not always, followed
in their wake by changing the law to reflect de facto practice. The reality
of the early 21st century is that same-sex couples are, in many case, de facto
married. Granting those relationships legal protection is not redefining marriage
- that's already happening. It's simply codifying practice and recognizing the
ongoing evolution of the institution. Much as marriage evolved to recognize
women's full equality and our lack of concern over the skin color of the partners,
it is now evolving to include same-sex couples. That's not government redefinition,
that's social evolution.
Romney continues:
Marriage is a fundamental and universal social institution. It encompasses
many obligations and benefits affecting husband and wife, father and mother,
son and daughter. It is the foundation of a harmonious family life. It is
the basic building block of society: The development, productivity and happiness
of new generations are bound inextricably to the family unit. As a result,
marriage bears a real relation to the well-being, health and enduring strength
of society.
All fair enough. In fact, it would be wonderful if heterosexual marriages
actually did all that! But the question is what all of this has to do with excluding
gays and lesbians. If it's so damn important, why don't we want more people
involved in it? (And watch out when "new generations" gets invoked
- that's heading for trouble.)
Because of marriage's pivotal role, nations and states have chosen to provide
unique benefits and incentives to those who choose to be married. These benefits
are not given to single citizens, groups of friends, or couples of the same
sex. That benefits are given to married couples and not to singles or gay
couples has nothing to do with discrimination; it has everything to do with
building a stable new generation and nation.
Oooooooooh, "stability" is it? You mean there's something "unstable"
about same-sex couples? (Not to mention all the "stable" heterosexual
couples that are keeping marriage and families so healthy.) So it's not about
discrimination, yet allowing same-sex couples into the institution will destablize
it. Unfortunately, the governnor chose not to expand on this point, but I'd
love to hear what he thinks is so unstable about same-sex relationships, or
how they will destabilize society writ large.
And look what's back! Our old friend "new generation." Once again,
marriage rights are linked to procreation to justify the exclusion of gays and
lesbians. Tell me Governor, if it's all about building a "stable new generation,"
will you ask the people of Massachusetts to support a law banning marriage by
infertile couples, and requiring all married couples to have children?
If not, what damage is done to a "stable new generation" by allowing
same-sex couples the same freedom to share their lives together that is enjoyed
by heterosexual couples who either can't have, or don't want, children?
As I noted in an earlier post, there are plausible arguments against full legal
recognition of same-sex marriage, but those arguments, at least from a broadly
liberal perspective, are going to have to show some demonstrable harm to third
parties from it, and further demonstrate, in my view, that such harms aren't
already at play with current practice. If same-sex marriage poses a threat to
"stable new generations," then why aren't we outlawing other practices
that do, e.g. divorce, childlessness, and putting kids in day care, if the conservatives
are to be believed? The inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, of most of the conservative
arguments against same-sex marriage is so transparent that it's no wonder they
face the accusation of discrimination, and feel compelled to be defensive about
it. Most conservatives are smart people. Given that, how else to explain the
obvious weakness of their arguments other than it being a case of a tortured
intellectual opposition to something they just find "icky"?
When I read these conservative anti-same-sex marriage screeds, my belief that
Margaret Atwood's wonderful book The
Handmaid's Tale is a bit overwrought as a cautionary tale just gets
eroded away a little bit more.
Robert's comments about the Deming case are largely on the money from my perspective.
As much as that story is about an attack on one faculty member's tenure, it's far more of an administrative horror story (as I noted in the comments section of
my original post). The irony, of course, is that I am an associate dean these
days, so I suppose I should view these all as cautionary tales. My own guess
is that, like the problem of political correctness, the problem of rogue administrators
is worst at mid-level state universities (as opposed to top Tier I schools),
where it's more likely that you'll find faculty and deans who overestimate their
importance both in terms of their intellectual contributions and their ability
to make the trains run on time. At a place like mine, a small upper Tier II liberal
arts college, these things are less of a problem, I think.
I'm in the third year of a three-year administrative appointment and my dean
has just begun a campus-wide performance review. He has specifically asked
for letters from folks who work closely with me, and will send out a broader
campus call for information shortly. That's one way to get accountability I
suppose. In a small place, with relatively few layers of administration in
academic affairs, that's probably easier to do. In any case, I don't see the
systematic threat to tenure, nor do I see Deming's situation as just being
about tenure. It certainly points to other problems in higher ed, as Robert
rightly notes.
Although I generally agree with the tenor of Robert's questions about Charles'
concerns over tenure (namely that it's not so "under threat"), every once in awhile something like this
comes along, and I get deeply concerned. Thanks to Instapundit
for the pointer.
Wow, things are heating up in this little corner of cyberspace! Mark is trying
to out-libertarian David Bernstein (I caught the same point in David's op-ed)
and Arthur is calling W treasonous for trying to enshrine heterosexual marriage
in the Constitution. Hard to argue with either of those positions! For those
interested in the same-sex marriage issue, there was quite an intense debate
over on the Hayek-L
list the week before last that might be worth looking at. The thread headers
should be obvious. I will just add, about my own participation in that debate,
that my position is identical to Arthur's: ideally the state should be out
of marriage, but in the world in which we live where the state is involved,
as should be the case with all such involvements, it may not discriminate in
its actions.
The conservative animus toward same-sex marriage never ceases to amaze me.
It cannot be explained, in my view, by any rational objection. The good news
is that I see much less of this animus among my students, including those who
are otherwise pretty conservative. In the end, the conservative objection often amounts
to philosophically tortured attempts to justify the
"naturalness"
or "genital compatibility" of heterosexual marriage/procreation, ignoring when
such marriages involve infertile persons or placing genitals where they, supposedly,
don't belong. If not that, it becomes a really weak attempt to construct evidence
and argument where none exists, e.g. Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz's
argument has been
ably destroyed by Andrew
Sullivan, and it's worth repeating that if one of
my first-year students tried to make an argument that failed to distinguish
causation and correlation and so blatantly over-looked or discounted a dozen
intervening variables, I'd make her rewrite the paper.
At the end of the day, the only reasonable objection is one that attempts
to address Mill's harm principle: somehow same-sex marriage harms third parties.
Kurtz's argument that it undermines the institution of marriage might qualify
if there was any evidence, or if it weren't the case that heterosexuals are doing such
a good job at undermining it themselves. If someone could make the argument
that same-sex marriage meant same-sex couples parenting more frequently and
could
provide
evidence
that children raised in such homes are somehow harmed, that would be more persuasive.
Unfortunately, the evidence I'm aware of suggests there are no major differences
in psychological outcomes for children of same-sex parents as compared to children
of opposite sex parents. And we certainly know that the evidence does suggest
that, ceteris paribus, two parents are better than one (not to mention the
fate of so many children languishing in foster care and orphanages). That those who claim to support "family values" are so eager to prevent people who wish to form familes
from doing so, and to thereby reduce the number of families available to take
in children who have none, is the height of hypocrisy and makes me sad and angry. In that order.
Thanks to Chris Coyne, graduate student extraordinaire at George Mason's Economics
department, I give you my quote of the day:
"The immense majority strives after a greater and better supply of
food, clothes, homes, and other material amenities. In calling a rise in
the masses'
standard of living progress and improvement, economists do not espouse
a mean materialism. They simply establish the fact that people are motivated
by the
urge to improve the material conditions of their existence. They judge
policies from the point of view of the aims men want to attain. He who disdains
the
fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues
may cast the first stone upon the materialism of economists."
- Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 193
It never ceases to amaze me how those who defend capitalism are quickly labeled
as selfish
and cruel despite the evidence to the contrary. The difficulty in making
discussions focus on the means and not the ends is equally
frustrating. I guess it's just too easy to assume the worst intentions of those
with whom we disagree.
Will's post below is right on the
money, especially this bit:
Conservatives tend to see the feminist movement and the so-called sexual
revolution as perverse, willful repudiations of the sorts of regulative convention
that make civilization possible. Yet here we are; civilization remains. And
they fail to relate these cultural shifts to the ongoing development of capitalism,
which, in other moods, they are only too eager praise. The increased economic
autonomy of women, of which the feminist movement is as much a response as
a cause, fundamentally alters the terms of sexual and marital relations,
and thereby fundamentally alters the social meaning of man- and womanhood
This is a point I've tried to make in other contexts: pining for a world where
markets are free and vigorous and the culture remains untouched is asking for
the impossible. Conservatives just seem to miss this entirely. It is the very
wealth, technology, and resources devoted to education that capitalism has
made possible that has been largely responsible for the profound changes
in gender roles that we've seen in the last 35 years. To claim to support free
markets yet to expect that these sorts of changes can be prevented, stopped,
or reversed is just not possible. You can't stand athwart the market and yell
"stop." This is one reason why I really like Virginia Postrel's work. She
gets the dynamism of the market-culture interaction.
Will is also quite right to note that the feminist movement is "as much a response
as cause" of the increased economic independence of women. If you look at the
data on female labor force participation, it was climbing well before the 1960s,
suggesting that the feminist movement may well have been more a response to
the fact that women were getting out there in the market and realizing the
changes that needed to take place culturally and legally. A very readable book
on all of this is Stephanie Coontz's "The
Way We Never Were."
Will's post also raises another question that fascinates me: economic theory
predicts (and Dick McKenzie and Gordon Tullock did so explicitly in 1975) that
as women's wages rise, the burden of housework should shift more toward men.
If the division of labor between the market and the household is driven by
the opportunity cost of each partner's time, then as the cost of women's time
at
home rises
with
their wages, we should see them doing less housework and men doing more, at
least relative to each other if not absolutely. The evidence from time diaries
is that men have picked up, no pun intended, a bit more of the work in the
household, but not nearly in proportion to the gain in women's wages. It's
an interesting question why women continue to bear the burden of what sociologists
call the "second shift." I have a few thoughts on why, but I'm going to hold
those for a bit. What's interesting to me is the ways in which libertarians
have largely not investigated these sorts of cultural questions, nor do we
feel especially comfortable discussing them if there's no apparent link to
the intervention of the state. I think that's a mistake - in the long run,
if libertarianism is going to gain ground both intellectually and politically,
it's going to have to address these sorts of questions. They take up too much
space in many people's day-to-day existence to just shrug because the state
has no big role.
I don't know if folks saw these two pieces by Virginia Postrel on Sunday. The
first is a long Boston Globe "ideas" piece on Hayek
that is very well done. There's a companion piece on Hayek and gay marriage here.
I post these not just because they are of possible interest but also because I'm
quoted in the gay marriage piece and in an odd sort of way. During a debate over
at The Corner on National Review Online, where several folks were saying Hayek
would oppose same-sex marriages, I sent an email to Jonah Goldberg arguing the
contrary. I hedged my phrasing to the right a bit, trying to make sure it got
mentioned, which it did. Well Virginia saw it there and then used it in her piece,
so now my hastily constructed and very hedged email language has appeared in a
major daily newspaper! The world of the Internet continues to be a wild and wacky
place.
A friend just sent me this piece on Adobe including code in Photoshop that prevents users from copying and manipulating images of many of the world's major currencies, presumably to prevent counterfeiting. There are a couple of worrisome things here, including the state apparently requesting/demanding that such code be included in private software, and Adobe agreeing and not informing customers about it. In addition, it would seems to be a limit on free speech to the extent artists might like to use Photoshop to create artistic images that involved currency. (Not to mention the fact that manipulating the image of currency is not per se illegal.) But I'd like to make a point that I haven't seen raised elsewhere: once again, this whole situation
creates problems,and a bad precedent for state involvement, precisely because of the existence of state monopoly central banks. Where states control the currency, they will act in understandable ways to protect those monopoly rents, and presumably pressuring Adobe into doing this would be one of those ways.
In a world of competitive banking, not only would banks have plenty of good reason to make their currencies hard to counterfeit (and banks did so historically, before central banking), they could also negotiate competitively with companies like Adobe to make these sorts of deals. Adobe would certainly be in a better position to resist where the power of the state is not involved, but rather the more decentralized forms of power we see in the market. Moreover, banks and/or software manufacturers could test the market to see whether customers really cared about an issue like this, or whether they were indifferent. The discovery processes of the market would both allow for more options and put more pressure on all parties concerned to be more forthcoming about what is and is not in their software.
Just a quick response to David's post from
earlier: isn't the denial of rights to ex-felons a good example of a punishment approach to law-breaking as opposed to a restitution approach? If one sees the legal system as inflicting punishment, then refusing to allow ex-felons to vote or own guns might make sense. However, if one thinks in terms of restitution, then someone who has paid their debt, either literally or in time served, has made full restitution and should start with a clean slate. (Whether or not the logic of "starting" with a clean slate" applies to all ex-felons is an interesting question. Are there some crimes that are likely to be repeated even after time is served, e.g., child molestation? If so, is it so easy to assume the "clean slate"?)
A conversation on a Usenet group brought up an observation I've noted about the classical liberal/libertarian movement that has persisted over the course of the now more than 20 years I've been involved. There are, and have been, a goodly number of prominent gay men in both the academic and policy sides of the movement for many, many years, and the Libertarian Party has had a gay rights plank and gay men involved for many years as well. And in the more recent past, there's been a flourishing of openly gay conservative men. All this is to the good I think. But it raises an interesting question: why don't we see many (any?) prominent libertarian lesbians?
Now perhaps they are there and I just don't know about them, and if so, mea culpa, and please don't name names! Still, given the increasing numbers of libertarian women in the academic, policy, and political worlds, it's surprising that open lesbians remain so few in number or at least so far below the radar.
Obviously, I'm not trying to out people, but it is curious and the real question to me is whether or not there's something about the way libertarianism is couched, or about the underlying ideas (perhaps maybe the focus on rights?) that makes it far more attractive to homosexual men than women. I'm also not interested in launching a recruiting drive; nonetheless, it remains a fascinating question about the culture of the libertarian movement and the broader culture as well. (I also think a parallel argument can be made about the conservative movement.) It's the question of "why" that I find fascinating. Of course I may start hearing that I need to check my premise here! If my initial assumption is wrong, I'm happy to hear about it.
I saw this
piece from the Manchester Union-Leader on Wes Clark and couldn't help but notice this comment:
The retired four-star general said he will discern a prospective judge's position on abortion not with a litmus test, but by reading his previous decisions to ensure that the judge has never upset existing judicial precedent.
"I don't believe people whose ideological agenda is to burn the
law or remake the law or reshape it should be appointed whether they are from either side,"; he said during an interview with editors and a reporter.
"I just want good, solid people with judicial temperament who respect the process of law that we have in America."
Does he really mean, abortion aside, that he'll only appoint people who never upset precedent? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't a key part of a judge's job to discern whether new circumstance produce good reasons for new law? After all, precedents came from somewhere. Doesn't respecting "the process of law" include recognizing that sometimes precedent is wrong? Too bad the reporter didn't ask him if his view suggests that the judges who comprised the majority in Lawrence v. Texas should be removed from the bench! Seems to me this view of judges is itself a dangerous precedent.
My apologies if my html is bad in this first post.
I just wanted to post a quick hello and to thank you all for inviting me on board. I've been a reasonably regular reader for the last few months and have enjoyed your contributions. It's particularly nice to be here with several folks I know (Dave, Don, Chris, Sheldon) and others (such as Rod, Gene, and King) who I've met briefly over the years. King may not remember when we met - I interviewed for a job at SCSU back in 89 and didn't get an offer. (I won't hold that against him though.)
The links Chris provided give you a good sense of my professional and not-so-professional life. In addition to what's there, I have a current interest in issues of gender and family, having taught both economics and first-year seminar courses on the topics for several years. I think family issues are particularly challenging ones for classical liberals and libertarians, and find exploring them to be
endlessly fascinating. I also love TV and rock music, and am always on the lookout for ways to link those topics to my more academic and political interests. Finally, as a result of spending the last 15 years at a liberal arts college, I'm very interested in issues of pedagogy, from the nitty-gritty of how you teach first-year students to write a substantial research paper, to the role of technology in higher education, to issues of political correctness and ideology in the classroom.
One last word: now that I've gone over to the dark side as a half to full-time administrator, I'm particularly grateful to be part of this group, as I need all the opportunities to engage in this sort of give-and-take that I can find.
Thanks again for having me. Substance will follow.
