Fetters and Fairness -- When will the left stop saying dumb things like this?

The U.S. economic-policy debate is in fact dominated by the assumption that unfettered markets work best, a view that's applied to our domestic economy and to that of other countries through international financial institutions that the United States controls. John Kerry's recent statement that he is "not a redistributionist" indicates how dominant this view has become.

That's Lawrence Mishel in TAP.

If the economic-policy debate is in fact dominated by the assumption that "unfettered" markets work best, then why don't we see fewer fetters? Bush's shrimp tariff surely indicates how dominant this view has become. No? Or the US's continued attempts to stonewall the WTO on US free trade violations in order to protect inefficient domestic interests? Kerry's statement is just a lie, and, in any case, not being a redistributionist doesn't imply support for unfettered markets. One might be against redistribution but want fetters on the market in order to slow the rate of growth for ecological reasons, say.

Mishel's concern, however, is redistribution. He's worried about inequality. The top 1% of families earned 19.6% of all income. That sort of thing. Yet that sort of thing tells us almost nothing interesting at all. But Mishel leaps forward:

Because of the inequality in the United States, even though our per-capita income is higher than many countries, our low-income families are not better off than those in other places where per-capita income is lower.

This is a confused sentence. He seems to imply that the fact that the income of American low-income families is lower than the income of low-income families in some other countries has some logical connection to inequality. But there is no logical connection. (If one guy, Rick, discovered a trillion dollars of unobtanium in a hole, it would skew the inequality figures, but wouldn't have anything to do with explaining why the least well-off have what they do.) And if Mishel's actually making sense, as opposed to positing dubious causal power to inequality, all he's saying is that given two sets of numbers, one set's having a higher average doesn't imply also having a higher lowest element, which is so trivial there's no point in mentioning it.

More:

The social class a person belongs to really matters -- it determines your health, how long you live, where you live, your exposure to crime, your success in school, and the likely success of your children.

This is a bit much. Your class determines none of these things. It influences them. And "class" here just means something like "income bracket." Mishel is correctly saying that your health, longevity, lifestyle, safety and success will be improved by having more money. No doubt! Will the the folks at the bottom (and, ahem, that's me!), do better if we put more fetters on the market? It seems unlikely.

It strikes me that Mishel is confusing matters of regulation with matters of distribution. Now, it happens that economic regulations are very often implemented in order to bias distribution in favor of certain interests over others. (Shrimp!) But suppose we had a clean slate and committed to restricting regulation to only those that are generally efficiency enhancing. This would mean wiping out almost all trade restrictions and huge swathes of the government bureaucracy. Such a system would surely count as "unfettered" in Mishel's terms. Now, suppose we set a tax rate sufficient to guarantee a minimum income sufficient to provide the means to develop human capital to a certain critical level. Now, this may or may not cause a reduction in the overall rate of growth, although some slowdown strikes me as likely. But, notably, this kind of guaranteed minimum within the context of a relatively minimal state does not seem to entail especially fettered markets. We haven't added any regulations on the market other than those needed for the purposes of our very streamlined tax system.

This is in fact my big beef with economic egalitarians. Most of the time they aren't really talking about equality at all. They're talking about the poor getting enough. A society in which the top 1% has 50% of the stuff, but where the poorest person has a million dollars looks pretty great to me. A million dollars is enough. Who cares if someone else has a house made of diamonds?

When the left starts wanting to actually help the poor, then maybe they'll start arguing for the de-fettering of the market in order to enable a truly efficient and effective redistributive welfare state.

Mishel concludes:

I daresay that there's no reason to believe that unfettered markets provide us with the type of society our faiths guide us to have in terms of the lives of the poor, the treatment of workers, and the solidarity of our communities.

Well, I double-dog daresay that markets much more unfettered than ours would better serve the kind of welfare state Mishel professes to want.

GPI Field Dispatches -- I mentioned the Mercatus Center Global Prosperity Initiative Journalism Fellows a while back. GPI has now posted dispatches from the field from the intrepid fellows. Matt Welch in Romania. Melinda Ammann in Botswana. Mark Hemingway in Philippines. These aren't formal articles. They're dispatches. So they're breezy and chatty, which to my mind makes them even better reading.

Tragedy of the Bunnies -- Try this cute little game/economics lesson from IHS.

Negative and Positive Rights -- I started this long post a month or so ago when there was a bunch of talk about positive and negative liberty, etc. I found much of the discussion confused. I never finished this post, which ended up getting me confused, but I thought I would share what I had in any case. Comments welcome.

-----

First, I don't think there are natural rights of any kind. Rights are conventional. If they are justified it is because they enable or otherwise contribute to a general system of mutually beneficial cooperation.

Rights are a kind of action-guiding moral relation between persons. Negative rights and positive rights are different because they are different kinds of relations. All moral rights have a dual entitlement/obligation structure. A negative right is, from one side, an obligation to constrain one's own actions in certain ways, and, from the other side, an entitlement to constraint from others. Negative rights are negative not because they include no element of entitlement -- all rights do -- but because one is entitled simply to a sort of forebearance from others. One is owed a pattern of constraint, a series of omissions, the absence of certain kinds of action. A positive right is, from one side, an entitlement that certain actions be performed, and, from the other side, an obligation to perform them.

Suppose there is a negative moral right to property. This means only that one is entitled to have one's property go unstolen (or not used without permission) by others, and that others are obligated to satisfy this entitlement. (Don't confuse the entitlement to constraint from other with respect to some things one has with an entitlement to those things. One may have a morally binding property right to something that one is not entitled to, in some senses of 'entitle'. But the fact that I am in possession of something I do not morally deserve does not imply that it is thus fair game for others. The system of useful constraints that defines our negative rights may tell us that that the best policy is to leave people with things that have fallen into their laps in certain ways, and so they are entitled to constraint from others with respect to those things, even if they are not in some sense entitled to them.) The negative right to property does not in itself imply a positive right to the provision of the enforcement of property rights. This would be a confusion. One is entitled simply to constraint from others, who are obligated to provide it. Or one might think. (As I am sometimes tempted to think.)

If we do not meet our obligations, and there is consequently a general problem of predation, then we might think that this is an extra problem that will need to be addressed. Notice that if everyone voluntarily, by force of conscience, met their obligations of constraint, then there is no problem of providing a service or positively contributing to the provision of a good. Conceptually speaking, a negative right asks us nothing but forebearance. No labor. No money. No goods. No services. Just constraint.

But this really is a simplification. Because individual reasons in contexts of collective action are to some extent interdependent, it may be that I do not have a reason (and thus obligation) to constrain my behavior unless others will. In which case, there is no right to property, say, independent of a context of general compliance. If most of us constrain ourselves voluntarily, then all of us have a reason to do so as well. But if enough of us won't constrain ourselves, then none of are obligated to. In such cases, the pattern of constraint we are aiming at may require a coercive element, and the existence of a coercive framework may be a necessary condition for our rights-defining entitlements and obligations.

What's going on here? One might say that whether property rights are negative or positive depends on the mechanism of compliance and assurance. If compliance with principles of constraint can be generated internally, by sympathy, psychological sanctions, and other moral emotions (or at least through non-coercive social sanctions), then property rights are negative. If compliance must be generated externally through a system of publicly financed law enforcement, then property rights are positve.

But I'm not sure that this is the right way to think of it.

I think even under a system of coercive enforcement, we should want to say that property rights are negative rights. An interesting thing about the use of coercion to enable coordination is that the coercion, per se, does not provide most of us with our motivating reason for action. We need coercion to motivate people who wouldn't otherwise be motivated, and to publicly assure us that others are so motivated. Given this assurance, knowing that others will comply, we will have a reason to likewise comply. Our reason will be grounded in the expected advantages of cooperation, and this may move us totally independently from an expectation of coercive sanctions for non-compliance. So the coercion is creating a context in which we can be entitled to constraint from others and obligated to constrain ourselves. The right to property, as such, is negative. But, barring voluntary compliance, the right exists only when coercion solves the assurance problem.

Self-Promo -- My review essay on Brookhiser's and Adams's recent biographies of Gouverneur Morris are now online at Reason.