Monthly Archives: August 2006

On the Libertarian Vice

Posted on by

I find most of the responses to Tyler’s provocative “libertarian vice” post very stimulating, but I find the prevailing defensiveness pretty disappointing. This is 1/2 Tyler’s fault for making it sound like the vice—assuming that government quality is fixed and low—is essential to libertarianism, which it isn’t. Indeed, a quite widespread understanding of Rand-Rothbard-Nozick rights libertarianism doesn’t even require the premise that voluntary price-coordinated action is generally more effective than state coercion. Rights are normatively binding deontic restrictions whose authority and force does not wait on the outcome of an empirical comparison of the consequences of alternative institutional arrangements. (I think this is view incorrect, both in fact, and as a reading of everyone but maybe Rothbard; the point is that this is the catechism of High Church axiom of non-coercion libertarianism.)  

It is, however, 1/2 the commentators fault for not directly conceding that the libertarian vice is indeed a widespread libertarian vice. Alex and Glen: You protest too much! It is exceedingly similar to, if not the same thing as, what I call the “fallacy of asymmetric idealization.” Libertarians are in fact very often guilty of assuming counterfactually ideal markets and counterfactually non-ideal governments. And faith-in-government liberals commit the opposite vice. To argue, correctly I think, that empirical comparative analysis shows us that actually existing market institutions tend to perform better than actually existing government institutions in achieving liberal aims does nothing to establish that libertarians aren’t often guilty of Tyler’s vice, or my fallacy. Indeed, as long as you don’t read Tyler uncharitably as making a silly definitional claim about libertarianism, I don’t see how what he is saying is even contrarian, as opposed to a perfectly good observation.

If nothing else, Tyler’s post is cagey piece of strategic rhetoric that signals to egalitarian liberals a good faith willingness to actually having a debate without pointlessly pulling out ideological trump cards and declaring victory, and a related commitment to non-utopian policy—to endorsing the best option in the politically feasible set. I read Tyler as saying that he considers it inappropriate to assume a priori that market alternatives to government will always be better than government, or to assume  a priori that a policy to improve the effectiveness of some government function will not be the best feasible alternative. If some politically infeasible market reform is “better” in the abstract, that is often simply irrelevant. I think this is certainly correct.

Of course, each policy decision alters what is politically possible in the future, which can present very complex choices. Suppose policies A and B are politically feasible. Policy C is not. A is “better government” and is best in the short run. But C is “legalizing a market in whatever it is A produces” which is best in the long run. A severely reduces the probability of getting to C. B significantly increases the probability of getting to C, but by no means guarantees it, and at the cost of short-term consequences worse than A. So, should we choose A or B? It depends on what you think the expected value of A and C conditional on B are.

If you think the value of C relative to A is huge, you’ll endorse B, even if it increases the probability of C only by a very small amount. I think the debate between statist liberals and market liberals is often a debate over the relative benefits of A and C. If you’re the sort of libertarian who endorses B no matter how big the gains from A, and no matter how small the probability of C, then you’re guilty of the vice. I’ve met more than a few libertarians who will not only endorse B for the purpose of very slightly increasing the the low probablity of C, but on the basis of a truly fantastic conception of a possible path from B all the way through the alphabet to N, libertarian nirvana. But by the time you get only a few steps into the future, the probability is basically zero, in which case supporting B on the prospect of its leading to N is surely a form of addlepated utopianism. If you deny that this happens, then we have been going to different libertarian conferences.

Of course, matters of feasibility are just stupefyingly complex. The infeasibility of certain market reforms are often in large part a function of the ignorance or dogmatism of statist liberals. The probability of getting from here to there is a matter of all sorts of endogenous variables. Indeed, it may be that by signaling good faith in the way you are intend to compare market and government institutions–by saying that you think better government can sometimes be the best feasible choice–you are more likely to get into a conversation that slightly lessens the ignorance and weakens the dogmatism of statist liberals, thereby making is slightly more likely that better government is not the best feasible choice. The strength of this signal is surely amplified by visibly aggravating your libertarian comrades. So, good job Tyler! Sorry I can’t help by scolding you!

Easy Now!

Posted on by

My first thought upon hearing about the foiled plot to blow up airplanes was: good! My second thought: why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, massive manpower, and valuable intelligence resources in Iraq when we should be rooting out this crap instead? My third thought was: “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”? Bullshit.

Auschwitz is mass murder on an unimaginable scale. A dozen jam-packed airliners adds up to a few thousand people. As horrifying as that is, I’m afraid I can imagine it. Andrew Samwick has the same thought, and, better yet, the numbers.

Despite the gigantic quagmire of a distraction in Iraq, we’re clearly winning the war on terror. Of course, it is not in the interests of the political class, or of glory-hungry security officials to provide us with a realistic sense of the risk. Steven Johnson has it right, and quotes this bit of John Mueller’s great essay in Regulation:

…it would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate that an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads — rural interstate highways — one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.

Take away all the TSA foolishness, and I’m still safer in a plane than driving to Alexandria. Sure, murder is different from accidental deaths, and we’ve got to take active measures to try to stop these kinds of plots. But the response has to be rationally proportionate to the objective risk. I’m afraid we’re unecessarily allowing ourselves to be freaked out of our liberties.

I'm Terrified of Going Home Tonight

Posted on by

Liquids are piped directly into my home, to my horror. My refrigerator is full of them. Thank God I am miles and miles from the ocean.

What's Going On?

Posted on by

My recent blogging efforts have been directed to Cato@Liberty. Here’s one from yesterday on the right of exit versus political predation, and here’s one from Tuesday on pluralism and school choice.

And keep eye an out for the new Cato Unbound next Monday. Essayist Richard Rodriguez will kick things off with a meditation on “Mexicans in America,” our topic for August. Victor Davis Hanson is first in line to reply. Should be good.

Jimbo and Larry in the Atlantic

Posted on by

Wow. I sure wouldn’t have predicted back in the days of MDOP that Jimbo and Larry would get profiles in the the Atlantic for their contributions to the cataloguing of human knowledge. Actually, I wouldn’t have predicted when I was involved in the early stages of Nupedia (I have an unfinished article on “the paradox of analysis” laying around somewhere) that Wikipedia would become some kind of elemental force of nature. So you never know!

Cowen on the Experience Machine

Posted on by

Tyler writes of Nozick’s most famous thought experiment:

Is the experience machine example so compelling as a refutation of hedonism? I think it puts pleasure squarely on the map as one value which matters and which is even undervalued in many circumstances. Many of us are too reluctant to step into the machine rather than too ready. Isn’t our general tendency to overvalue the illusion of control?

Surely it is not meant to rule out pleasure as “one value which matters.” Hedonism is the view that pleasure is the only value that matters. The experience machine is pretty compelling in making us feel the force of competing values. Control is one. I imagine Tyler meant to say we overvalue control, which is often (always?) an illusion. But sometimes it’s not. In any case, a sense of control and self-efficacy gives us pleasure, which is one reason why we are hesitant to relinquish control, but not the only reason.

That’s not quite what the experience machine is about anyway. It’s not about hedonism or control: it’s about subjectivism about value broadly. The value of many things don’t require them to be experienced. They are valuable because of what they are and they way they relate to our lives. That relation is sometime experiential, but sometimes it isn’t. In many cases we think of pleasure as a response to a value; it’s how the value registers, but isn’t the value itself. Nozick is drawing that out, together with the fact that we often see the real relationship between value and its experience as a value in its own right.

Don’t marginalist arguments require a common currency? I think Nozick’s argument is that there isn’t one here. How good must an illusory life seem in order to compensate for the cost of actually losing all values that are not seemings. Nozick’s plausible intuition is that the currencies generally aren’t tradeable. Tyler is right that this is wrong. If in fact the circumstances of your life are such that it is hardly worth living, or your demise is imminent anyway, such that expected future value approaches zero, the pleasures of illusory experience may make life objectively better for you by being, at least, subjectively good.

I agree that pleasure is undervalued in some circumstances. It is also overvalued in some circumstances. Like every other value. Isaiah Berlin and Aristotle helps us a great deal more than silly monists like Bentham. Values are values. The trick is how to correctly balance them in the context of a lifeplan without recourse to a mythical common currency, or a stable and predictable exchange rate between values. The ideal balance is not the one that gives you the most pleasure; it is the one the gives you the best life. What that is is your problem, and is not answered for you by any theory. Good luck! Now, a phronimos would know at what moment to step into the experience machine. But if you are not a phronimos, his reasons are not yours.