Smaller pie, fairer slices.
(posted by Angelica)
Sorry for the lack of posting, all. I’ve been on holiday in Japan and then started a new job the day after I got back to Taipei. But one of the good things going on holiday is good for is reading books, which I never seem to get around to in my normal life anymore.
From my vacation reading (Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen) comes this fascinating nugget about life expectancy in Britain.
Interdecade comparisons, based on decadal censuses, show that by a very wide margin the most speedy expansion of life expectancy occured precisely during the two “war decades” [that is, 1911-21 and 1940-51]. While in the other decades life expectancy rose rather moderately (between one and four years), in each of the two war decades it jumped up by nearly seven years.
Britain had to undergo food rationing during the wars, especially during WWII. But what food there was, people were willing to share in a time of national crisis, posits Sen, and that accounts for the counterintuitive increase in life expectancy during the two decades containing the world wars.
Each war situation produced much greater sharing of means of survival, including sharing of health care and the limited food supply (through rationing and subsidized nutrition)…It is in fact, confirmed by detailed nutritional studies that during the Second World War, even though the per capita availability of food fell significantly in Britain, cases of undernourishment also declined sharply, and extreme undernourishment almost entirely disappeared. Mortality rates also went down sharply (except of course for war mortality itself). A similar thing had happened during the First World War.
To me, the fact that such an important measurement of welfare as an expansion of life expectancy can go up during such times of deprivation because of greater sharing of what’s available is a compelling reason to adopt a liberal rather than a libertarian point of view. Some sharing in the form of government sponsored healthcare and social safety nets to take the edge off inequality is humane and increases total welfare. I therefore find those programs desirable even though they mean I would have to pay taxes I’d rather not and at a cost to total economic efficiency.
Inequality is a scourge that is not going to go away. As technology advances, multiplying the productivity of the most skilled workers and rendering the services of less skilled workers increasingly worthless, we are entering a time where even healthy economic growth on a macro level do not translate into higher household incomes for the bulk of us.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
I think Kevin Carson and Sean Gabb of the UK Libertarian Alliance have both worked out pretty good positions on this. Kevin argues that we should seek to dismantle the state according to a certain hierarchy of priorities as opposed to the vulgar libertarian credo of “cut taxes and deregulate”. Kevin’s position is that we should first eliminate the military-industrial complex, central banking, corporate welfare and other such measures that institutionalize artificial privilege and create the fiefdoms of modern state-capitalism. Once such state-imposed privilege has been eliminated, then we can move on to dismantling social welfare which will have been rendered superfluous in his view. Kevin, am I summarizing your views accurately?
Sean Gabb argues that in the process of shutting down the present ruling class we should avoid creation of a constituency for the return to power of that ruling class. This means keeping welfare systems and other public services large numbers of people are dependent on in tact, at least for the time being, so these folks don’t get restless and starting agitating for a return to power of the old elites. In the US this would be things like veterans benefits, social security, civil service pensions, student aid, social welfare programs with large numbers of beneficiaries, etc.
The way to preserve these things and simultaneously cut taxes and spending might be to eliminate the bureaucratic middlemen that manage these programs in favor of direct payments to recipients like Milton Friedman’s idea of a Negative Income Tax, a guaranteed annual income or the distributist idea of a living wage. Also the management of such institutions could be placed in the hands of mutualist consumer cooperatives, claimants’ unions, workers’ councils, municipalities or other institutions outside the central government.
If there must be taxes of some kind, I tend to favor eliminating personal income taxes (start by cutting taxes from the bottom up) in favor of higher import taxes.
April 6th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Angelica,
There’s a strong case to be made that the unequal slicing actually makes the pie smaller. All the vulgar libertarian defenses of inequality argue that it leads to greater total wealth. But if the present degree of inequality results from statist privilege, that means that the wages of labor are being artificially lowered and senior management salaries and returns on capital are being artificially increased. So the process actually reduces the normal market incentive toward productivity on the part of the producing classes, and rewards the idleness of the rentier classes. This has exactly the effect that most libertarians ordinarily predict: reducing economic output by punishing industry and rewarding laziness. They vulgar libertarians are just ass-backward on who the industrious and lazy *are*.
Privilege hampers productivity in another way. By artificially concentrating large amounts of capital and land in the hands of the plutocracy, and artifically raising the normally expected rate of return on land and capital, it creates an incentive for holding land and capital out of productive use. Take the example of a piece of vacant and unimproved land, which by any legitimate theory of property should be considered unowned. If it were open to homesteading free of charge by an unemployed laborer, the only threshold for judging it “profitable” enough to bring into use would be meeting the subsistence needs of the laborer and his family. On the other hand, when vacant land is engrossed by an absentee landlord, it is not considered profitable to bring into use unless it will produce enough to feed the worker and his family PLUS provide a rent to the landlord. Same goes for profit on capital: many capital investments that would make labor more productive and result in a net efficiency increase are withheld because they don’t produce a *sufficient* productivity increase to fund a rentier income, in addition. So land and capital with which labor could comfortably support itself are held out of use, because they don’t produce a sufficient surplus to feed the useless eaters in addition.
Keith,
Sean Gabb also argued for replacing the welfare state with something like a basic income, and shifting taxation to fund it mostly onto land value and suchlike. IMO simply taking the taxes off the income of those with a “high propensity to consume,” and taxing land and resource consumption and negative externalities, would result in the longest sustained economic boom since the postwar period. If Obama (or whoever) made the centerpiece of his agenda 1) raising the personal income tax deduction to $40,000 and funding it with the elimination of all corporate welfare, and 2) totally replacing the SS payroll tax with a carbon tax, he’d guarantee the Democrats a lock-in for the next generation.
April 6th, 2008 at 2:00 am
I’m sure it exists in other engineering fields, but in network engineering and in software development you’ll occasionally hear references to “the solution” and “the real solution.” The idea being that if there is an unacceptable scenario creeping up due to the design of a system, a response can be almost anything, but the proper response is to say that the system is fundamentally flawed and didn’t take this into account.
Similar logic applies here I think. Here, the “real solution” seems to me to be to explain to people who advocate government programs how it “breaks” the system. The fact that the Monsanto labelling fiasco wasn’t a bigger deal in the MSM amazes me. The New York Times did a decent bit on it, but no one seemed to pick up on the fact all Monsanto had to do was ask for favoritism and they got it. That was a missed chance to explain how modern corporations operate.
April 6th, 2008 at 3:30 am
‘Take the example of a piece of vacant and unimproved land, which by any legitimate theory of property should be considered unowned. If it were open to homesteading free of charge by an unemployed laborer, the only threshold for judging it “profitable” enough to bring into use would be meeting the subsistence needs of the laborer and his family.’
Unfortunately, this does not work as a general principle, as there are cases where it backfires. I seem to have heard of one elsewhere: what if someone wants to preserve some unspoiled wilderness, say? The principle, applied simplistically, says you can have any use of land except that. It brings in a need for regulation and policing, however you decide to refine the principle, if you go the conventional route for handling the issue.
That’s not a hypothetical you can counter with “things will so arrange themselves that the issue will not arise”, either, unless you can engineer in things to keep down Malthusian pressure and whatever, i.e. so that the counter isn’t just an unsubstantiated hope but that there really are things working to make it so. I have heard of a wilderness area in Madagascar today that only exists because a French colonist wanted to hold it back so that there would be an unspoiled area.
April 6th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Kevin C,
Please flesh out a bit more your view on property. I do not see that many plots of vacant and unimproved land lying about anymore and I highly doubt if those were available to subsistence farmers, we would solve our poverty problem.
Keith,
Even supposing that it is possible to dismantle the state, what’s there to say that inequalities would not exist in a state-free society? You guys point out that state-granted monopolies could be a source of inequality, but the twin factor of technological advancement and economies of scale means that as society progresses, the individual productivity of workers are going to get even more disparate.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Angelica,
On the question of dismantling the state, I agree with Martin Van Creveld’s analysis that the massive state bureaucracies that have developed over the past two centuries are in the process of decline. He outlined this view a bit in this lecture:
http://www.mises.org/story/527
And I elaborate on the implications of his theories here:
http://attackthesystem.blogspot.com/2008/01/next-radicalism-rightism-without.html
I would make a distinction between the modern state and “government” in the wider sense. The state as we know it emerged as a corporate entity with a legal personhood of its own in the early modern period and in the twentieth century was expanded to its present Hobbesian-Leviathan levels. Even the anarchist Kropotkin saw a distinction between the modern state and historic government. It may be that government itself will never disappear. I’m with Proudhon on this, viewing statelessness as an ideal like world peace to be worked for, but one that will never be fully realized. Just a clarification.
On the question of inequality, I suspect you and I might have a different hierarchy of values. For instance, I have no problem with inequality itself. I accept that people are not equal in many, many ways, whether as individuals or groups. I do oppose exploitive artificial privilege of the type imposed by state-capitalism and some other systems, but I accept that even without this artificial privilege there may still be inequality. I have no problem with that in and of itself.
I think what you’re really getting at is the question that if inequality, however it comes about, is such that it seriously reduces the lifespan, health, quality of existence, etc. for some people due to the nature of the economy or technology, with or without parasitical exploiters, is not “welfare statism” justified in the name of preventing disease, death, deprivation,etc. for certain sectors of the population whose only fault is not being able to keep with the modern economy?
I’m agnostic on the question of whether inequality would be that pronounced minus the exploitive apparatus of state-capitalism. I’d say let’s abolish state-capitalism and see what happens. If it were true that the subsequent abolition of welfare statism would still produce a system comparable to,say, India in the early twenthieth century with life expectancies for some people being about 28, large numbers of death from preventable diseases, people living in shanties on the street, then yes, I would say the social welfare system should be preserved.
I would still reject social democracy as an end unto itself. On a similar note, it may also be that some sort of organized state military system will always be necessary for common defense. If so, I would still reject militarism as an ideological end.
April 6th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Angelica,
Well, for starters the example of homesteading vacant land was intended to be just one extended illustration of a much broader general phenomenon: the holding of land and capital out of what would otherwise be productive use, if a class of absentee owners did not require it to produce an acceptable level of rentier income in addition.
The same thing applies to capital: if property were widely distributed and the main source of investment capital were worker-owners mobilizing credit on their own property, the primary consideration would be whether the investment would increase the productivity of their labor and reduce the ratio of effort to consumption. But when investment capital is concentrated and largely monopolized by a small plutocratic class, it is withheld from otherwise productive investments because it doesn’t produce enough extra calories to feed the tapeworms.
I hear fairly regularly from a Shia economic student who is well versed in both Shia economic doctrine and in neo-Keynesian and other forms of modern heterodox economics (radical Shia economic doctrine is a bit like a mixture of Proudhon, Henry George, and Hilaire Belloc). He quoted Keynes on the gift economy, and radical neo-Keynesians developing the idea, who made the same point: in a regime of abundant and near-zero interest credit, all investment projects that result in net efficiency increases would be undertaken. The added requirement for an investment to provide rentier income in addition to the primary efficiency increase acts like molasses in an engine block.
By “vacant and unimproved,” BTW, I didn’t mean the land had to *remain* vacant and unimproved. If an existing landlord’s title to land can be traded to the preemption of vacant and unimproved land through a state grant to land speculators, then the land is the rightful property of those who actually first occupied and improved it, or their heirs. Just to take one example, I believe considerable amounts of real estate in southern California are held by mortgage companies and rental management companies subsidiary to the railroads which received land grants in the 19th century. The railroad land grants included not only the rights of way themselves, but extensive swaths of land on either side of it which were intended to serve as sources of wealth to the railroads when real estate values skyrocketed along the routes. The state enabled railroads to engross land along their own routes and then extort money from those who settled it. This is, essentially, the same sort of thing that used to regularly scandalize urban populations when a collusive deal between the city government and a traction company enabled a lucky few to make enormously profitable real estate deals based on insider knowledge. But in this case it wasn’t illegal because, as the saying goes, “I oughtta know–I’m the sheriff.”
In cases like that, or in cases in the Third World where a landlord’s property traces to some essentially feudal grant of power, present ownership rightfully belongs to those actually working the land.
And I suspect there’s a lot more vacant and unimproved land than is apparent at first glance. Back in the ’30s, Albert Nock observed that if the land had been occupied naturally (by legitimate homesteading instead of politically engrossed), the limit of American settlement would probably have stopped short of the Appalachians. In his time, in the most densely populated state in the country–R.I.–almost all the countryside along the major through highways was completely undeveloped. Even today, pretty much the whole pattern of leapfrog development and urban sprawl in the U.S. results from vacant land being held out of use. Even in the largest urban areas like greater N.Y., it’s common for 20% or more of the total area to be undeveloped, and held out of use because speculators expect it to appreciate in value. And in areas of average population density, areas of suburban sprawl are themselves surrounded by miles of almost completely undeveloped trashwood or meadow that somebody is holding off the market until the price goes up.
PML,
I think the last point also relates to your question. I don’t think we’re anywhere near the point that genuine Malthusian pressure would lead to the bulldozing of wild nature. Where that sort of thing happens, as it does almost everywhere, it’s because so much land has been politically appropriated and held out of use. For example, in South America the great holdings of the latifundistas often include a majority of unused land, and much of what is in use for cash crop farming is used much less efficiently and with much lower output per acre than it is typically used under intensive cultivation by peasants. Because of this political appropriation of the land, peasants are forced into slash and burn development of unsuitable land in the rain forests, depite the wealth of unused or underused arable land.
April 6th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Paging Robert Lindsay…
April 6th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
TGGP,
Why don’t you just page the fucking devil while you’re at it. I’m sure we’d love to have him stop by for a visit as well.
I thought you’d acknowledged already that it was poor judgment to do this. And I thought we were finally shut of THOSE PEOPLE.
Remember what happened last time you mentioned one of them in a comment thread here? He found us doing a vanity search and came by here and left a lot of white supremacist shite for us to clean up. Do you really want to get that crap started again?
If this was my thread and I didn’t have to worry about bigfooting Angelica, I’d delete the comment before we attracted that person’s attention again.
April 6th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I agree for the most part the views expressed by Keith and Kevin. With Keith, I agree that inequality as such is not a problem about which the state ought to concern itself, assuming that that inequality is the result of fair transactions built upon a just initial distribution of resources. (If that doesn’t accurately state where you’re at Keith, let me know.) A basic income guarantee is appropriate and right in my view, not because inequality requires or justifies the state to require citizens to share *their* property. Rather, the state is justified in requiring citizens whose current holdings include the *rightful property of others*, to return the same to others. Wealth that is or is derived from natural resources is wealth that belongs (in some sense) to all of us, and individual retention of the whole of that wealth is tantamount to theft. A state’s requiring individuals to distribute such wealth is right and just, not as a redistribution but rather a restitution of property.
I agree wholeheartedly with Kevin’s views if limited to the case of land (not capital).
With respect to vacant land: Angelica, ever been to Montana? Almost all of it would homesteadable still today but for the current regime of property law. In most states there is a large amount of vacant land. America is one of the least population-dense countries in the world.
On Sen’s “Development as Freedom”: I once read the first chapter and was very impressed by it. What sticks out in particular in my mind is his observation of the non-instrumental good of the ability to participate freely in a market. Those (like me) who favor free markets too often rely and are forced to rely on instrumental defenses of it. For example, one argues that free markets are worth having because they result in a more prosperous end-state than (say) centralized planning. That’s an instrumental defense. The non-instrumental defense is even more appealing to me. A free market–or rather the freedom to participate in a market–is a good in itself, regardless of the consequences. Not only do I value participating in a free market because it best facilitates my wants, etc.; I value it for itself, for the mere ability to engage in uncoerced exchange of the means of life with my fellow humans.
April 6th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
No worry about Lindsay coming back, I thought he was already banned? Paige’s perspective on wartime Britain just reminded me of Lindsay’s perspective on Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, which while unusual seems to be supported by the data you’d find from gapminder.org
April 6th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
And welcome back, Angelica. Hope you enjoyed Japan–one of my favorite places in the world.
April 6th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
“Each war situation produced much greater sharing of means of survival, including sharing of health care and the limited food supply (through rationing and subsidized nutrition)…It is in fact, confirmed by detailed nutritional studies that during the Second World War, even though the per capita availability of food fell significantly in Britain, cases of undernourishment also declined sharply, and extreme undernourishment almost entirely disappeared. Mortality rates also went down sharply (except of course for war mortality itself). A similar thing had happened during the First World War.”
This sounds eerily similar to the argument for war in general: It increases solidarity. With solidarity comes sharing, in the style of the family - wherein instrumental and calculating self interest are suppressed - but applied to the nation-state.
Unfortunatly the war scenario Sen describes is nothing like a small tribe, family or commune. In war time an extremely hierarchical and regimented system is foisted upon society as a whole, with all of the abuses, priveleges and hypocrisies it brings with it. Rations? The people got the crumbs, the war profiteers and high ranking govermnent officials got the spoils. Those “petty” concerns such as gasoline for the trip to see Grandma are squashed for the “greater good”. But yes, material inequality is typically reduced in these scenarios because a command economy, not to mention conscription, has a heavy levelling effect. I hardly think this is a good thing.
I’m with Keith as seeing inequality per se as not particularly important. A diverse society contains millions of individuals with particular interests forming bonds with millions of others, constantly in flux. These choices will inevitably result in inequality in a material sense, as not everybody values precisely equal levels of consumption.
And of course a governmental system with universal reach to “ensure” equality will inevitably be very unequal in the sense that those in power must necessarily have enormous resources of their own - the antithesis of a system of dispersed power that anarchy would represent - to implement their plans.
I’ll assume that Sen is correct on the lifespan thing, but that is merely one dimension to overall quality of life. Given the war time necessities of rationing and the diversion of what could have been consumer goods to war “goods”, it stands to reason to that qualilty of life went DOWN during war, especially for those dying in battle (needless to say).
April 6th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I’ve also found the idea of a guaranteed annual income to be pretty intriguing. Instead of the myriad of federal agencies, cut out the middleman, as it were, and give the monetary equivalent per person in these large outlays to the people themselves.
This would seem to satisfy the right libertarians who fear “social engineering” and the left who fear corporate sponsorship and corruption of many government programs. Employment and work training programs come to mind, with taxpayers bearing the cost for politically connected businesses.
April 6th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
I think it was Milton Friedman that first proposed the guaranteed minimum income as part of a negative income tax or something.
April 6th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
MLK jr. proposed it too.
April 6th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Libertarian Friedman definitely gets credit for that one — and the concept is incompletely realized (but inspired by him) in the Earned Income Tax Credit.
The thing is this, if you federally tax people and send the money to D.C. for safety net programs, multiple bureaucratic hands take huge chunks of each dollar before a fraction of the original dollar reaches those who need the help. (And, one creates rent-seeking bureaucrats incentivized is to expand their power and protect their jobs. Friedman wished to cut out that fat.)
F.A. Hayek did NOT oppose all social safety net programs; he was simply very (and rightly) concerned with how they were structured, and whether they simply made Leviathan bigger, stronger and gave it more control over everyone’s life. At some time I will post about Hayek’s views on safety net spending.
April 6th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
“The thing is this, if you federally tax people and send the money to D.C. for safety net programs, multiple bureaucratic hands take huge chunks of each dollar before a fraction of the original dollar reaches those who need the help. (And, one creates rent-seeking bureaucrats incentivized is to expand their power and protect their jobs. Friedman wished to cut out that fat.)”
Yes, government safety net programs spend more on overhead and bureaucracy building relative to independent alternatives:
http://mises.org/journals/jls/21_2/21_2_1.pdf
April 6th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
TGGP,
I hope you’re right. I wasn’t even aware IP addresses could be banned at this blog. Anyway, sorry if I seemed to jump down your throat over it. I just saw you “paging” that name, and had the same reaction I’d have if I lived in the Amityville house and saw somebody playing with a Ouija board.
April 6th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Ah, but, KC, your counter is just precisely what I described as unsatisfactory. Your principle fails under worst case behaviour, and pointing out that we aren’t in a worst case isn’t a rebuttal unless you provide something to show that things so arrange themselves that the worst case doesn’t come up. All you’ve shown is that it isn’t a priority - but I gave an example, Madagascar, where it had come up (largely because of the extensive land use approaches there, like slash and burn).
You can have a more ambiguous scenario to show how unautomatic the homesteading idea is, if you have previous land users practising hunter gatherer, nomadic or pastoral lifestyles. Historically, new people actually have come along and claimed that by their standards the land was unused, then homesteaded it for more intensive uses.
The point is rather like asking how many hairs make a beard or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The answer itself is not serious in its own right, but the question is trying to draw out where you draw a line by using an extreme test case to highlight things. The test of appropriation you used is fundamentally flawed, even though it does not produce huge discrepancies in familiar conditions. So why bother? Because the time to fix things is before they are serious - it might even be too late by then.
April 6th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
I often come across liberals mocking Hayek for claiming in Road to Serfdom that welfare states will inevitably lead to totalitarianism, and then the hard-line Mises crowd denouncing him for endorsing the welfare state…in Road to Serfdom! Maybe I should get around to reading it some day.
Robert claimed to be banned and I took him at his word, but if you want to be sure you can look at this and this for tips on banning people with Wordpress.
April 6th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
There’s much of value in Hayek’s work, though he was a little too much of a “vulgar libertarian” for my tastes. Not in the sense of his modest welfare statism, but his lack of criticism of actually existing capitalism.
April 7th, 2008 at 8:37 am
There’s a passage in the Road to Serfdom that actually helped open the door for me to appreciate Kevin’s arguments regarding centralization. It’s an empirical statement comparing the economies of the U.S. and Britain to Germany, and, while not explicit, certainly left me with the impression that centralized businesses became more common, the more centrally planned the economy was.
Certainly Hayek didn’t develop this passage, or some of the implications of his knowledge theory as much as he could have in his later scholarship. But I’ll give him the same pass I give Mises.org - they’re pushing the envelope as much as they can while still trying to retain funding for their projects.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:25 am
PML,
If a truly Malthusian situation ever arises, we’re screwed either way. If the population really does become so great that there is literally insufficient land available to feed people without encroaching on the last bit of unspoiled nature, we’re screwed either way. Attempts to enforce nature preserves under those circumstances would just be a rearguard action of staving off the inevitable.
But I think we’re a lot less likely to reach the worst case in the first place, or will reach it a lot later, under a strict Lockean or occupancy-based system than under the present enforcement of de jure titles to vacant land. If the population ever gets so large that all arable land is literally physically occupied, things will be pretty shitty no matter which property system we have. But at any intermediate stage where all arable land is *not* physically appropriated, legal enforcement of titles based on political appropriation will make the kind of slash-and-burn development practiced in Brazil much more likely.
As to unsupportable population increase as an issue in itself, there seems to be a consensus that economic prosperity reduces population growth in the long term. So arguably wer’e less likely to reach the worst case, and more likely to reach a steady state short of the worst case, where there’s widespread distribution of productive property and comfortable subsistence.
April 7th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
My initial reaction to Angela’s post had less to do with theoretical debates about the nature of the state than the tactical appeal of solidarity based reforms which, although are cumbersome from a purely economic (capitalist) perspective, may be beneficial to the general population.
The example of the war economy may be extreme, however, I tend to be more sympathetic to such reforms than most of the folks on the board. I see popular demands for things like universal health care, social security, and some legal assurance of ‘fair play’ in daily life as reasonable responses to an otherwise unreasonable situation.
I tend to see such things holistically. Drawing from Kevin’s assertion that there is little difference between the public and the private, if a public reform undermines the privileges of dominant private interests, and does so in a way which allows the average person to have a little breathing space, space which they can use for their own ends; and does so without expanding the authoritarianism in any measurable manner, I say go for it. That is why I support a universal health care initiative as well as many other “welfare” reforms. Granted it may be “statist” in that puts health insurance in the hands of the government, but I don’t see our current health care system, managed by insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms and subsidized with tax dollars, as being inherently worse or less statist.
From a purely libertarian perspective, I don’t see any ground lost by moving the managerial responsibility from the private sector to the public. I do see possible gains in that it makes health care more of a “public issue” meaning that folks have more ability to vote in or out those who are making the decisions, and I hope that it undermines the notion that quality health care (or any other form of social service) is a privilege afforded to the few.
April 7th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Goffchile,
“I do see possible gains in that it makes health care more of a ‘public issue’ meaning that folks have more ability to vote in or out those who are making the decisions, and I hope that it undermines the notion that quality health care (or any other form of social service) is a privilege afforded to the few.”
I put more trust in EXIT than VOICE. And the government is a private interest too. Formally speaking I can vocalize my opposition to its actions, but the reality is bureaucratic inertia and turf protection. As far as I’m concerned making health care government run is to grant the ultimate monopoly.
Health care need not be a privelege of the few. The goal is to bring costs down, not hide them. I’m afraid a fully implemented universal health care would bring the latter. Not to mention very extensive politicization of just what is covered, what is not, etc.
April 7th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Goffchile and Dain,
I just can’t bring myself to positively advocate tax-funded universal healthcare, even though the healthcare industry is pretty close to Rothbard’s nationalization standard of getting 50% or more of its revenue from government.
For that reason, though, I can’t get too worked up over the prospect of nationalization, either. And I’m the first to concede that a National Health system like Britains would probably be far easier to *geninely* privatize (by placing it under the coopertive control of staff and patients), because it wouldn’t carry all the moral baggage of being “private property,” which in fact it is not in any real sense.
April 7th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
I’m pretty sure if we ever had “universal health care” in the US it wouldn’t be a British-like National Health Service or even a Canada-like single-payer system. It would simply be a state-corporatist monopoly like Mussolini’s Italy. That’s more or less what Hillarycare was when it was proposed in the 90s.
April 7th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
No, KC, I’m still not getting my point across.
I wasn’t talking about what would actually happen under a Malthusian situation, I was talking about two other things.
First, the ownership through use principle is inadequate because it certainly would fail under such extremes. We don’t care about the other things that would go wrong under such extremes at this point (see above about beards and angels), we’re just examining how the principle holds up; it doesn’t. That is, it doesn’t come with caveats and variations, so we can’t use it as is - because we know there are failures out there, and we don’t know where all of them are. Just dealing with the counter-examples is like people I’ve met in the software field, pointy-haired bosses who hear of a failed test and then say, “all you have to do is fix what made it fail that test; fixing the one specific thing you found fixes the problem”. Of course, it doesn’t; what does is, fixing the overall logic such that the tests don’t trigger failure. Think “teaching to the test”. In the same way, Malthusian stuff is just a test case - not “the” problem but something that reveals that there is a problem.
Second, in bringing out real world examples that got near the failure area like the Madagascar one, I wasn’t presenting a Malthusian situation but Malthusian pressures - the things that come up as the original working assumptions about unlimited resources start to creak. The Malagasy had been working according to their tradition that the forest is forever, using slash and burn and other extensive lifestyle methods. They by no means hit a Malthusian situation, yet even present levels would have prevented that unspoiled area existing today if it had not been held back. This is not to endorse the colonial era laws that allowed that, merely to show that the property through use method does not provide for that.
As it happens, I do reject the property through use principle on theoretical grounds too; rather - for much the reasons given above, taken in reverse - I see it as a good working approximation in ordinary and (to us) familiar conditions, a method. However, I see a deeper underlying principle, one that’s less easy to use as a working tool but that shows up cases where the other method starts creaking: personal connection. Just as animal behaviour theory tells us about animals defending territory, and game theory says that expensive signals defining the claims are less likely to be bluffs, so also blending a person’s effort in a visible way tells the world that he is more likely to have a serious connection; an outward sign of inner grace, but not justification through works as such (to adapt a similar line of reasoning from a theological field).
So, what counts is internal to the person, but outward signalling is what anyone would reasonably do to minimise the carrying cost of facing challenges. Blending effort is merely one way of doing that, with the advantage that it imposes no additional cost (you apply the effort that you would have applied anyway, to get your value in use). But as the principle is broader, it allows you to do whatever it takes to set up an unspoiled area, say - post guards, publicise what you are doing, build walls, whatever. You will have higher carrying costs of removing squatters, because you don’t get the “for free” engineering them out option of squatting yourself (it would defeat the object), but it would still be cheaper to take preventative measures than to keep having to go in and remove incipient squatters before they had a chance to blend much effort and set up signals of their own, creating chronic costly repeated challenges (if you let it get that far, you would get adverse possession issues).
This broader principle seems self-consistent, viable and just, but it does not fit within your description “Take the example of a piece of vacant and unimproved land, which by any legitimate theory of property should be considered unowned” - it allows owned but vacant and unimproved land - yet still admits the blended effort test as a (not the) criterion, suitable for many common cases. It rejects blended effort as a principle.
The new principle doesn’t answer all property-related ethical questions, though. For instance, late in the day, the British Mandate in Palestine introduced regulations so that sitting tenants could not be evicted until they had found alternative livelihoods. The idea there rests on the assumption that they really were tenants (I don’t want to raise the specific Zionist controversy); we can certainly construct hypothetical cases where real landlords suddenly need somewhere to live, but the eviction still produces incidental rather than inherent injustice which could and so should be mitigated.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
@ Dain
This sounds eerily similar to the argument for war in general: It increases solidarity. With solidarity comes sharing, in the style of the family - wherein instrumental and calculating self interest are suppressed - but applied to the nation-state.
I certainly don’t think wars are jolly good for fostering solidarity and promote liberal policies. This is more like a horrible natural experiment of sorts that nevertheless tells us something insightful. To wit: underlining the extent that people were dying prematurely of undernourishment due to inequality.
I too disagree that there should be an eradication of inequality. But the thing is, I am not a particularly ideological person and am inclined to take overall welfare into account as well one’s rights to the fruits of ones labor. If impinging on that right a little bit brings about a positive outcome, then I’m all for it.
Your other point is taken as well: length of life is just one measurement of well-being. It may well be that the leveling process (having one’s income taxed, relying on handouts) is a trauma in itself and decreases the welfare surplus of the arrangement. All I can say is, we all make different tradeoffs and thus have different points in mind for when more redistribution is too much. You and others on the board are not totally opposed to the idea of the negative income tax or universal income. This means you are not against all redistribution. You want there to be an austere safety net so that people are not dropping in the streets of starvation, say. I want a slightly cushier safety net with healthcare taken care of as well.
The level of social support one prefers is in many ways a personal choice based more on one’s disposition, level of risk-averseness etc and I’m not sure more debate would change our position on those fundamental values even though my mind is open to be swayed on other things. However, the beauty of living in a democracy, imperfect as it is, is that we can take those preferences to the polls with us in some way.
April 8th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
“You and others on the board are not totally opposed to the idea of the negative income tax or universal income. This means you are not against all redistribution. You want there to be an austere safety net so that people are not dropping in the streets of starvation, say. I want a slightly cushier safety net with healthcare taken care of as well.”
I’m still opposed to state redistribution, but like others here who are trying to think of ways of mitigating statism toward a long term libertarian agenda, I see the guaranteed annual income (as opposed to the costs of the alphabet soup of agencies) as both more libertarian and less statist. The libertarian part because it replaces cartelization with choice, and less statist…well, that part’s obvious.
I’ll have more to say later. I gotta eat lunch with my girlfriend
April 8th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
“However, the beauty of living in a democracy, imperfect as it is, is that we can take those preferences to the polls with us in some way.”
I’m going to offer up a bit of heresy here and insist that democracy is grossly overrated.
The Marxist critique of “bourgeoisie democracy” maintains that formal democracy is a sham used to justify class rule. The libertarian critique argues that democracy is a system where five wolves and a lamb vote on what to have for dinner. Elite theory (like that of Michels or Mosca) insists that all systems are oligarchies irrespective of their formal institutional arrangements.
I actually agree with all of these perspectives. Democracy might be workable on a small scale among a culturally homogenous population. But modern democracy is simply a synthesis of mob rule and an oligopoly/oligarchy of economic parasites and “special interest” groups. Nothing to take seriously.
April 8th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Keith,
I agree with you, but I think the kind of thing Angelica and I are talking about can still work within those restrictions. It’s admittedly reformist.
“But modern democracy is simply a synthesis of mob rule and an oligopoly/oligarchy of economic parasites and “special interest” groups. ”
Well that is significantly contradictory enough to make it sound like plain ol’ interest group pluralism.
Where the class concept is useful is in identifying the moneyed and family interests that persist over time. Michels and Mosca are spot on in noting how a small strata of particularly educated, articulate and relatively wealthy people are the ones actually influencing the state’s power apparatus.
In any case, there is a staggering level of public ignorance and state autonomy that results from a state as large as ours. This may not fit the theories you noted (though it best fits the Italian elitist school), but it’s the most salient for me.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Keith,
Democracy is not without problems, but it’s the best of the systems we’ve got. I certainly think there are ways to make our current democracy better.
Just curious. As a libertarian, what kind of possible society do you forsee with no democracy? An authoritarian society imposing liberty is simply contradictory, of course.
I suppose you are for a society with no overarching organizing principle whatsover. However for such a society to exist, the vast majority of people must agree its a good idea. Back to democracy.
April 9th, 2008 at 12:42 am
“Privilege hampers productivity in another way. By artificially concentrating large amounts of capital and land in the hands of the plutocracy, and artifically raising the normally expected rate of return on land and capital, it creates an incentive for holding land and capital out of productive use.”
Kevin, it seems to me that Angelica is pointing to actual historical events. If we can trust the statistics that Amartya Sen is looking at, mortality really did improve during the war decades. I’m not sure I see how your response is related to the facts that she is reporting.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:55 am
“Keith,
Democracy is not without problems, but it’s the best of the systems we’ve got. I certainly think there are ways to make our current democracy better. ”
Well, what I’m attacking is the idea that there’s anything special or sacred about 51 percent. I think all systems are organized on the basis of the subjective value systems held by those holding power. From there on, it’s just a matter of winners and losers.
“Just curious. As a libertarian, what kind of possible society do you forsee with no democracy? An authoritarian society imposing liberty is simply contradictory, of course. ”
I’d certainly prefer an “enlightened despot” that upholds my own interests to a parliamentary state controlled by my enemies. I simply want those individuals and groups whose objectives are most consistent with my own to be the ones pulling the strings. If they do it through parliamentary process, fine. If it takes a putsch or a coup, that’s okay too.
“An authoritarian society imposing liberty is simply contradictory, of course. ”
Not necessarily. This gets back to the discussion we were having on the other thread involving the repeal of anti-libertarian laws pertaining to abortion, sodomy, etc. It was pointed out that this was done by an authoritarian process-the usurpation of states’ rights by the federal courts and rule by judicial decree. In other words, enlightened despotism. I have no real problem with that.
An authoritarian process may or may not produce libertarian results, just as a “democratic” process may or may not process libertarian results. I’d much prefer to live a under a feudal aristocracy or even an outright dictatorship that was content to simple collect its tribute and otherwise leave well enough alone than a democracy that claims the prerogative of interfering in every aspect of society for social engineering purposes.
“I suppose you are for a society with no overarching organizing principle whatsover. However for such a society to exist, the vast majority of people must agree its a good idea. Back to democracy.”
Well, if ideological labels have any meaning, I suppose I would consider myself a left-conservative or an anarcho-pluralist. I’m in favor of radically decentralized systems where conflicting social groups are simply separated from one another. However they organize themselves internally would be their prerogative I suppose.
I suppose any kind of system could be considered democratic if it has popular support, even Marxism-Leninism or National-Socialism. Are you familiar with Carl Schmitt’s work in this area?
April 9th, 2008 at 8:54 am
PML,
I think I do grasp your point, but I don’t agree that it’s a relevant criticism. How a given system would hold up under the worst Malthusian stress is not a relevant criticism IMO if it’s less likely than the present system to get there in the first place, if it’s less subject to such stress in the intermediate term, and if both systems are equally screwed if it *does* come. To repeat my earlier argument, either a Malthusian overload (population greater than the carrying capacity of the land) will happen, or it won’t. If it does, then holding reserves out of use is a bit like rearranging chairs on the Titanic. On the other hand, if the population doesn’t exceed the carrying capacity of the land, it isn’t really a Malthusian overload–or if it is, it’s an artificial one resulting from a privileged class holding land out of use for speculative purposes. An end to such artificial restrictions on land that is suitable for farming would reduce the pressure to appropriate land that is inappropriate for such use. I repeat, the kind of slash-and-burn farming that is ruining the Amazon rain forest results from arable land being held out of use by privileged landlords.
April 9th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I intended it as another side to Sen’s story, not to challenge his account of events, but to question the underlying assumption that fairer slices would necessarily be associated with a smaller pie. The vulgar libertarians tend to present it as just that kind of a tradeoff, arguing that egalitarianism will reduce efficiency. But to the extent that current inequality results from the state intervening in the market to redistribute wealth upward, that also promotes inefficiency. Underpaying labor and overpaying capital is just as much a disruption of the link between effort and reward as the (much more hypothetical IMO) opposite case that the Right likes to harp on.
April 9th, 2008 at 9:08 am
I’m not sure, but I think by “democracy” Keith is not so much arguing against democracy as such, as against the vanilla-flavored kind of representative system that’s celebrated in America’s civics classes.
I consider myself very much pro-democracy. IMO the essence of democracy is not majority rule, but the consent of the governed. The closer that consent approaches unanimous, the closer to ideal democracy. A majority is simply a way of approximating this ideal when it is otherwise impossible. But the smaller the unit of government, and the more consensual and participatory the decision process, the more closely it will approach the ideal. A federation of local direct democracies, with delegates recallable at will, is far more democratic than a state organized on the representative principle; and the neighborhood or workplace direct democracies are more democratic still.
As an anarchist, I consider the final stage to be when the town and neighborhood direct democracies finally relinquish the character of government altogether, and cease to suppress competing services or to use coercive taxation to fund themselves. I understand that most people won’t go this far with me, but perhaps we can agree on an intermediate program of approximating direct democracy as much as possible by pursuing (say) the Green plank of decentralism.
April 9th, 2008 at 9:33 am
“I often come across liberals mocking Hayek for claiming in Road to Serfdom that welfare states will inevitably lead to totalitarianism, and then the hard-line Mises crowd denouncing him for endorsing the welfare state…in Road to Serfdom! Maybe I should get around to reading it some day.”
It is one of those books that is loved and hated by both sides. Another one, less famous, is Orwell’s book, Homage To Catalonia. I recall in 2002 living in a house of radical anarchists, and the whole crew went to the big protest against the IMF in DC, during September of that year. They got gassed and arressted and they came home smelling of tear gas. A young woman copied out passages of the book and she put them up all over the house, so everywhere you went in the house, you could read about the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War. One of the them asked me if I wanted to read the book and I said yes and they handed it to me and I turned it over and on the back, as a marketing blurb, it said “Voted one of the ten best books of the 20th Century by the National Review!” Damn, did I get a laugh out of that.
April 9th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Many on the libertarian Right don’t realize what a two-edged sword Hayek’s distributed knowledge argument is (likewise Mises’ rational calculation argument against socialist central planning). Both also apply very well to the large corporation.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:20 am
jackson,
Homage to Catalonia was also on the ISI’s list of the best 50 books of the 20th century (the corresponding list of the 50 worst books became sort of infamous for putting Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age of Samoa on the top, sharing room with the usual people-the-right-hates suspects like Alfred Kinsey, John Dewey, Carl Rogers, Susan Sontag, and E. P. Thompson); they describe it as “The savagely incisive song of a great writer’s disillusionment with the bloody inhumanity of the Left”:
http://www.isi.org/journals/ir/50best_worst/50best.html
http://www.isi.org/journals/ir/50best_worst/50worst.html
April 9th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Yes, it’s “civics class” democracy that I’m attacking.
As for the idea of consent of the governed, I supposed this would be dependent on how consent is defined. The libertarian idea of explicit individual consent is fine by me. There are other theories of consent that I find more dubious. One is “explicit” consent, meaning one consents to whatever state that happens to exist at the time simply by walking on government roads or failing to emigrate. Another is Carl Schmitt’s theory of consent by acclamation, meaning the state is democratic if the people generally approve of it. According to this theory, if a plebiscite gets 51 percent in favor of appointing the Fuhrer president for life, then that’s “democracy”.
Some libertarians like Hans Hermann Hoppe and Spencer Heath MacCallum have this ideal of society organized solely on the basis of contractual communities. While not necessarily hostile to this as an abstract ideal, I don’t think a real world decentralization process would be so neat and tidy.
April 9th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Something has happened over the last few decades as the reality of widespread lack of political participation has set in. Instead of viewing traditional measures of democratic participation (voting, writing your congressmen, etc.) as the legitimate signifier of principle-agent interaction, more and more simple public opinion is thought to be sufficient. This is quite telling.
Essentially, it doesn’t matter if john and jane doe have not a whit of information about the nuts and bolts of this or that policy proposal, history of their nation or even the name of their representatives as long as they give an answer, positive or negative, about very general questions on governmental activity.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
The vulgar libertarians tend to present it as just that kind of a tradeoff, arguing that egalitarianism will reduce efficiency
Complete egalitarianism probably is bad for efficiency, but massive wealth disparities are also bad - they distort markets. If a market’s imperfection is its weakness then the disparity is the strength of one force applied to distort it.
If you ever pass through Nice aeroport, you’ll get see that all the Taxis are Mercedes(and similar) and they charge 60 euros to take you for a ride (the bus is about 1.50euro). Rich tourists … pfft.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Mike,
that’s a HUGE disparity in cost between taxi and bus. What, like 45-1? Perhaps it’s that way in Europe, but not in my experience with airports in the states.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
It is actually true. Though it is a little more complicated; the 1.5euro bus price is artificially cheap. Originally the price for a single ride was 9euro, which was price gouging passengers from the aeroport as most of the passengers were commuters (paying ~50euro/month) on this route that happened to pass by the aeroport. Then from one day to the next the price dropped from 9euro to 1.50euro! One can only presume state intervention. The taxis remain a racket however.
The original point is really that Nice isn’t a normal destination as there are many rich people in the region (Cannes,Monaco) and tourists. Neither of which discriminate enough with their money, distorting the market.
Admittedly there are more causes in play than just the wealth disparity, but I was trying to think of an example where there is an above normal number of wealthier people further distorting a market which would otherwise be able to service normal people. Other airports, those in the US and better still the others in France are the control if you like. The implication of all this is that many markets we assume to be functioning ok may actually also distorted by wealth disparity.