1. How much oil does Nigeria produce?
2. Feudal libertarianism; an insightful post (nowadays, what would Crooked Timber do without libertarians as a foil?)
3. What would (do) Greek bank runs look like?
4. The jobless recovery in two simple statistics.
“everyone is given one lump-sum gubmint handout at birth – herself”
Yeah. Insightful. I couldn’t read the whole thing, so if someone can point me to the part where slavery could exist without government sanction I’d appreciate it.
Government is the repository for violence. You don’t even need government to enforce contracts if you prefer private gangs breaking kneecaps.
“Now: suppose we drop, experimentally, just the libertarian ‘self-ownership’ assumption, while keeping the ownership model. Imagine a society in which everyone belongs to their parents, at birth. (Or, if their parents belong to someone, to their parents’ owners.) The libertarian logic of this is clear enough, I trust. (I don’t say all libertarians should be bound by logic to embrace this vision of utopia on the spot, but they ought to recognize libertarianism, minus assumed self-ownership, as a form of the philosophy they advocate, albeit an extreme form.)”
Right, like a two-legged stool is an extreme stool.
Andrew asked, “if someone can point me to the part where slavery could exist without government sanction”
Isn’t it obvious? Who’s going to arrest the slave owners if there is no government?
point me to the part where slavery could exist without government sanction
Slavery can certainly exist in the absence of government, which seems to be the important point. If there is an effective government then certainly it may be able to get rid of slavery, depending on power relationships, or it may not.
on Two simple statistics
I agree with Trevor – since they were going to a bad period, many firms just dumped everything they could into a bad year.
So the past wasn’t as bad as the statistics implied and the present isn’t as good.
However employment is a lagging indicator, in part, because it reflects true feelings on the future. In the short run firms can do many things to improve the bottom line on paper. But when they hire that reflects a believe that they have an opportunity for sustained growth.
“Two Simple Statistics”
Do these statistics tell us anything worthwhile about how many jobs are involved? They may be interesting from an industrial organization point of view, but the number of jobs a company has can fluctuate dramatically depending on which tasks are performed in-house and which are purchased from other firms. The fact that some big firms have been able to organize themselves around their high-profitability activities and potentially out-source their low-profitability activities does not help to understand a jobless recovery.
Does anybody read Holbo? Is he even capable of making a succinct and substantive argument, or is it always long, clever, and pointless?
“…so if someone can point me to the part where slavery could exist without government sanction I’d appreciate it.
Government is the repository for violence. You don’t even need government to enforce contracts if you prefer private gangs breaking kneecaps. ”
Were you answering your own question or do you somehow fail to see that if private gangs can enforce contracts, they could also enforce slavery (or choose to disrupt it – either way).
Government is an attempt to make private violence more efficient and less messy.
Holbo’s writings are an attempt to prove the necessity of editors.
I really couldn’t get through Holbo’s argument. He lost me at the children as feudal slaves argument. Talk about pedantic.
Actually, I think the question is who arrests the slaves after they kill the slave owner?
These guys think slavery lasted until, well, damn near today because libertarians have been in charge the whole time.
A gang of thugs organized and paid privately by the slave owners. Except they wouldn’t bother with arrests. What you are asking is how slavery can exist in the absence of the owners’ ability to enforce it. But there is nothing (except, maybe, government) to prevent the owners from hiring and arming enforcers. Indeed, in the context of union battles the Pinkertons were a good example of this.
Bernard Yomtov,
Well, no group of people outside of government, and certainly no government, was interested in ending slavery as institution until quite recently (the 18th century). So “effective government” really is not the issue or the reason for the end of slavery. In some fashion or another capitalism (or markets or whatever term one wants to use) has a lot to do with the desire to see its end (if it were religion or Christianity, well, then there would have been some push to see it end in the 10th century or some such).
Thomas,
Also: Jim Crow was state action, not private ordering.
False. Is there some honest, informed libertarian somewhere who will drive a stake through the heart of this idea?
Just two examples:
Greensboro, the site of the first lunch counter sit-ins, had no law preventing lunch counters from serving both black and white customers.
Jim Crow laws said almost nothing about discrimination in employment. It was the private choice of employers.
There is much more to be said, but I just wanted to start here.
In #2 –
I don’t understand why the author drops the “self-ownership” premise from libertarianism, does a thought experiment, and derives his critique from there. Why would you drop that premise? And why would you spend such a long time reducing your new paradigm to absurdity?
I don’t understand why the author drops the “self-ownership” premise from libertarianism, does a thought experiment, and derives his critique from there. Why would you drop that premise? And why would you spend such a long time reducing your new paradigm to absurdity?
I think the broader point he is trying to make is that a society in which property rights are given the highest and only priority doesn’t necessarily guard against negative outcomes (e.g. feudalism, slavery), in which people, while perfectly free, do not in practice have access to a wide latitude of choices.
To the extent, then, that you endorse a consequentialist view — that is, prefer a society engineered so that people have a wide range of choices, over a society in which people simply get to choose whatever options they have, and let the chips fall where they may — his contention appears to be that you are endorsing “liberty” (in a positive sense, not a negative sense), and so you’ve put yourself right on the slippery slope that leads to the welfare state, socialism, and a communist tyranny worse than the tigers of Mount Tai (haha), such that the distinction between you and a modern Liberal is reduced to a question of means, not ends.
Thank you Taeyoung, that makes sense. It seemed very bizarre to me (and the whole comment section on that blog does) that you would drop that premise, because it seems like *the* premise of libertarianism. There’s a good reason the parents don’t own their children; the child is its own person.
It’s healthy to try and figure out where liberals and libertarians diverge, but ripping the fundamental premise out of one political philosophy and then saying “See, we’re really not that far apart!” is just … not very enlightening. Just my $.02 …
Thanks for linking Mr. Cowen, it was indeed an insightful post, even if I disagree with his methodology.
I’m very confused by the libertarian debate. In Hayek on Hayek, on page 123, he sums up his position. My reading of this is that we want to have an economic system based on competition. Where that is not possible, the govt can provide the service or, alternatively, compete in it on fair terms, in order to facilitate competition. That’s the bottom line, and that’s what I believe.
There are two main differences I have with Hayek:
1) He believes in a version of the ratcheting up view, possibly because govt was growing after the war. Maybe because of age or disposition, I don’t like slippery slope arguments or ratcheting views.
Also, I see the growth in govt after the war due to the entrance of formerly left out constituencies into the govt scramble. But that Interest Group scramble has a limit, since it’s based upon targeting benefits and spreading costs. At some point, the spreading costs reach their limit.
2) A kind of rhetorical point. A Socialist just wants the govt running things. I want the govt running some things. But that leads to the always waiting of question of “If the govt can do x and y, then why not z?” Hayek seems to believe, in my view only, that this leads to govt running things people having and edge in explaining their position.
However, I don’t come across many Socialists. In fact, if you read part 3 of HOH, called A Parting In The Road, you’ll notice that Hayek is puzzled by what his interlocutors mean by socialist. Like Hayek, I think they sound like adherents to Capitalism that simply want govt to do more.
I can give an example. Hayek says on page 114 of HOH that he has always favored a Social Safety Net. I do too. But we prefer a Guaranteed Income because it’s cheaper, more humane in being targeted to the neediest people, and less subject to Interest Group Games. It also leaves competition largely in place. I see this as a factual debate. I might be wrong, both for theoretical or practical reasons. But I don’t get overwrought by people with a different view of the same goal.
One more example: Health Care. I favor the govt providing Catastrophic Health Care for everyone, with a type of competitive system for everyday expenses. I want the govt to keep people from being indigent, and to keep them from becoming indigent because of health costs. That’s it.
Of course, over the years, we’ve managed to get to Universal Care by adding every inefficiency we could could think of into the system. This is an issue where, for people who follow my view, it would have been much better to agree at the start about the universal part and argue about the specifics. Instead, practically, trying to stop universal care has contributed essentially to the bloating of the system.
I don’t know where my view fits in to this debate, even though I’ve always felt very close to Hayek. But that also means being close to Burke. Hence, I find theory problematic, and no excuse for allowing the practical to become a pig’s breakfast.
Thanks Don. It’s good to get back to the basics. And true that Hayek was no fanatic.
Why all this hypothetical talk about whether its possible to have slaves without government. There ARE slaves not only in the absence of government, but even where government actively opposes and attempts to stop slavery. Please, let’s not get silly. Of course you can have slavery without government.
“Since government is simply another way of organizing the output of labor,”
Seems like a questionable place to start…
To kent: After reading the whole post again, I am unconvinced. There is some equivocating, and a fundamental disagreement about human nature. In a nutshell, liberty should be (IMO) strictly defined as property rights, based on human nature. The rest of the realm of morality is up to us to voluntarily and peacefully discover intellectually, live it, and persuade our fellow man through our actions and speech to follow.
But what do I know?
“liberty should be (IMO) strictly defined as property rights, based on human nature.”
I’d refine this once more. Property rights IS human nature in response to nature. If you don’t understand this, you’ve never been to grad school! Or, perhaps you’ve been to grad school in philosophy.
As for the mysterious reason that the commenter drops the most important leg from the libertarian stool, leaving him with only a pile of stool for an argument, I don’t really feel like trying to skim through it again to decipher it.
I’ll just say that there is a difference, as any liberal will tell you, between their being a right versus an expectation that the government will enforce that right. So, while I believe in self-ownership, and if a government is going to enforce anything, it should enforce that, I clearly don’t expect government to enforce it on my behalf.
Taeyoung,
You see mass emancipation in the Roman Empire as well; and Wang’s reform was undone by Wang himself when he became less secure on the throne (he was a pretender after all). Anyway, none of these efforts ever attacked slavery as an institution. No such thing as a modern abolitionist movement existed in the ancient world; it took the Quakers and other groups to start that.
Btw, this is why you are going to see a libertarian government in your lifetime. There is zero intelligent debate from The Right, and the only intelligent debate from The Left is with libertarians.
Andrew – I think he used the argument that if you are a perfect slave you are perfectly free to show how absurd the “propertarian” position is, but there’s nothing absurd about it at all. It is precisely those difficult and counter intuitive cases that demonstrate what the idea of human freedom is. It goes against your emotions? It doesn’t make you feel good? Oh well, reality bites. The liberal position (and positive rights in general) remind me of the crudest idea of liberty – I get to do what I want to do. If I want to go to school but can’t because I don’t have money, then I’m less free. Yes, less free in that since people won’t contract with you, you can’t get whatever you want. Philosophically though, you are still free. Other human beings can be assholes, and decide to be ignorant and mean. A free society *could* look like that. It could also be much better than what we have right now. It’s up to us to live moral lives, but we don’t start by violating the foundation of freedom (property).
That feudal libertarianism argument was ludicrous. Look at this quote:
“point of libertarian arguments for minimizing interference is to keep to a minimum, not interfering actions, but the kinds of political duties we have, and in particular any enforceable obligations to transfer market-acquired holdings to benefit the disadvantaged. (126)
Jim Crow, for example. The social-legal lot of women in the U.S. in the 19th Century is a less extreme case, but similarly illustrative.”
Huh? Talk abot nonsequiturs! Private property = racism and oppression of women?
The critical point in Holbo’s post is when he provides the quote “The idea of libertarianism is to maximize individual freedom by accounting each person’s person as that person’s own property” and then starts to question whether self-ownership really maximizes anyone’s freedom.
The problem is simply that people like Holbo and followers of Amartya Sen and broadly liberals in general understand freedom differently from libertarians. For libertarians, freedom is simply the absence of coercion. By definition, a society in which some people are owned by others is a society in which some people are arbitrarily subject to coercion. Therefore, that society is not libertarian by definition.
Whether a society that defines freedom as the absence of coercion is desirable or practical is another debate and that’s where attention should be focused. But it is a coherent idea and leads immediately to the notion that every person has a sphere of individual autonomy that cannot be taken away from them without their permission. And one way of framing this state of individual autonomy is self-ownership.
Thomas,
The implicit or explicit threat of lawless violence for violations of the informal social code of Jim Crow (in those instances where it was not imposed by law) were possible only because of the state’s refusal to enforce the law against such violence. That is, the result of violations wasn’t a legal action by the state, but withdrawal or refusal of protection against illegal action from private parties. The state’s role was essential.
How did the state’s refusal to enforce the law render its role “essential” in a libertarian sense? That is, the state would hardly have done a better job of doing nothing had it been smaller.
That doesn’t really matter, though, since the threat of violence was not the major factor upholding Jim Crow. The Greensboro Woolworth’s was not bombed after integrating its lunch counter. Nor, really, were the Jim Crow laws the binding constraint. What drove segregation was the intense racism of white society in the South. Why do you think the state governments acted as they did? Because they represented the overwhelming will of the voters. We are not talking small majorities, or even fairly big ones. An anti-segregation candidate for governor of a southern state at the time would have gotten a vote total in the low single digits. The strength of a candidate’s commitment to segregation was often the most important issue in political campaigns.
Social attitudes were, unsurprisingly, reflected in economic behavior. This is a point that liberatarians find hard to swallow, but it’s true nonetheless. In an intensely racist society, markets reinforce discrimination, they do not alleviate it. This is because even non-racist businessmen find it profitable to go along with racist practices. If your customers don’t want to eat with blacks, or won’t buy from blacks, then you won’t serve blacks, or hire them as salespeople. If your office staff won’t cooperate with black co-workers then it’s a good idea to stick to white employees.
Now, one claim is that some employers will take advantage, and hire productive black workers at a low wage rate. But this misunderstands productivity. In a racist environment black workers are less productive than white workers. This has nothing to with skill or diligence. It has to with the kinds of problems I mentioned above. The attitudes of co-workers and customers affect one’s productivity in real life. And the facts bear this out. As I pointed out above, discriminatory hiring practices were not mandated by law.
Someone get a stake, please.
Hey Bernie,
Apply your arguments to Israel, for a change.
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