Category Archives: Political Philosophy

How Not Metaphorical Is "Countries as Clubs"?

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I confess that I agree with the Drunken Priest/Steven Pinker here:

Will Wilkinson has raised a fair amount of sand with a post on immigration.  Borrowing a page from George Lakoff, he attempts to recast the frame of reference: instead of nation states, now we will speak of clubs and membership.  The rhetorical aim is that such a reframing will put a downward pressure on moral inclinations involving xenophobia, in-group out-group biases, and other forms of patriotic fervor.  But as much I support Wilkinson’s moral views–I would prefer to abolish passports–I think Steven Pinker’s criticisms of Lakoff apply here as well. You see, clubs have membership fees; states have taxes. I can choose not to pay a membership fee. The club may fine me. They may even throw me out. But if I don’t pay my taxes, I am harassed, pilloried, fined, incarcerated. As Pinker said: 

If you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will stop providing you with its services. But if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail. And even if taxes were like membership fees, aren’t lower membership fees better than higher ones, all else being equal? Why should anyone feel the need to defend the very idea of an income tax? Other than the Ayn-Randian fringe, has anyone recently proposed abolishing it?

It had even occurred to me that I was taking a page from Lakoff. Horrors. Anyway, I agree that the big difference between a country and a club is, as Pinker observes, the coervice nature of the “public finance” of  distinctively political communities. Unlike Lakoff, I obviously disapprove of the “country as club.” Like Lakoff, I suppose, I’m urging that we pause to note the very close schematic similarities in actual political discourse and theorizing between (here using the convention of mentioning concepts by capitalizing the words that express them in English) COUNTRY and CLUB, CITIZEN and CLUB MEMBER, LEGAL RESIDENT ALIEN and GUEST OF THE CLUB, etc. Leftwingers like Lakoff want to draw attention to commonalities in these shema so that we confuse state coercion — the fact that creates problem of political legitimacy, the foundational problem of political philosophy — with the fair reciprocity of paying dues for services. He wants to use the similarities to efface the essential difference, which I guess seems pretty slimy. 

My intention is to draw attention to the fact that people do tend to confuse the COUNTRY and CLUB schemata in order to challenge the terms of ordinary and theoretical political discourse. I want people to think of COUNTRY[GEOGRAPHIC] as LARGE PUBLIC GOODS JURISDICTION and COUNTRY[POLITICAL] as LARGE PUBLIC GOODS PROVIDER. When we see countries or nation states as public goods providers covering big jurisdictions, we open the possibility of seeing the United States of America as a very big version of Iowa that can itself be embedded within, or overlap with, other public goods jurisdictions. Jurisdictions need boundaries, but they can be a lot more porous than national boundaries tied up with club-like notions of national identity and sovereignty.

Certain kinds of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all take the idea that a country is a big piece of real estate jointly “owned” by its citizens way too far. My complaint is that none of them say much at all about the justification of the principles that determine who becomes a citizen — becomes a legitimate part “owner” of the huge plot from which others may be excluded — and who does not.

Bop: More Utopia Tennis

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Roderick Long returns serve from my “Utopia Tennis” post. I think our disagreement is really nothing more or less than the fundamental disagreement between liberals and anarchists. This will emerge pretty clearly in my reply below. Here’s Rod:

I’ve never claimed, and do not think, that moderate reductions in state power are impossible. What I do think is that merely moderate reductions in state power are not an adequate solution to corporatism. After all, although the popular notion of the nineteenth-century U.S. as a laissez-faire free-for-all is a fantasy (even if we exclude, as we shouldn’t, legal restrictions on the economic activities of women and nonwhites), it’s still true that the interventionist policies that fueled corporatism in that era are by many measures significantly less extensive than those we have today.

To reiterate my earlier post, I argue for fairly large reductions in state power. I argue that this is quite realistic because large reductions have actually occurred in the recent past, and moderate reductions are ongoing in many places. I don’t know enough to question Rod’s history. My question is: “adequate solution to corporatism” relative to what? If nothing but anarchy or quasi-anarchy is going to count as “adequate,” then, yes, a Hayek-Buchanan generality amendment will be inadequate. But if something like anarchy is infeasible, as I believe it is, then it’s hardly an adequate solution either.    

Wilkinson further describes as “obviously false” my contention that “achieving benign outcomes via the state is a chimera”; for Wilkinson, “[m]any states evidently succeed in achieving relatively benign outcomes.” But I don’t see how this is supposed to be “evident”—unless the claim is just shorthand for the claim that “many states are evidentlycompatible with the existence of relatively benign outcomes,” which is certainly true. But if people who drink small doses of poison are healthier than those who drink large doses, that doesn’t make it “evident” that small doses of poison can achieve relatively benign outcomes. Any measure that shrinks the scope of voluntary cooperation by expanding the scope of compulsion thereby makes things both a bit less just and a bit less efficient.

I’m pretty sure Rod’s guilty of Tyler’s “libertarian vice” here. Rod doesn’t think some states are better than others? That some governments are more effectively limited than others? That people are more free in some places than in others? If he doesn’t think that this is evident, then all I can do is ask him to look again, because it’s true.

The poison metaphor suggests that any state action is like poison. But I think that some state action is like medicine. I think there is legitimate state coercion. When it’s just, it’s usually because it reduces compulsion and enhances efficiency relative to the relevant non-state baseline. And I deny that that baseline is Rod’s anarchist utopia. My claim in my prior post was that anarchy is an inferior means of reducing corporatism than is further limiting government because anarchy is not stable. In that context, it’s rather brazenly question-begging to characterize government action “compatible with relatively benign outcomes” as “poison.” 

Of course, my idea is to shrink the scope of compulsion by limiting illegitimate government action. Rod is coy, but seems to agree that this is possible. But he seems unhappy about it. The question was, What can be done about corporatism? I gave an answer: limit government. If he agrees that limiting state power is possible, which of course it is, then he’s pretty much lost the debate unless he can show that his alternative is actually more likely to successfully reduce corporatism. And that’s a heavy burden, because then he’d need to establish the feasibility of his happy anarchism. So I can see why he avoided actually addressing my original point about the feasibility of anarchism.    

Finally, Wilkinson is puzzled at my claim that (1) is less unstable than (2). “If (2) is unstable because people will demand state interference in the economy given a state,” he writes, “then (1) is unstable because people tend to demand states.”

But the crucial difference between (1) and (2), as I see it, is not that under (2) people demand more statism, but rather that under (2) people are able to socialize the costs of such demand.

This is just nonresponsive. My point was that you can’t get anything out of (1) — anarchy or near-anarchy — that you can’t get out of  (2) — keeping the state and limiting it — because there’s no plausible way to not have a state. The point is that (1) isn’t on the table as an alternative to (2). We’re going to have a state. So limiting it is the only game in town. I thought it was clear that this was the claim I was making, but I guess I made a hash of it. 

Anyway, I doubt we’re going to resolve the great anarchism v. liberalism debate soon. But why did a discussion originally about libertarianism and corporatism lead here? My best guess is that Rod thinks that the corporatism issue is a smart place to mount an argument for his favorite libertarian ideal theory, freed-market anarchism. So I can see why the idea that effectively limited government is the best realistically available solution to actually-existing corporatism would seem inconvenient. But I think it remains that effectively limited government is the best realistically available solution to actually-existing corporatism. So… bop.

Shorter Kenneally

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The greatest gift Culture 11 has given the world is the dazzling thought of RIT political theorist Ivan Kenneally. I think I’ll make Kenneally translation an occasional feature. On the subject of Thanksgiving: 

Thanksgiving is a holiday devoted to the virtue of gratitude which, one could argue, finds less than hospitable ground in the modern world. The Lockean position on nature, that it furnishes only worthless materials that gain value through an imposition of labor, could not be more inconsistent with gratitude; in fact, Locke specifically undermines any conception of nature that would inspire reverence for the evidence it gives us of God’s providence. Instead of gratitude for what nature provides Locke encourages pride in our mastery and possession of nature—we take pride in ourselves as the only part of nature that can refashion nature. It is hard for beings who fancy themselves as radically self-sufficient or autonomous to be grateful for anything.

Translation:

In the modern world, there is so much more to be grateful for. Therefore, we are less grateful.

Evaluate!

Getting the Numbers Right

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My farseeing sister points me to this AP report which helps clarify the matter of accounting for GM’s labor costs:

GM, which negotiated the four-year deal that serves as a template for UAW deals with Chrysler and Ford, says its total hourly labor costs dropped 6 percent this year from pre-contract levels, from $73.26 in 2006 to around $69 per hour. The new cost includes laborers’ wages of $29.78 per hour, plus benefits, pensions and the cost of providing health care to more than 432,000 GM retirees, GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said.

The total cost will drop to $62 per hour in 2010 when the linchpin of the contract — a UAW administered trust fund — starts paying retiree health care costs.

But that’s still $9 more than the $53 per hour that GM estimated Toyota now pays in the U.S., and the gap could be even wider. Toyota spokesman Mike Goss said the company’s total labor costs at its older U.S. plants are around $48, with about $30 per hour in wages.

The remaining difference largely is due to “legacy” costs, the cost of a 100-year-old company paying its retiree pensions, Sapienza said.

So there you go. I completely agree that it is deceptive to present the numbers in the way GM does in the document I link below. That GM would try to make its health and pension obligations look crushing makes sense from a driving-a-hard-bargain-with-the-UAW pespective. But if you want to get bailed out, it makes no sense to make yourself look like a complete basketcase, which exactly what the $73 number does. I would expect GM to be doing what its spokesman is doing here: trying to make the company look like it is in fighting trim, just one giant infusion of taxpayer money away from not losing massive quantities money. For that reason alone, I’d be surprised if the remaining gap between GM and Toyota, even after legacy costs are taken into account, isn’t “even wider,” as the Toyota spokesman suggests.

Now, it bears emphasizing that Casey Mulligan’s point, that a bailout would benefit mostly relatively wealthy workers and shareholders is true, even if we go with the the $30/hour wage figure. According to the BLS, the median hourly wage in 2007 was about $15 and the mean was about $20 (and the averages in assembly and production work are lower than that). But GM (and as far as I know, all the other car companties) pays a lot for overtime and so forth, which is where you get GM’s estimate that the “average annual cash compensation for hourly employees in 2006 was $39.68 per hour.” Autoworkers who end up jobless because their company and union are run by doofuses deserve our sympathy. The fact that they’re so much richer than the average American worker doesn’t change that. The point is that subisidies to relatively rich shareholders and workers are basically the opposite of distributive justice, and that’s true whether the right number is $70, $40, or $30.

Utopia Tennis

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The conversation on corporatism and free(d) markets at Cato Unbound continues to be fascinating. I do have to say I found this bit of Rod Long’s reply to Yglesias a little peculiar.

The chief question at issue between Matthew Yglesias and myself is how best to remedy this situation. There would seem to be three possible options:

1. Either abolish or radically diminish the power of the state.

2. Keep the state as it is but demand that it remain neutral and noninterventionist.

3. Use the state actively as a tool against corporate power.

Yglesias seems to think that the libertarian solution is (2), which he rejects as unrealistic. The “concept of a state apparatus that simply sits on the sideline watching the free market roll along” is “impossibly utopian,” Yglesias argues, because people will inevitably “try to manipulate the state to advance their own ends.” Hence Yglesias favors (3) instead.

But of course the libertarian—or at least the radical libertarian—agrees with Yglesias that a passive bystander state is utopian, and so favors (1) rather than (2). But for the libertarian, (3) is impossibly utopian as well; the incentival and informational perversities that beset the state are inherent in its monopolistic nature, so that the hope of achieving benign outcomes via the state is a chimera. (1) may be difficult to achieve given the prevailing political climate, but unlike (2) and (3) it poses—or so we libertarians claim—no inherent, ineradicable tendency to instability, and so is the least utopian option of the three.

I favor something between (1) and (2). I say “something between” because the diminution of power I have in mind probably isn’t “radical” in Rod’s book. But, unlike (1), (1.5) I think it quite feasible. It’s feasible because (2) is. The argument that (2) is feasible is that successful liberal democracies are already relatively limited, neutral and noninterventionist. Theirs are by no means Rod’s “freed” markets, but they are also a very long way from maximally unfree markets. Indeed, some of the most successful existing societies such as Denmark, Ausralia, and New Zealand have come a long way over the past several decades in a freer market direction. We have an existence proof of the possibility of doing better. Rod’s case seems to be based on the claim that “achieving benign outcomes via the state is a chimera,” but this seems obviously false. Many states evidently succeed in achieving relatively benign outcomes. Further, the claim that (1) has “no inherent, ineradicable rendency to instability” strikes me as completely conjectural. If (2) is unstable because people will demand state interference in the economy given a state, then (1) is unstable because people tend to demand states. Perhaps Rod has some account of how we get from here to (1), and an account of how (1) tends to generate it’s own popular support, such that demand for a larger state does will not tend to reemerge. But until I see that account, the claim that (1) is especially non-Utopian strikes me as weird. 

Thick Libertarianism and the Federation of Liberty

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Excellent post from Micha Ghertner:

Thick libertarianism is that much more important when you adopt a “Federation of Liberty” over a “Union of Liberty” approach, to use Kukathas’ language, or when you adopt a pluralist over a rationalist approach, to use Levy’s. The only way to convince other cultures that liberty is worth preserving is by engaging them in that argument, and rooting out those aspects of their culture that are inimical to freedom. Removing benevolent imperialism from the libertarian tool-kit makes the tool of peaceful but critical persuasion all the more necessary.

Micha also makes this great point… One can admit that a social practice is unjustly liberty-limiting and be opposed to coercive intervention in exactly the same way that one can admit that a state violates the rights of its people and be opposed to coercive intervention.

Failure: For Our Future

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Megan McArdle has been righteous on the Detroit bailout. The argument from justice is most hard-hitting in this post. Lots of companies fail. Lots of cities, built around those companies, decline. If employees of the Big Three deserve to have taxpayers pay part of their relatively lavish salaries, then employees at thousands of failing businesses deserved the same. They had no chance of getting it, though, simply because they don’t have the right history with Washington. There is no other reason. 

There is nothing that helps people more than high rates of economic growth, compounding, compounding. But everyone is not helped equally. Economic growth requires dynamism, requires “creative destruction,” and some people get trapped in the wreckage, become wreckage. Not everyone is hurt equally. That irks. We should do what we can to limit downside risk consistent with the goal of producing broad prosperity. And we should feel a pang for those whose expectations are disappointed, whose lives turn out harder than they’d hoped. But the impulse to freeze the system, to try to tape all the cracks and staple all the cleavages, to ensure that nobody has to explain to their kid why Christmas this year is going to be a lousy Christmas, that is one of our greatest dangers. Our sympathy, untutored by a grasp of the larger scheme, can perversely make itself ever more necessary. When we feel compelled to act on our uncoached fellow-feeling, next year’s Christmas is likely to turn a bit worse for everybody. And then somebody has to explain to the kids that they can’t find a job at all. Businesses that would get started don’t get started, wealth that would be created isn’t. And in just a few decades, the prevailing standard of living is much, much lower than it could have been had our sympathy been more far-seeing. There is no justice, and great harm, in diminishing the whole array of future opportunity to save a few people now from a regrettable fate.

Large-scale market dislocation is not the worst possible thing, but it does put me in mind of a passage from my favorite tragic memoir, Joan Didion’s masterful The Year of Magical Thinking, about the aftermath of her beloved husband’s sudden death:

After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words as it was in the beggining, is now and ever shall be, world without end, which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the scheme could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No one was watching me. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. 

Unlike slipping tectonic plates, adjustments in the market, even violent ones, tend to make the human world more hospitable over time. The principles that govern the earth as it works out its tensions are indifferent to our welfare. The principles that govern a well-ordered economy favor it. No eye is on the sparrow. No one is watching you. Your job and your dreams may suddenly evaporate. But mostly we find that, as if guided by an invisible hand, the scheme has made available opportunities to work, has made available opportunities to buy the things that make life comfortable, interesting, and long. We can stop the hand from pushing the mountain into the sea, but then we will never enjoy the abundance of the future island we’ve erased. We can put an eye on the sparrow, but more sparrows will fall if we try to save every rotting tree.

Surprise! I'm a Libertarian!

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I just took the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz.” It says I am a… libertarian!

The RED DOT on the Chart shows where you fit on the political map.


Your PERSONAL issues Score is 100%.
Your ECONOMIC issues Score is 80%.

According to your answers, the political group that agrees with you most is…

LIBERTARIANS support maximum liberty in both personal and

economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one

that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence.

Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose

government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate

diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.

I think the quiz is correct. If I have the policy views that I do, then I’m a libertarian in the sense of the term dominant in contemporary public discourse. I notice that the quiz didn’t ask me any questions about the conditions under which I consider state coercion legitimate. I may have views on this question similar to those of liberal political philosophers, but I apparently have strongly libertarian policy preferences anyway. So I guess I’m a libertarian anyway. It also didn’t ask me any questions about whether I think emotional and social coercion can be as liberty-limiting as state coercion. So I guess if I do think this, it has no bearing on my being a libertarian, right? Why don’t I get 100% on economic issues? Because, like noted socialists Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, I support a redistributive safety net.

One might be a WSPQ-libertarian for many, many different reasons. I happen to think principled constraints on government power are extremely important for the very same reasons I think rooting out sexism and racism are important: because people need to be free.

Against Fake Libertarian Clarity

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This exchange reminds me that many (maybe most) self-styled libertarians think that libertarianism is, by definition, a philosophy that conceives of liberty as a lack of coercion, and, additionally, that coercion is something easy to understand. For these libertarians, just as one might decide to take up an interest in the plight of foreign war orphans, one might decide to be troubled by the fact that some people’s lives are stunted or ruined by arbitrary yet systemic social exclusion, or by having the development of their interests and talents constantly discouraged and their aspirations and confidence constantly undermined. But, they say, these elective worries cannot flow from an interest in liberty, because liberty is about not being threatened with involuntary confinement in a small room, while these things are about being threatened with involuntary confinement in a small life.

These libertarians are usually guilty of defining “coercion” ideologically, and then acting as though the word has always meant what they use it to mean. But it is abuse of language to deny that many emotional or social threats are coercive–that they can strip a person of her liberty by raising the price of its free exercise beyond what she should be made to pay. You can choose to welcome the knifepoint. But we agree that this is too much to ask, so we agree that going along at knifepoint doesn’t count as an exercise of freedom–as something for which you bear responsibility. There are many other things that are too much to ask.

These libertarians are also notoriously guilty of pretending that their favorite kinds of coercion aren’t. Threatening force to deny another person use of one’s land, or one’s house, is coercion. A system of private property is a system of coercion. It may be justified coercion. It is justified coercion. But then the question is: What justifies it? The coercive protection of property is justified because people do better with it than without it. If people do better in a system that defines rights to property a bit less strictly, and coercively guarantees an economic minimum, then that is justified coercion. It’s not really a philosophical question whether it is or not. Justified coercion, like the coercion in the protection of property, isn’t wrongfully liberty-limiting, but it does limit liberty. 

If libertarianism is the view that coercion is never social or emotional, and that coercive limits to liberty are justified only in defense of private property, or in the enforcement of contracts, then libertarianism is false, and I am not a libertarian. If libertarianism is the view that human well-being is best promoted by ensuring “that every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty to every other man,” then I am a libertarian. If this is a libertarian view, then the goal to minimize or abolish wrongfully liberty-limiting social norms is a libertarian goal.

Equal Chances for Equal Talent

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The first part of Rawls’ Second Principle of Justice says, in Joshua Cohen’s words, “people who are are equally talented and motivated are to have equal chances to attain desirable positions, so far as this is consistent with maintaining equal basic liberties…”

This has always thrown me for a loop.

First, what little I know of economic sociology tells me that access to economic opportunities is deeply network-relative.

Take two college grads of similar intelligence and discipline, Anne and Betty. Anne’s best friend has a brother who just started a small technology company. He figures Anne would be a phenomenal project manager, and it turns out to be true. The company has a huge IPO and Anne ends up a rich executive in what turns out to be a glamorous firm. Betty doesn’t happen to know anyone whose brother runs a promising start-up. Does she have anything approaching an chance equal to Anne’s to get something like Anne’s highly desirable position? Obviously not. But how could she.

Second, desirable positions aren’t just boxes out there waiting to be filled. They are created, sometimes by the people who occupy them. And they may depend on contingencies of technology.

Let’s say it’s 1988. Robert gets into Yale as a legacy, goes on to Harvard Law, also like Dad, gets a clerkship on a district court, and gets a gig at a plush firm whose partners Dad sails with on weekends. Today he’s a partner and a bit of a big deal in Massachusetts Democratic Party politics, having years ago been a summer associate in DC with, and now an informal advisor to, the Governor.

Sudeep gets an academic scholarship to a local state school in Northern California. His immigrant parents want him to go pre-med, but he’s fascinated with computers and studies computer science instead. While in school, he designs some useful software for tracking inventories, and later starts a small business selling this software to stores. His business grows and grows until he sells it for $100 million in 1998. Since then he’s become a successful tech venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and philanthropist, worth half a billion. Politics mostly seems like a nuisance to him, and he stays out of it.

Did Sudeep ever have any realistic chance of becoming a partner at Robert’s firm, or an insider in state politics? No. But he’s also orders of magnitude wealthier than Robert, and his venture capital decisions help determine the path of future technology, which, let us say, will affect standards of living more than the Governor of Massachusetts ever will. Did Robert–an equally talented and motivated guy–have an equal chance at Sudeep’s powerful position? What would that even mean? Sudeep’s position didn’t even exist when Robert was clerking on the Fifth Circuit.

But, hey! There’s a future in which Robert runs successfully for State AG, becomes number two at DOJ, and finally gets appointed a judge on the Federal Court of Appeals. There is no future in which Sudeep has anywhere near this capacity to affect the laws of the land, no matter how much money he might choose to spend on political advocacy. So what would it mean for policy to have equalized access to political power between Robert and Sudeep? Given the technological contingency and social network aspects of opportunity, I don’t even know how to approach the question.

Maybe this is how you approach it, and I do wonder why we don’t see more proposals like the following from those egalitarians who do tend to see the desirable positions as more or less fixed… How about a quota system for firms that limits hiring from high-status schools and mandates a certain number from low-status schools, so that it’s better to be the best kid from the University of North Dakota than the median kid at Princeton? Radical high school-quality affirmative action quotas for college admissions. No Supreme Court justice can have more than one clerk from a top-ten law school. It is illegal ever to hire someone who is a relative, or a friend, or a friend of a friend. Randomized assignments to a vast network of national boarding schools. Combat self-reinforcing prestige by picking an athletic conference at random and then mandating that all Federal Reserve governors for the next ten years be professors at schools from that conference. (So Harvard and MIT econ depopulates as everyone rushes to Creighton and Indiana State. Etc.) Examples of this sort can be multiplied. So would these strategies be “consistent with maintaining equal basic liberties”? Are they necessary for maintaining equal basic liberties, but egalitarians are simply missing the real issue by going on and on about income redistribution?

That there be no systemic, structral discrimination that keep whole classes of talented, motivated people from attaining desirable positions strikes me as obviously desirable, and pretty feasible, too. We’ve made huge strides in just the past several decades. But that’s a point about everybody having a good chance of making the most of their talent and motivation, not an equal chance. Indeed, that’s a long way from the idea that people of similar talent and motivation ought to have something like an equal chance at a given position or office. That seems pretty obviously impossible, and I don’t see the point of it anyway. All I know is that I want a entrepeneurial, innovative, high-growth system in part because that’s the kind that increases the chances of landing a desirable position because new ones are always being invented and that diminishes the relative importance and power of many entrenched and exclusive networks. Elite networks can achieve only limited succeed in opportunity hoarding if new networks, new opportunities, and new hierarchies of prestige and status keep springing up.

Fearful Asymmetry

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Maybe I’m missing something, because almost all arguments to the effect that people have no moral right to their pretax income  (such that taxation would require a special moral justification) and therefore taxation is legit, are plain non-sequiturs.

For instance, Ronald Dworkin argues in Is Democracy Possible Here that the status quo system of political and economic institutions is the result of what he calls “the political settlement.” Because the distribution of incomes is to a large extent a function of these institutions, it is to that extent a function of the political settlement. But the political settlement is either morally justified or it is unjustified. At this point the argument goes something like this (and please correct me if this is too vulgar or innacurate a sketch):

(1) If you have a moral claim to your pretax income, then the political settlement is justified.

(2) The political settlement is not justified.

So (3) You have no moral claim to your pretax income.

Then…

(4) If the political settlement is morally justified, then it implements X scheme of income redistribution.

(5) If a justified political settlement implements X scheme of income distribution, then there is no moral right to pretax income.

So (6) No justified political settlement is one in which there is a moral right to pretax income.

Suppose you think this is a drop-dead valid argument. What does it NOT imply?

(7) The government, under the status quo political settlement, may legitimately confiscate pretax income.

Because, of course, the legitimacy of state coercion also depends on the moral justification of the political settlement. For example, if runaway economic inequality has led to political inequality, which has led to takeover of the state by oligarchic elites resulting in a mere shell of genuine democracy, then obviously that government lacks a mandate to use force legitimately.

If (1) Is true, then so is

(8) If the exercise of state coercion is legitimate, then the political settlement is morally justified.

(7) really doesn’t follow because Dworkin explicity argues that a certain scheme of redistribution is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of government, and that we are now falling short of it! So then the government is not legitimate, right? And that’s just to say that it is not justified in its use of coercion. So Dworkin seems offer an argument to the effect that (a) You don’t have a moral claim to your pretax income and (b) it would be wrong for the government to collect taxes. An illegitimate government has no moral claim to your income either, no matter how illegimate your claim! But Dworkin thinks his is an argument to the effect that it is morally mandatory that the status quo government take more in taxes. Puzzling.

Dworkin does allow for degrees of legitimacy. But it seems like he’s still stuck with the problem that if things get too bad, according to his lights, then it’s wrong for the government to do anything about it. And if the government has a pretty secure mandate to legitimately act, things can’t be all that bad, and peoples’ moral claims to what they’re now left with post-tax must be more or less secure.

What am I missing?

For me, the general lesson is that political philosophy is rife with unprincipled violations of analytical symmetry. If luck vitiates rights to incomes, then it also vitiates rights to hold and exercise political power. If there are common preconditions for the legitimacy of property rights and the legitimacy of political power, then the failure of those preconditions cannot be part of an argument for the legitimate government expropriation of illegitimate property. Etc.

Dworkin on Taxes and Legitimacy

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So, I’m reading Ronald Dworkin’s Is Democracy Possible Here. It’s especially interesting because it’s a relatively pop public affairs book by a top academic political philosopher. You get to see how he thinks his theories cash out in real political terms. Anyway, the aim of Dworkin’s Chapter 4 on “Taxes and Legitimacy” is basically to argue that in the U.S. taxes are too low in general and that the Bush tax cuts in particular threaten the legitimacy of the state by undermining welfare spending required to treat citizens with equal concern. But the entire chapter seems to be based on, and vitiated by, a very simple mistake. Dworkin sets up the entire thing on the assumption that the generosity of welfare assistance and social insurance has some kind of internal connection to high tax rates on the wealthy. But that’s just plain wrong.

First, the primary issue is budget priorities–what we’re spending money on–not tax rates. Everything Dworkin thinks is required for the state to treat people with equal concern (and thereby to secure legitimacy) is a matter of spending money on the right programs. So there just needs to be enough money to do it. And there is. The U.S. could massively expand the generosity of welfare assistance, unemployment insurance, worker retraining, etc. etc., at the cost of a relatively small portion of the budget of the Navy. We could cut taxes significantly across the board and increase the openhandedness of the welfare state if we were willing to significantly reduce spending elsewhere.

I don’t sense that Dworkin sees any need for military power that dwarfs the rest of the world’s, so why not just admit that the government already has mind-boggling revenues at its disposal, and argue that it ought to spend much more on the kinds of programs that he thinks are required for treating citizens with equal concern and much less on fighter jets and allegedly humanitarian military intervention? Dworkin mentions in passing that all budgetary choices have distributive consequences, and even mentions military spending as an example of this. Indeed, he mentions the war as an onerous fiscal burden. But then he just breezes by to argue that the legitimacy of American democracy is threatened unless we raise taxes on rich people, because otherwise we won’t be able to pay for his preferred social insurance scheme. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Why the emphasis on raising taxes rather than on spending current revenues less wastefully and more in lines with the demands of justice? Indeed, if you’re sniffing for threats to the legitimacy in the status quo system, the fact that a massive portion of current revenues is mispent on the warmaking industry is a much a more plausible candidate than the U.S.’s relatively low top marginal income tax rate. Moreover, if current revenue is spent poorly, you probably shouldn’t assume additional revenue will be spent well. (If you’re doing non-ideal theory, you’ve got to stick with it, Dworkin!)

Second, the U.S. tax structure is rather more progressive than most (all?) countries that have the kind of welfare/social insurance state Dworkin is looking for. The top of the American distribution pays a huge portion of overall taxes. Social democracies of the kind Dworkin thinks the U.S. should be more like do indeed tend to take a higher percentage of GDP as tax revenue. But relatively little of this comes from higher marginal income tax rates on the wealthy. Most if it comes from the middle class through relatively high consumption taxes. So if Dworkin’s point is that government needs to take a bigger chunk of GDP, so that it can afford to implement the right kind of social programs, then he ought to be arguing that the American middle class needs to pony up.

But, again, the idea that current U.S. revenue is insufficient to finance Dworkin’s social insurance scheme is wildly implausible. Even granting all the key normative premises in favor of this scheme (which I certainly don’t) it’s hard see why Dworkin thinks he has an argument about tax rates at all, rather than an argument about spending current revenue better.

Some Nuance on "Bad Voters"

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I’d like to emphasize that my crazy gloss on Jason Brennan’s fastidiously logical academic paper is my crazy gloss. Please do read the paper [rtf], which I think is outstanding.

Let me weigh in on a few objections that have come up in the comments. First, the general thrust of the argument is just to show that civic-mindedness need not require political involvement. Indeed, Jason gives what I find to be a powerful argument to the effect that civic-mindedness sometimes requires not participating in politics. That’s what I take to be the point of the paper. If you can show that voting is sometimes morally wrong, then you’ve got a killer argument that it cannot be morally mandatory.

Now, Jason certainly has no interest in keeping people who want to vote from voting, and neither do I. He’s just pointing out that there are conditions under which it would be wrong for a civic-minded person to do so. (We’re both libertarians, very comfortable with the idea that people should be free to do things they ought not do.) If you accept some reasonable assumptions about the aim of democracy, and accept standard reasoning about moral duties regarding collective action problems, then you probably should accept Jason’s conclusion

If you were to watch our diavlog, you’d find that the we cover the paradoxical elements of the argument. Many of the people most likely to be vote badly–out of ignorance, prejudice, groupthink, etc.–may well be least likely to judge that they will judge badly, while those most worried about their own biases, and most likely to be moved by an argument like Jason’s, are probably least likely to vote badly.

So what’s the practical upshot of the argument? I take the upshot to be that widespread conceptions of civic engagement that fixate on political participation in general, and voting in particular, should not so blithely be given the moral high ground in popular discourse. We should not make poorly-informed people feel embarrassed or ashamed at not voting, or pressure them into it. Indeed, if Jason is right, they should take some pride in not voting, and we ought to congratulate many people for staying away from the polls.

I concluded my post with a potential explanation of why this change in norms will not in fact happen. I argued that the Democratic party in particular would have a lot to lose, since the least-educated lean Democratic, while the media and the intellectual class also overwhelming favors the Democrats. The cognitive elite who dominate media and academia are part of an active coalition with the least educated, and they need them to turn out if they’re going to get into power and stay there. If you don’t think it is true that the least educated Americans are much more likely than average to vote Democratic than Republican, and that journalists and academics are overwhelmingly more likely to vote for Democrats, then I would like to introduce you to something called Google. I don’t bring this up in a completely bizarre and pointless attempt at suppressing the votes of people with a high school education or less. I bring it up to explain why, in the present climate, the idea that it is not the civic duty of absolutely everyone to vote is totally doomed. I would like to think that the dispassionate discussion of democratic politics is possible.

But for those of you who are convinced that American democratic politics is a momentous battle of good versus evil, and that anything said about politics must reflect some kind of coalitional motive, let me point out that I have often aired my preference for Obama over McCain, though I will probably vote for Bob Barr.

Pluralism and the Strains of Commitment

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[Warning: This post assumes a lot of background, and may not be generally accessible.]

I’ve been re-reading bits of Justice as Fairness to try to nail down Rawls’ take on the relationship between the difference principle and the value of the basic liberties. But I got sidetracked.

The story on the development of the doctrine of “justice as fairness” is that Rawls saw that he initially grounded the argument for the stability of his ideal system on a particular comprehensive conception of the human good — one that is neither all that broadly shared, nor rationally mandatory. The argument in A Theory of Justice failed to take into account the inevitable pluralism in such conceptions in a free society. So Rawls famously changed the structure of his argument in Political Liberalism to better accomodate the unavoidable fact of pluralism in free societies.

It has been frequently pointed out that it’s pretty remarkable, and suspect, that this rather fundamental change in the argument entailed no really substantive change in Rawls’s conclusions. And that is remarkable, and suspect. Rawls just never does get his head around real pluralism, and his account of stability always seems to revert to the assumption that people brought up within a just social order will end up believing and valuing the same thing when it matters to the argument.

What I have in mind is his brief discussion of the strains of commitment in Justice as Fairness. The question is why won’t the rich always try to renegotiate the principles that govern our basic social institutions to their benefit? If they do clamor for more, the principles won’t last, and so won’t be stable, which they must be if they are to be adequate principles of justice. So why won’t the relatively rich try to get a better deal, if raised under the right institutions?

First, EVERYBODY shares an idea about the point of society and political institutions. Impossible. That idea — free and equal people engaged in mutually advantageous cooperation — entails a certain idea of reciprocity. Sure. And that principle of reciprocity is the difference principle, Rawls says. Remember, the idea is that all rich people raised under just institutions will think this. Unlikely. But it gets more implausible the more he drills down:

We also suppose that in addition to the reason which all have [that the difference principle is the principles of reciprocity implied by the abstract political conception everyone will allegedely share], the more advantaged have a second reason … The point here is that the more advantaged see themselves as already benefited by their fortunate place in the distribution of native endowments, say, and benefited further by the basic structure (affirmed by the least advantaged) that offers them the opportunity to better their situation, provided they do so in ways that improve the situation of others.

You know you’re in trouble if your argument (intended to be adjusted to the inevitably roiling pluralism of a free society) depends on all-but-universally-shared ideas about “the distribution of native endowments.” A bit earlier, Rawls notes that “this idea of reciprocity is implicit in the idea of regarding the distribution of native endowments as a common asset.” That’s also part of what, come the reign of justice, we’ll all understand.

I’m sorry. Even granting Rawls’ badly undermotivated framework stipulation that the strains of commitment cannot be expressed through emigration or capital flight, this is a total failure if the aim is to take reasonable diversity of thought seriously. These passages read like a reductio of the attempt to reconcile justice as fairness with the fact of reasonable pluralism. By Rawls’ own account, JAF seems to have no hope of passing the compliance/stability test without simply positing a level of agreement that makes a mockery of the whole idea of reasonable pluralism.

Remember, Rawls’ project is to outline a realistic utopia — a society that could really exist given actual human nature. So his stability arguments amount to predictions about, among other things, the beliefs and desires that would prevail among people brought up under institutions that satisfy his two principles of justice. The principle with the very highest priority here is an inviolable right to free thought and expression. And Rawls’ prediction is, what? That in that kind of society — in which freedom of thought, speech, conscience, etc. are paramount –  rich people won’t try to get a bigger piece because they will  all agree, more or less, that the “distibution of native endowments” is a common asset, that they’ve got it plenty good, and there could be no justification for wanting more.

We’ll never be in a position to see this prediction play out, but knowing what we know about the way actual human minds work, I would bet the farm against it. Even when he weakens his Kantianism, Rawls leans hard on it, and is undone by it. For all the talk about pluralism, he’s really depending on some assumptions about the universal structure of the “two moral powers” — rationality and the moral sense — that make his yearning for a kind of stability that is more than a fragile, contingent modus vivendi seem plausible. But it just isn’t plausible.

David Gordon on Rawls

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In the latest issue of the American Conservative, David Gordon has written a smart and lucid essay on John Rawls and his use by libertarians, like me. I agree entirely with Gordon’s concluding suggestion that Rawls will be the Herbert Spencer of the 20th Century, though I wonder how we’re supposed to take this? That Rawls will simply fall out of fashion? No doubt. That Rawls will be dishonestly maligned and fall into underserved disrepute? Perhaps. Anyway, I have a few quibbles with Gordon’s piece.

For the most part, I think Gordon gives a fair account of Rawls’ view, but it seemed to me that at one point his account was inconsistent with itself. (The emphasis below is mine.)

Indeed, Rawls’s greatest critic was a libertarian, his Harvard philosophy department colleague Robert Nozick, who raises a key objection to Rawls in his classic 1974 work Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick notes that Rawls does not include property rights among the liberties protected by his first principle. To the contrary, Rawls starts off by assuming that the people in the original position have the task of distributing all the property in society. If one denies this, and, like Nozick, thinks that people start off with property rights, then there will be little or no scope for the difference principle to operate.

Then, later, while discussing what Hayek liked about Rawls — the generality of his proceduralism — Gordon notes:

In Rawls’s system, people in the original position do not assign shares of wealth to particular people: they set up general institutions for society. This fitted in with Hayek’s emphasis on the rule of law. When Hayek opposed “social justice,” what he had in mind was a system that gives orders to particular persons, ungoverned by general law.

The latter claim is correct. Principles of justice apply to the “basic structure” of society — the general institutional “rules of the game” — and do not identify patterns of property holdings. Hayek notes, correctly, that Rawls makes precisely his own point: that questions of justice apply to the rules that govern social cooperation, not to the patterns of holdings that interactions in accordance with those rules produce. If the rules are okay, then so is the pattern. But how do we know the rules are okay? Rawls says, correctly, that the basic rules of the game, including property law, have broad distributive consequences, and must be shown generally to benefit the least well-off class. Why? Because everyone needs to have reason to comply with the rules of interaction if those rules are going to define a social order that is stable in right way. The question whether the rules are okay is not independent of the kind of pattern it will tend to produce. My sense is that Hayek agrees with this.

It’s a common misinterpretation of Rawls (helped along by Nozick, I’m afraid) that the task of selecting principles of justice in Rawls’ system is “distributing all the property in society.” The task, part of it, is indeed to evaluate the basic rules in terms of their distributive consequences. If we “start off” with property rights for men, or property rights for white people,  we will find that the subsequent patterns of holdings will have something to do with how we’ve agreed to assign and enforce those rights. The fact that, under an order governed by such rules, women or blacks will tend either to be dependent or impoverished is grounds enough for those people to reject those rules, and grounds enough for any of us to reject those rules. If whole classes of people have reason to reject a basic rule of social interaction, that rule can’t be a principle of justice.  Counterfactual choice in the “original position” is an unwieldy and unnecessarily extravagant way of generating the incontestably desirable impartiality of the rule of law. But Rawls is not wrong to see that the basic institutional rules have distributive consequences, and that these consequences may provide reasons to reject some candidate principles of social cooperation.

I should say that by no means do I take my Rawls neat. Like Rawls, I am a kind of contractarian who thinks the justification of basic institutions involves their being generally to the benefit of everyone, especially the least well-off.  Like I said, I don’t think the original position/veil of ignorance business is all that illuminating in the end, if used as anything more than an intuition pump. Scanlon ends up distilling it down to what rules are and are not “reasonably rejectible” for a good reason. I think a strict interpretation of maximin (e.g., not okay for everyone else to to gain a million if the working class loses a dollar.) is crazy, and that talk of “justifying inequalities” in Rawls’ Second Principle is based on a mistake. I deplore Rawls’ completely unjustified analytic nationalism. And Rawls’ discussion of luck and desert has always struck me as flat-out confused, and I think has had a terrible influence in political philosophy. Rawls is a neo-Kantian, I am a neo-sentimentalist. I also disagree with Rawls at a profound level about the relationship between democracy and liberty. Let me say a bit more about that.

Rawls is genuinely a liberal thinker. Liberty has categorical priority in his system. Political equality via democracy, he thinks, is the best means for achieving and maintaining liberty. Rawls worries a lot that self-reproducing and/or widening economic inequalities threaten the conditions for democracy and therefore the conditions for liberty. I think Rawls is not really very careful here and is pretty poor on the political economy of democracy. I am a James Buchananite here, and I think a great deal more of the necessity of constitutional constraints on the scope of democratic government than does Rawls. But it is worth nothing that Buchanan, too, more or less buys in to Rawls’ general analytical framework. Richard Epstein is thinking much the same thing is his obituary of Rawls when he argues that adding “institutional realism” to Rawls “ironically” renders libertarian conclusions.

I’ve drifted away from Gordon’s essay, haven’t I? Gordon’s real beef with Rawls seems to be his later ideas about “public reason,” ideas that I like a lot. I’ll tackle that in another post. For now let me point you here.