I'm naturally a libertarian. Hatred (not dislike) of people telling me (or anyone else) what to do is as natural as breathing. And I've been consistently libertarian since I started reading the Economist magazine when I was 10. I've oscillated, for sure, between being a moderately committed minarchist of the night-watchman state variety, and a moderately committed anarchist of the Friedman II persuasion. But the core libertarianism: it is evil to tell someone else what to do under threat of violence...has been a permanent fixture throughout my life, well before I was an adult. I worship at the altar of truth, and morons with big sticks or guns attempt to get me to follow their idiocies, rather than truth. F them.
In the last 2 years, my core libertarianism has undergone two shifts.
First, and less importantly, I have taken the left libertarian label. In the Aretaevian formulation, a leftist is one who considers the protection of the weak to be a primary goal of society. In terms of justice/ethics, marginal impacts on the weak MUST be weighted more highly than marginal impacts on the rich, else you're insane, and ignoring marginal utility. A libertarian is one who is largely or completely opposed to government action. A left libertarian is one who opposes government action generally, but who believes that the goal of a society should indeed be to protect its weak. Hence, the left-libertarian believes that the evils of government are primarily concentrated in what evils the government does to the poor...and that the features of government that most need abolished are those that unfairly preserve to power/influence of the rich, and force the poor/weak into wage-slavery roles. Intellectual Property, Factory Schooling, Licensing Laws, and contractor restrictions are the kinds of things we rail against it.
Second, and even more importantly than my left-libertarian anarchism, is my recognition of the near-infinite fungibility of Wealth in general. It is certainly true that at many (most) margins, an extra unit of wealth is (rationally) preferred by the citizenry (especially the poor/weak) to an extra unit of liberty. Furthermore, extra wealth is multiplicative, while extra liberty is at best additive, and likely not even that. If you want better environmental protection? pursue a richer society who can afford it. If you want lower violent crime? Pursue a richer society which naturally has less. If you want more liberty? Pursue a richer society that can afford it. If you want a higher Gross National Happiness? Pursue a richer society that can build it. Better health? Wealth. If you want a more equal (by consumption) society? More wealth gives greater equality.
The best, most reliable path to almost all positive goals is more wealth. However, more wealth is fundamentally and deeply anti-conservative. The poor are stuck in situations that they would prefer to exit...and are kept there only by the constraints of insufficient money. Traditional institutions are built to solve resource-constraint problems that fade as median wealth increases. Wealth buys you Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, and tolerance of those types, in addition to all the good stuff. Always has, always will. Cope.
Combining growth rate obsessiveness and left-libertarianism...politics is the means by which the current elite use violence to preserve their families relative positions as elite. Economic growth via entrepreneurial creative destruction (the only path) is necessarily and profoundly disruptive of relative positions in the social hierarchy, and is necessarily opposed by the current elite. The political fight that matters is the suppression of the current power blocks' ability to slow economic growth by preserving their power. And the only path to said diminution of elites' power (3rd level public choice) are states that need to compete for citizens.
So my other radical transformation has been that as a value-theorist...I am required to push the social goal of higher growth OVER the social goal of higher liberty. That doesn't mean I think the folks "nudging" with guns aren't evil, and don't deserve a tall tree and a short rope. But Growth Rate is the god-metric on which societies must be evaluated.
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10 comments:
what about the argument that Protecting the weak=subsidizing weakness= getting more of it?
HBD? Bell Curves?
Or the idea that all human polities tend to become violent and expansive because military superiority is the only way to avoid external threats?
Spandrell,
Buying weakness is the strongest argument I'm aware of against protecting the weak. But it's a deep, deep human ethical drive. And you ain't going to dodge it by saying there are costs. The question is how you manage the protection of the weak, not whether you choose it.
HBD is simply information as to how to effectively help the weak. See Charles Murray's discussions.
Polities become violent because they can paint the enemy as "other". You can't get an army to attack their own brothers. For instance, everyone I know has family all over the country. You couldn't get the independent republic of Illinois to attack the independent republic of Indiana in < 100 years...because the populaces are too intertwined.
Well Indian brahmins don´t seem to care much about their weak, besides making sure they clean their crap fast. So its a culture-specific drive at most.
I've been for long in East Asia and let me tell you they don´t share your ethics.
And how much of historical noblesse oblige sentiments are just a survival strategy? Basically modern liberal politicians redistributive retoric is just a ploy to expand the state apparatus, and their power in it.
Issue #1:
In the standard Haidt typology of ethics, there are 6 basic ethical values.
Libertarians like
Autonomy
Liberals like Autonomy, but also like
Fairness/Equality and
Harm/Care
Conservatives like all 3 of the above, but also:
Ingroup/Loyalty
Purity/Sanctity
Authority/Respect
I would argue that Indian Brahmins have 3 things going on.
1. Insufficient societal wealth to deal with poor/weakness properly.
2. A very careful ingroup/outgroup maneuver that puts non-brahmins in the outgroup.
3. A high weighting of authority/respect over other issues.
Loyalty/Ingroup
It is possible at times for the ingroup/outgroup
Issue #2:
I just read Piven on Noblesse Oblige as a survival strategy. Lots. And for sure, liberal politicians use redistributive rhetoric to expand state apparatus just as conservative politicians use free market rhetoric as a ploy to expand state power over business. Politicians are, by public choice analysis, necessarily pro-power more than they are pro- anything else. Observation concurs.
That doesn't mean, however, that the people voting aren't voting in order to get more equality. Just that politicians and elites are able to deceive very well, rather than delivering what folks actually want.
I assert:
Empirics are pretty much united on the fact that any organized attempt to protect the weak will harm your god-metric.
Would you agree?
I would interpret this to mean that any intentional or societal-level attempt to protect the weak does so at the expense of the future weak.
This also ties into a point I want to make on your Caplan link.
Alrenous.
1. Well said, but it's relatively small effect compared to other government actions.
2. Future weak are less weak/poor than the current weak, assuming any positive growth rate. Present weak thus get precedence under marginal utilities.
3. Removing pro-rich regulation (licensing, IP law), and enabling predictability and entrepreneurship (bankruptcy law making it low-pain to fail, for instance) has a MUCH larger impact on growth rates than does social insurance, as witnessed by the Nordic countries. Social insurance is only a drop in the bucket.
I would point out that policies that increase wealth will make everyone wealthier, and hence also benefit the weak.
Therefore, not all policies that protect the weak harm growth. This means it isn't always a choice you have to make.
Growth is good for everyone, but there´s this concept who formalists et al tend to ignore, called "justice".
I would call it "societal balance". In a free economy bigger growth leads to bigger wealth disparities.And poor people have a will to power too. Which means violence. If they see a non-religiously mandated closed ruling class, they will hate it. With a passion.
yago,
Claim: as an average...for all people.
Power over other people is worth 8 hedons, Autonomy is worth 7, and subservience is worth negative 15. It is a profound real bad for people to be subservient.
2. The formalists don't seem to me to ignore justice. Their conception relies more on desert, and the conservative moral foundations, rather than the narrower liberal or libertarian moral foundations.
3. May I recommend the book, Hierarchy in the Forest. really well done explanation. In the primitive world, the attempt to order others is worth a death sentence.
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