Positive Liberty

This one sat in the post queue for a long time while animal rights questions occupied most of my blogging time. But I’m done with those for now, I promise.

Commenter D. Stephen Heersink, also of The Gay Species, has some difficulties with libertarianism, which he left in a comment a while back. A few of them I think are apt; others, I find misplaced. And some I think are based on factual errors. His objections and my replies, below the fold.

The principal point is that 18th century liberal principles are still 20th century liberal principles, but the 18th century context and 20th century context are no longer the same. Thus, to use 18th century applications in the 20th century is an anachronism.

The subsidiary, albeit more important, point, is the distinction between “means” and “ends.” Not even 18th century liberals regarded their principles as the “ends.” Rather they were the “means” to anti-tyrannical forces that impeded the freedom to choose one’s own way of life (ethos) in a minimally-ordered social cohesion, i.e., human flourishing. Thus the principles served this end.

Libertarians, conversely, take the principles as “ends.”

In the eighteenth century, all liberals wanted the same things, basically, and they had a set of means (here, principles) that they thought would achieve them. Those principles included a broad array of individual freedoms as well as laissez-faire economics. Subsequently, liberalism discovered that its principles should be discarded. (This, in itself, is an alarming admission.)

Libertarians failed, somehow, to keep up with the times, and to drop their principles like all good people should do.

Well… That’s certainly one spin on things. But immediately I begin to wonder: Why is it that “modern” is so often equated with “good”? Modern, after all, is a moving target, and much of modernity has been pretty awful.

Had we been discussing these questions in the 1920s, “modern” would have meant nationalizing all industry and property, because only wise central planning could end the chaos of the market. Modern would have meant Prohibition, eugenics, and fascism.

Now, “modern” means a careful interventionism and only nationalizing those service-intensive industries that we moderns just so happen to place this value upon: education and healthcare above all. But nowhere in “it’s modern” do I find “it’s good.” I just don’t see it.

I tend also to believe that the means/ends distinction in Heersink’s argument is misplaced. Yes, we libertarians insist on certain social arrangements that we think will allow more fully authentic human lives, but this doesn’t mean that these social arrangements are ends in themselves — no more, at any rate, than the liberal interventionists’ preferred social arrangements say the same things about the people supporting them: It would hardly be a fair critique of welfare liberalism to say that welfare liberals view food stamps as an end in themselves.

Food stamps are a means, and we may argue about what means are most effective. But I would not reduce modern liberalism to a set of government goodies and say “ah, there you go, that’s all there is to it.” This simply isn’t a fair way to argue.

Personally, I tend to think that libertarians and at least the better sort of liberals have the exact same goal in mind. (I’ll leave off those liberals who think their principles should be jettisoned for the sake of modernity.) What we share is as follows: We all look forward to a world in which individuals, conceived as ends in themselves and not subservient to a race, a class, or a nation, are held to be the highest political and social good.

Society, and the state, will exist only for the sake of individual flourishing and individual fulfillment. The precise nature of this fulfillment is a matter of debate, and it probably always will be: And since humans are by nature disputatious, this in itself may be a part of human fulfillment. Accordingly, both liberals and libertarians offer considerable latitude as regards individual lifestyle choices.

So I do not agree that libertarians and liberals differ about ends; I think that our ends are actually just the same. Our opponents are often the same too, and it’s worth exploring this similarity.

Libertarians and liberals alike have often pointed out that free moral agency is made difficult or impossible under a tyranny, for example, and that this is precisely the reason why tyranny is intolerable to us both. Tyranny is not rejected merely because you don’t get to say whatever you please. It’s intolerable because being able to express oneself is part of a fully authentic human life, and the fully authentic life, chosen for oneself, is a necessary precondition for anything that might be the true embodiment of the Good on earth. If it is not freely chosen, then it is neither good nor evil — It has no more moral dimension than the weather. (And this is to say nothing of the inherent moral harms of permitting the machinery of despotism to continue.)

Now here is where we differ: Libertarians view liberty, in all possible instances, as the necessary precondition for living the best possible type of life, whatever that type of life may ultimately be. Liberal interventionists, or modern liberals, view compulsion as sometimes preferable. Some choices, they argue, should be removed from the sphere of some individuals, and then these choices are to be consigned to other, presumably wiser individuals. And by this method, we will all achieve more authentic, more fully human lives.

I fail to see how it should be, but that at any rate is the claim. To my mind the interventionist strain in modern liberalism undercuts the very idea of individualism which it purports to serve.

But in any event, we share the same ends. The question then becomes one of means, and while the libertarian prescription may seem naive or dogmatic to Heersink, I feel that the modern liberal prescription has not been successful, or, at any rate, insofar as it has appeared successful, credit is due not primarily to interventionism, but to the capitalist system on which interventionism was above all a parasite.

Because these are empirical claims, we must turn to history. Heersink writes:

The unfettered free market of the 18th century proto-capitalist type becomes its own raison d’etre, despite the advent of child labor, industrial pollution, Robber Barons, the corporation (its diffused ownership and management), etc., changing the basic assumptions. Capitalism, unfettered, works beautifully in a simple entrepreneurial economy of the mid-18th century, where the manager/owner has global knowledge of all means of production and/or sale. That 18th century context is no longer dominant, in fact, it is very rare. Adam Smith never saw a factory, London, or a corporation.

…and there is a lot of history here. I can’t claim to speak for all libertarians, but for me at least, these critiques either do not apply or are simply mistaken. Let’s look at them point by point:

Child labor may be forbidden in many libertarian theories of justice, because children are not fully autonomous moral agents yet. And this is exactly my belief: A child can no more meaningfully agree to a labor contract than he could meaningfully agree to sex.

Child labor was not, however, the creation of industrial capitalism. It existed throughout the early modern, medieval, and ancient worlds. True, historical child labor was not of the intensity or the danger of industrial work, but these were problems that were identified quite rapidly and that were almost as rapidly abolished.

Child labor, which had existed for as long as human civilization, was ended within the space of a few decades — an accomplishment of similar scope and moral vision as the abolition of slavery. It is to the credit, and not to the detriment, of modern capitalism that it alone abolished child labor.

Industrial pollution is of course a relatively new development, unlike child labor. While humans have been modifying the environment ever since they learned to make tools and fire, industrial pollution, and the harm it could do, was frankly a bit of a surprise. Yet there is nothing about libertarianism that says we must tolerate industrial pollution. On the contrary, polluting someone else’s property is a genuine harm done to that person, and libertarians — who consistently believe that natural resources should be made into private property — also look forward to the punishment of anyone who pollutes the property of another without his consent.

Now in practice there have been essentially two social systems under industrialism: a relatively free market, with rigorous property rights and the rule of law; and a planned economy, with state-owned property and rule by decree. Only in one of these societies has industrial pollution been taken at all seriously, and only in the free world have property owners had the legal means of even beginning to confront this very new problem. Whenever the environment has been left to central planners, they have tended very strongly to make a mess.

(It’s worth pointing out, purely as an aside, that the lives of virtually all human beings are on balance vastly better thanks to industrial production methods, even if we unfairly assign to capitalism all of the blame for all pollution worldwide. I would sooner die of cancer from industrial pollution, even at sixty, than die of cholera, starvation, or sepsis, at thirty. By contrast, the damage to my property is a relatively minor detail, albeit one that the market can also handle quite well.)

Robber Barons, to the extent that they existed, fall into essentially one of three categories, with allowances for intermediates.

The first type made their money through honest work, making the lives of others better in the meantime, and therefore deserved all that they got. These were neither robbers nor barons.

The second type made their money through subverting the government and winning ill-gotten favors. These were criminals and should have been prosecuted much more vigorously than they were. It’s a little harder to do this sort of thing today, but, sadly, not much harder. It is entirely beyond me why libertarians get the blame for people who make their living mooching off the state.

Libertarians tend to think that the whole problem of corporate favoritism could be solved in an equitable manner by limiting what the government can do in the first place, and by particularly limiting the government’s ability to intervene in support of any particular economic vision for the country. (”A transcontinental railroad” would be one such vision. “Universal health care” would be another.)

Modern liberals who would not only preserve but actually increase the government’s role in the economy are the ones who really have some explaining to do — How on earth would they keep the robber barons at bay? Libertarians, who would not dole out government contracts or any other favors to private industry, except perhaps for national defense, run much less risk of encouraging them.

The third sort of the so-called robber barons inherited their wealth. These of necessity either squandered it or else joined one of the first two types. Also, and hardly a case of squandering, many of them established great artistic, intellectual, or charitable organizations that exist even today. To say nothing of the corporations they created, which have provided generations of products and services, jobs, and wealth.

So… all of this is a problem for libertarians how? And how is it not more of a problem for modern liberals?

Adam Smith never saw a factory, London, or a corporation… Aside from stating that the corporation is somehow a problem, I really don’t see what this or the other anti-corporate sections of the above passage are getting at. Smith was one thinker — an important one — but capitalism as a mode of production neither stands nor falls on the depth of his own experience.

Whereas liberals recognize that human flourishing is being abused and misused by modern capitalist corporations and special interest hegemony over the political process, and would act to remedy those abuses through anti-trust, fair labor, worker safety, environmental responsibility, etc., laws and regulations, universalized, the libertarian reverts to the 18th century context to apply his liberal principles, a context no longer extant. If “markets” are to operate in a 21st century, the liberal principles have to apply to the present moment, not what was extant two centuries ago. Monopolies, for example, defeat markets, and yet they continue to amass. “Out-sourcing” and “importation of cheap illegal labor” surely drives down consumer prices, increases the bottom line, but only temporarily, if the producer no longer produces with domestic labor to feed consumption, and the consumer is no longer playing on the same “level playing field” to earn an income from which to buy products.

NO LIBERAL would endorse taxpayer subsidies of business, to keep inefficient, archaic business afloat with taxes. He might use Keynsian stimulus occasionally, but the folly of government paying private business to do government jobs is inefficient and expensive to boot. Plus, it undermines the “markets’” own dynamic forces. For the spontaneous market to respond to economic exigencies, the LAST thing is for PUBLIC funds to cause disequilibrium. Stimulus is one thing, transfer-of-payment infrastructure economic security is nuts.

No liberal would endorse taxpayer subsidies of business? Really? There must be vanishingly few liberals left then, and none in the U.S. Congress, with the possible exception of Ron Paul. (And this would mean that I too am a liberal, unreservedly, and not in the classical sense, but in the modern one.)

The quoted paragraph just cries out, I think, for further elaboration. To my mind the distinction between inefficient subsidies and Keynesian economic stimulus is spurious. Likewise the distinction between corporate welfare and all of the various measures employed to “correct” capitalism. Companies lobby for these things. They’re trying to live off your tax dollars — and you’ve bought their line. Monopolies defeat markets if and only if a government helps them out. Otherwise the monopolist must always reckon with the possibility of future competition.

Modern liberals would subsidize businesses all across the board — even if they don’t believe that they are doing so. How? Through “anti-trust, fair labor, worker safety, environmental responsibility, etc., laws and regulations, universalized.” These measures are subsidies — to some businesses. Just as they are penalties to others. And this is to say nothing of the much more direct subsidies, offered in the forms of eminent domain, tax deferrals, tax exemptions, and outright cash payments. Not only are libertarians innocent in these areas, but we have to protest, too, that our accusers are the guiltiest of all.

As we all recognize, not every need is or can be met by private initiative, markets, or resources. Healthcare, retirement programs, highways, etc., are examples of a definite need for PUBLIC use to serve individual and social needs. That does not mean that a single monopolistic model has to be universally used. A government-managed social health insurance program could offer various types of plans, as could public education. So government also needs to modernize to offer choices that are substantively equal, but vary according to individual preferences. The “market” in other words should not necessarily be the exclusive domain of PRIVATE use.

I like the idea of choice. But then, how will the government know which choices to offer? How will it know when people start wanting a new choice? Or, more importantly, how will it know when people are ready to start wanting a new choice, but don’t yet know what that choice should look like? In other words, how can government solve the problem of innovation?

My answer is that it can’t, because government usually does not take risks, and it almost never permits its own programs to fail. Failing programs are propped up; innovations go untried. These are systematic problems that can’t be cured by any means at all. Once you have the power to tax, you have foregone both the carrot of innovation and the stick of failure.

Moreover, an “insurance” scheme is not a “transfer-of-payment” scheme, and thus when Social Security was born it was billed as the former, but is actually the latter. Only government could screw something so obvious up. But trust Bush to solve the mess? Not after Bush’s Medicare Part D which prohibits price negotiations, is operated through hundreds of different and incommensurate schemes and insurers, and the taxpayer picks up any shortfalls to the insurer. What kind of nonsense allowed government to create this scam? Special interests, perhaps? A little milk for the elderly, a lot of honey for industry, and more bilking of taxpayers (assuming someone pays at some point).

Trust Bush to solve the mess? Good heavens, no! I can’t imagine any real libertarian trusting this administration to fix entitlements, whether today or seven years ago. We may have hoped for the best, but we didn’t hold our breath. Social Security and Medicare Part D are both failures in part for the reasons you state. What kind of nonsense allowed government to create these scams? I’m not sure, but I know it wasn’t my kind of nonsense.

(I’ve deleted, by the way, the slur against my employer. I’ll thank you not to do that again.)

P.S. What is the liberal principle freedom of exchange fundamentally about? Private markets? Not at all. CHOICE. If government offered choices, or if one producer offered competitive choices, would it matter how the choices arose? Governments, alas, tend not to allow choice. Nor do monopolies, even “private” ones.

Yes, it would matter how the choices arose. It would matter tremendously, and this is why government is lousy at providing choices.

The act of deciding which choices will go before consumers is itself a choice. It’s a choice either made by entrepreneurs in a free system, or by bureaucrats in a socialist one. Both entrepreneurs and bureaucrats will often guess wrongly about which choices should be on the menu. But only the former will be quickly corrected.

Having choices, as a consumer, is great. Having choices, as an entrepreneur, is possibly even more important — because the entrepreneurs’ choices are either rewarded or punished in a timely manner, ensuring that consumers get more of what they do want and less of what they don’t want.

The fundamental thesis behind freedom of exchange is not exchange itself, but freedom to choose and negotiate in an exchange. When private lenders engage in a cartel demanding an ubiquitous “due-on-sale” clause, without any choice, are you defending the right of the private markets to cartel the absence of choices? Or do you prize the option of having a CHOICE?

If there is sufficient demand in the market, someone will defect on the cartel arrangement and make windfall profits. Historically, cartels almost never work, and if they succeed at all, it is only for a very short time — only just long enough for someone to realize that money is being left on the table. Compare this to a government-enforced monopoly, which can endure for centuries.

So… I’ve carried on quite long enough. Shall we discuss?

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