Fear the Cartoon Libertarian

Responding to this post and recalling an earlier comment of mine from a thread at TAS, Freddie writes:

… of course libertarian orthodoxy really does render most libertarians unwitting shills for corporate interests. Although also unintentionally so, the mainstream libertarian agenda is in effect largely a sop to corporate interests. If you could wave a magic wand and enact your average libertarian’s economic agenda, our corporate leaders would fall into a joy-induced stupor. The libertarian economic agenda, to a great degree, just is the corporate economic agenda.

There are times when Freddie can be a quite incisive observer, but this is decidedly not one of those. Indeed, as my friend Tim Carney has recently observed, the most libertarian members of Congress are actually among its least “business-friendly”, for the simple reason that they’re staunchly opposed to the kinds of taxpayer-sponsored corporate giveaways that make up approximately 95% of the daily business of Washington. The libertarian economic agenda includes neither bailouts nor handouts nor bizarro tax loopholes nor unnecessary wars and the associated channeling of billions of dollars and loads of influence into the hands of defense contractors. In a perfectly libertarian world there would be no regulatory creep for the simple reason that there would be very little regulation to speak of; no influence-peddling due to the government’s lack of, well, influence; no such thing as being too big to fail or too small to cut through the red tape; no more billions channeled to Midwestern farmers to produce wasteful and unnecessary corn ethanol; and so on. To me at least, this sounds very little like the sort of thing that sends corporatists into joy-induced stupors.

Now we can, of course, read Freddie’s words with an emphasis on “unwitting” and “unintentional”; he’s not really saying that libertarians are evil, but only that they’re a bit daft. And in fact I think there’s quite a lot to the observation that on the ground, the aspects of the libertarian political agenda that have the greatest political traction are the ones that are likely to get big-time corporate funding. But the problem with this criticism is that the same is true of everyone in politics; if libertarians are accidental shills for corporate elites, then by the same token liberals like Freddie are just a bunch of unknowing tools in the hands of unions, trial lawyers, energy interests salivating over the prospect of cap-and-trade, and dozens of other powerful lobbies besides. And many of those lobbies are – get this! – representatives of those dread “corporate interests”, aiming to use the liberal agenda as a means to tilt the economic playing field by regulating their competitors into oblivion, protect their backsides when things go wrong, siphon billions away from the government in the alleged service of “green” ends, and so on. Everyone gets played in this game, and so telling a realistic story about the politics of libertarians or conservatives means telling the same sort of story about those of standard-issue liberals. The idea that it’s the libertarians, of all people, who are insufficiently sensitive to “the banal truth of the everyday corruption of human power politics” is silly beyond belief.

Filed under: economics, libertarianism, politics

There Oughtta Be a Law …

When I came across this New York Times article about large vegetable growers and other segments of the industrial food industry who are paying out of pocket to hire inspectors and implement production guidelines and safety standards that go beyond the FDA minimums, I figured it would be a great opportunity to crack some jokes about how this really goes to show that market pressures aren’t enough, and our food safety laws really need to be stricter. Turns out, I didn’t need to joke:

These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them. But with industry itself footing the bill, some safety advocates worry that the approach could introduce new problems and new conflicts of interest. And they contend that the programs lack the rigor of a well-run federal inspection system.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

[…]

“Industry self-regulation didn’t protect our money, and industry self-regulation won’t protect our food,” said Carol L. Tucker-Foreman, a safety advocate with the Consumer Federation of America, in an e-mail message. “We want every inspector to be paid by and owe their loyalty to the people who eat, not to the owner of an unsanitary produce packing operation. You can’t work for both.”

Yes, because there are never problems or conflicts of interest when things are run by the government, are there? This is a case in which markets are working, in which the threat of safety hazards or bad publicity has led producers to develop a self-imposed regulatory regime and so bear on their own, rather than passing on to the taxpayers, the costs of responding to their customers’ perceived demands. If, in the face of all of this, you think that the desire to pass this burden on to the gummint is motivated more than a whit by a selfless desire to protect the public health, then you must be … well, you must be a Times reporter who ends up carrying water for the food industry, that’s who you must be.

As my friend Tim Carney has helpfully explained in connection with the Food Safety Modernization Act being pushed by the congressional Democrats (on which see more here), what’s going on in this case is every bit the rule rather than the exception:

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

For the record, my CSA sends out their spinach literally caked in mud, ensuring us that this actually makes things safer, by allowing nature’s defenses to do their work and keeping contamination from spreading. If such practices aren’t good enough for the Consumer Federation of America, that’s their problem, not mine; a quick rinse and then a dunk in cold salt water cleans those leaves off just fine. That this isn’t the result of state-enforced policy doesn’t show that these decisions are made in a “vacuum”, or that a “well-run [sic!] federal inspection system” could keep things any safer than the collective power of a highly-motivated consumer base. It’s regulation, not individual choice and corporate responsibility, that fails to be a “substitute” for the natural state that it aims to displace.

Earlier: I interviewed Tim, and a host of other luminaries, on regulatory capture and the politics of food safety in my Doublethink article on the war against unboiled milk.

Filed under: agriculture, food, government/law, libertarianism

Race and the Drug War

Last Friday, Jonah Goldberg wrote a post at The Corner arguing that there is something “unlibertarian” about opponents of drug prohibition who use claims about the drug war’s disproportionate effects on blacks in an attempt to demonstrate its injustice. This post prompted a lengthy response from Reason’s Jacob Sullum, who helpfully showed up Goldberg’s claim that blacks are disproportionately affected by the drug war simply because they are “disproportionately in this line of work” for the falsehood that it is, concluding that especially in conjunction with the troublingly racist history of drug prohibition in the U.S., the disproportionate harm that the drug war inflicts on black Americans does indeed suggest an injustice that goes beyond that which libertarians would recognize in the war on drugs even if its effects had an equitable racial distribution.

Meanwhile, here’s how Goldberg responded to a reader who made some points similar to Sullum’s:

Let’s take drugs out of it. I’m in favor of the death penalty. Let’s assume blacks and white commit murder at identical rates but because blacks are poorer they get convicted and executed more than whites. I don’t think that fact alone means we should get rid of the death penalty. It means we should do a better job of executing white murderers. A justly convicted murderer should be punished regardless of his race. A justly convicted drug dealer should be punished, regardless of his race as well. If we’re punishing a disproportionately high number of blacks, that’s a sign we should crack down on more guilty whites, not give up on punishing crimes.

It’s really hard to follow the logic here. In the first place, the hypothetical crackdown that Goldberg proposes here is appropriate only if the laws in question deserve to be enforced; this is uncontroversial enough in the case of murder, but given that this very issue constitutes a huge part of what’s at stake in discussions of drug prohibition, it seems an unreasonable move to make. Moreover, doesn’t it seem that Goldberg has pretty much given up the game at this point? “Poor people are disproportionately affected by all sorts of things all the time”, he wrote earlier in this post, “and blacks are disproportionately poor. In most other spheres, libertarians don’t take that fact and bend their principles to it.” But that’s exactly what Goldberg is proposing to do in this hypothetical example! We’ve got the murder laws that we do, and they’ve got the effects that they have; whether those effects make life a bit more difficult for certain “identity politics groups” is supposed to be entirely beside the point, isn’t it? Or do Republicans only buy into identity-politicking when it can be used as an excuse for harsher sentencing penalties and enforcement of existing laws?

The more basic point, though, is this. What differentiates the case of the drug war from that of, say, the racially disproportionate effects of market capitalism or loan policies based on credit-worthiness is that drug policy is an aspect of our state-sponsored criminal justice system, and as such its societal function is essentially that of, well, doing justice, whereas private banks and the free market have only economic ends in mind. And so it’s simply astonishing to see Goldberg claiming that a government policy that leads blacks to be incarcerated at several times the rate of whites is somehow less troubling in its racial implications than affirmative-action policies that “keep Asians or Jews out of elite colleges”; neither situation is ideal, to be sure, but locking up a poor black man who couldn’t afford legal representation for selling dope on the corner is, shall we say, a bit more morally problematic than telling a Jewish kid from Scarsdale that he’ll have to go to Williams instead of Harvard. It is indeed the case that so far all this amounts to is an argument for serious and widespread drug policy reform, and not outright decriminalization; there’s nothing at all unlibertarian, however, about suggesting that one reason we might want to go one or the other of these routes is that an already disadvantaged racial group that still bears the scars of a long history of genuinely appalling treatment in this country might stand to benefit from it.

Well, that or you could just shut your mind to the facts and write, as one of Goldberg’s readers actually does, that the only evidence we need for the belief that drug dealers are disproportionately black is the disproportionate blackness of the “victims of drug dealing-related murders”. Because it’s certainly not as if there could be another explanation for that.

(Cross-posted at @TAC.)

Filed under: civil liberties, libertarianism

(Still) Against the Medical Cartel

Via Jesse Walker, Kevin Carson has a great piece up at the P2P Foundation’s blog on government regulation and “radical monopoly”, with a particular focus on cartelization and the medical industry. Here’s Kevin’s comparison between the sort of deregulated, “open-source” system he favors and the mess we’ve presently got:

In an open-source healthcare system, someone might go to vocational school for accreditation as the equivalent of a Chinese “barefoot doctor.” He could set fractures and deal with other basic traumas, and diagnose the more obvious infectious diseases. He might listen to your cough, do a sputum culture and maybe a chest x-ray, and give you a round of zithro for your pneumonia. But you can’t purchase such services by themselves without paying the full cost of a college and med school education plus residency.

The government having made some aspects of treatment artificially lucrative with its patent system and licensing cartel, the standards of practice naturally gravitate toward where the money is. The newly patented “me too” drugs crowd out drugs that are almost (if not entirely) as good, so that the cost of medicine is many times higher than necessary. The licensing cartel requires diagnosis and treatment by someone with an MD’s level of training, when something much less might be all that’s needed.

Result: radical monopoly. The state-sponsored crowding-out makes other, cheaper (and often more appropriate) forms of treatment less usable, and renders cheaper (but adequate) treatments artificially scarce.

Now that’s a libertarian, my friends. As with most of what Kevin writes, you ought to read the whole thing.

Earlier: I talked up a paper by Shirley Svorny on the economics of state-sponsored medical licensure, and Kevin left some “baby step” proposals for reform in the comments.

Elsewhere: Mike Riggs in Reason on the nefarious ADA; Kevin’s “Free Market Agenda for Healthcare Reform”; Roderick Long on false dichotomies in the health policy debate; and here is Kevin’s blog.

Filed under: government/law, health care, libertarianism

It’s Not About the Economy, Pothead. (Or, a Rant.)

As a strong supporter of the legalization of marijuana, I sympathize entirely with Freddie’s frustration with Obama’s craptastic take on the subject from Wednesday night’s “town hall” meeting. That said, I’ve got to get something off my chest.

There is, I am comfortable saying, a whole host of good arguments in favor of legalizing pot. The argument that we should legalize pot because we can then aid the economy and make money for the government by taxing it is, however, decidedly NOT a member of that host. Want to know why Obama LOLed at your question last night, pro-legalization America? Maybe it’s because the idea that a tiny boost in GDP and the associated tax revenue comprise a sufficient reason to legalize a substance that millions of Americans stupidly think is dangerous is a laughable idea. Is it true that pot is nowhere near as dangerous or addictive as those tut-tutting parents, pols, and educators so sternly and solemnly say that it is? That the drug war is costly, dangerous, and patently unjust? That legalizing an already widely-used substance and so bringing its use out of the shadows is the best way to develop the social mores necessary to use it responsibly? That it’s generally best, all else being equal, not to ban those activities that don’t cause serious social harm? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. But then why, if there are so many arguments as good as these in favor of legalization, is the one that Obama’s web-based pesterers have repeatedly chosen to present him with an argument about tax revenue? Is it because they think that avoiding the moral questions altogether and instead dressing up their argument with dollar signs and fancy economic analysis would make their case look – what? – more serious? Less frivolous? Less about freedom and self-indulgence than the Very Serious Matter of the Health of America’s Economy? And if so, why in the world would they think that anyone would buy it? You’d almost think that the folks who came up with this strategy were on drugs or something …

Does anyone agree with me? Does everyone? Or is there something I’m missing here?

UPDATE: Reader Gherald L. has a very nice post laying out the economic case for legalization as it ought to be stated.

Filed under: civil liberties, government/law, libertarianism

Food Safety and Small Farms: A Dilemma

Over the weekend, Tim Carney and Rod Dreher both had very nice columns on the controversy over the push for the implementation of a National Animal Identification System and other food safety measures being pushed in Congress that would likely pose serious burdens for smaller farmers and other producers who are unable to take advantage of the benefits of economies of scale. This is, I guess, the kind of thing that’s supposed to be right up my alley, so I suppose I ought to have something to say about it.

First, here’s Rod:

The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 attempts to streamline the unwieldy federal food regulation system, as does the similar Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2009. Both, however, are written as a “one size fits all” bill that would ramp up fees and regulation on all producers of food (and, in the case of the latter, drugs and cosmetics). The little guy who sells homegrown tomatoes or homemade soap at the farmers market would be subject to the same regulation as industrial giants, without the resources to implement it.

As those familiar with my earlier writing on food safety and related subjects will be unsurprised to hear, I think this is exactly right. I’ll turn in a minute to my diagnosis of a similar sort of problem in the battle over raw milk in California, but for now here’s what Mark Thompson wrote about the regulatory dynamic in his terrific Culture11 piece on the CPSIA controversy:

The effects of these new restrictions on small and medium-sized businesses are difficult to underestimate. […] And Woldenberg, whose company is more properly classified as “medium-sized,” says that he conservatively estimates a minimum increase of 30% in the overhead for his company to manufacture an average product.  In one instance, a testing company estimated that it would cost $24,000 in testing fees for one of Learning Resource’s children’s telescopes to comply with the law — even though the product contains no parts that could conceivably be considered hazardous. Because this product only generates $32,000 in gross sales per year, it will need to be discontinued. Similar problems will exist for just about every niche children’s product, for which large production runs are impractical, such as educational materials for special needs children.

Meanwhile, however, massive multi-national corporations will be relatively well-suited to adjust to the new law. Their huge economies of scale mean they can afford to staff a few lawyers to oversee compliance with the law, and it is only a minimal change to their business models for them to mass produce and import their products in a way that minimizes testing fees. In sum, the net effects of this law are that the largest businesses will be relatively able to cope with the changes, while small and medium-sized businesses (and really, any domestic business) will be disproportionately affected.

It should go without saying that the fact that in food safety and toy safety alike it is the larger companies rather than the smaller ones that tend to be responsible for the worst crises makes this a self-defeating response indeed: the companies with the greatest intrinsic incentive to do the right thing anyway get run out of business, while those that remain are only barely compliant with the new regulations and have that much less to fear from the efforts of the competition. Hence Rod:

Ironically, the food safety problems that cause such legitimate public concern are caused by large-scale, technology-driven industrial food production and distribution methods – precisely the sort of thing that local, sustainable farmers don’t engage in. Yet they are the ones who will suffer the most from these government attempts to solve a problem caused by bigness and technology by imposing more bigness and technology.

The problem, though, is that the food safety scares of the past few years have given us every reason to think that those industrial producers simply aren’t growing and distributing food that is sufficiently clean and safe: something needs to be done, goes the standard response, and the only option available to us is this one. If saving a few small farms means allowing our food system to be overrun by bacteria-infested and otherwise potentially harmful meat and tomatoes, then that’s a choice that not many of us are willing to make.

Rod tries, though, to argue that there’s room for a third way:

We do need better food safety regulation of major producers, but local family farms and artisans shouldn’t pay for sins they didn’t commit. Consumers need to have the small-farm alternative – and if they are going to preserve it, they have to contact federal and state legislators now.

What Rod wants, then, is a system that puts stringent regulations in place on the larger producers while granting exemptions for smaller farmers who can’t reasonably be expected to meet them. But granting that this sort of route is clearly possible in principle, is it politically feasible? In my Doublethink piece on raw milk, the dynamic I detected in the battle over regulation in California was essentially the same one that Mark found in his work on the CPSIA controversy: in stark contrast to the naive image of anti-regulatory businessmen squared off against the would-be food nannies in government, the actual relationship between business and government was much more, well, symbiotic than that; it was the corporations that were pushing for the new regulations, and it was hard not to think that they were doing so at least partly because they were cognizant of the effects that such regulation would have on the competition. “Regulation”, as Tim Carney put it to me in a quotation from that article, “always helps the big guys by creating barriers to entry, but there’s a more important dynamic here: When you give the government power, you give the lobbyists power. It also works the other way: When only a handful of businesses dominate an industry, bureaucrats and politicians find it easier to control that industry.”

Which brings me to Tim’s very important column:

The lineup of backers and opponents of these [new food safety] bills has surprised some observers, but it shouldn’t. Big food processors—including the makers of some recently recalled foods—support the legislation, while leading advocates of local produce, organic food, and farmers markets are vocally resisting the measures.

Science and environment writer Steve Nash in The New Republic Monday praised Durbin’s bill as a “good idea,” and expressed surprise that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, “who many decried as corporate, conventional, and something of a shill for Big-Ag” would come out for greater federal regulation, too.

But also supporting the Durbin bill, the DeLauro bill, or both, are Kraft Foods, General Mills, Kellogs, Pepsico (maker of Frito-Lay brand snacks), the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and the National Restaurant Association.

[…] Galen Reser, vice president for government affairs at Pepsico, which processes snack food under its Frito-Lay brand, told this columnist “I think the industry is pretty comfortable with” the regulatory burden of Durbin’s bill, maintaining there are no significant “unnecessary costs.”

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

And ‘round and ‘round it goes.

So look: either you support a new regulatory regime that is equally strict across the board and so will lay undue burdens on smaller producers, or you push for exemptions and likely lose the support of the big corporations that currently think the proposed regulations are just dandy. You’re damned either way, and to be perfectly honest I don’t know where I come down. I’d love it, of course, if someone could make the case that the food safety scares of recent years haven’t been so serious after all; short of that, however, it’s hard even for a near-libertarian like me not think that the implementation of even an unfairly strict set of regulations would be better than the reachable alternatives. Sadly, the possible world where we get a menu of choices less horrid than these ones is quite a long way away, and involves a political system with a very different character than ours.

Filed under: agriculture, food, government/law, libertarianism

Unlikely Convergence

First, from Paul Weyrich and William Lind’s forthcoming and decidedly un-libertarian The Next Conservatism, which I’m currently reviewing for ISI’s Intercollegiate Review:

Local order depends on local police. The job of local police is not responding to crime, but prevent crime before it happens. Response comes too late; civic order has already been disrupted.

Here as elsewhere, tradition shows us what works. What works is the neighborhood cop. He walks or cycles a regular beat in the same neighborhood, day in and day out, year in and year out. He knows the people who live there and they know him. He knows what is normal and what is out of place in the neighborhood. He talks to people, and they tell him what is going on. He protects the neighborhood, and the neighborhood protects him. That is how the famous British “Bobby” worked, and it was why he did not need to carry a gun.

In modern parlance, this is called “community policing.” Expanding community policing is an important part of the next conservatisms agenda. It is national security writ small, as conservatives would write it, consistent with our desire to “Think locally, act locally.”

Second, from a lengthy post by Radley Balko, which as always is well worth reading in its entirety:

… if we’re going to put more cops on the streets, we need to emphasizing the right kind of policing, where cops become an active part of their communities. The problem with policing today isn’t so much a lack of personnel, it’s that it’s plagued by a structure of perverse incentives and a lack of accountability and transparency, problems driven by 40 years of get-tough-on-crime rhetoric and war imagery from politicians and law-and-order activists. […]

The problems accompanying the fact that there are entire communities who no longer trust the police charged with protecting them aren’t going to go away once we put more cops in the neighborhood. That will likely only make things worse. We first need a major overhaul in the way police interact with the communities they serve.

At this point I was going to make a hopeful remark about the possibilities for conservative-libertarian fusion, but then I realized that an obviously sane policy like this one is likely to be favored by smart liberals as well, and that the real lesson is that obviously sane policies are a political non-starter in a mass democracy with leaders as dumb as ours, hence there’s actually no reason to be hopeful about anything at all, really. Woohoo.

Filed under: civil liberties, conservatism, government/law, libertarianism, politics

Conservatives, Red Tories, and Freedom

There are few things in the world that can take a hatchet to blogger’s block like a provocation from Russell Arben Fox:

… the last time John Schwenkler […] and I went back and forth over this whole idea of whether or not Red Tories and Christian socialists and left conservatives generally (all eight of us!) could ever be part of an coalition of thinkers on the right side of the blogosphere, we found ourselves hung up on a fundamental disagreement over liberty. Basically, the localist dissidents picking fights with Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the Republican establishment are still, truly, liberal: they see something essentially valuable in the basically libertarian conception of liberty (subject to the classical, Aristotelian and/or Christian notion of the individual as conditioned by their place within a larger body of meaning and membership). Whereas I think Hegel and Marx got more right than Locke; I think liberty in an individualistic sense is vitally important in an instrumental and prudential sense, but I’m not sure that it offers us much as an essential guide to morality and philosophy in the modern world.

I agree wholeheartedly with quite a lot of this; the problem, really, is that I’m not quite sure where it is that I disagree. That is to say: if pressed to give an account of why it is that I think liberty is such an important political value, my initial response tends to be exactly the sort of “instrumental and prudential” one that Russell sketches here; liberty is so important, I want to say, because in a pluralistic society like ours there is simply no alternative to liberty, because any attempt to impose significant governmental restrictions on individual liberty will tend in a society like ours to worsen the situation rather than bettering it, to fail to rein in the vices at stake and to undermine, along the way, whatever moral legitimacy government may once have had thanks to the seeming illegitimacy of its overreach.

That, at least, would be my initial response. But I do think there’s something deeper that’s at stake here.

Take, for example, this splendid paragraph from James’s splendid reflections on red Toryism (it’s everywhere, and now with fancy British spelling to boot!):

Rather than de-linking the free market from the good life, conservatives might emphasise the space between culture and politics. Communitarian thought often seeks to close this space, so civic life is a seamless blend of political and cultural relations. But the nationalisation of social issues in America has created a similarly seamless ideological landscape that forecloses public interest in reviving the alternative tradition. Putting space between national politics and regional or local cultures is essential to recovering real conservative alternatives. Amid the current climate of exhaustion and anxiety on the right, that’s a prospect all American conservatives should welcome.

Well, how about that? What we have here is a case for why limited (though not necessarily: small) government is so important that does not trade on the individualistic, telos-free conception of liberty that all parties to the discussion (no non-communitarian libertarians here, thanks very much) have agreed to reject: limiting government is important because it makes space for community, and because community in turn, as Daniel Larison has recently argued, is essential to the proper realization of the freedom of any particular person:

This is a freedom among neighbors, and not a freedom over and against other individuals or apart from social relationships.  Something that has long perplexed me is how Americans have persuaded themselves that an important part of their freedom is to be measured by the degree of non-interference of their neighbors in their lives and the distance–psychological and social–they have achieved from other people.  […] Related to this measure of freedom is the desire for mobility and the hoped-for ‘escape’ from one’s own neighbors, perhaps the perfect expression of which is the automobile, which permits constant proximity to others who exist mainly as obstacles and causes of frustration rather than, as the shared road might suggest, as companions on a journey to a common destination.  It is remarkable how much modern Americans travel in and around the cities where they live, and how few pilgrimages we make.  This is a function of not understanding what freedom is, which is a freedom among and not a freedom apart from.

The problem now, though, is that I’m once again unsure as to where, if anywhere, Russell and I disagree. It may be that this is another one of these cases where, as I suggested the other day, the essential differences boil down to the vagaries of disposition rather than abstract theories: described in general terms, Russell and I may tend to agree about what we are really after, but when we get down to brass tacks about, say, Obamanomics he may be quite happy with it while I view it as morally and scientifically suspect at best and … well, I’m not going to say what I think about it at worst. Hence Russell writes toward the end of that paragraph that I started off by quoting that he wants “to find and defend social policies and arrangements which acknowledge the need for collective (hopefully democratic, and occasionally compulsory) action and institutions to preserve the cultural and economic infrastructure which local communities and traditions and families depend upon” – which seems fine to me so far as it goes, though I’d tend to go on and on a lot more about how we also need to find and destroy those policies and arrangements that undermine the cultural and economic infrastructure that sustains the local and familial and traditional as opposed to the national and global and collective. So understood the motley coalition whose emergence we’re celebrating may be one whose cohesion has a lot more to do with ideas than practical politics, which of course would be a happy result from my perspective since I’m not much of a fan of practical politics anyway.

Filed under: conservatism, libertarianism, politics

“Statism”

Will sticks up for it, and good for him: I deserve to stand accused as often as anyone else, but it’s a largely contentless epithet that serves to do little more than generate bad feelings. And at the end of the day everyone (well, almost everyone) is a statist, and the focus of our disputes is really the question of what kind of state that state should be.

Or is that too quick? There’s a temptation, I think, to make all of this into nothing more than an issue of engineering, as if once the economics are in place people will have no choice but to fall in line. But as we’ve seen before that just ain’t so: our disputes have to do with more than just the empirical questions of how the welfare state is most effectively administered, and all the empirical data in the world aren’t going to resolve things on their own. The case of just war theory can be instructive, I think: as Daniel has observed, the just war tradition can be utilized quite differently depending on whether your starting point presumes in favor of “loopholes” or of “barriers”; if the former, then you’ll tend to find that the just war criteria make your war of choice look a-okay, and if the latter, then you won’t. So maybe progressives are like knee-jerk interventionists in this regard, always ready to pounce on the evidence that supports the case for shiny new domestic programs but much, much harder to persuade when the available evidence seems to point the other way. That’s not at all to say that the project of liberaltarian dialogue can be fruitful in the long term, but only that, well, it looks like that term will be pretty darn long.

While we’re on the subject of war, though, isn’t that the elephant in the room here? I mean, I’m not a tenth the social liberal that Will is, nor am I an open borders devotee, etc. etc., but the fact remains that I wouldn’t think of supporting the GOP so long as it remains the party of bloated defense budgets, unapologetic support for the Iraq war, and bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran, not to mention freedom fries, FISA, the PATRIOT Act, torture, and the rest. That’s statism, my friends, and if Jonah Goldberg really can’t see why a committed libertarian might regard such a party as a lost cause to be jettisoned in favor of an admittedly unattractive other, then he clearly needs to think things through again.

Filed under: government/law, libertarianism, war

Side Effects May Include …

… hyperinflation, stagnation, dollar devaluation, earmarks, excessive debt, bankruptcy, loss of jobs, growth of welfare state, expansion of nanny state, unrealized expectations, economic impotence, depression, halitosis, and sweaty palms.

Filed under: economics, government/law, libertarianism