Tag Archives: Public goods

The Virtue of Libertarian Consistency

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Liberty

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Libertarians

Many on the Right of the political spectrum sincerely believe that they hold libertarian views. They might be close on some economic matters, but only some, and not on a host of social issues. Fewer on the Left make the same mistake, but it happens. Some uninformed lefties might imagine that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is representative of libertarianism, and occasionally the ACLU does take positions consistent with libertarian views. Many of these individuals, left and right, probably self-identify as libertarian only because they think it “sounds good”. After all, the root “liberty” might ring a compelling (if distant) bell, but perhaps I’m congratulating myself.

Jonah Goldberg, the conservative senior editor of National Review, wrote an interesting article a few weeks ago called “Fusionism, 60 Years Later“. In it, he describes the historical relationship between libertarianism and conservatism. Fusionism, Goldberg says, is the longstanding effort to find common ground between these two camps. He contends that most support for libertarian ideas comes from Conservatives:

“In other words, conservatives tend to be libertarian, but libertarians tend not to be conservative. …libertarians want to have their own identity, separate and distinct from that of conservatism. They’re a bit like the Canadians you meet abroad who go to almost obsessive lengths to show everyone that they aren’t American.“

I got a laugh out of that quote because it contains a grain of truth, but Goldberg knows all too well that there are substantive differences between Libertarians and Conservatives on the role of government. There are not-so-subtle departures on the basic role of government in regulating personal behavior. Libertarians, of course, believe that government almost never has a legitimate role in that area, with exceptions for the prevention and redress of various forms of aggression. Another difference is that Conservatives, like the political Left (not a typo), often favor government promotion of private business objectives, including protectionist anti-trade legislation, policies which Libertarians consistently oppose. And unlike Libertarians, Conservatives make a glaring exception to their avowed dedication to small government in their support for massive military outlays and foreign incursions in the name of protecting vital U.S. interests, which usually amount to safeguarding private economic interests abroad.

Nevertheless, Goldberg contends that Libertarians and Conservatives are all classical liberals, defined broadly:

“The Founding Fathers were all classical liberals, but … they were largely conservative in manners, morals, and faith. Their conservatism was not labeled as such because it suffused the culture and was simply taken for granted. …

Until the middle of the 20th century, the conservative side of the classical-liberal tradition in America was not cultivated the way the libertarian side was, in large part because no one thought it needed to be cultivated.“

That may be, but it does not diminish the differences that exist. Insofar as “conservatism” is about the preservation of certain institutions, such as private property, free speech, and other individual liberties, then there are areas of commonality between Conservatives and Libertarians, but full “fusion” is impossible if Conservatives cannot consistently recognize the appropriate limits of government. The power of government derives from its police power, or “legitimized” aggression to accomplish public objectives. That power must be restrained by adherence to the kinds of checks embodied in the U.S. Constitution.

Here is a quote from Goldberg’s piece giving just a bit too much relative credit to Conservatives on the subject of morality:

“… conservatives borrowed heavily from the libertarian tradition, but they also borrowed from the religious, patriotic, and moral arsenals of the Founders. That is why the libertarians have stood apart like Coptic Christians, who claim a lineage and authenticity that needs no sanction from the larger, more powerful, and more syncretic Catholic Church.“

The libertarian philosophy is grounded in two moral principles to which I’ve already referred: liberty and non-aggression (or non-coercion). The liberty of individuals is sacrosanct (as it was to the Founders) but does not extend to physically aggressive actions, including any form of theft. Liberty includes freedom of speech (the notion of “micro-aggression” is unlikely to carry much (if any) weight with most libertarians) and the freedom to defend oneself. Defined properly, aggression includes the imposition of external costs on others, such as unchecked pollution of the environment.

Ideally, “legitimized” aggression or coercion by the state extends only to preventing aggression by private parties or foreign aggressors, and to the revenue collection necessary to provide public goods desired by the polity. Defining strict limits on aggression by private and public parties provides a direct mapping to the broad extent of liberty. In other words, non-aggression itself implies liberty.

The libertarian philosophy provides a moral framework that exists comfortably alongside a wide range of religious beliefs as well as atheism. However, it cannot be denied that differing religious beliefs among libertarians often inform different positions when the rights of individuals stand in conflict.

There is no reason to assume that Libertarians lack patriotism, as Goldberg comes close to implying. However, patriotism should never be used to justify aggression, whether that involves limiting expression or unnecessarily entering into conflicts abroad. So Goldberg is stretching when he credits Conservatives with a better grip on moral or patriotic principles than Libertarians.

Goldberg ends his piece with misgivings about the potential for Donald Trump to hijack the conservative movement, and in this I am sympathetic. About Trump, he says:

“He makes little or no effort to celebrate conservatism as a defense of the American tradition of liberty. He never talks about the Constitution, nor plausibly about religion. He makes scant mention of freedom. Instead, he taps into deep reservoirs of resentment and a kind of nationalism that has little to do with patriotism rightly understood.“

Goldberg’s piece serves as a reminder of Friedrich Hayek’s great essay, “Why I Am Not a Conservative“. While not referencing this essay explicitly, Goldberg mentions that Hayek and other European political philosophers have known a different kind of conservatism than what we know in the U.S. In Europe, conservatives:

“... sought to conserve the absolute rule of Church and Throne. The American Founders sought to overthrow even the partial rule of Church and Throne. And therein lies all the difference. In Europe, conservatism was understood as the opposite of classical liberalism. The reverse was the case in America, as Friedrich Hayek observed: ‘What in Europe was called ‘liberalism’ was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.’“

Point well taken, and Hayek understood that difference all too well. His essay focuses on certain unflattering aspects of conservatism that ring true of the American version as well, including certain nationalistic and authoritarian tendencies, and a penchant for government involvement when it suits them:

“… neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits. I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of [classical] liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion.“

My attraction to libertarian philosophy has much to do with the simple appeal of liberty and the ugliness of aggression. However, I think my original attraction to libertarianism was strongly related to the superiority of market forces as a form of social organization. Market forces cannot operate very effectively without liberty, and the healthy maintenance of liberty is facilitated by the superior resource allocation made possible by market forces. What a beautiful symbiosis!

Must Support For “Family Planning” Be Compelled?

05 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in Big Government, Liberty, Presumptive rights, Property Rights

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Fund Me

Where do Libertarians stand on the issue of federal funding of Planned Parenthood? What sort of balance should be struck between the rights of conscientiously-objecting taxpayers and the rights of women to use Planned Parenthood (PP) services? The correct answer has nothing to do with abortion, an issue on which Libertarians lack unanimity. However, the existence of moral objections by any segment of society, whether considered valid by a majority or not, is an important consideration.

Do Individual Freedoms Require Taxpayer Support?

Sheldon Richman discusses the funding question on his Free Association blog in “Planned Parenthood, Social Peace and  the Libertarian approach“. He first makes a basic point: “… no one’s freedom is violated by lack of access to taxpayer money.” I agree, but this statement requires some context. For Libertarians, the baseline is a society in which individual liberty is a presumption. That cannot be the case if taxes and transfers dominate our economic lives. If we’re all busy picking each other’s pockets, then perhaps anyone can lay claim to a dollop of public funds to pay for any damn thing they want. But in a society that explicitly limits the powers of coercive government, private individuals cannot, on the public dime, lay claim to whatever they wish to compel from others. What they desire, after all, is almost always available privately. Therefore, the denial of public funding for PP does not constitute a denial of anyone’s rights.

Individual’s are free to exercise their reproductive or non-reproductive rights as they see fit, and to pay for related services themselves or by seeking a benefactor. Nothing is deprived to that individual other than an invalid claim on the belongings of others.

“Individual rights ultimately boil down to the single right to be free from aggression, that is, to self-ownership. Rights would be defined out of existence if they could be ignored whenever doing so would make someone else’s objectives easier to accomplish. Such an approach to “rights” would turn rights theory on its head by making us a mere means to other people’s ends rather than ends in ourselves.“

Consistent Application of Property Rights

Richman asserts that the right of ownership of one’s body applies equally to the right of individuals to the income they produce:

“Ironically, the right to choose abortion is defended as an application of the right of women to their bodies, that is, as a property right (self-ownership). Another implication of the right to one’s own body is the right to control the fruits of one’s labor (income). No coherent theory of rights can permit a clash of the right to one’s body with the right to the fruits of one’s labor. Thus implicit in the pro-choice case is an argument against tax funding of Planned Parenthood (and anything else), that is, against taxation itself.“

Leftist elites say that a denial of public funding for PP is tantamount to a denial of service to low-income women. Richman asks the elites to put up or shut up: if they believe the services in question are critical, they are free support PP financially, but they much prefer to extract resources from taxpayers without regard to possible moral objections.

Protection of Religious and Moral Principles

Richman adds the following thoughts on public funding of Planned Parenthood near the end of his post:

“Reasonable people of all persuasions should see that it is simply unreasonable to force people to finance an organization they find morally offensive. Thomas Jefferson famously said, ‘To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.’ Compelling men and women to furnish contributions for the performance of services they deem immoral (whether or not they are) is worse.“

Supporters of public PP funding have sought to deflect morality-based opposition with the contention that abortions represent only 3% of PP’s services, but Slate debunked that claim over two years ago. It was based on a count of tests and procedures performed, not on revenue. PP also claims that tax funds never pay for abortion, but as Richman points out, once available, the revenue is fungible and may be used to cover the cost of any procedure. In short, the argument is specious.

The Public Good Argument Is Weak

One more elephant in the PP funding debate concerns the appropriate functions of government. Does PP provide a truly “public” good, one having benefits that are nonexclusive to the primary user? Health services are sometimes assumed to confer public benefits; that is an easy argument in the case of infectious diseases and to some extent for medical research, but not for most health services. The benefits of individual health services are largely private, providing little justification for government funding of PP from a public finance perspective.

Collective Action Needs Strict Limits

Collective action should be confined to the provision of public goods, but even then it can be fraught with conflicts, such as the difficulty of accommodating pacifists during wartime. A truly liberal society will do all it can to accommodate diverse beliefs by allowing objectors to opt out, if possible, or avoiding the funding of private activities, especially those over which there is significant dissent. Under no circumstances should one be compelled to pay for private services that they find to be morally objectionable.

Will ET Be a Socialist?

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Capitalism, Socialism, Space Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

image

If we are ever visited or contacted by agents from an extraterrestrial civilization, what kind of society will they come from? The issue is given scant attention, if any, in discussions of extraterrestrial life, at least according to this interesting piece in The Freeman by B.K. Marcus. The popular view, and that of many scientists, seems to be that the alien society will be dominated by an authoritarian central government. Must that be the case? Marcus notes the negative views taken by such scientific authorities as Neil deGrasse Tyson toward laissez faire capitalism, and even Carl Sagan “… could only imagine science funded by government.” Of course, Tyson and Sagan cannot be regarded as authorities on economic affairs. However, I admit that I have fallen into the same trap regarding extraterrestrial visitors: that they will come from a socialist society with strong central command. On reflection, like Marcus, I do not think this view is justified.

One explanation for the default view that extraterrestrial visitors will be socialists is that people uncritically accept the notion that an advanced society is a planned society.  This runs counter to mankind’s experience over the past few centuries: individual freedom, unfettered trade, capitalism and a spontaneous social order have created wealth and advancement beyond the wildest dreams of earlier monarchs. Anyone with a passing familiarity with data on world economic growth, or with F.A. Hayek, should know this, but it Is often overlooked. Central planners cannot know the infinitely detailed and dynamic information on technologies, resource availability, costs and preferences needed to plan a society with anything close to the success of one arranged through the voluntary cooperation of individual actors.

Many of us have a strong memory of government domination of space exploration, so we tend to think of such efforts as the natural province of government. Private contractors were heavily involved in those efforts, but the funding and high-level management of space missions (NASA in the U.S.) was dominated by government. Today, private space exploration is a growth industry, and it is likely that some of the greatest innovations and future space endeavors will originate in the private sector.

Another explanation for the popular view is the daunting social challenges that would be faced by crews in interstellar travel (IST). Given a relatively short life span, a colonizing mission would have to involve families and perhaps take multiple generations to reach its destination. There is a view that the mini-society on such a ship would require a command and control structure. Perhaps, but private property rights and a certain level of democratization would be advantageous. In any case, that carries no implication about the society on the home planet nor the eventual structure of a colony.

A better rationale for the default view of socialist ETs involves a public goods argument. The earth and mankind face infrequent but potentially catastrophic hazards, such as rogue asteroids and regions of strong radiation as the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. These risks are shared, which implies that technological efforts to avert such hazards, or to perpetuate mankind by colonizing other worlds, are pure public goods. That means government has a classic role in providing for such efforts, as long as the expected benefits outweigh the costs. The standard production tradeoff discussed in introductory economics classes is “guns versus butter”, or national defense (a pure public good) versus private consumption. IST by an alien civilization could well require such a massive diversion of resources to the public sector that only an economically dominant central government could manage it. Or so it might seem.

As already noted, private entrepreneurs have debunked the presumed necessity that government must dominate space exploration. In fact, Elon Musk and his company SpaceX hope to colonize Mars. His motives sound altruistic, and in some sense the project sounds like the private provision of a public good. Here is an interpretation by Tim Urban quoted at the link (where I have inserted a substitute for the small time-scale analog used by the author):

“Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash [from time to time] … what’s the very obvious thing you’d do?
You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.
That’s why Elon Musk wants to put a million people on Mars.”

Musk has other incentives, however. The technology needed to colonize Mars will also pay handsome dividends in space mining applications. Moreover, if they are successful, there will come a time when Mars is a destination commanding a fare. Granted, this is not IST, but as technology advances through inter-planetary travel and colonization, there is a strong likelihood that future Elon Musks will be involved in the first steps outside of our solar system.

While SpaceX has raised its capital from private sources, it receives significant revenue from government contracts, so there is a level of dependence on public space initiatives. However, the argument made by Marcus at the first link above, that IST by ETs is less likely (or impossible) if they live under a socialist regime, is not based primarily on recent experience with private entrepreneurial efforts like Musk’s. Instead, it has to do with the inability of socialist regimes to generate wealth, especially the massive wealth necessary to accomplish IST.

Discussions of ETs (or the lack thereof) often center around a question known as the  Fermi Paradox, after the physicist Enrico Fermi. He basically asked: if the billions and billions of star systems, even in our own galaxy, are likely to harbor a respectable number of advanced civilizations, where are they? Why haven’t we heard from them? My friend John Crawford objects that this is no paradox at all, given the vastness of space and the difficulty and likely expense of IST. There may be advanced civilizations in the cosmos that simply have not been able to tackle the problem, at least beyond their own stellar neighborhood. No doubt about it, IST is hard!

I have argued to Crawford that there should be civilizations covering a wide range of development at any point in time. In only the past hundred years, humans have increased the speed at which they travel from less than 50 miles per hour (mph) to at least 9,600 mph. The speed of light is approximately 270,000 times faster that that! At our current top speed, it would take almost 50% longer to reach our nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, than the entire span of human existence to-date. With that kind of limitation, there is no paradox at all! But I would not be surprised if, over the next 1,000 years, advances in propulsion technology bring our top speed to within one-tenth of the speed of light, and perhaps much more, making IST a more reasonable proposition, at least in our “neighborhood”. There may be civilizations that have already done so.

Answers to the Fermi Paradox often involve a concept called the Great Filter. This excellent HuffPo article by Tim Urban on the Fermi Paradox provides a good survey of theories on the Great Filter. The idea is that there are significant factors that prevent civilizations from advancing beyond certain points. Some of these are of natural origin, such as asteroids and radiation exposure. Others might be self-inflicted, such as a thermonuclear catastrophe or some other kind of technology gone bad. Some have suggested that the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland could be a major hazard to our existence, though physicists insist otherwise. Another example is the singularity, when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, creating a possibility that evil machines will do us in. The point of these examples is that some sudden or gradual development could prevent a civilization from surviving indefinitely. These kinds of filters provide an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

More broadly, there could be less cataclysmic impediments to development that prevent a society from ever reaching an advanced stage. These would also qualify as filters of a sort. Perhaps the smart ETs lack, or failed to evolve, certain physical characteristics that are crucial for advancement or IST. Or their home planet might be light on certain kinds of resources. Or perhaps an inferior form of social organization has limited development, with inadequate wealth creation and technologies to transcend the physical limitations imposed by their world. On a smaller than planetary scale, we have witnessed such an impediment in action many times over: socialism. The inefficiencies of central planning place limits on economic growth, and while high authorities might dictate a massive dedication of resources toward science, technology and capital-intensive space initiatives, the shift away from personal consumption would come at a greater and greater cost. The end game may involve a collapse of production and a primitive existence. So the effort may be unsustainable and could lead to social upheaval; a more enlightened regime would attempt to move the society toward a more benign allocation of resources. Whether they can ever accomplish IST is at least contingent on their ability to create wealth.

Socialism is a filter on the advancement of societies. ETs capable of interstellar travel could not be spawned by a society dominated by socialism and central planning. While government might play a significant role in a successful ET civilization, one capable of IST, only a heavy reliance on free-market capitalism can improve the odds of advancing beyond a certain primitive state. Capitalism is a relatively easy ticket to the wealth required for an advanced and durable civilization, and conceivably to the reaches of the firmament.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no guarantee that capitalistic ETs will be friendly  toward competing species, or that they will respect our property rights. They might be big, smart cats and find us mouse-like and quite tasty. Their children might make us perform circuses, like fleas. In any case, if ETs get this far, it’s probably because they want our world and our resources. My friend Crawford says that they won’t get here in any case. He believes that the difficulty of IST will force them to focus on their own neighborhood. Maybe, but on long enough time scales, who knows?

I would add a caveat to conclusions about the strength of the filters discussed above. A capitalistic society might reach a point at which it could send artificially intelligent, self-replicating machines into space to harvest resources. Those machines might well survive beyond the end of the civilization that created them. Conceivably, those machines could act autonomously or they could take coordinated action. But we haven’t heard from them either!

For a little more reading, here is SETI‘s description of the Fermi Paradox, and here is a post from io9 on the Great Filter.