My post on libertarian democraphobia has elicited a sharp response from Patri Friedman. It’s good stuff, but I think we’re talking a bit past each other. In part, that’s because I was brain-dumping and wasn’t as clear as I might have been, and in part because we have some substantive disagreements. I think maybe I can be clearer on a few points and that we can start to try to get to the bottom of our disagreements.

First, I’m completely sincere in wishing Patri and others well in their exciting visionary project. I’m eagerly watching its progress and I hope it succeeds. But I think one thing we need to hash out is why we think the probabilities of success are what we think they are. At this point, I consider the probability very low that seasteads (or something like them) will create a competitive market for systems of social organization within my lifetime. I also think the probability is low that persuasion and political organization will, by itself, be very effective in moving any already relatively liberal state within the status quo global system of states very far toward more thoroughly liberal ideals. I just happen to think that the prospect of making some progress on this front is better.

I share the view that demonstration is more powerful than argument. And I think that if there is significant further liberalization within the system of states, it will most likely be due to the salience of successful innovations in governance, and that other jurisdictions, competing for talent and investment, will act to copy those innovations. I just don’t presently think the jurisdiction most likely to set off this kind of race to the top will be a seastead. And, furthermore, I think setting off this kind of cascade requires a good deal of intellectual and rhetorical groundwork. Argument and persuasion often makes demonstration possible.

Anyway, let me reply directly to some of Patri’s remarks:

Will seems trapped in the hopeless quest to philosophically define a single just society.  I find the idea that one can determine, philosophically or practically, the best way to organize a society a priori to be laughable.  And that’s even if we agree on a single set of goals for our society – which we don’t. Competition and consumer choice are the answers – why is this so hard for a libertarian to understand?

Not hard at all. And I share Patri’s skepticism about the worth of a priori ideal theory.

We face a very hard problem – the problem of creating a good system of social organization, one with the power to enforce laws,  yet which does not abuse this power.  As liberals, we know how to solve hard problems – use markets.  Which is why I advocate for a competitive market for government.  Will, strangely, seems to like the current oligopoly with its high barrier to entry and high switching costs, and is skeptical that a more competitive market will provide a better solution.

I don’t believe I said anything that implied I like the status quo system of states. As readers of this blog know, I am deeply invested in the conviction that the fundamental human right to move — the right to exit and enter jurisdictions — must be more fully recognized and honored. Competitive markets for government can’t work if people are not allowed to “unsubscribe” from their current provider of governance or “subscribe” to another. Because governance is territorial, the very possibility of anything like consumer choice in governance is based on mobility rights. I’m not skeptical that more competition between jurisdictions will provide a better solution. I’m pretty certain it will. I think Patri has confused my defense of the possibility of progress within existing liberal democracies for complacency about the “current oligopoly” system, which I actively deplore.

Note that this argument has nothing to do with democracy, and doesn’t depend in the slightest on the morality or practicality of the system.  Democracy is simply the current industry standard product that firms offer customers.  If it truly is the ultimate form of social organization, then in a world of competitive government, democratic seasteads will outcompete all other seasteads, attract all the customers, and people will eventually give up trying other forms of government.  Personally, I find the idea that this ancient Greek technology is the best we’ll ever do to be absurd, but even if I’m wrong, even if our Thousand Nations are all different variants of democracy, the system will still improve politics by allowing for competition between those variants. so we can find those that work the best.

First, I think it’s more than confusing, on Patri’s own terms, to talk of states as if they are “firms” and as if the people who live within their territories are “customers.” I thought the point was that there isn’t a market and that people within the jurisdictions of states don’t have effective consumer choice over governments. I suppose talking as if the culmination of your work has preceded you may help to create a needed conceptual shift, but it also obscures the fact that the freedom of citizens and subjects all over the world to become globetrotting jurisdictional shoppers remains a largely political question within existing states.

Second, does Patri think democracy has become “the current industry standard” for no reason? As it happens, liberal democracies are in fact the best places in the world to live. They are where people are happiest, healthiest, live the longest, and, yes, are most free, And, as it happens, people who live in advanced liberal democracies generally have significant freedom to emigrate. (In non-democracies, not so much.) When they do move, they tend to move to other liberal democracies.

I understand it’s tough for new entrants to break into the government “market,” and that if attractive non-democratic alternatives were to be offered, people with the freedom to choose them might choose them. But insofar as there has been a limited market test, democracy is the decisive champ. So, if Patri really finds a priori identification of the best way to organize society “laughable,” then I don’t understand why he’s entitled to be so confident that “the idea that this ancient Greek technology is the best we’ll ever do [is] absurd.”  It’s this sort of thing that makes me (and others, I’m sure) suspect Patri’s less than wholehearted about the “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom” rhetoric and is in fact a closet ideal theorist who wants a bit of turf on which to demonstrate the superiority of his ideal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Thus even a democraphilic should want competitive government.  It’s not democraphilia or democraphobia which is the key here, but agoraphilia or agoraphobia (meaning markets, not open spaces, of course).  So my challenge to Will, and any other agoraphilic skeptic of competitive government is to resolve this contradiction.  If you generally believes in the power of competition to offer better products to consumers, why is the market for government fundamentally different?

I do want more competitive government! But I’ll persist in complaining that Patri underestimates the extent to which the possibility of competitive government remains, for the forseeable future, largely a political problem and not an engineering one. The question of “why the market for government is fundamentally different” takes us back to anarchist vs. statist ground zero, doesn’t it? But, that aside, my response to the challenge is simply to deny that I am agoraphobic, or that there is a contradiction I need to resolve.

Here’s a question for Patri: Why do you think building some new territory relatively few people will be politically free and economically able to move to will be sufficient to create a “competitive market in government” significantly different than the current “market”? And here’s another: If seasteads converge on forms of democracy not very different from current ones, will you consider this a vindication of familiar forms of democracy or an indictment of imagination?

There’s more in Patri’s post I’d like to respond to, but for now I’ll leave it at that.

If you’re a new-school classical liberal (neoclassical liberal?) like me, you like democracy just fine. This puts you somewhere between (a) modern liberals in the post-Rawlsian vein who tend toward not-actually-very-liberal Rousseuvian romanticism about democracy and (b) libertarians who tend toward often not-very-liberal renunciations of democracy. I want to talk about these libertarians. Here are some off-the-cuff (that means disorganized) thoughts.

First, I think it’s important to recognize that libertarian democraphobia often comes from a deeply liberal place. The libertarian non-coercion principle is a good abstract first approximation of the liberal presupposition that persons are free and equal. No one has a natural right to rule over another, and no one has a natural duty to obey. The liberal presupposition sets a high bar for the justification of coercion, and thus the justification of the state. Many libertarians think there is no justification. Therefore the only acceptable rule of collective choice is unanimity or full consensus. This is one focus of the debate between anarchist and limited-statist libertarians. On the anarchist side, political power cannot get off the ground, and thus the design of mechanisms to control political power is a non-issue. On the limited-statist side, political power does get off the ground, and thus so does the design of constitutions and democratic institutions. I think this divide is far wider than is reflected in the libertarian community, and part of the reason is that limited-government libertarians tend to internalize more of the anarchist framework than they logically should.

In any case, libertarians often display a confusing or confused reaction to democracy as it actually exists. The scheme laid out in most libertarian ideal theory is so distant from actual democratic practice that the whole existing system can seem by comparison a comprehensive injustice. When one’s ideal theory implies that politics is by its nature illegitimate and corrupt, one tends to develop a sharply disapproving attitude toward participation in politics. Lots of libertarians, for example, think it’s morally wrong to vote. (There are many structural reasons the Libertarian Party is hopeless, but here’s one reason libertarians tend to be at best half-hearted political activists.) Likewise, incrementalist approaches to policy can never be adequately pure from the perspective of radical libertarian ideal theory. School vouchers are still tax-financed; a system of mandatory personal retirement accounts has a restriction on economic liberty at its heart; and so on. So, not only is politics corrupt and corrupting. There are few democratically feasible libertarian policies that merit support. The public does not want libertarianism. Which means that the public does not want a system that respects fundamental rights. So much the worse for the public, the thinking tends to go.

The confused radical libertarian response is to more or less agree with all of this, and then decide to vote for the Republican because he promises lower taxes or whatever. Whatever else you can say about Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel’s wholesale rejection of politics in favor of flight to a DIY frontier, it is not confused or incoherent. It is to reject the terms of the local democratic game by exercising the exit option. It’s what the Pilgrims did. It’s what the Mormons did. The difference is that there’s no more ready-made frontier left to settle. And I truly wish them the best of luck.

But I don’t think they take seriously enough the problem of governance in the DIY frontier. One can avoid politics and democratic conflict in the short-run through self-segregation. But this tends not to last that long. (See: the Pilgrims in Massachusets; the Mormons in Deseret/Utah) And I have questions about how well the Friedman plan can scale, as newcomers come to the settled frontier, and as pioneers raise children who do not share the consensus of the initial settlement. Sooner or later the problem of pluralism and moral disagreement will rear its head, and there are liberal and illiberal ways to respond. If the response is to maintain the consensus of self-segregation by evicting inevitable dissidents, one begins to wonder what to call those with the power to evict. At a certain point, the differences between a sovereign monarch and a monopoly landlord becomes semantic.

Anyway, not to rehearse Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but I think the prospects for avoiding something like a state are slim. And I think it would be better to design a democratic structure in advance, rather than morphing into a neo-fuedal landlord/tenant model of territorial governance, or trying to cobble together an adequate constitution when the original system starts to break down. Of course, the point of the DIY frontier for its present advocates is precisely to demonstrate that society without politics is possible. So to recommend a democratic constitution at the outset is just to express pessimism about a project meant to show this pessimism unfounded. And why argue when you can experiment? Let’s do the experiment!

Now, as I’ve argued before, I think the anarchist is right about the minarchist: once you accept the public goods argument for state protection of various rights, you have accepted that there are no fully voluntary solutions to certain collective action problems, and you’re logic-bound to ride the public goods argument as far as it takes you, which is further than the minarchist thinks. And you have accepted that it is possible to justify a break from a full consensus or unanimity rule. You’re going to have to settle on a collective decision procedure that can determine what is and is not going to count as a public good, how much it will cost to pay for these goods, what the scheme of public finance is going to be, etc. You have agreed to politics, and there is no guarantee things are always going to your way. I fully accept all of this. And I think other neo-classical liberals (other moderate limited-government libertarians) could do much better at fully facing up to their implicit buy-in to democratic politics. This doesn’t mean giving up idealistic disenchantment with the current dispensation, or giving up hard-headed views on the limits of democracy, but it does mean taking democracy seriously, and I think that means taking more responsibility for public opinion.

Which brings us to Thiel’s boneheaded quip about women’s suffrage. Extending the franchise to women is, in my estimation, one of the great triumphs of the American classical liberal tradition. Like the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage was rooted in the rejection of a shameful tradition of paternalism that held that some classes of people are less than fully able to govern themselves. I cannot see how anyone who accepts basic liberal assumptions about freedom and equality can see the establishment of equal political rights as anything but an unequivocal good… unless he rejects the legitimacy of politics in principle. I think this is were Thiel was coming from.

But if politics is in-principle illegitimate, it was illegitimate before women got the vote, so why bring it up? By bringing it up as a reason why democratic progress is hopeless, Thiel does make it sound like he thinks the problem’s not democratic politics per se, but democratic politics without good prospect of producing the right answer. But liberalism starts from the recognition that free and equal people don’t agree about the right answer but need to find a way to live together anyway. The secessionist instinct does seem illiberal insofar as it’s based in the frustration that reasonable pluralism fails to generate consensus on the right answer — even when the content of the right answer is a radical version of liberalism. And Thiel’s comment seemed to imply that political recognition of the fundamental equality of persons is not only tangential to the right answer, but might even get in the way of arriving at it, which is just screwed up.

If establishing equal rights to political participation in fact created an impediment to the political success of libertarianish ideas, maybe there are some very good reasons for that. People who finally gained equal political rights through a long democratic struggle cannot have been unreasonable to see democratic politics as a morally and politically progressive force. An ideology that damns democratic politics as almost necessarily immoral might not look so good to them. And if libertarian-style politics seems especially unnatractive to members of formerly oppressed and disenfranchised groups, maybe that’s because it is reasonable to suspect that a politics that focuses relentlessly on the inviolability of property rights in a system that once treated people as property, and for centuries denied much of the population the chance to accumulate any property, is a politics meant to protect those who reap the gains of a still-rigged and unjust system.

Libertarianism does have public relations problems, and it’s not because most people are stupid or immoral. It’s because libertarians have done a terrible job countering the widespread suspicion that it’s a uselessly abstract ahistorical ideology for socially retarded adolescent white guys. The sadly common libertarian-conservative penchant for “brave” counter-PC truthiness (e.g., “Women do love the welfare state!” “Blacks really do have lower IQs!”) certainly doesn’t help.

Most libertarians don’t want to move to man-made islands. Most don’t even want to help take over New Hampshire. If libertarians are going to shift the politics of the countries we live in, we’ve got to get it through our thick skulls that many people have considered libertarian ideas and have rejected them for all sorts of decent reasons. We’ve got to take those reasons, and those people, fully seriously and adequately address them. Otherwise, we should probably just accept that libertarianism is a niche creed for weird people and reconcile ourselves to impotent, self-righteous grousing. Or get serious about life on the sea. For my part, I’m going to continue to try to convince people that free markets and limited goverment are better than they might have thought.