A Part of the Possible
(posted by Jim Henley)
I want to make sure to point people toward Will Wilkinson’s recent essay on taking the openness of Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan toward a social safety net seriously. No time for me to say more right now - it’s past midnight and I just finished my work work for the day and I’m very very sleepy - but I want to peg the piece for discussion.
Arnold Kling has a qualified dissent that isn’t altogether wrong. In comments, Franklin Harris has a dissent from the dissent that cuts to the nub, I think:
I really think it comes down to this: libertarians who are irreligious or generally secular in outlook would much rather argue economics with our liberal friends over drinks than get into messy arguments about morality with conservatives, especially when you’re arguing with them over drinks, because they’re angry drunks. Plus, you still end up arguing economics with conservatives because of their cognitive dissonance regarding military spending, “energy independence,” immigration, and, increasingly, trade.
I’d add untrammeled police and internal-”security” power to Franklin’s list. I don’t completely discount what Kling says because I do hear guys like Ed Schultz plumping for the return of the 55mph speed limit. (He’s willing to go up to 65mph.) More on the general topic of the ghost of 1970s economics when I’ve had more sleep.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:44 pm
The perfectly secular conservatives with a vast knowledge of evolution and sociobiology are the most frightening because they aren’t so easy to refute. I aint no scientist.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:46 pm
To bolster Kling, I’m reminded of what the California Teacher’s Association is up to right now, going on about teachers losing their jobs when the pink slips have been rescinded. And they know it, but partisan politics and alarmist rhetoric is part of the game. Public Choice is vindicated time and time again in this fashion.
This applies to this discussion if state schooling is a “safety net” (and I’m sure most people believe it is).
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:37 pm
I think Kling makes an extremely common mistake, which is in assuming the political Left to be monolithic. The fact is that the “Left” in this country, just like the “Right” is just a mish-mosh coalition of various ideological groups. Those interest groups can and do change sides over the course of time, as different issues come to predominate within the group.
Much of what the “Left” generally claims to believe in is not as universally held as they like to think. Instead, many in the modern Left coalition, just like many in the modern Right coalition, conform their political views over time on lower priority issues to match the views of coalition members to whom those issues are of higher importance.
So I think it depends which element of the “Left” you’re talking about. The Barack Obama wing of the Dem Party, for instance, typically is most concerned with civil and personal liberties and a less aggressive foreign policy; meanwhile, the populist wing of the party (now dedicated to HRC) is primarily concerned with populist economics. The Obama wing tends to have a pretty good understanding of the concept of free markets; what winds up happening, though, is that they wind up sounding like outright socialists because the figure that people within their coalition who care more about the issue than they do probably also know more about it than they do. Similarly, politicians in this wing of the party have to tailor their message to be more populist on economic issues in order to make sure they retain the support of the more populist elements of the party.
If you look at the survey TNR posted a week or two ago regarding the respective political messages of the two parties, you kind of get a good idea of what I’m talking about. In that survery, something like 60 or 70 percent of Dems wound up agreeing with restrictions on free trade when the survey indicated that free trade was the Dems’ position; but when you removed party labels from the questions, that number dropped to barely half, with the rest saying that they supported more open trade policies.
Bottom line: if economic populists begin to shift to the Republican Party due to the GOP’s stance on social issues, foreign policy, and immigration, then the remaining Dems are likely to be well worth libertarians joining as coalition members. As I said yesterday, the threatened defection of HRC supporters would hasten this result. However, without that kind of defection, McCain is probably not the candidate to pull the economic populists into the GOP fold. Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, would have been exactly that candidate.
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:39 am
I would have no problem with a “guaranteed income” or citizen’s dividend if it’s derived from collecting rents on private claims of land and natural resources. A necessary adjunct to this position, of course, is that labor and capital are not taxed. This is more or less the Geolibertarian paradigm.
Wilkinson’s position seems to be more along the lines of Public Choice Market Liberalism, a notion that I have come to sour on. From a Libertarian Class Theory perspective, the Welfare State has proven to be an apparatus for the rise of an ensconced Political Class; the welfare state has proven not to be an ideal mechanism for dispensing Rawlsian moral justice. And in the case of the American Experiment, the rise of the Welfare state has proven to be irrevocably tied to the rise of the Warfare State, whether it’s outright military wars or self-declared internal wars on personal or economic behavior.
Wilkinson’s focus on the death of socialism is a complete red herring. Arnold Kling is entirely correct, corporatism, not socialism, is the trend and has been for quite some time now. Without exaggeration, the raison de’etre of both political parties almost comically boils down to spotting and declaring “wars” on Hayekian spontaneous orders. The modus operandi for both parties seems to be to find an offending spontaneous order and appoint a new “Czarist” central authority to counteract it. A rough generalization can be made that Republicans tend to be on the look out for regulating social spontaneous orders and the Democrats for regulating economic spontaneous orders. However, in reality the Democratic Party is not really that much more socially liberal than the Republicans. For example, far more House democrats voted for the Internet gambling ban than against it. In the Democratic presidential nomination race, i’ve heard enough crap about pastors and church than I would care to hear in the totality of 10 nomination cycles, much less over the course of just one.
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:54 am
Hello again, Jim
As I’ve told Mona on more than one occasion, Hayek was a socialist! If you believe Walter Block. Then again, Friedman thought Nixon a socialist.
Scroll down to page 19 in Adobe reader, p. 357 in the original and start reading from there. It’s Block’s Addendum to his crtique of The Road To Serfdom
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/12_2/12_2_6.pdf
The exchange between Kreuger, Merriam and Hayek begins on page 23 of the Adobe doc, page 361 of the original.
It’s becoming more acceptable to have this discussion.
http://www.theprometheusinstitute.org/politics/taxes/50-taxes/153-doling-for-columbine-five-reasons-why-welfare-should-be-a-libertarian-cause-
I’ve always enjoyed this website:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html
It has critiques of libertarianism from left, right and center, from anarchists, libertarians, marxists, liberals and conservatives. Some of the links have gone stale but you can usually find the targets with google. Reading it made me realize I was a left libertarian.
Mike Huben is a good friend of David Friedman.
June 3rd, 2008 at 7:08 am
My favorite quote comes from David Friedman.
It syas it all, and not just about libertarians.
There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with one another, but I am not one of them.
David Friedman
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:16 am
I just love Kling’s template for his opinions:
1′. X is being over-dramatized.
2′. Private initiatives are probably sufficient for dealing with X.
3′. Collective action through government to solve X will turn out much worse in practice than in theory.
4′. Government already has more than enough power to solve X. The problem is not lack of power–the problem is, well, see point 3′.
It must be so much easier to just fill in the blanks and not consider individual issues on their own merits!
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 am
Mike Huben is a good friend of David Friedman
I assume you are making a funny.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am
A large part of my hostility to libertarians would be resolved if they agree to some sort of social safety net, even if it is a minimal one.
It would show that they are willing to negotiate such matters on some kind of empirical rather than ideological level and makes compromise and a political alliance possible.
And yes, after reading Hayek I realized that he is much more reasonable than most Hayekians (present company excepted, of course) makes him out to be. Ditto Adam Smith and the Adam Smithians.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Angelica,
I’ve said before on this forum that a guaranteed annual income would be fine with me, if it meant the abolition of the “middleman” (the plethora of regulatory or state intermediaries). But if Kling is right, and its about paternalism and govt power, then the left would be against this.
Thus, the money itself would be the safety net. After all, money buys nets (being snarky) and everything else.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
If you look at the survey TNR posted a week or two ago regarding the respective political messages of the two parties, you kind of get a good idea of what I’m talking about. In that survery, something like 60 or 70 percent of Dems wound up agreeing with restrictions on free trade when the survey indicated that free trade was the Dems’ position; but when you removed party labels from the questions, that number dropped to barely half, with the rest saying that they supported more open trade policies.
This is fascinating, and speaks volumes about the way people form tertiary opinions based on group alliances.
June 3rd, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Some time ago I realized that the question of a guaranteed income, and eliminating the welfare bureaucrat middlemen, would be a hell of an effective way to expose New Class “liberalism” (no offense to the honest liberals here) and simultaneously bridge certain gaps between far left and far right.
Imagine if a radical/revolutionary, libertarian/anarchist left emerged calling for a guaranteed income for everyone, while eliminating the welfare bureaucracy. Sincere socialists, honest liberals, genuine minority civil rights advocates, the poor people across the cultural and racial spectrum, the poor whites and the poor blacks, genuine libertarians, populists and sincere conservatives should all jump at this idea.
But the liberal elite won’t, because the welfare state for them is about power, control and self-congratulation. The civil rights industrialists won’t because they want to keep the black underclass on their plantation. White-collar liberal social service bureaucrats will be afraid for the jobs. And the pro-Republican establishment right won’t want to lose the welfare state as a convenient whipping boy.
June 3rd, 2008 at 7:10 pm
“This is fascinating, and speaks volumes about the way people form tertiary opinions based on group alliances.”
Well, I think it illustrates what I’m always saying about most people simply being herd creatures who irrationally follow the norms, peers and leaders of their own reference groups. For instance, they think an idea is good not because of the idea but because “one of us” is talking about. Someone is regarded as a “good person” not because of what they do but because of who they are-”he’s one of our own”.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:07 pm
A lot of geolibertarians have proposed funding a guaranteed income with land-value taxation and severance fees, heavily taxing negative externalities so that price reflects real social cost, and then almost completely dismantling the regulatory and welfare state.
Interestingly, the Libertarian Alliance’s Sean Gabb has recently proposed a libertarian-populist alliance that would do an end-run around the New Class strongholds of the bureaucratic welfare and regulatory state, through policies that are quite similar: shifting taxation onto land value, and replacing the welfare state with a minimum income.
And I’ve heard the same thing from Chris Dillow, a market-friendly and anti-managerialist sort of socialist who wants to exorcise both Harold Wilson and Tony Blair from the British Left.
Jesse Walker suggested, similarly, that the Democrats might pick up a lot of libertarian votes if they demonstrated an ability to think outside the box, by promoting progressive and egalitarian ends outside the conventional bureaucratic-centralist paradigm of traditional liberalism.
As far as I’m concerned, that would be at least one hell of a big step in the right direction, and the current domination of American politics by the sham war between big business and big government.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:10 pm
“Ditto Adam Smith and the Adam Smithians.”
–Angelica
As Nietzsche said, there was one Christian and he died on the cross. That thumping sound you hear every time another post goes up at the Adam Smith Institute blog is Adam Smith spinning in his grave.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 pm
At the moment I’m involved in developing a proposal for the implementation of a universal basic income here in New Zealand on behalf of my employer, director of a policy institute here, as personal initiative.
In my research I was suprised to discover its support by advocates from across the political spectrum. From John Stuart Mill to Charles Fourier and Milton Friedman to John Kenneth Galbraith.
Both Jay Hammond, former Governor of Alaska, and Eduardo Suplicy, a Brazillian Senator have recommended to the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government, that they should provide a basic income for all Iraqis, which would be funded from the country’s oil revenues, as a means of pacifying and stabilising the country. Apparently members of both administrations were interested in the proposal.
http://www.usbig.net/papers/182-Suplicy–Iraq.doc
The problem is that such a proposal could face opposition from both sides of the spectrum as well. From Liberals who are ideologically wedded to the invasive and coersive Welfare State and neo-conservatives who have almost succeded in shredding the remnants of a safety net for unfortunate.
Even now there is a controvesy in New Zealand surrounding a call for a “tax credit” which is currently awarded only to the working poor and lower middle class, to be extended to those on benefits.
Even the “liberal” Prime Minister, leader of the “Labour Party”, says its obscene that families on benefits should be given one, because then apparently there would be no incentive to work, which is laughable considering the effect of the current scheme allows the recipients to cut hours or for one member of the family to quit there job in order to stay home.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:33 am
“I think it illustrates what I’m always saying about most people simply being herd creatures who irrationally follow the norms, peers and leaders of their own reference groups.”
You call it irrational, and yet it seems wholly rational to me: you give ground on those issues that are secondary to you, so you can form alliances with other factions, and thus put together a coalition that is big enough to take power. So long as those other factions are willing to give ground to you on your highest priority issues, then the compromises you make might well be rational. Some of the compromises you’ might have to make might strike you as quite painful, but that would be the price of actually attaining power.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Or, let me put that the other way around: if you’re imagining some world where you can gain power without making any compromises at all, then you are imagining a world quite different from our own.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:09 am
No, I get what you’re saying, but that’s not really what I was getting at. What I thought was interesting was the way people changed their opinions in the survey once the party labels were removed. People tend to “think with their tribe”.
As another example, how many Democrats, liberals and lefties automatically assumed Scooter Libby was “guilty” when he was initially charged solely on the basis that he was a Bush henchman?
How many Republicans, conservatives and righties assumed he was being framed simply because he was a Republican?\
Believe me, I’ve encountered plenty of people who hold a particular opinion on something-trade, foreign policy, death penalty, whatever-simply because it’s the good liberal thing to do or the good conservative thing to do or the good Christian thing to do or whatever. In fact, I think that type of tribal thinking is normal for most people. You ever been around college students trying to be pseudo-radicals or enlightened liberals who are deathly afraid someone else might be more liberal or more progressive or more enlightened than they are? Ever known any talk-radio freaks who feel ashamed because they harbor secret doubts that Rush’s latest pronouncement is the gospel? I have.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Jackson,
I agree with you about it not being irrational, but would another reason. When government concerns so many issues in such depth, it is ridiculous to ask every one of millions of voters to be policy wonks to a sufficient degree on each issue. So most people go the shorthand route and find who agrees with them on big issues and think that such people are at least more likely to be right on other issues than the people who disagree with them on big issues.
Especially on issues that don’t directly affect said voters.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:14 am
“Or, let me put that the other way around: if you’re imagining some world where you can gain power without making any compromises at all, then you are imagining a world quite different from our own.”
Obviously, you haven’t read much of what I’ve written on this question:
http://attackthesystem.com/liberty-and-populism-building-an-effective-resistance-movement-for-north-america/
June 4th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
[...] Keith Preston: “Or, let me put that the other way around: if you’re imagining some world where you can gain power without making any compromises at all, then you are… [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Actually, the guaranteed income funded by land taxes thing, described above, falls between two stools.
On the one hand it doesn’t go far enough. It leaves the business of taxing, funding, and government intermediation in place, which would make it harder to proceed to an even more direct arrangement with everybody connected to their own peronal resources. Georgism pre-empts distributism, and so on.
On the other hand it goes too far in terms of doing too much in one go, which creates huge transitional problems. For instance, you’d be very likely to get economic disruption since employees wouldn’t want to lose their existing wages, so employers who ultimately fund the taxes would have even more incentive to downsize in the short term, etc. It’s a problem of sobering up too quickly and being able to weather the political and economic problems while things got worse before they got better.
That’s one reason I suggested a Negative Payroll Tax as a good beginning, at least for countries like Australia with a GST/VAT already in place. (See also my recent contribution on this at wikipedia - it’s the second paragraph of that section.) Ideally, I would want that working as the first step of a transition, implemented by issuing individuals anonymous, transferrable vouchers to give to employers to qualify them for their tax breaks. The second stage would be once the vouchers circulated as money; then they would be a guaranteed income set at a level below sufficiency but enough so that effectively everyone could price themselves into work for top up wages. Then switch the funding from taxes to an endowment cum saving fund or funds, e.g. with share portfolios obtained in exchange for commuting corporate taxes and by switching income taxes to a SAYE (save as you earn) system going into the funds. The funds should use an age related descending ceiling to determine what funds individuals could draw down, and be used to provide old age benefits above a slowly rising entitlement age (I also have part of this on my publications page). Over time, the funds would wind back and allow people to arrange their own personal resource bases, probably at family level as well as individually.
I could go on but probably shouldn’t, so I’ll stop there.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
When I was in high school, I had the odd habit of studying government budgets. It occurred to me then, that if we simply combined all the social spending programs into a straight negative income tax, we could eliminate poverty. Later, I learned that idea had occurred to many others, such as Friedman, and all of you. What’s odd is that it is so obviously the right thing to do, and yet after 80 years of the welfare state we are no closer to having it happen.
Since the name of this blog is “The Art of the Possible”, what makes you all think that such a reform could actually happen? Congress is ruled by factions, not the general interest. It’s hard to think of a single example of a policy change that has actually resulted in a simple, elegant, better solution winning out. The best
example may be the 1986 tax reform. But even there, the simplification quickly eroded after a few years.
Democracy is a very, very blunt intstrument. I just don’t see it being able to push through small reforms that simplify things. I’m increasingly coming to the belief that getting one big whopper reform passed - like a Consitutional amendment allowing state seccession - is actually more realistic than the idea that incremental reforms will ever benefit the public good. Entropy, complexity, and factions are systematic components of our current government system. Until that changes, I don’t see much hope for common sense good policy.
June 7th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
TGGP Says:
“Mike Huben is a good friend of David Friedman”
I assume you are making a funny.
Not at all. It says much about you that you would think that.
Huben is “making a funny” here:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/ddfr.html
June 7th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Kieth Preston, you wrote:
“As another example, how many Democrats, liberals and lefties automatically assumed Scooter Libby was “guilty” when he was initially charged solely on the basis that he was a Bush henchman? How many Republicans, conservatives and righties assumed he was being framed simply because he was a Republican?”
Again, I don’t regard that as irrational, or at least, not automatically so. None of us has the time to follow every issue, so on many issues we simply have to default to accepting opinions offered by those whom we trust. For instance, I have not studied the issue of health care insurance very much, so I tend to simply accept the view given by those that I’ve agreed with in the past, perhaps on issues where I was better able to judge the issue based on the merits.
I believe the correct term for this is “rational ignorance” as explained by Virginia Postrel:
“Rational ignorance, which is to say having better things to do with your time than bone up on every public issue, also explains why those who do pay attention to what’s going on, either because they have a large stake or because they’re just weirdly interested, have a disproportionate influence on both particular policies and the general climate of opinion. Recommended reading: Jonathan Rauch’s Government’s End (no, it’s not about anarchy).”
June 7th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
I think one big mistake that many people make is assuming you have to have a position on things you either don’t care about personally or that don’t affect you personally.
June 8th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Keith, sure, but something like health care would effect me personally, so it seems natural to have an opinion on it. My friends and I talk about health care all the time - at least once a month, maybe more. It’s become the common punch line to jokes - the cost of it, or what life choices are effected by it. But I’m not about to go back to college and get my masters degree in health policy, so I tend to listen to those of my friends who have, or those writers whom I know I agree with on other issues.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Well, most debates I see on the question of health care amount to a discussion of the merits of vulgar libertarianism/corporatism vs more welfare statism. Flip a coin.