Thomas R Wells writes in 3Quarks
Libertarianism does not make sense.
The Mochizuki proof of the abc conjecture might not make sense to Wells. But this does not mean it is nonsense. Why? Wells is a cretin. He teaches philosophy. Anything that makes sense to him is probably nonsense.
It cannot keep its promises.
No doubt, it promised him a b.j if he did the washing up and...he's still waiting.
It has nothing to offer. It is an intellectual failure like Marxism or Flat-Earthism – something that might once reasonably have seemed worth pursuing but whose persistence in public let alone academic conversation has become an embarrassment.
This could certainly be said about academic philosophy. But Marxism is important. The Chinese Communist Party is Marxist. Libertarianism may once again become important in that it may find political representation of an influential kind.
The only mildly interesting thing about libertarianism anymore is why anyone still takes it seriously.
People take things which are influential seriously if it is in their interest to do so. There may be a few cretins who take philosophy seriously because teaching that shite pays their bills.
When evaluating a normative ethical theory we should consider three dimensions:
No. We should only only focus on that theory's conceptual tie to action. This is because outcomes should be evaluated. Where there is no outcome, there is nothing to evaluate.
Is the theory plausible in its own right?
Plausibility is a function of the wholly ideographic contents of a given individual's information set and cognitive functioning. It has a mimetic component. We nod along when others nod along- till one of them stops doing so. What is plausible to one may be implausible to another. There is nothing 'internal' to a theory which endows it with plausibility for a given individual though, no doubt, that individual may affirm otherwise. This is because in the short to medium term, no great harm is done in speaking as though value inheres in things rather than in the use we make of them.
I.e. does it make sense or is it an incoherent mess of contradictions?
There are normative ethical theories which are rooted in mystagogy. A mystery may involve a logical contradiction. But no one can say that Religions have not had a substantial impact on the world. Clearly, we can and do evaluate Religions in terms of their ethical contents and how this changes the world we live in.
Would the world be better if it was ordered according to the theory? I.e. does the theory promise us anything worth having?
This is a matter for the economist. We can certainly compute a 'Libertarian' solution and compare it with a 'Marxist' or 'Gandhian' one.
Does the theory provide a useful guide to action around here right now? I.e. is it any help at all for addressing the kind of problems that actually appear in our practical moral and political life?
Libertarianism comes in various flavors and does in fact counsel particular courses of action which can be evaluated by an economist.
1. Does Libertarianism Make Sense?
Libertarianism is a response to the problem of politics
like everything else- including scratching your arse and farting in a derisive manner
– the sphere of activity concerned with the collective management of our social living arrangements that is complicated, contingent, and refuses to obey the authority of reason.
This is not the realm of politics at all. There is nothing 'political' about sewage and waste management or electricity generation and distribution. There is an 'economic' aspect to such things but that economic aspect may not ever become 'political' at all. What matters is the type of 'mechanism' that is used to implement an essentially technical solution. If that mechanism redistributes Income and Wealth, then the subject may become 'political'. But this is covered by the theory of rent contestation. Coalition stability in this context is more 'economic' than 'ideological'- i.e. it is a bargaining problem not anything abstract or ethical.
The problem of politics has offended many philosophers from Plato onwards.
Politicians tend to take a dim view of philosophers- but then so do we all. But, few of us would bother to commit any actual criminal offense upon them no matter how offensive they find our polity or economy or Science.
Libertarians’ particular solution to the problem is what I call eliminative moralism: the reduction of the entire noisome political sphere to its supposed basis in a narrow interpersonal morality of consent.
This could be said of anything- including scratching your arse and farting in a derisive manner.
The result has an extraordinary intellectual simplicity and normative minimalism which many find appealing and convenient, yet the very sources of its appeal are its deepest flaws.
This sentence may appeal to Wells. But that is its deepest flaw because Wells is a cretin. Things which are appealing and convenient are things which don't cost us much cognitive effort. But, if they are useless we lose interest in them and move on.
Libertarians argue that they can replace what politics does for us by recognising our right to do as we please with ourselves and our other property so long as we don’t infringe upon the same right of others or promises we have made to them.
All political theories say 'the existing Social Order isn't the only way things can be. We can create a different Order. We aren't like ants or bees. We can change the way in which we are governed.' Libertarianism is interesting because it fleshes out the intuition at the heart of the 'folk theorem' of repeated games. Marxism was interesting because it fleshed out the notion that a Society could advance rapidly through centralized control of resources and the exploitation of economies of scope and scale. This was certainly true of 'catch-up growth' or the mobilization of resources for 'total war'. Chinese Marxism, in the eighties, was based on Marx's dictum 'to each according to his contribution'. Provided the Party kept 'residuary control rights' over the Economy, it could use the Market to lift the country out of poverty. It remains to be seen how this story will turn out.
With this moral right secured, we can live a flourishing life in a flourishing society powered by consensual exchange between free and sovereign individuals.
Sounds reasonable. It is good to believe you can rise up by your own efforts or, at any rate, that this should be the norm. One can always have a collective insurance scheme such that a 'social safety net' is available. All that matters is that the thing is not adversely selective- i.e. we get the mechanism design right.
Moreover, this right of self-ownership offers a stringent test for the moral legitimacy of any politics:
But anyone arguing that a particular brand of politics has 'moral legitimacy' is implicitly conceding that his audience gets to decide on whether he has succeeded. By contrast, if you say 'Obey! That is your destiny!' you aren't offering an argument at all.
There can be no obligation without consent.
Though failure to exit a jurisdiction may be taken as implied consent. But this could be said of any regime.
No one can make us do anything, or take anything from us, unless we agree to it – and that includes anyone calling themself ‘the government’ who says some people in a building somewhere wrote a law so we have to do what it says.
If 'Exit' is cheap, then this is true enough. The fact is, if we raise our elasticity of supply and demand then this is always the case. Suppose I had worked hard to improve myself, then I'd be freer than I am now in the sense that I'd have lots of alternative places to live and work. I'd be at less risk of suffering harm if the politics of my place of domicile turns to shit.
The problem is that wishing away the need for politics doesn’t make it so.
Raising your elasticity of supply and demand means that 'politics' can't fuck you up. This does not involve 'wishing' things away. It involves developing useful skills or amassing transferable resources.
Eliminative moralism says that no one can be required to contribute to any collective project without their consent.
But 'implied consent'- arising from a failure to Exit- is a real thing. What matters is not 'consent' but the ability to get the fuck out of a place which is turning to shit.
However, it is obvious that many people who agree that collective projects like a public school system, a police force, or protecting drinking water sources from pollution are worth many times their cost will nevertheless prefer that other people should be the ones to pay for them. Since everyone else will feel the same way, everyone will free-ride and the projects won’t happen. Despite the intellectual contortions of generations of libertarians trying to make out that collective projects can run on private interpersonal contracts or charitable subscriptions, it turns out that a social order based merely on consent would not be a flourishing one.
Alan Gibbard's 'Revelation Principle' gets rid of the problem. Muth Rationality means Mechanism Design can get on with the job at hand. There will always be some antaganomic nutters- like Thoreau- who won't pay their taxes but this is mere noise and, as the Law of Large Numbers applies, ceases to affect the Signal. Gibbard's notion of normativity as involving a conceptual tie to action may not be beyond criticism- but only because all Philosophy is shite.
Worse still, it turns out that a society based on nothing but consent is itself a political project that depends on coercion!
Nonsense! The thing may not be a 'political' project at all. Anyway, 'coercion' is a movable feast. The thing can always be delegated. The Church didn't burn heretics. It just withdrew its protection from them. The Secular authority tied them to a stake and lit the auto da fe.
For it is easy to say that everyone has the right of self-ownership and to convince yourself that this is true, and that it is the only truth that matters. But what will you do if someone else disagrees, or disagrees with your interpretation of it in this case? Your society is going to need institutions for judging and enforcing the moral truth on people – whether they like it or not. There is coercion back again. Your society will have to pay people to run these institutions. But that is a collective project and we already saw what happens to them. Either those institutions will be funded voluntarily, in which case they will collapse under the curse of free-riding. Or they will be funded by some non-voluntary taxation, in which case there is coercion once again.
Is Wells completely ignorant of all the work done in mechanism design and incomplete contract theory and so forth over the last 40 years? Perhaps. It enough for people to 'minimize regret', because we live under Knightian uncertainty, for the relevant game theoretic dilemma to disappear. But then why speak of indefeasible 'rights'? Such things are Hohfeldian and defeasible because they don't exist unless they are linked to incentive compatible remedies.
The very moral minimalism that makes libertarianism so attractive also leaves it with no resources to answer such challenges.
No. Modern Economics has given it plenty of such resources though, of course, 'philosophic' Libertarianism is fucked in the head because all modern Philosophy is retarded shite.
Everything is black and white, right or wrong. It turns out that – by its own lights – libertarianism is also wrong.
Regret minimization involves 'hedging'. Nothing is 'black or white' because we don't know all possible states of the World. Libertarianism may be less wrong or it may be more wrong than some other 'ism'.
2. Would a Libertarian Society be a Utopia?
No. Nothing would so long as scarcity, or just Uncertainty, obtains.
Libertarians assume that a society based only on consent would necessarily be a good place to live because everything that everyone does would be voluntary, or follow from an agreement that they had previously voluntarily committed to. Since everything we do would be by our own choice, this society maximises respect for freedom. Since everything we do is by our choice, it must make us better off by our own lights (or we would not have agreed to it).
This may be the case, but it is not necessarily so. It is enough to agree that we are better off if we feel we consented to a thing than if we feel we had no choice in the matter for Libertarianism to be an attractive theory.
But actually such a society would be ruled by consent and this would be a dystopian nightmare.
Saying so, don't make it so. Anyway, anything at all can be presented as a 'dystopian nightmare'. Mahatma Gandhi was appalled that many English women walked in the streets. Some even had jobs! They were demanding the vote! But the House of Parliament is a brothel! How so, you ask? Well, every few years, Westminster gives itself to a new man- a 'Prime Minister'! (Luckily, Gandhi hadn't heard of 'Black Rod').
It would be a society in which all the bad things about the legalistic conception of consent would be amplified and set free of any overarching (political) constraint.
What are 'the bad things about the legalistic conception of consent'? Wells doesn't tell us and so we must speculate. I imagine what happens is that Wells consents to receive a golden shower but then his wife shits on him. No wonder Wells has turned against Libertarianism!
First, the libertarian idea of consent assumes a purely formal equality between parties, and this wishes away the problem of power.
Wells too wishes away the 'problem of power'. Libertarianism would not exist if Power hadn't shat upon it when all it consented to was a golden shower.
In theory, each party can pick and choose with whom they reach agreements and on what terms, for example from whom to buy a computer and for how much. In the real world, power saturates every agreement. Only a tiny number of employees are in a position to negotiate over their terms of employment. The rest of us sign the contract we are given. No one negotiates for credit card agreements, iTunes user agreements, website privacy policies, and so on. They are not even written in a way that we could understand them. But these contracts written by one party to maximise their advantage are nevertheless binding on us.
Not really. Plenty of people walk away from such 'binding contracts'. The cost of enforcement may be too high. Thus, in the end, all that matters is the elasticity of supply and demand. If we maximize elasticity then no one has power over us. But this is true under any dispensation. It is an empirical fact not a philosophical proposition.
Are legal contracts at least also binding on those who wrote them?
Again this depends on the cost of enforcement which, ultimately, depends on their elasticity of supply and demand.
It turns out that this is another theoretical fiction.
As opposed to what? Paperback fiction?
In the real world the most powerful party not only gets to write the contract but also has the privilege of interpreting and enforcing it in the first instance.
In the real world, the most powerful party would not bother with contracts. They would simply issue commands while mounting the heads of the recalcitrant upon pikes for all to see.
If your employer disagrees with you about the hours that you worked or which of you should cover the costs of safety equipment they can directly impose their decision on your pay check.
And you can directly quit and take another job- provided the elasticity of demand for your services is high enough.
If you disagree with them, you are allowed to find an expensive lawyer and struggle for months to get a hearing from an impartial judge, and probably get fired in the meantime for your troubles. These days you may find that the contract you had to sign requires all disputes to be brought to a private arbitration company with its own contract with your employer. Thus, the libertarian dystopia creeps a little closer.
All this is only true if you have low transfer earnings. That is the source of your misery, not the fact that your employer is obliged, by law, to give you a written contract.
It is quite true that the Nanny State can force employers and big businesses to spend money on 'compliance'. But this does not help those at the bottom with little 'transfer earnings'. The solution is to invest in the poor so that they have more options and higher productivity.
One important role of the political sphere is to set the background rules that protect us from the inevitable exploitation of asymmetrical contracting, but that requires just the kind of broad substantive idea of rights that is lost when you narrow everything down to individualistic self-ownership.
India has always been ahead of the US in this respect. There are millions of 'background rules'. But they don't protect shit. No doubt, you have plenty of 'Public Interest Litigation' but the thing is a nuisance. The underlying activity continues outside the formal sector. Those who protest are killed.
The 'broad substantive idea of rights' is that they aint worth shit unless the corresponding remedy is incentive compatible- i.e. worth the obligation-holder's time and effort to supply. But this remedy would arise in a repeated game without any coercive mechanism whatsoever. The theory of incomplete contracts explains why incentives have to change as underlying elasticities change.
Second, while it may – ideally – be an exercise of sovereign freedom to engage in binding agreements with others, such agreements are nonetheless encumbrances on our living, ruling out all sorts of choices we would rather make.
Not really. Contracts of adhesion don't rule out anything.
In a libertarian world we must expect to be bound by even more agreements since a libertarian world would be agreements all the way down.
No. We would expect to see 'relationships' flourish because of 'regret minimization'. Society would be less transactional and 'agreement' would matter less and less because discretionary accommodation and the building up of mutual good-will would pay better.
Ironically one of the great emotional appeals of libertarianism is dismay at the proliferation of rules in the modern world (rules required for our complex cooperative projects, like fire safety). Libertarians proudly declare that we should only accept rules we have actually agreed to.
We accept a thing as a rule- rather than a probable cause of our being ass raped in a prison cell if we step out of line- if we have agreed that it is a rule we should follow. Obeying rules you set for yourself is beneficial to you. Doing the same with respect to rules you agree with other people depends, first and foremost, upon your abiding by the rules you set for yourself. Once one has accepted an ethical rule- e.g. always fulfil duties in a diligent manner- the need for detailed rules, or exhaustive 'positive law', is reduced. This is good for everybody.
Yet if you try to match the functioning achieved by those government rules with ones generated through consent, one typically ends up with more rules not fewer, and often ones that are less sensible or accountable. This is the case for the US Homeowner Associations often cited by libertarians as the closest thing yet to societies ruled by consent, and yet which hardly seem like paradises of liberty.
The alternatives to such Associations are worse. Either 'externalities are not internalized' and so property values fall or else the freehold is retained by a magnate- e.g. the Dukes of Westminster who have ensured London's West End did not go the way of the East End. The problem with this solution is that capital appreciation for the resident is limited which in turn reduces elasticity. Homeowner Associations may have restrictive covenants but the pay off is that you can sell up and move somewhere more to your liking. The question is, would Municipal Government have done a better job that Homeowner Associations in implementing things like the Clean Water Act? Theoretically- sure, why not? Then you visit the DMV and realize why the very notion is absurd.
3.Does Libertarianism Have Any Practical Guidance to Offer?
Unfortunately libertarianism is an ideal theory, meaning that it is a theory of how the world ought to be arranged, but not a theory of how things as they are now could be made better – nor even how they could be made more libertarian.
This may be true of philosophical libertarianism, which- being philosophical- is ignorant and stupid and keeps getting shat upon though all it had consented to was a golden shower. But economic libertarianism- i.e. 'mechanism design' on the basis of Gibbard's 'Revelation Principle' and the 'folk theorem of repeated games'- is very useful indeed.
Marxism, at one time, was a promising Economic theory. Kantarovitch was a great mathematician. But Soviet mathematical economists persuaded Gorby to tank the Soviet Union. Still, the Chinese, with their genius for a type of politics which isn't psilosophy, may be working to some super cool Marxian economic tool-kit.
Recall that libertarianism is supposed to be built up out of nothing but the property right we have over ourselves and what is ours. This stuff is ours and no one gets to decide what we do with it except us. This is the principle that rules out politics as we know it by disallowing taxation for collective projects that are supposed to improve our societies. But what is ours in the first place? If libertarians have no good answer to that then their theory cannot even offer a moral objection to policies – like redistributive taxation – that would seem most directly contradictory to their theory of justice. It really would be a pointless theory.
Self-ownership is the notion that you can Exit a jurisdiction for purely self-interested reasons. As a matter of fact, people voting with their feet do bring about significant political change- as the collapse of the Berlin Wall vividly demonstrated.
Redistributive taxes may flourish within a particular economic class- essentially, the unfortunate are compensated by the less so- but this is merely an insurance scheme. If Elasticity of supply is high then there is no 'economic rent' to be confiscated for redistribution. Sure, there can be a one-off 'windfall' effect of a confiscatory sort and, okay, a group with low elasticity- e.g. the retired- can be impoverished over a decade or two- but smart people don't stick around to be robbed. Nor do those with other options. So redistribution goes off the agenda pretty quickly. Even under Stalin, you had 'proletarian millionaires' and big 'pay differentials' based on 'contribution', not 'need'.
In Robert Nozick’s influential entitlement theory people have the right to what they have acquired legitimately and also to what they have legitimately acquired from others who also got it legitimately. Does this mean that you can say that you own the house you bought with the money you earned at your job and that has your name on the title deed? As it turns out, no. For whether anyone’s possession of something is legitimate depends on whether the entire historical chain of possession that got you to this point also meets the conditions. Considering the amount of skulduggery in history – committed by both private actors and governments – this is unlikely and anyway could not be proven. So if the governing party proposes a new wealth tax on people like you with nice houses to support those economically suffering from Covid, you could not, as an honest libertarian, object that such an action is simply not allowed. On the contrary, it is allowed if politics decides so, and if you don’t like that you had better start making your own political arguments about it.
An honest libertarian is not necessarily a stupid one. What the guy should so is hedge against a confiscatory government by borrowing on what it can tax and offshoring assets. Thus, when the axe falls, his neck is elsewhere. If your elasticity is high, you can't be exploited. Your ownership of yourself has been to a good purpose. If you didn't take these precautions then you didn't use your freedom properly- i.e. didn't ensure you had effective Hohfeldian remedies against arbitrary deprivation.
4. Why is Libertarianism Nonetheless so Popular?
Liberty is considered a good thing in some places. It may not be in other places. The word is too close to 'Libertine'. You deny that your daughter is very liberal with her charms though this may not in fact be the case.
Libertarianism is one of various anti-politics available to those jaded by liberal democracy.
Or it is a political agenda available to those enthused by getting to live in a well functioning liberal democracy.
Together with the likes of populism and theocracy it promises to excise the toxic business of politics and replace it with moral purity.
It may have done so to Wells but what it actually did was shit on him though all he had signed up for was a golden shower.
As with the others, it tends to attract support from people who want a way to win political arguments without having to have them.
But, equally, it may attract support from people who don't give a toss about arguments of any kind.
The specific focus of self-identified political libertarians is on minimal government, meaning one that is less keen on bossing people around so much or imposing the moral majority’s prejudices on everyone else (and also, particularly attractive to some, less keen on redistributive projects that might dent their wealth).
That sounds perfectly sensible. Governments use up scarce resources and often screw thing up terribly.
Given the weakness of libertarianism as a means of actually defending individuals’ freedom,
All 'isms' are weak at actually doing shit.
however, its supporters would do better to back the classically liberal approach of using moral principles to constrain but not annihilate government.
while denying women the vote
Libertarianism is also often conflated with free-market capitalism and its pleasing efficiency and apparent freedom from the political domain, even though capitalism would collapse if people tried to run the system on contracts alone.
No it wouldn't. What would happen is you would need to pay a premium to get access to Capitalist institutions. This 'front loading' of the compliance burden under an incomplete contract is what makes it worthwhile to quaff Kavka's toxin- i.e. commit to a punishment mechanism. But Capitalism does not have to enforce it. You could yourself Youtube yourself chopping off a finger anytime you fuck up so as to send a signal that you are back with the program.
Are academic political philosophers responsible for the persistence of this ridiculous theory? I admit I teach it to my own students – both because bad theories can be excellent resources for thinking about the attributes of a good theory, and because it can be relied on to drive a lively discussion.
A bad and stupid teacher can only teach a bad and stupid version of a theory- whether or not that theory is good and smart.
But the actual student libertarians I have come across all seem to have picked it up from the internet before they got to my class. I suspect the problem is not the handful of philosophers who still take libertarianism seriously, but that the theory’s extraordinary ratio of simplicity to radicalness makes it a perfect viral vector.
People stupid enough to want this cretin to teach them are bound to have shit for brains.
If a thing is a 'perfect viral vector' it would be ubiquitous. Chairman Xi would hire me to dress up as Ayn Rand and golden shower the fuck out of him.
It has so few working parts that it requires almost nothing of its supporters, yet in return it offers an exciting, even revolutionary world view in which you get to live in a fantasy world where all the difficulties of having to share a society with others are wished away and they all have to shut up and leave you alone.
But 'all the difficulties of having to share a society with others' do leave you alone if you are actually alone in your house. If you find yourself asking them to shut up you are suffering from schizophrenia. Get help. If this involves shitting on Wells despite the fact that all he paid for was a golden shower, do so by all means. Seen in the right light, such defecation is a principled defense of liberal democracy.
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