Here are the sort of political/economic thinkers whose substantive views I find most congenial: Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James M. Buchanan. If I tell most highly-educated people that these are the thinkers whose views of desirable institutions are most like mine, they might infer that I am some kind of rabid libertarian ideologue. But when I actually defend something like the arguments for an economic safety net each of these giants of libertarian thought actually set forth, lots of libertarians accuse me of not really being libertarian at all. And many liberals act surprised, as if I’m being saucily iconoclastic by wandering so far off the reservation. I can tell them that Hayek was actually in favor of a guaranteed minimum income and that Friedman basically invented the idea behind the EITC, but they’ll still think I’m some kind of congenial squish. But what I am is a market liberal just like Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan — the same intellectual role models who make me a rabid libertarian ideologue. So, which is it?

Frankly, “liberaltarianism” and “progressive fusionism” don’t really amount to much beyond what Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan thought anyway. So the fusionism here isn’t really a fusion of anything. It’s just seeing our way back to a pre-existing economically literate political liberalism.

Here’s my conjecture about why this now looks more like an attractive position than it might have a few years back.

The 20th century libertarian-conservative alliance was based on anti-communism/socialism. The reasonable, sophisticated consequentialist pragmatism of the great 20th century market liberals seemed an insufficient bulwark against the slippery slope from the liberal, capitalist welfare state to full-on illiberal, totalitarian socialism. (Indeed, Hayek himself made the slippery slope argument powerfully, though unsoundly.) So there was a good deal of motivation for radical anti-socialists to coordinate around strongly categorical prohibitions against state coercion.

Misean economics, disinfected of the open-minded empirical consequentialism of Mises’ Liberalism, and filtered through Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard’s peculiar views of rights and coercion delivers a powerfully moralized brief for capitalism that calls into question even taxation for the purpose of financing genuine public goods. That Rothbardians and Randians have wasted so much time fighting with each other on the question of the minimal state versus anarcho-capitalism obscures their unity on a rights-based bulwark against the slide from the welfare state to socialism. Sadly, “libertarianism” has become identified rather strongly with this ideology — an ideology some of the thinkers most strongly identified with libertarianism, like Hayek and Friedman, never shared.

The death of socialism as a viable competitor to the liberal-capitalist welfare state makes continued slippery-slope-to-socialism thinking look densely anachronistic. Other liberal welfare states, like the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, etc., have moved in a rather more market-liberal direction, becoming rather less of a soft-socialist middle-ground between the American model and full-on economic socialism. The question these days is whether the U.S. will have the good sense to adopt more rational market-based old-age pension policies, like Sweden or Australia, or lower corporate tax rates to a level more in line with the rest of the wealthy world. Slightly higher personal tax rates and slightly more redistribution is a possibility, but a slide into socialism just isn’t on the table. In this context, the negative income tax looks much less like a dangerous concession to the world-historical forces of evil.

Meanwhile, with the obsolescence of the anti-communist alliance with conservatives, many libertarians have sloughed off much of their previously tactically useful sympathy for socially conservative initiatives. Freed to be full-on social liberals, many libertarians are left sensing a much deeper cultural affinity for the left than the right. And this leads naturally to seeing more clearly their ideological affinities with welfare liberals. And then you read thinkers like Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan, and you think: Oh, yes. This is extremely sensible. And now that the welfare-liberal elite has become rather more economically literate and is no longer sighing over five year plans, there is no reason to think they cannot find this sensible, too.

So that’s where I’m at. An old-fashioned market liberal who thinks Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan get it right, and who thinks Rawlsian welfare liberals should be able to recognize themselves in these thinkers.

1) Libertarians and many conservatives often talk about lower taxes as a matter of liberty. But a higher tax isn’t more coercive than a lower one. You’re either being coerced or you’re not. A guy who mugs five people with thin wallets is no less guilty of coercion than a guy who mugs five people with thick wallets. The harm from coercion might be greater if more is taken, but there is no more or less coercion. But if you don’t think that the size of the opportunity set is a matter of liberty, then you should not think of lower taxes as a gain in liberty, but just as a reduction in harm. Yet libertarians and conservatives don’t tend to talk this way. Why not?

2) The average citizen of Singapore has fewer politically recognized rights but is freer than the average citizen of India.

Discuss.

Skepticlawyer reports on a Tyler Cowen talk in which he divulges several “libertarian heresies,” one of which Skepticlawyer records as follows:

Next, he argued for a form of positive liberty. This is not the positive liberty of Isaiah Berlin, with its totalitarian tendencies and desire to tell others how to live – something that has plagued the political left for many years and arguably persists to this day. Rather, Cowen’s positive liberty is closer to Amartya Sen’s account of ‘capabilities’ – people should be able to do certain things, and the most successful society is one where the most people can do the most things. Then – and this is where there was an audible gasp around the room – he argued that roughly 70% of the liberties worth having fall into this ‘ability’ version of positive liberty.

Once people had cleared up that he wasn’t riffing on a notion of ‘ve vill give u zees because vee think it vill be gooood for you’, some of the grounds for the audible gasp drained away. Cowen’s and Sen’s ‘positive liberty’ has a modesty absent from Berlin’s account, and lacks the obsession with inequality that – later in the address – Cowen dismissed using Hayek’s words: as a ‘category mistake’.

This is pretty much what I think, too. And the fact that some libertarians find it so annoying is one reason I am likely to classify myself simply as a liberal. Of course, most liberals don’t want me, because I’m such a libertarian, so what can you do?

Anyway, in the comments of Tyler’s post pointing to Skepticlawyer’s account of his talk, Dan Klein writes:

Two points on Tyler’s talk (as summarized by skepticlawyer blog):

1. It might be good for Tyler to speak of positive capabilities as “positive liberty,” but I think that, nonetheless, his doing so is bad for humankind (as compared to his just speaking of positive capabilities).

2. The expansion of positive capabilities enhances liberty ONLY by the channel that it reduces the coerciveness of restrictions. The coerciveness of a restriction ranges in magnitude, and a restriction is less coercive the less important to you it is. Expanding positive capabilities reduce the importance of any particular restriction. But it is only through this channel that the expansion of positive capabilities enhances liberty. Thus, “negative” liberty remains primary. Positive capabilities figure in only through the channel of negative liberty. Robinson Crusoe, alone on a desert island, is perfectly free, even though his positive capabilities are piss poor.

I don’t really follow Klein’s first point, since I find that it is perfectly good English to say things like “Now that Chad is making a bigger salary, he is at liberty (or, more naturally, free) to travel more often.” I’m all with Dan about the misuse of language when it comes to “libertarian paternalism,” but I think he’s acting in something like the revisionist spirit of Sunstein and Thaler on this one: he thinks we’ll be better off if we stop using “liberty” in one of its perfectly ordinary, widely accepted senses. I don’t mind prescriptive semantics, but revisionist prescriptive semantics seems a waster of energy.

I think I just straightforwardly disagree with Klein’s second point, though I’m not certain I understand it. An individual’s feasible set of options can be bigger or smaller. There is an obvious, conventional sense of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ in which people with more options have more freedom or greater liberty. Coercion is one way to limit the size of that set — it takes away the individual’s liberty to choose some elements of the set in an especially salient way. Coercion is such a salient and dangerous threat to the availability of our options (to our ability, our freedom, to choose) that there is a perfectly good sense of ‘liberty’ that focuses exclusively on its presence or absence. Norms against aggression and theft are very important, and so it very important that we always remain jealous of our liberty in this sense. But isn’t the point of reinforcing norms of non-coercion maintaining the openness of the alternatives that would otherwise be foreclosed by violence or the threat of violence? Robinson Crusoe strikes me as the perfect illustration of why it is that positive liberty — the size of the substantive opportunity set — is primary. He’s got total negative liberty and it’s good for bupkis.

Crispin Sartwell writes:

do me a favor?: cut and paste this everywhere. it’s a…marketing ploy. but it’s sincere.

A Philosophical Challenge

My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State argues that

(1) The political state or government rests on force and coercion.
(2) Force and coercion are always wrong if they can’t be morally justified. (That is, the use of force is wrong if it lacks a moral justification.)
(3) The arguments for the moral legitimacy of state – for example those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas – are unsound.
(4) Hence, state power has not been shown to be morally defensible.
Until you show me otherwise, I conclude that government power is in every case illegitimate.

Not only are the existing arguments for the legitimacy of state power unsound; they are pitiful. They are embarrassments to the Western intellectual tradition.

So I issue a challenge: Give a decent argument for the moral legitimacy of state power, or reconstruct one of the traditional arguments in the face of the refutations in Against the State.

If you can’t, I insist that you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism.

Henceforward, if you continue to support or observe the authority of government, you are an irrational cultist.

We’re all anarchists now, baby, until further notice.

I may agree with Sartwell about legitimacy, depending on what he means by it. But I detect a missing premise or two. For example, that in the absence of a decent argument for the legitimacy of state power, you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism. Aren’t you rationally obliged to accept the social system that does best relative to the values you care about? So what if human flourishing, not legitimacy, is your greatest concern. You can still accept that all states are illegitimate. But suppose the path to the best feasible anarchy leaves people worse off in terms of flourishing than in the best illegitimate states. It seems, in that case, you would be rationally obliged to support states that do better for people than anarchy, despite their illegitimacy. In which case, it would be irrational cultlike behavior to endorse anarchy just because it is not illegitimate.

Now, some people would say that doing better for people than the relevant non-state alternatives is all it means to say government is legitimate or coercion is justified in the relevant sense, but I don’t think so. It seems perfectly coherent to me to say both that an instance or pattern of coercion is morally unjustified and that it leaves its victims better off than they would be in the nearest anarchist possible worlds. In that case, you just have to choose between flourishing and legitimacy.

I think moral and political philosophers have a bad tendency to make all normative vocabulary line up. So you can retrofit all moral language so that “justified” just means “best for flourishing.” But I think that we in fact have multiple conventional moral vocabularies that are orthogonal to one another, which relate messily, and sometime incoherently. In the absence of a revisionist account of moral terms that gets them all to march in a single direction, you just have to accept that sometimes its best (according to one conventional moral conception) to do the wrong thing (according to another conventional moral conception) and there is nothing internal to reason or morality, as such, to tell you which conception generally carries overriding force.

Anyway… The point is: Showing that the state is not legitimate does not deliver anarchy because “If the state is not legitimate, then it is not morally defensible” is a false premise. The existence of a moral justification, in terms of flourishing, say, doesn’t entail final moral justification, since there is no fact of the matter about the final authoritative moral vocabulary. And the language of “legitimacy” may have its own internal logic that is at some level indifferent to flourishing. So showing that the state is not legitimate need not entail that it is morally indefensible.

Note: I am not sure whether I agree with myself.