Frontpage Feed
Community Feed
The Idea Market Feed
The 'Verse Feed
Blogs
Think tanks and activist organizations are complementary
Submitted by Patri Friedman on Thu, 2009-07-02 18:06.From an email I received from an FSP participant:
David Boaz just spoke at Dartmouth and had this response to a question about the FSP:"My own attitude towards the Free State Project is that the federal government should move to New Hampshire and leave the rest of us free,” Boaz joked."
He just blew an easy opportunity to say something nice about a fellow libertarian organization.
(Boaz is the Executive Vice-President of Cato).
This attitude is silly. Yes, national reform would be way better. It would also be way better if I shat gold bricks instead of poop and the Miss America Pageant included a category on sexual prowess with me as the judge. The FSP's goal may be far more modest, but at least their goal is not a fantasy and their methods have at least some chance of working.
Policy think-tanks have a valuable role in helping libertarians signal affiliation, showing how flawed the current system is, and generally building culture and momentum. But that diffuse culture and momentum have to be eventually concentrated so that our small movement can have real impact. Projects like the FSP and seasteading are examples of concentrated efforts.
I'm glad that Cato helped promote seasteading, and I wish they would work with and promote the FSP. The apparent attitude that the FSP is a quaint provincial group makes no sense given the strategic landscape for libertarianism. Only such groups have a chance at radically increasing liberty, and that is (or should be) Cato's ultimate goal.
Secession Week Blogging Begins!
Submitted by Patri Friedman on Mon, 2009-06-29 14:59.Spread the word, join the fun, send us more links, and plz upvote on the Libertarian Reddit
"Randy" likes Distributed Republic
Submitted by Mark on Mon, 2009-06-29 09:01.Though we don't do scheduled TV, my family has been a fan of "My Name is Earl" for the last several years. We watch the episodes at the Official NBC Show Site.
The show is about a bunch of redneck scofflaws. The main character, Earl, is on a mission to right all the wrongs of his past. Ethan Suplee plays "Randy", his little brother sidekick. Randy gets to deliver great lines--after a guest character returns from a "cavity search" at a government building security checkpoint, he asks, "Did they find any? Or have you been brushing real good?"
I ran across Ethan Suplee's blog a while ago and found out he was a fan of Thomas Jefferson, Gerald Celente, and Ron Paul. I left a comment on his site pointing him at Stefan Molyneux's great "Matrix" video. Ethan not only liked that, but also said he liked the link to Distributed Republic that was attached to my name.
Now, if we could just get him to introduce us to Nadine Velazquez from the show! Here she is in character as the illegal immigrant Catalina...
Cap and Trade
Submitted by Constant on Sat, 2009-06-27 00:32.The destruction continues. I'm too bleak to write anything, so instead I'll listen to this a few times. No, it has nothing to do with it, it's just something to listen to.
Privately Funded Public Transportation
Submitted by Peter Lambert on Tue, 2009-06-23 12:04.From the Detroit News,
Private investors have stepped forward with enough money to build a prototype for a futuristic elevated rail system that would race along freeway routes between Lansing, Ann Arbor and Detroit, according to experts who testified at a hearing on the proposal Monday.
This seems like a good idea, instead of demanding money from the government, they are actually coming up with money. I have often heard people saying things like "if high speed trains are such a good idea, then private industry would build one". Well, here they are, trying to build one. The only thing they are asking from the government is permission to build the track along the interstate corridor. If they build it and have a reasonable fare, I might use it every once in a while; I live in Lansing and my parents live near Detroit.
Now, my question is, what if the business fails? This may be economically viable, and it may not. If the business goes bad, what will happen with the miles of track along the highway? Will they come and ask for a government bailout if there are no riders? I would like the company to address this possibility, I certainly don't want to fund a loser and I would hate to see deteriorating tracks crossing the state.
In another developement, the Michigan State Department of Transportation is asking for Federal money to build a high speed rail from Detroit to Chicago. Of the two plans, I like the private venture better, just because it is privately funded. It will be interesting to see how the two projects turn out.
Are civilians legitimate targets or aren't they?
Submitted by econoholic on Mon, 2009-06-22 15:45.Jonathan Wilde summarizes comments made by Bill Whittle that sum up the defense of Harry Truman's decision to drop the bomb:
- The US made some effort to warn the Japanese citizens about what was coming.
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in some ways, military targets.
- Conventional bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have cost as many lives, if not more, than the atomic bombing.
- Dropping the bombs killed fewer people than not dropping them would have killed on both the American and Japanese side.
- The Japanese citizenry were probably not ready to surrender anytime soon before the bombs were dropped.
I have my own take on this issue that I don't want to share. However, I ask that you read these points and just try to evaluate the quality of the arguments made.
Ask, for example,
- Does it really matter whether a warning is made? Would a Japanese citizen have taken this seriously or even have the power to heed this warning?
- How can a city be "in some ways" a military target? Is Seattle a military target because Boeing still has facilities there?
- Let's say dropping the bomb actually saved lives. Do we want to set the precedent where this is an estimation that is made unilaterally by the country with the bomb? Can't this argument be used to justify pretty much any action in any war by countries other than the US?
- Assuming the Japanese were not willing to surrender anytime soon, did they present a clear, proximate threat to the United States?
Ok, maybe Whittle's defenses aren't the best available. This is a relatively intelligent blog though, right? We should have something better show up in the comments. Let's see.
1. Armchair judges, sipping their beverages, declaring "murder!" this and "murder!" that.
Econ: I understand that this is a fair criticism if the judge is missing some of the relevant details due to being on the armchair. What exactly is the detail that's missing in this case though? (Keep in mind that the decision itself was an armchair decision. It was made by a grown adult in Washington who had the time to think about his decision.)2. It is a terrible mistake- and unjust, to boot- to judge the actions of people in the past by the standards of the present.
Econ: How different were the standards in 1945? Was intentionally targeting civilians a permissible action?
I ask you: why are the arguments in defense of dropping the bomb so bad? Why are we all taught that it was something that we had to do and that there was no other choice when it seems that there clearly were? (I think I first got this indoctrination in 6th grade.)
More than that, why do we say with no uncertainty today that purposefully targeting civilians in unconditionally wrong when in fact there seems to be a glaring condition under which almost all Americans think it was the right thing to do? It seems like we either need to say targeting civilians is cool in some rare cases or that we goofed.
There is no distinction between law and morality.
Submitted by Constant on Thu, 2009-06-18 19:11.Google law morality. The first hit is this page, and the first line on the page is:
At first there seems to be no distinction between law and morality.
The rest of the page is an argument against this naive impression. The argument fails and the naive impression holds. Here is the summary and my comments.
(1) The existence of unjust laws (such as those enforcing slavery) proves that morality and law are not identical and do not coincide.
An alternative interpretation of the same facts is that there are two distinct systems of law, one here being called "law" and the other being called "morality". We should not be surprised if two systems of law are not identical.
(2) The existence of laws that serve to defend basic values--such as laws against murder, rape, malicious defamation of character, fraud, bribery, etc. --prove that the two can work together.
This does not argue for a distinction.
(3) Laws can state what overt offenses count as wrong and therefore punishable. Although law courts do not always ignore a person's intention or state of mind, the law cannot normally govern, at least not in a direct way, what is in your heart (your desires). Because often morality passes judgment on a person's intentions and character, it has a different scope than the law.
A difference in scope may distinguish two legal systems from each other. Aside from this, it is unclear whether there is any real distinction. The author admits that law does not always ignore intention.
(4) Laws govern conduct at least partly through fear of punishment. Morality, when it is internalized, when it has become habit-like or second nature, governs conduct without compulsion. The virtuous person does the appropriate thing because it is the fine or noble thing to do.
Law can be internalized. When we drive we automatically move to the appropriate side of the road, and generally obey the rules of the road, without (direct) compulsion. On the other side, while we develop a moral conscience which then governs us, observation of children makes it hard to deny that compulsion plays a role in the development of a conscience.
(5) Morality can influence the law in the sense that it can provide the reason for making whole groups of immoral actions illegal.
This does not argue for a distinction.
(6) Law can be a public expression of morality which codifies in a public way the basic principles of conduct which a society accepts. In that way it can guide the educators of the next generation by giving them a clear outline of the values society wants taught to its children.
This does not argue for a distinction.
Morality is not enforced by the state (except insofar as it coincides with the state's laws). It is a system of law that is characterized by non-state enforcement, generally social exclusion (including, for example, being fired) but also, on occasion, violence. It fits Webster's first definition of law:
a binding custom or practice of a community
There is, however, one commonly alleged distinction which never got mentioned, and that is that laws can change, but morality is unchanging. For example, it is immoral to keep slaves now, and (so people think) it always was immoral, even though no one realized it. But it was once legal, and is now illegal. There's your difference.
There are two concepts of morality in play now. Stanford explains the difference:
The term “morality” can be used either
1. descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or,
1a. some other group, such as a religion, or
1b. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.
I've been talking about morality in sense (1), and "unchanging" morality is sense (2), though I think as written (2) is much too specific about the required characteristics of unchanging morality.
Of course, like morality, law also comes in two varieties - natural law is unchanging. So the important distinction isn't really between morality and law. It's between the changeable varieties and the unchangeable varieties.
Western view on Iranian elections
Submitted by Arthur B. on Wed, 2009-06-17 09:12.Disclaimer: I don't know squat about Iranian politics. However my point isn't about Iran but about Western politics, which I know about.
I am under the impression that the Western support for Iranian protesters has nothing to do with defending democracy. It looks like the favorite was slightly more liberal than Ahmadinejad, and therefore he has more support in Occident, a good thing in my opinion.
However, if the more fundamentalist candidate had been defeated and the more liberal candidate had won, and if people had taken the street to contest the election, then no matter what the evidence for ballot fraud, I am sure that the press would be all over the violent anti-democratic protesters for being sore losers clinging to a past order. Similarly, if violent protests arose outside of the context of an election to oust the fundamentalist leader, the press would support them.
(This is only my intuition, but that doesn't mean it's not backed up, I just can't easily summon what backs it up)
What we're seeing now is that most people express outrage over voting fraud, but deep down, they're really outraged that a less liberal candidate is holding power. In a way this is very healthy, it's good that people care about Liberty and not Democracy. However, it'd be even healthier if they recognized democracy has nothing to do with it and left it out of the debate.
Immigration and Elections
Submitted by Curunir on Mon, 2009-06-15 20:27.Long before I started posting here at the DR, there was an interesting dust-up on immigration's effects on political culture, and whether we should care:
If you believe (as Russell claims to) that in a country like the US, an influx of people hostile to freedom will reduce the freedom of people in that country, one is led inexorably to an uncomfortable conclusion. Namely, that the impact on freedom is the combination of gains from the increased freedom of the immigrants and losses from the decreased freedom of the residents. We can let in the coercers and be coerced, or we can coercively keep them out.
Now, there is plenty of room for debate about the resulting net impact. But if immigrants truly are anti-freedom, then the real question is how to evaluate this tough tradeoff. Not whether libertarians can have their immigration and a small government too.
The Economist recently discussed [HT-Maggie's Farm] some recent research on this topic, and the news is not good for libertarians:
Mr Luttmer and Ms Singhal analyse data from the European Social Survey, a biennial multi-country exercise, on the attitudes of over 6,000 immigrants who have moved from one of 32 countries in the survey to another and they find precisely this result.
Even after controlling for income, education and other relevant economic and social factors such as work history and age, views about redistribution in an immigrant’s home country are a strong predictor of his own opinions. Indeed, this measure of “cultural background” explains as much as income levels, and three-fifths as much as income and education combined. These results hold even for immigrants who moved 20 years before they were surveyed; they cannot be attributed to people not having had time to adjust their views.
Nor is it true that simply waiting out for the next generation of immigrants will solve the problem:
Even more convincing evidence of the impact of culture comes from second-generation immigrants. The opinions of children born in the host country about the desirability of redistribution are strongly influenced by the norms that prevail in the countries their parents came from.
Now, there are several possible reactions one could take to this finding, assuming it holds up, which is always tricky in social sciences. One is to find that the net benefit of immigration for libertarians is still positive. Another is that free movement of people is simply a basic civil right, consequences be damned (I'm not wholly unsympathetic to this view). A third would be to blame this entire problem in the existence of the state, which strikes me as true but irrelevant (since anarchy isn't coming any time soon, I fail to see why we shouldn't consider how our policies on immigration will effect the world as it currently is).
But what is unacceptable is to just sweep aside concerns over the cultural and political effects of immigration as simple racism. What this study shows us is that it really does matter who constitutes the voting public, and that immigration could easily change the beliefs of the people in ways libertarians will find discomforting.
A stratagem to delegitimize democracy
Submitted by Arthur B. on Sun, 2009-05-31 17:03.This paper should be familiar. It was featured by Levitt in the New York Times and has been discussed at length in these circles. It describes what happened when a Swiss Canton allowed mailing ballots in an election. Participation fell dramatically. The article concludes that most people vote because showing up at the poll booth signals you are participating in the election.
I was recently reminded of this paper by an article on Slashdot telling a similar story:
Voting fell 83% in an all digital election
Why should we care? Many anarchists, including me, argue that if one is to vote, it is better to cast a blank ballot than to pick the least worst candidate. If the least worst candidate gets a sufficient number of votes, it may send a weak and noisy signal to the population about the ideas held by some anarchists. However, non-voting sends a better signal. A low turn out indicates that people do not really care about the election. It indicates they perceive the different candidates as similar. Better, it attacks the myth that democracy is representative. It creates a visible distance between the state and the citizens.
Indeed, the success of democracy has relied on letting people believe that as long as anyone could become an institutional exploiter there was no exploitation going on. In Democracy: the God that Failed, Hoppe argues that in monarchies, people clearly understand the nature of the state as a separate organization. A democracy with a lot of eager participation is a recipe for collectivist arguments about the “will of the people”. Low turnout allows the state to be viewed as a separate parasite.
Therefore, I suggest that libertarian pushs for internet or text message ballot in the US. I do not think the government would see that one coming. It seems to me that any proposal to have Internet voting would look like the will of technology and democracy enthusiasts, not anti-democracy activists.
Imagine for a second Internet voting is used during the next election and voting drops 83 percent... This would deal a serious blow to the collectivist rhetoric about a government “by the people”. It would also considerably increase the proportion of principled votes which might be a good thing.
I want to make it clear that I am not calling for change through the ballot. If you have that impression, I have been terribly misunderstood. I do NOT think this is a magic bullet, and it will obviously not lead to libertopia. Still, it is a reasonably easy battle to win. Politicians want to appear as technology savvy and might go for it, and the public might go for it. There's a nice opportunity here.
Say No to Email Taxes
Submitted by Curunir on Wed, 2009-05-27 20:58.Today's new tax proposal comes from the British Prospect magazine:
Internet service providers (ISPs) have proposed price mechanisms to control it, but users objected. The time has come for a public sector remedy: a tax, perhaps no more than 2p, or 3c, on every email sent.
There's something strange about this argument. Here we have someone admitting that public opposition killed the private proposal to charge for email. Presumably this is because they thought the expense of paying an email charge was greater than the cost of dealing with spam. What does government involvement change about that calculation? Nothing. So why should the result be any different?
I also get incredibly annoyed at this argument:
How much would it cost? An average employee might send 100 emails a day. At 2p or 3c, the tax would be £2 or $3, less than a large caramel macchiato.
It's very common to compare some tax or cost to a cup of coffee a day, as if to make the point that it's completely trivial. But it isn't at all. For someone who works a full year, that's $750. Sure it's a 'cup of coffee', but guess what? I love vanilla lattes and almost never drink them because I can't afford them. Now you're going to tell me that emails will become as unaffordable to me as coffee. Great.
Then there's what the author wants to do with the revenue:
Above all, an email tax could safeguard the future of the internet itself. Peer-to-peer data transfers, video streaming and voice services like Skype demand ever greater bandwidth. When new capacity is needed, part of the tax proceeds could be used for investment.
Now this makes no sense, right? Suppose, as I have no reason to doubt, Skype and video streaming are what are causing internet bandwidth problems. Even if you accept this is a reason for government investment (rather than, say, abolishing net neutrality regulation), wouldn't you want to fund this investment from a tax on Skype, which is causing the problem in the first place?
As a libertarian-leaning fellow, I'm temperamentally opposed to new taxes in general, but this seems like an uncommonly bad proposal, even among tax hike initiatives.
What's Wrong With Empathy
Submitted by Constant on Wed, 2009-05-27 01:27.It does not take all that much imagination to answer that question. Here's a simple answer: people tend to feel greater or less empathy for other people for a variety of reasons but largely because of who and what they are, i.e., their identity - their ethnicity, their class, their gender, their physical attractiveness.
A judgment based on empathy will consequently tend to be biased in favor of certain parties on the basis of their identity.
Granted, it is probably unrealistic to expect a judge not to be influenced by empathy for some of the parties. But that doesn't mean it should be advocated!
And also granted, a mention of "empathy" in relationship to judging could mean any number of things. For example, it might mean placing oneself in another's shoes - an act which does not necessarily involve any consideration of their identity, but may involve merely a consideration of their situation in the case being judged regardless of who or what they are. But considering the current political climate (in which, for example, people who complain about the actions of the Obama administration are called racists - a charge which has nothing to do with the specific complaint and everything to do with the identity of the president), the interpretation I offer is hardly a stretch.
Will Wilkinson's interpretation of Obama's statement construes the president as speaking in code (which is the very thing he complains of in others). On Will Wilkinson's interpretation, Obama isn't looking for empathy (as opposed to lack of empathy), but rather, Obama is looking for a redistribution of empathy. To defend Obama's remark, Wilkinson writes:
But holding ideology fixed, I think there’s a strong reason to prefer a well-qualified woman to a well-qualified man. And I think another woman would likely increase the scope of empathy on the court in a pretty straightforward and desirable sense.
Will Wilkinson isn't talking about increasing the amount of empathy, but increasing the scope. Wilkinson is not claiming, or implying, that a female judge would have more total empathy than a male judge. He is implying that a female judge's empathy would be better attuned to a different group of people than a male judge's empathy, and thus increasing the proportion of female judges would redistribute some of the court's empathy to that group.
But that is not actually what Obama said. Obama was talking about empathy versus lack of empathy, not about empathy for one group versus empathy for another group. Will Wilkinson complains about conservatives' interpreting Obama's talk about empathy as "code" for "judicial activism", but Wilkinson himself is interpreting Obama's talk non-literally - i.e., as "code" for something he is not actually saying. It is, moreover, perfectly defensible to interpret anything Obama says non-literally, as the right does, as Wilkinson just did, indeed as Obama's left-wing supporters do. Obama's supporters trust him because he lies.
Notice, however, that Wilkinson's interpretation agrees with mine on the important point of linking empathy with identity. Wilkinson's argument assumes the truth of my claim, which is that judges don't have the same amount of empathy for everyone, that identity is a key factor in who gets a judge's empathy, and finally that this fact is Obama's reason for talking about empathy.
By the way, here is one of Obama's explanations of his talk about empathy:
[Lilly Ledbetter] didn't know that she was getting paid less, when she discovered it, she immediately filed suit to get back pay and the suggestion was somehow that she should have filed suite earlier.
Well, I think anybody who has ever worked in a job like that understands that they might not know that they were being discriminated against it. It doesn't make sense for their rights to be foreclosed.
That's the kind of case, where I want a judge not only to be applying the law in front of them, but also to understand that as a practical matter. A lot of times people have weak bargaining power.
Obama is advocating that the judge ignore the law in a case like this. His reason for making the exception: Ledbetter's "weak bargaining power." Why does she have weak bargaining power? She is presumed to have weak bargaining power and he gives no reason, but we can guess: she is an employee and she is a woman.
So, one reasonable interpretation of what Obama is saying is: the law should be bent in favor of employees and women. (And coincidentally, a majority of voters are employees and a majority of voters, a majority of Democratic voters, and a majority of those who voted for Obama, are women [or so my googling tells me].)
Obama is careful to say:
Now, in some ways it might cut the other way. I want a judge who has a sense of how regulations might affect the businesses in a practical way.
With the obvious intent to give the impression of evenhandedness.
But first, this is not at all obviously a case of it cutting the other way, because this is not described as a dispute between an employer and a female employee, but as a dispute between an employer and a regulator.
Second, if he were really for evenhandedness, he wouldn't advocate bending the law in the first place to favor women and employees (which is what he appears to advocate).
Would Obama really advocate tilting some cases in favor of women and employees and others in favor of men and employers? But Obama hasn't given any specific reason why Ledbetter as opposed to a random woman or employee has "weak bargaining power". What about Ledbetter makes her deserving of special favor from the court other than being a woman and employee? And if these are enough, then it follows that women and employees generally, always, deserve special favor from the court. Every woman is a woman, every employee is an employee, so if Ledbetter's only claim to special favor is that she is a woman and an employee, then necessarily anyone else with the same properties has that claim.
This has been a long entry so to summarize it, Obama advocates bending the law to favor people who voted for Obama. And this is what he means by "empathy".
All of which illustrates the tie that both Wilkinson and I see between empathy and identity.
Property Rights are Orwellian?
Submitted by Curunir on Wed, 2009-05-13 17:28.I'm having trouble working up outrage in defense of the civil right to noisy sex:
Yes, in modern-day Britain even the decibels of our sexual moaning can become the subject of a police investigation.
At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the north east of England, was remanded in custody for having "excessively noisy sex." The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her "shouting and groaning" and her "bed banging against the wall of her home."
Now, if you were to say this is an inefficient use of resources because the cost of litigating are excessively high, that I understand. If you claim the ASBO procedures don't respect people's rights and circumvent good legal procedure, I'll agree with that too (not that I know all that much about it.)
But from a purely (non-anarchist) libertarian perspective, I'm not seeing much of a problem here. Most classically liberal people I know have great respect for the common law, and for handling matters through courts rather than through legislation. But isn't nuisance one of the oldest torts in existence, and hasn't the common law long held that excessive noise is a nuisance and abrogation of private property rights?
This is precisely the sort of issue which should be handled through local norms and practice (and, ideally of course, private property.) But it isn't 'Orwellian' for different communities to settle on different standards. Some may choose a free-for-all of blaring music and shouting sex. Others may choose to respect people's rights to quietly enjoy their own property. Neither is more libertarian than the other, though one may be more libertine.
On "Libertarian Outcomes"
Submitted by C.J. Trillian on Wed, 2009-05-13 16:24.At Hit & Run, Brian Doherty gives a nice shout out both to Patri and Jonathan's new Let a Thousand Nations Bloom blog and to Michael Strong's recent post. Brian quotes Strong's take on innovation before noting approvingly that "such innovations in governing styles won't necessarily lead to more libertarian outcomes, though."
I have to confess that I find Doherty's (and, for that matter, Strong's) claim to be a tad confused. Or, at the very least, I think that their observation conflates two very distinct ideas of "libertarian outcome."
Let me start by saying that I, like pretty much everyone else here, have a vision of libertopia. In my vision, people are free to do pretty much whatever they want in their own private lives, just so long as everyone involved is consenting. I may well personally disapprove of your heroin-injecting, meat-consuming, teenage sex-having, book-burning ways, and I might well try to talk you out of them. But neither I nor anyone else will turn the heavy hand of the state on you to force you to stop. But I will, in my same vision, turn that hand on you in order to keep you from dumping toxic sludge into the river from which we all draw our drinking water. And I'd use it to make you pay for some share of our common defense. In short, my libertopia contains a state that works to curb genuine collective action problems. And it'd probably also provide something of a safety net, perhaps in the form of a negative income tax.
Now I realize that my vision of libertopia is very different from the vision that most DR regulars have. And I've spent many hours defending various parts of it from commenters here. I think (obviously) that I have well-grounded reasons for my position and that those reasons follow from deeper beliefs about things like rule-utilitarianism, justice, fairness, rights and so on. In short, my conception of the ideal society is based upon "that which is equal, rational, planned, enlightened, and principled." I am, in short, very much in the rationalist camp.
The distinction I'm drawing, of course, comes from Jacob Levy's "Liberalism's Divide," an essay that FWIW, has probably had more of an impact on my thinking than anything else written post-Mill. There Levy argues that the welfare/laissez faire distinction is just one of two important distinctions that cut across liberalism. Levy sets the enlightened, principled rationalists against pluralists, who argue that freedom is instantiated in the "local, customary, unplanned, diverse, and decentralized." Levy actually puts most strains of libertarianism -- indeed, everyone from Narveson to Nozick to M. Friedman to Mises (and one can safely include Rand here, as well) -- into the rationalist camp.
But Patri, most DR-readers and Strong are far more in line with Hayek's pluralist approach to libertarianism. For Hayek, libertarianism is about creating space in which the local and the unplanned can thrive. It's about recognizing spontaneous order, and, perhaps more importantly, it's about recognizing that that order will take different forms in different places.
And that's really the point of the Thousand Nations thesis. It's about creating a world in which thousands of diverse, local societies can form. Some will organize in one way, and some in another. Many of those forms may well be an anathema to a Nozick or a Narveson or a Mises -- or, for that matter, to a Doherty or a Trillian or a third-generation Friedman. But that does not entail that the outcome is not libertarian.
Doherty is certainly right that Seasteading isn't a guarantee for creating what I've called a first-order libertarian outcome. That's just another way of saying that it's entirely possible that none of the Thousand Blooming Nations may turn out to be something that a rationalist libertarian would recognize as libertopia.
But it's simply inaccurate to suggest that a world with space for thousands of competing local systems of government would fail to be a libertarian outcome. It might fail to be a rationalist libertarian outcome. But it just is a pluralist (or, in my terms, a second-order) libertarian outcome.
Dennett and Heterophenomenology
Submitted by ThePenileFamily on Sun, 2009-05-10 10:01.In the spirit of sharing information, I'll throw this bit of information out there.
From wiki:
Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another not oneself"), is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bend, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine his or her mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted.
Here, Dennett introduces the concept of Heterophonomenology; and later, he clarifies it.
The two PDFs above are interesting reads.
Just for fun, prying minds can watch this interview with Daniel Dennett, which turns into a full fledged debate as Robert Wright and Daniel Dennett find themselves at odds with each other. This interview in particular starts off pretty casual, but it heats up at the 36 minute mark.
Check it out.
Trouble in Paradise
Submitted by Mark on Sat, 2009-05-09 15:16.I've written romantically before about what a nice place I live in. But, it seems that one of the locals is threatening to take away the property of a neighbor and lock him in a cage for a non-crime.
The original posting is at Doug Thompson's Blue Ridge Muse.
One of my longer cross-posted comments follows below:
Doug,
I was not arguing for legalization of one particular substance: marijuana. I don't particularly care how dangerous it is or isn't to the person who decides to use it. I also don't care how dangerous any other substance is--alcohol, heroin, red meat, tobacco, pharmaceuticals or herbal remedies--it is not a crime for someone to ingest these substances. Further, I argued that it is expressly forbidden for federal legislators to make laws against substance use by the Constitution they all voluntarily agree to uphold upon taking office.
What I call a crime is when a person undertakes some action with intent to do harm to another party. According to the link you posted, Ted Bundy was a mass murderer. He should be punished and forced to make restitution to his victims' families. I am not arguing that nice people should not be punished. First and foremost, I am arguing that it is wrong to punish people who do not take some action with the intent to harm others, and you and I and your readers should not give such unjust punishment a shred of legitimacy.
Second, I am arguing that any federal laws that were created against ingesting substances are unconstitutional and were made "illegally". I put the terms in quotes, because we now have diverging meanings of the term "legal". Elected officials who were part of the legislative process you allude to took a solemn, voluntary oath to abide by the Constitution when they took their job. If they thought it was important to write laws against a substance, legislators had the means through the amendment process to do so, as was done with the 18th amendment prohibiting alcohol use. But this prohibition was reversed by the 21st amendment and never repeated for any other substance. The war on drugs uses government guns, jails, and confiscated revenue for a purpose the Constitution never authorized.
Contrast the legislators' "illegal activities"--violating a voluntary oath so they could lend legitimacy to violent actions--to the "illegal activity" you say we must avoid. I don't know the facts of the case against Patrick Fenn, but from your posting, I don't see mention of anything he did that was intended to harm another person. You said that he was growing marijuana for his own use, and that he was also giving it to friends. Even if he were selling it to strangers, this would be a voluntary exchange between consenting individuals. As far as I know, he is not accused of giving it to minors against the wishes of their parents, or misrepresenting what the product is that he is selling, or failing to deliver goods after accepting payment (each of which might fit my definition of crime). The things you say Patrick is accused of are only "illegal" by the decree of the authorities.
So, there seem to be two types of "illegal activity". Rulers are allowed to violate a solemn voluntary oath and authorize force against those who have committed no crime. Under what I take to be your view, this "illegal activity" is allowed. All's fair within the DC beltway because it makes up the "legislative process". But for you and I and Patrick, "illegal activity" is the result of that process, and we better follow it whether we like it or not, otherwise expect a gun in our face while our neighbors cower in fear. Our input into the "legislative process" is to vote for red team or blue team every few years and hope that whoever gets the spoils of our confiscated wealth doesn't find our lifestyle objectionable. Are there two types of people--rulers and ruled? Or are "all men created equal"?
Thirdly, I alluded to the argument that once you empower people to legitimately use force beyond self-defense, it is abused.
You say that you don't advocate "blind obedience to authority" but rather "obeying the law". Maybe you object to my use of the word "blind"--maybe you advocate obeying authority under the full understanding that the authoritarian is wrong, but still we should submit. This would be inconvenient for pot smokers in this case, and home-schoolers, homosexuals, conscripts, and various buyers and sellers in others. But I hope that you don't characterize Stephanie Shortt as "obeying the law". In her case, she is undertaking actions intended to harm another--threatening to lock Patrick in a cage and take his home. Such actions are criminal, and having a fancy title and the sanction of the federal government does not change this. Do you approve of Stephanie's choice (if she were to act upon it, your article suggests it is still under consideration) to prosecute Patrick?
I sincerely hope that the passion of my convictions hasn't alienated you or other readers. I spent years living under different governments, reading, and pondering before arriving at these views. In retrospect, it seems I should have known from the age of six that initiating force and fraud are always wrong. But we receive a lot of conditioning to obey our rulers, and it is too easy for us to succumb to peer pressure and think that we can take a shortcut and use violence to achieve our well-intentioned ends. I hope that, after consideration, you will agree that it is wrong to steal from an innocent, even if you disapprove of his choices in life.
You have your opinion about marijuana being dangerous and Patrick and his friends have their opinion. I believe you volunteer to help people deal with marijuana and other addictions and I find this very admirable. You should be allowed to live according to your opinion and Patrick should be allowed according to his, so long as neither of you intentionally harm another person.
I don't believe I even know Patrick. What is upsetting me in this story is that it is destroying a myth I held about Floyd--that the inhabitants of this small mountain community would value the peaceful choices of their neighbors above the decrees of Washington. It is probably too late to save Patrick, but we all better consider these ideas seriously. The steady accumulation of federal power over decades seems to me ready to collapse upon itself over the next few years. We had better decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong before we hurt each other any more by "obeying the law".
Why Would FDA Approval Cause a Stock to Increase Ten-Fold?
Submitted by Constant on Thu, 2009-05-07 05:41.In the news:
Vanda Pharmaceuticals won U.S. approval for its first product, a drug to treat schizophrenia, the Food and Drug Administration said. ... Vanda, which closed at $1.08 in regular trading yesterday, soared to $9.98 in extended Nasdaq trading.
It would appear, going by the jump in price, that prior to the FDA's decision, investors gave the drug at most a 1 in 10 chance of being approved. If Vanda's case is typical, then, even moments before the actual decision is made, it is hard to predict what drugs the FDA will approve.
I can understand it being difficult to predict whether a new chemical will turn out to be a useful drug when all the testing is done five or ten years down the road. But once the testing has been done, at the very least the results of those tests are fully known. There is no uncertainty about the results that have already been observed. And the FDA decision is, necessarily, based entirely on the results available at the time the decision is made.
If the FDA's decisionmaking process is
a) not arbitrary, and
b) based on the available results,
then the FDA's decision should be highly replicable, and therefore highly predictable, by any independent entity with access to the same results. And yet the FDA's decision is, apparently, hard to predict. Two possible alternative explanations are:
1) The results that the FDA bases its decision on are extremely well-guarded right up until the very moment that the FDA makes its decision. I doubt this is possible.
2) The FDA's decisionmaking process is highly arbitrary. This is my tentative conclusion.
A few anticipated objections and responses.
Objection: Vanda's case is not typical.
Answer: Could be. However, this seems not all that atypical. When I read the story it didn't really stand out as atypical.
Objection: The typical investor doesn't know how to interpret the data, doesn't know what the data is, etc.
Answer: This is true of most investors in most publicly traded companies. If it were a significant problem the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) would be not only wrong, but wildly wrong, all the time, and Vanda's case would provide a model for disproving the EMH.
Objection: Pharmaceutical companies really keep a tight lid on their results.
Answer: I have a hard time believing that. A tremendous number of people are involved in any study that gets to this stage. Even partial information should give a sense of how well a drug is working and what its side-effects are.
Objection: The cause of the unpredictability isn't that the FDA is arbitrary, but that the drug is borderline useful, and even the most predictable decisionmaking process will be unpredictable when it comes to borderline cases.
Answer: But surely the typical drug is not borderline.
Objection: The FDA can hardly be blamed because it is fundamentally hard to judge whether a drug is useful or not. It is unclear and/or subjective whether a given drug is useful or not.
Answer: Then why is the FDA making a decision for all of us?
Threatened By Exit
Submitted by Patri Friedman on Mon, 2009-05-04 01:51.Unfortunately, I had jaw surgery a week after Peter Thiel's response to my Cato Unbound piece came out, and so I spent the ensuing firestorm lying in bed taking liquid Vicodin, rather than vigorously debating. Which is sort of sad, because I love a vigorous debate, especially with people who are being stupid and mean, qualities which were on prominent display in the responses to Peter.
The weird thing is that the firestorm was not over any of the basic ideas, but a throwaway comment he made that one of many reasons why democracy in the US is unlikely to produce libertarianism is that women are a large, non-libertarian voting bloc, and so it is no surprise that the era of female suffrage is also the era of big government. (Although both are the post-Depression era, so as always in country-level trends it isn't like we have clean randomized data).
It is always very telling when people freak out over a simple statistical observation, and I think Jason Kuznicki has the best post pointing out the absurdity of the freakout:
The astonishing thing — the really embarrassing thing for the left-wing blogosphere — is that so many people concluded from these lines that Thiel wants to end women’s suffrage.
People, it’s just not there — he’s not saying it. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
...
Thiel isn’t interested in making any changes at all to American democracy. He wants to exit American democracy. Thiel wants to found a new government with people who share his own (admittedly very eccentric) political views. In other words, he wants to leave you and your suffrage completely alone. Just to repeat, he’s not recommending any change to American government at all, except to subtract himself from it.
There are a lot of things you can accuse a secessionist of, but disenfranchisement is not one of them! The whole point of seasteading is to create more choice among societies. How can that hurt anyone? Oh, wait, I was thinking of a just, libertarian world. I forgot about the parasitic world of the left:
I find it tremendously revealing how threatened the left seems to be at the prospect of a talented, successful individual leaving to found a new society. It’s not enough to say that he’s cooked up a wildly utopian scheme with hardly any chance of success. This might have been more than enough to dismiss him. But no — it’s got to be much worse than that. So out come the lies and the smears. Or maybe the blank incomprehension. (I’m trying to be kind.)
And he closes by mentioning how Atlas Shrugged-sian this is. Which it is! If you doubt that the reaction to Peter's essay is a display of the looting instinct, one of the earliest and highest-profile reactions from the left was entitled "Libertarian inadvertently argues for 90% marginal tax rate":
I think we all know what a combination of watching too many sci-fi movies (plus “Waterworld") and being completely shielded from reality by your money can do. You become either Kim Jong Il, or you become Peter Thiel. We can’t reach Kim Jong Il, but what we can do to help Thiel is to tax away most of his wealth. While that doesn’t initially seem like it’s helpful to take 90% of what someone makes over X million a year, what it would do is force Thiel to get out there and actually work for his money if he wants to be stinking rich. Right now, he’s obviously not getting out of the house much, and all that sitting around counting his money and not associating with the real world is breaking his mind. He needs something to do, and needs to associate with people. Ideally, he’d be in a situation where he had occasional exposure to people who don’t indulge his crazy fantasies. And with the amount of money shielding him from the world, that’s not going to happen. For his own good, that pile of money he’s sitting on needs a dramatic reduction.
Wow. I mean, it pretty much caricatures itself. If you had any doubt that there are people out there who consider all the value you produce to be theirs to dispose of, at whim, "for your own good", this should end it. (If this makes you feel depressed, go join The Seasteading Institute, and you'll feel better).
Now's a good time to note that while I've spent most of my career as a libertarian thinking of Objectivism as a subject for mockery, I am now reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time, and loving it. It hasn't changed my mind about any of the things I think are wrong with the philosophy, and I do get annoyed by things like her constantly equating certainty with strength/good and doubt with weakness/evil (sorry Ayn, but the world is Bayesian and posteriors are rarely 100%. Certainty may be sexy, but it is rarely correct).
But the good things about it are things that hardly appear anywhere else, and are needed now more than ever. The whole theme of how bad laws turn honest people into criminals and outlaws, into hiding from other men instead of taming nature, and what an awful reversal this is of how a good society should be, is just awesome. That's how I've felt my whole life - I just want to create value, not constantly struggle with stupid artificial constraints, and to live my life openly, not constantly have to hide my consensual activities.
The commonalities between Gult's Gulch and seasteading are actually pretty hilarious considering that I had only the vaguest idea of what GG was until a couple weeks ago. There are some key differences, of course, but some strongly overlapping themes.
Greatness
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Sun, 2009-05-03 04:33.It is of nights like these that legends are built. Manny Pacquaio was a war god in the ring - inhuman, immortal. His fists were lightning, crossing the chasm to his opponent instantaneously. When the counter-punches came, he was mist.
Thus Manny destroys one of the best boxers in the world with an effortless six minutes of work. Such speed. Such polish. There is not a finer fighter living. My children's children will know his name.
People Don't Care about Global Warming or the Environment
Submitted by Constant on Sat, 2009-05-02 02:16.The New York Times reports:
The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is “global warming.”
The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes, according to extensive polling
and
The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. ... In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”
The article implies that the ideas are fine but the words are not fine, and that new words should be used to relabel the same ideas - that the old wine should be sold in a new bottle. I think that's wrong as a true diagnosis though the suggested cure may work as a temporary palliative. People are not rejecting the words. They are rejecting the ideas.
Language does, of course, affect people's perceptions. Call a bill a "stimulus bill" and that will tend to make people think it is a stimulus bill. But the size of that effect depends on ignorance, and over time ignorance fades. Call enough wasteful legislation "stimulus", and over time the word will acquire a bad aroma. The fix - a temporary fix - is to find a new word, one which has not built up valid associations from long experience and therefore one which wipes the slate clean and pulls the wool back over people's eyes.
The terms "global warming" and "the environment" used to be fine and are fine, by themselves. What made the terms become radioactive was the ideas behind them. The words "global warming" call to mind economic sacrifice because that's what activists have been demanding. If they switch to new words, they may buy themselves a few years by the temporary confusion caused in people's minds, but eventually - if the activists don't stop demanding economic sacrifice - people will realize that the new words mean the same thing as the old words, the new words will become radioactive, and activists will have to find even newer words. Changing the words is a short-term fix. The long-term fix is changing the ideas behind the words.
A short term fix, of course, may confuse people for long enough to ram through the legislation that the activists want.