No king in Israel

"In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." -- Judges 17:6

"And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them."  -- 1 Samuel 8:7

One of the central tensions throughout the Bible is a lingering question: should Israel have a king? Deuteronomy law permits Israel to have a king and provides some guidelines for how a king should behave. When David finally does become king, he is considered a man after God's own heart, and a consistent theme in the prophets is that Israel's future hope will be found in his royal line. Judges 17:6, which is repeated in 21:25 (the very last verse), becomes a haunting theme framing the latter section of the book, which recounts one of the most disturbing stories I've read anywhere. So that seems like pretty strong evidence that Israel needs a king; it is dysfunctional without one, but under good king David, life is good.

On the other hand, we have the famous passage in 1 Samuel 8, where the people ask Samuel to give them a king, much to his disliking. In response, God explains that the people have not rejected Samuel, but rather God: "According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you." Indeed, the whole story of the exodus is not merely a story about God saving his people, but about him coming to be king. (This explains why the whole second half of Exodus gives instructions, not only concerning God's moral code, but also on how to prepare the tabernacle for his dwelling place. The Sunday school version of Exodus most often fails to get this point across very well!) It is not hard to imagine that, especially in ancient times, when a strong warrior came and liberated a people, they were inclined to make him king. In the story of the Exodus, that warrior was God. The fact that the God of the universe was not a good enough king for the people of Israel, according to Scripture, says something rather unflattering about them.

This tension is resolved in Jesus Christ. The Son of David does show up to be king and liberate Israel from its oppressors. But who is he really? The answer is that he is the God of Israel. The one who led them out of Egypt has now returned to finish the job--now he will lead them out from the bondage of sins.

And what kind of king does he intend to be? "And [Jesus] said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves." (Luke 22:25-27) This is a unique kind of king. On the other hand, it is important not to miss the continuity between Jesus in the gospels and God in the book of Exodus. Jesus gives the law and expects his people to follow it: "Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?" (Luke 6:46)

All of this seems essential for thinking like a Christian about the concept of liberty. The point of freedom is to be free from human kings. But the divine king does not use force. He comes to us as a servant. He expects us to obey his commandments because his words have power, not because he has weapons to enforce them.

I've noticed that a lot of Christians talking about politics try to propose the question, "What would Jesus do?" This question seems to betray a lack of faith. The proper question would seem to be, "What does Jesus do?" Do we believe him to be alive or not?

Because as far as I can see, Jesus is the most libertarian king who ever existed. I have never known him to come down and enforce his will by physical threats or punishments. And yet he is seated on high, at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Or does he rule us by his words? Just as he commanded the wind and waves, perhaps he also punishes us by merely speaking.

Yet I have never known the world to abide by a simple view of justice. Jesus himself did not deserve to suffer, yet he suffered a most gruesome death. Not only that, but he called us to follow him in suffering.

I am not saying Jesus Christ is a libertarian, certainly not with all the connotations that word carries in modern American politics. But what I would guess is that he is not very impressed with all of our political reflections and ideas to make government better. Maybe, just maybe, we should start taking him seriously as our true king.

Libertarianism's surprising virtue

There is a virtue which I have found--to my surprise--to be far more deeply cultivated among libertarians, as a political movement, than either progressives or conservatives. That virtue is gratitude.

I say I am surprised by this because before I started reading a certain collection of libertarian media, I associated libertarianism with a certain angry crowd who complained endlessly about the government and the downfall of freedom. Now, there is certainly room to complain endlessly about the government. But what I have found is that between Reason Magazine's regular coverage of technological and social innovation, or the quietly optimistic tone of blogs such as Marginal Revolution ("small steps toward a much better world"), or especially the Cato Institute's new project humanprogress.org, there seems to be a trend among libertarians of a more intellectual variety to emphasize the positive.

More deeply, libertarians start with the premise that for us modern humans, especially Westerners, our entire way of life is nothing short of a miracle. They then form a political philosophy based on the study of how that way of life came into being, combined with intuitive moral reasoning (which, it is often acknowledged, is itself a product of our way of life). They conclude that a maximal amount of individual freedom and a government firmly restrained by the rule of law is not only how we got here, but also the way we continue to advance in leaps and bounds.

There is a certain cheerfulness in the whole story. Although most of humankind in all times and places struggled to get by, today we are blessed to have received the right kind of institutions which allow both freedom and prosperity to flourish. If we can but use that freedom, in part to defend those institutions but mostly to pursue whatever good ideas we are fortunate to stumble upon, then the potential for future progress is practically infinite.

Now contrast this story with progressivism. Especially when speaking about poverty, progressives tend to assume that if something is wrong in the world, it must be our fault, or more particularly the fault of big bad rich people. Never mind how any of those riches got there in the first place. The conversation most certainly does not start (or end) with gratitude, but rather with a demand. The poor are entitled to progress, and if we don't give it to them we are thieves and bandits.

Conservatives, too, suffer from a lack of gratitude, but for a different reason. While conservatives wholeheartedly agree that we ought to be thankful for having inherited the right kind of institutions, their gratefulness is soured by a pessimistic view of future progress. It seems that conservatives have very little faith in the very institutions for which they are so thankful. Especially when speaking about immigration, they bemoan any major cultural change as an existential threat to our way of life.

I don't deny that both progressive and conservative impulses are necessary. At times progress must be demanded, and at other times it must be critiqued. But I think both sides ultimately propose policies that are built on a distortion of reality, and society pays for that. Whether it is the ever expanding welfare state proposed by progressives or the ever more authoritarian federal law enforcement agencies bolstered by conservatives, the cost and burden of government continues to grow. This is truly a cause for concern.

Yet despite the continual errors of conservatives and progressives in government, I deeply appreciate how libertarians have not lost their spark of optimism. We indeed have so much to be thankful for, and we have so much at our disposal to make the world a better place. As technological progress outpaces government regulation, experimentation will lead to better ways of doing things before our leaders get their hands on the brakes. Cultural change is nothing to be afraid of, so long as we succeed in transmitting the fundamental ideas which have served us so well until now. The institutions which make freedom possible are not fragile; they are alive and well.

As a Christian, I think the very first step to a happy life is thanksgiving. We did absolutely nothing to cause our own existence. We owe every molecule in our body to inheritance. What we do with that wonderful inheritance--and in our day it is more wonderful than our ancestors could have ever imagined!--is up to us, but we will most likely do better if we start by recognizing how good it is.

So I think it is fitting that our politics should start with gratitude, as well. Let no discussion of any of society's problems begin without first acknowledging what we have to be thankful for. And once we study and determine where all these good things came from, then let's decide how we can do even better.

My one simple rule of politics

I have a simple rule for choosing the right view on any particular political issue. Whatever position makes you feel better about yourself--more patriotic, more compassionate, more socially conscious, more "American" (or whatever nationality you like)--is probably wrong. The right position is the one that makes you feel deflated--that you are just one small individual in a very large world, of no greater or lesser value than any of the other 7 billion people who walk the earth, wise enough to take care of perhaps your own affairs but not others', and that if there is hope for human progress, it comes from the unpredictable changes that occur when all these billions of people stumble onto solutions to their various problems.

To be sure, if you want to feel more compassionate, you can be more compassionate--by giving your money, your time, your work, and yourself to others. If you want to be more patriotic, you can do that, too--for instance, by joining the military (or perhaps better yet by actually reading what the Founding Fathers thought about government). But if believing in a particular public policy makes you feel any of these things without you actually doing anything, then it's wrong. Don't believe it. And definitely stop listening to anyone who tells you that you must believe in a particularly policy or else you won't be considered compassionate, patriotic, socially conscious, and so on.

In a word, the rule I'm talking about is humility.

That pretty much sums up my Christian pseudo-libertarianism. I say "pseudo" because it's not a philosophy primarily based on a love of liberty or a hatred of coercion. It's primarily based on a steadfast opposition to pride. And I suppose that makes it even less popular than actual libertarianism. In a world in which humans try so savagely to find a chieftain to rule their tribe, it's unlikely that humility will ever be considered a political virtue. I know of a man who once tried to declare himself a humble king. Well, they crucified him.

There is good news that comes after, or so I've been told. And I hope it's true, because if it isn't then I guess we'll just have to accept that the powerful get their way after all.

Impressions from a first reading of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, vol 1

I just finished reading the first tome of Alexis de Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique. It is, of course, a classic work, and it would be worth very little to add yet another summary or review to the cybersphere. On the other hand, I thought it would be worthwhile to write down the strongest impressions it made on my own thinking. There's nothing quite like learning about your own country from a point of view that comes from both a different era and a different continent. Here I will write a point by point list of the ideas that stuck with me most strongly.

• The United States can be rightfully called a Christian nation. This has not so much to do with the Constitution or the Founding Fathers, and everything to do with the original colonists, their culture, their beliefs, and their mission. Religion was everywhere in early America, much like today, though it is in a slow decline. It was not just a matter of personal belief, but it shaped laws and cultural norms. In particular, the education of children was highly shaped by Christian belief.
• Despite the mix of cultures, the USA is still very much an Anglo-Saxon nation. Its political and legal traditions have the same roots as those of England. Democracy in America was not an 18th century invention. It was a 17th century evolution. That is, the colonists put into practice what they already knew, and whatever innovation they came up with was learned from experience in their new circumstances.
• There was, from the very beginning, a pretty significant divide between the North and South. In some ways, the Civil War seems kind of inevitable in retrospect. This doesn't seem to be the result of profound cultural differences, but rather circumstances which caused political interests to be rather divided. I think we all know which was the biggest difference.
• Concerning slavery: it was already well-recognized at that time (the 1830's) that slavery hindered economic improvement. I found it particularly fascinating that Tocqueville would argue quite explicitly that the North ended slavery for economic reasons.
• Racism was just a given, North and South. In fact--and I admit this was a real discovery for me--Tocqueville argues it was in many ways worse in the North, precisely because there was no slavery (strange as that seems). Indeed, without the institution of slavery keeping blacks and whites legally separated, white people separated themselves from black people all the more carefully. And of course this racism wasn't against blacks only, but also against the indegenous people of America. The difference is that black people lived among whites, whereas the indigenous people were outsiders.
  Tocqueville said that if slavery ever ended in the South, there would be a huge struggle between the black and white races. It seems he was right.
• Freedom was not considered to be a state of nature. People had to learn how to be free. Certain morals were required for a free society. In short, freedom was the result of civilization.
  In some ways this feeds into my previous point, because if you don't consider a certain race civilized enough, then they can't really be free, either.
• Americans enjoyed remarkable equality of possessions and status, even though they didn't explicitly seek it.
• Americans believed in freedom: all people where free to choose in whatever concerned only themselves, and likewise for each city, county, and state (in relation to other cities, counties, and states). This is a point on which Tocqueville insists over and over again, calling it the principle on which the entire American society was based.
• The union was, in Tocqueville's opinion, fairly loose: in one place he said the federal government seemed to be losing control over the states. Things have certainly changed since 1835.
• Actually, an interesting example of the previous point had to do with American interactions with the indigenous peoples. The individual states were actually worse than the federal government, though both acted in bad faith. In theory, the federal government should have been responsible for interactions with foreign peoples, but individual states got rather impatient when it came to chasing tribes off of lands they wanted.
• Tocqueville was pretty certain America was going to become a global superpower. I don't have the historical knowledge to say whether he was unique in this, but I found his predictions kind of impressive. For instance, in one place he says that 100 years from his writing, the US would have at least 100 million people. His first volume was published in 1835. The US population broke 100 million in 1915, and in 1935 it was around 127 million. Not bad.
• The American president was a relatively powerless figure in Tocqueville's opinion. On the other hand, he said this had nothing to do with the Constitution, and everything to do with circumstances. At the time the US had relatively few military opponents. Any country surrounded by enemies will inevitably have to set up a strong executive.
  I think the experience of the US over the past century or so confirms, in a disturbing way, exactly what Tocqueville said.

Some of these points deserve more developed reflection, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of other things that jumped out at me, but that's a start.

The bleeding heart's dilemma

In a recent "Intelligence Squared" debate, Bryan Caplan gave his classic argument in defense of the statement, "Let anyone take a job anywhere." You can read his opening statement here. If you know Caplan, you know the moral force his argument has: immigration restrictions are violent means by which people in rich countries prevent people in poor countries from reaching their potential and bettering their own existence. If you believe that all the people of the world have equal moral value, then there simply is no moral defense of this practice.

Where, then, is the conflict, particularly from someone on the left? Someone on the right, after all, can claim unapologetically to be a nationalist, to think that by virtue of where he is born he is indeed entitled to certain priviliges, and perhaps even to think that his culture is inherently superior to and must be protected from others. People on the left would (rightly) think this view is awful. None of these things can justify immigration restrictions for a liberal.

There are two things that I noted in the arguments of the opposition, particularly coming from Kathleen Newland, as well as from the audience's questions. One is a subtle tribalism, which creeps in without ever being named. Whereas some might be openly nationalist, there is a different form of tribalism which protests, "We haven't done enough to take care of our own, how can we possibly take in others?" The underlying assumption is that merely coming to work in the U.S. would be impossible; you must also join our system, depend on our government benefits, receive our public education, and so on.

The second is a not so subtle nationalism. Newland is so frank as to say that part of a government's job is to be biased in favor of its own people. In other words, egalitarianism be damned--nation states are more important than human rights. I could be wrong, but I rather thought Newland was coming from a point of view typical on the left, namely that the role of the state is to embody the will of the people. And therein lies the dilemma--the will of the people is really quite often in conflict with the idea of human equality.

Caplan calls his position basic human decency. I think that's unfair, but only because our instincts are so biased against decency. His "basic human decency" is actually a moral tradition built up over thousands of years of civilization--but that's competing against hundreds of thousands of years of tribal existence, in which loyalty to the tribe was essential for survival. The concept that everyone within the tribe is equal may come naturally to a lot of us, but the concept that all humans are equal is still as radical an idea today as it ever was.

But the left claims to champion this idea. The only problem is that it can't champion the equality of all human beings and the sacredness of nation states at the same time. Either anyone should be allowed to take a job anywhere, or not. Let's just be honest about why the left could not bear to allow this: then they would actually have to see the poor. And it would be the truly poor, not just the statistical bottom 10% in a wealthy, developed nation. It would be the truly poor from all over the world coming into this rich, blessed nation with the hope of making a better a life for themselves. The sight of them all would simply be too unbearable. It is better to force them to suffer at home than to come here and make us feel guilty for not having the resources to take care of them all.

In other words, it's paternalism or bust. The best we can do for the rest of the world is develop those other nation states (whose very existence was in many cases forced by the West) so that they can support the population living there with services which meet Western standards. If those nation states won't listen and won't reform, then shame on them. And too bad for the poor, who continue to toil for $1 a day.

The fact is, Caplan is really asking us to stretch our morals to their limits. The prospect of witnessing a flood of foreigners is instinctively horrifying, not always because of the fear of what is different, but rather because of the sorrow of seeing others who are so much less well off. Do we really want to live in a country with millions and millions of the world's poor, working on wages we find obscenely low, even if it means they have a chance of earning more than they could ever dream in their homeland? It is, after all, our own country.

My contention is that the left ought to give up this "paternalism or bust" attitude. It is far too convenient to insist that others ought to change their government, and then everyone would be fine. The truth is, we have no moral reason to keep people out, only excuses which come from our instincts. If we really believe in human rights, we should also accept the right of people to start from much less than what we have and work their way up--even if that means doing so in our own neighborhood. And that might mean a lot of sad things. It might mean watching people stumble and fall. It might mean watching people live without all thoese benefits we take for granted. It might mean watching people struggle with basic things like language and literacy. And it would all be right there for us to see with our own eyes.

Of course, poverty exists already in the U.S., as it does in all countries. The reaction that the left expressly desires to cultivate against poverty is one of anger and revulsion. We should not tolerate poverty. I find it bizarrely sickening to think that this revulsion at the sight of poverty could be a reason to lock more people in it.

I'm picking on the left wing here because of their tendency to think of themselves as moral guides on this issue. They're for immigration reform, certainly. They believe we should naturalize all the undocumented Americans who have been in the country living as productive members of society for years. They believe they are being sensible in all of that. But they are unwilling to accept the ultimate conclusion of their humanist principles, which is that there is simply no excuse for any restrictions on who can immigrate to the U.S. in the first place.

Why does economics need to be a science?

I've seen some commentary going around the blogosphere about this article by economist Raj Chetty, "Yes, Economics is a Science." I believe there is some merit to the question of whether or not (and what ways) economics is a science. But what's more striking to me is why the question continues to create such a stir.

So that's why I ask the question: what is it about being a "science" that makes us argue over it? My conjecture: modern mythology. Or more precisely, modern messianism.

Here is the messianic myth of the modern age. Once upon a time, we were living in darkness, plagued by superstitious beliefs to which we clung due to indoctrination by authorities. Then, around 400 years ago or so, a revolution was stirred, and science came to show us the light and brought us into a new age of progress. Now, if only we embrace science and reject whatever isn't science, we will continue along the path of enlightenment, so that one day we can all live in peace and prosperity.

The roles of good and evil here are played by understanding on the one hand and bias on the other. Anything which is "science" can help us understand, anything which is not can only obscure. That's why the battle over calling economics a science is so perilously important--if it isn't a science, then it is merely a tool to fuel ideological agendas. But a real science could never do such a thing.

If we reject this myth, then the question becomes less perilously important (though still interesting for other philosophical reasons). Science as we know it today has helped bring about many positive changes, but it is not going to bring about the kingdom of enlightenment. It may be worthwhile at some point to give an argument stating all the reasons why I think this, but my main argument goes something like this. Science, as understood today, is supposed to be objective, in the sense of separating the observer from his biases and forcing him to interpret the facts from a fresh point of view. The problem is that you can't build a better society on a model of separation. Things which could be construed as bias are actually some of the most essential attachments which hold civilization together: family, tradition, empathy, duty, and above all love.

An important corollary of rejecting the messianic myth of scientism: society will not heal itself by adopting the right policies at the level of federal government. If society were merely an object of scientific study, then I suppose it could be engineered to perfection. That is not the case.

Immigration restrictions are the modern day slavery

Bryan Caplan has convinced me that supporting open borders--all the way, no restrictions--really is the right thing to do. Also, the fact that he has convinced me proves the point he was making in this post, where he compares the defense of open-borders to abolitionism:

The obvious moral objection is that comparing slavery and immigration restrictions is absurd hyperbole. But it's absurd hyperbole to call this apt comparison "absurd hyperbole." Yes, enslaving a Haitian is plainly worse than forbidding him to accept a job offer anywhere on earth except Haiti. But they're both dire harms. How would you react if the world's laws barred you from every non-Haitian labor market on earth? With weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Paradoxically, you might say, it's precisely Caplan's doctrinaire attitude that gradually made me reconsider the facts and adopt my present position. This corresponds with what he says further down: "Moderates are better at bargaining with people holding preferences fixed. Abolitionists are better at changing preferences." It also helps when the abolitionist is a highly well-informed economist.

I'm not sure why Caplan uses Haiti as his illustrative example every time he talks about the issue, but he really can get the point across. Immigration restrictions constitute one of the gravest injustices of our time, one which reinforces global social hierarchies--the poor remain poor while the rich remain rich--for no good reasons that cannot be addressed in other, more humane ways. This essay has pretty good answers to all the standard objections, particularly the ones which come from the right of the political spectrum.

Common political wisdom would suggest that the left is more naturally receptive to immigration, but I'm not so convinced. My guess is that in the long run, the left will have difficulty with truly open borders, precisely because of the difficulties presented in running a welfare state while letting everyone in (a classical right-wing objection to open immigration, to which the libertarian can reply, "Oh, well!"). And if what Caplan reports about the inverse relationship between diversity and redistribution is true, good old European socialists may be the last to embrace open borders.

As for me, I've come to see this as a plain implication of the existence of universal human rights. It comes down to a really fundamental question about the purpose of democratic governments. I don't believe that we can prohibit the movement of foreigners--of individual human beings who happen not to be born in our country--in the name of democracy, that is in the name of protecting our own interests. Indeed, when a country excludes certain people from immigration, it doesn't protect anyone's property, it only forces people not to exchange, and therefore not to mutually benefit from one another. For each immigrant you deport for trying to work in the U.S., you also deprive an employer of an employee he wanted to hire.

And this is a moral issue. If it were only a matter of economics, I think the empirical evidence might still make me an open borders libertarian, but the issue is far more urgent than that. There are people all around the world who could make a better life for themselves and their families if they had the freedom to move somewhere else. We need to let that happen. The first step is being convinced if the desirability of that goal.

I haven't thought what the next step might be, but I'm sure that will come.

Open Borders

I am so happy this website exists: http://openborders.info/

From the site's self-description:

This website is dedicated to making the case for open borders. The term “open borders” is used to describe a world where there is a strong presumption in favor of allowing people to migrate and where this presumption can be overridden or curtailed only under exceptional circumstances.
The goal of the website is to make the arguments for open borders, and also to explicitly discuss many arguments against open borders, evaluate their validity, and determine ways to tackle the objections.

Living abroad has made this issue more and more personal to me, but I know my experience overall hasn't been too bad. There are millions of people who are not so fortunate.

We need more people who are actually willing to say, "I support open borders." In the Western world, there are far too many intellectual forces which breed prejudice against free immigration, and they often come from what we think of as opposite sides of the political spectrum. On the one hand, you have nationalism, which comes in many forms. Some argue that the state should be obliged first to the economic well-being of its own citizens, and that any disadvantage caused by immigration should be a concern to the state. Others argue that every nation has the right to preserve a certain culture, language, or intellectual or spiritual tradition, and that free immigration would deny this right. Still others argue that it is simply too impractical to allow a pure "melting pot" experiment, in which people from different cultures all try to get along under on state. I call all of these arguments generally "nationalist," even though they may be more or less so.

On the other hand, you have social democracy, which can indeed get in the way of free immigration. If the state has the responsibility to care for the general well-being of all of its citizens, it is naturally going to be difficult to accept a large mass of new citizens. You end up with the paradoxical and sometimes overwhelming tension of a society so compassionate that it can't accept any more strangers.

I think it would be a great moral victory to see the world embrace open borders. I suspect it will happen (if it ever does) more gradually than other moral victories such as the illegalization of slavery.

Morality needs to take a central role in the debate. I am frankly always pessimistic about the average person's ability to understand the economics involved, and even if the whole world were well-informed on economics, maximizing utility functions is hardly an inspiring argument for changing laws. For some on the left, the case for open borders might come down to a sort of cultural relativism in which there really shouldn't be any national distinctions. I don't find this especially convincing, myself. Rather, I think adopting open borders would be the best expression of the values our Western civilization has cultivated over the ages (in particular our Christian values), and I don't think we should be ashamed to say so. We should welcome the stranger, not because cultural differences don't matter, but precisely because our civilization is capable of welcoming others to adopt our way of life. Of course, to invite the stranger is to invite cultural evolution, but there is no ultimate danger in this if one has enduring beliefs that inspire admiration in all. In particular, there is no reason to be shy about saying that all people long to be free, and we should welcome others to share in the freedom for which our ancestors fought hard.

Again, I'm excited this web site exists. Note that it includes every kind of argument you could possibly want: libertarian, egalitarian, utilitarian, conservative, and so on. We live in exciting times, for anyone aware of the intellectual movements going on.

Libertarian realism

Libertarians are often accused these days of being utopians. Sure, the free market would work in a perfect world, but in the real world there are predatory businesses and other such monsters crawling under every bed. We need the government to look out for the little guy, or else who knows what will happen to society?

But while libertarians may on occasion speak too highly of the virtues of spontaneous order, I think the reality is that conservatives and liberals buy into a vision of government which is naive in one extreme or another. On the one hand, conservatives talk often as if we get the government we "deserve," as if somehow if we were just more true to our traditional values we would have an ever-thriving society. On the other hand, liberals seem to think we need to "take back" the government, as if we, together, united, can change society for the better.

I think the libertarian critique is the most profoundly realistic vision of government you can have. On the one hand, no, we don't necessarily have the government we deserve (for better or for worse), because we have not nearly as much control over government's formation as our democratic institutions would suggest. On the other hand, there is no way to collectively take charge of government--such massive collective action simply doesn't exist in the real world.

Don't get me wrong. Values matter, and social movements make a difference. They just don't make the difference we expect. Libertarians instinctively believe that government should always be reformed, and we also expect that no matter how much reform takes place it will still never be perfect. The role of the individual in politics is not so much to take responsibility for government as it is to take responsibility for his own beliefs, his own actions, his own civic ties, and his own vote. If the government turns out bigger or worse than it ought to be, it's not the fault of the individual. But it is the fault of the individual if he takes the defeatest attitude of one so victimized by the system that he fails even to better his own situation.

I've been accused of being an idealist before, but I think that's because people underestimate how dangerous the real idealists are. The real idealists are the megalomaniacs in Washington who actually believe they're doing what's best for the country. God save us from the idealists.

Things that make libertarians sound like jerks

Last week I saw a photo with more profound political commentary (one of that endless supply you see on facebook) that went like this:

1,000 dollar monthly Social Security check for Grandma is bankrupting America.

Yet a billionaire not paying taxes is making America prosperous.

Up is Down in America!

Check and mate. At least as far as our instincts are concerned. Clearly the big greedy corporations are controlling everything, and this is evidence that we are the victims of a cruel right-wing ideology of laissez-faire economics.

There are many points where I can agree with my left-wing friends, including when it comes to corporate greed. No one can be naïve about the lengths to which powerful people will go to maintain their power, or wealthy people to maintain their status. Equally important is the realization that people are not perfect, and left to their own devices they often do pretty terrible things to themselves and others. And I also very much agree with the assertion that a society is only just insofar as it is capable of protecting the weak and vulnerable, and helping as much as possible those who are less fortunate.

It is thus with a deep sigh in my chest that I must point out something critically important about billionaires versus Grandma. Yes, it might make me sound like a jerk, because our instincts are not naturally wired this way, but here is a simple fact: billionaires not paying taxes really do help make us prosperous.

Now, before you jump too far ahead of me, please note that I am not saying billionaires have no duty to pay taxes. The duty to pay taxes comes from the cost of certain necessary public services.

However, a sound understanding of our economic system should leave you with no other conclusion than this: on the whole, every dollar of profit made by a business is, in fact, a sign of added prosperity to the society. (Note: the qualification "on the whole" will be very important later.)

I find that this statement runs counter to our instincts, and it is therefore not very widely accepted even though it is the fundamental principle on which our economic system runs. Most people are willing to say that, sure, if you make a lot of money, you must have worked very hard and therefore deserve quite a lot of it. Good for you is a common way to summarize this feeling. After all, we like personal achievement and appreciate an individual's right to benefit from his own work. What isn't at all clear is how this actually helps the rest of us.

By this reasoning, we arrive at the conclusion that there are limits on how much profit a company (or individual) should make. There is only so much that one person can really deserve. Here is where our instincts go totally off track. Because we so firmly believe that the amount of money one makes should be attached to the effort he puts in or merit he possesses, we react with disgust at the idea of one man making in one minute as another man makes in a whole year. Surely no man is that much better than another.

Very few people indeed are so bold in their egoism as to defend such an economic system on the basis of moral merit. What is unfortunately so poorly understood is that individual merit is not the justification for the economic system that brings some people such astounding profits. No, the real justification is--and here I reiterate--that every dollar of additional profit, no matter how great the profits already are, means more prosperity in the society as a whole--not just for him who gained that profit.

Why is this so? There is no point in trying to search for an original explanation, because the right explanation is very simple and by now very old. It is a simple logical deduction from the definition of profit. Profit is nothing other than the price at which something is sold minus the cost to produce it. If the profit is anything greater than zero, this necessarily means the product was more valuable than the cost--the cost being everything that went into producing it. If the product is more valuable than its cost, this necessarily means society is better off for that product existing rather than not existing. QED

The real question is why we have so much trouble accepting the argument. Perhaps the reason we have trouble is that it seems highly impersonal. Can a number with a dollar sign next to it really tell us that society has benefited? Given the number of things we buy for which we later have no use, or the number of times we actually regret having bought something, it is easy to be skeptical of the idea that profit always means a benefit to society.

Here's where that qualification becomes important: "on the whole" means that profit is never a perfect indicator of benefit added. But I submit that there is no perfect indicator of benefit added. Most of our measurements are very imprecise. Money--that horrible, impersonal device for measuring value--has at least the benefit that we are always critical of it. When you realize later that a purchase wasn't very smart, you are careful not to make a similarly bad purchase again, because it's painfully obvious that you only have so much money.

The market will never give us a perfect representation of value, but it is extremely adaptive, correcting its own failures more quickly than any other system comparably large. Contrast this, say, with our system of government, which continues to fail in the same way no matter how much people complain about the same problems over and over.

Thus, the truth is, billionaires, whether or not they pay taxes, do on the whole add value to society so long as they keep producing things people are willing to buy. Paying taxes is something completely independent of this market process. You don't benefit the United States primarily by earning a lot of money and then paying part of it to the government. That idea is simply economic nonsense from beginning to end. The primary way in which you benefit the society around you is by producing things we need or want. And the only way to know what people need and want, in a world so immensely complex and interconnected as ours, is to follow the prices. It may seem impersonal, but I defy anyone to try bartering one on one with 300 million other Americans, much less seven billion people around the world.

Helping Grandma seems much more personal, and therefore we like to think about helping Grandma and not about billionaires making money. The irony is, helping Grandma in this case really is every bit as impersonal as big corporations that make money. If you think that paying a check to the government means you've helped Grandma, I defy you to verify whether that's true. It is truly astounding to me that people are so spiteful of corporations that produce things which they themselves buy, only to be so blindly trusting of politicians who say that their money is really going to help their neighbor.

So now that you're convinced that I am a mean libertarian who has no heart, I want to encourage you by saying that yes; I do think the state has an important role to play in helping Grandma; no, I don't think billionaires should evade taxes; and no, like I said already, I don't think money can measure the value of everything. There are really many things on which I can wholeheartedly agree with progressives, including many of the excesses of modern banking, monstrous corporations, and the catastrophy that awaits our environment if we do nothing to curb pollution. But one thing always comes back to give me a headache when I talk with people on the left, and that is this unrelenting, gut-level suspicion of a very fundamental economic fact: profit is good.

I want to close on a personal note. I, myself, have very little desire for money, and I really have very little ambition for business. As I write this little blog post, I realize that my own instincts run very much counter to the conclusions I've reached about our economic system. Thus, I hope that those who share many of my ideals about a great many political issues will realize that it is not a set of different values that separates us, but only a matter of interpreting the facts. I think those of us with an interest in political questions have an obligation to think both morally and logically about the economic system, because it will not do to simply follow our gut-level feelings. If those who pride themselves on their ability to think rigorously on political questions cannot bring themselves to understand the fundamental importance of profit in a complex economy, the only direction I see left is for society to hand over more and more power to the state. And that can only end in disaster, as it already has in the past.

Unchecked capitalism

I miss this blog. It really makes me sad how little I've written here lately.

Because most of the people I talk to about politics seem to come from a left-leaning perspective, I tend to think a lot about the morality of markets. On the other hand, I can always count on the Catholic Church to keep things interesting by showing a firm, classical opposition to free markets such as that enunciated recently by Pope Francis. Thus I'm reminded that attacks on market liberalism come from both modern, progressive perspectives as well as classical, conservative ones.

As a side note, the one breath of fresh air I get when talking politics while living in France is that the word "liberalism" hasn't changed meanings as it has in America. Thus, while American "liberals" are actually the left, in France "libéralisme" is more associated with the right, at least with regards to the economy. It makes discussions much more clear, since the word is associated with its content, rather than with a political movement.

One thing that's striking about how both the modern left and classical conservatives respond to markets is how amazingly similar it sounds in terms of ideas. That is, you would expect that these two very different ideological groups would have two very differential ideological reasons for critiquing markets. What I hear is impressively similar: markets turn our attention toward the idols of money and greed, and they create a society that abandons the poor and the ideal of greater equality.

But on a good day, both the left and the Catholic Church might even be drawn to admit no other institution than those of property rights and free trade has done a better job in the history of civilization of raising people out of poverty, creating the innovative solutions that lead to better health and higher living standards. Where did it all go wrong?

One of the things I noticed in the article on Pope Francis was this little phrase:

Unchecked capitalism had created “a new, invisible, and at times virtual, tyranny”, said the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio.

No, I'm not talking about the thing the Pope actually said. I'm talking about the phrase there at the beginning of the sentence. "Unchecked capitalism." There it is.

For all the historic connection of capitalism with "laissez faire" and the idea of individuals gone wild doing whatever they want with their own money, the truth is that in principle the market is a very restrictive system. It's really in our nature to do almost the opposite of what the market demands: to demand or forcibly take what we feel we deserve, to respect property rights only when it seems good for the rest of us.

What doesn't get said enough in these discussions is that the modern lords of finance have not driven us all to ruin simply by acting on their own behalf. No, they are publicly designated to act on everyone's behalf. Private individuals who gamble their own money and lose are not bailed out. But bankers who gamble everyone's money are bailed out, because it turns out everyone is depending on them.

A system should not be called a "free" market because we see people acting in a free and unrestrained way. This is simply a mistake in terminology. A truly free market is one in which we are all equally restrained by the same rules. Only within the restraints of mutual respect for property rights can we then be allowed to act freely.

The symptoms that Pope Francis points to are real signs that our culture does have a real problem, and the problem is largely that something has been left unchecked. Properly speaking, however, it isn't capitalism that has been left unchecked. It's a few croneys who vie for the backing of society. Wealth is not inherently bad. Getting or securing your wealth by forcing others to support you is bad.

In short, we need to go after the bankers.

A happy libertarian meditation on elections

So America has just re-elected President Obama. Congratulations to him, and to all who supported him. For many Republicans, I'm sure this is a bitter pill to swallow, since they were so convinced the whole time that Obama is one of the main reasons for everything that is wrong with America right now. For us libertarians, it's not really that big a deal: we knew all along we probably weren't going to get a candidate we liked!

However, it's not all bleak. A lot of people today are very happy, because they view Obama as a very good man and an inspiration for the future. And I think they are right: Obama is a good man. So is Romney, for that matter. I think it's overly cynical to view all politicians as bad people. I'm guessing that both candidates for president really want to serve their country well, that they're both good to their families, and that they both can be nice people to be around if you get to know them.

It isn't because I think all politicians are bad people that I am against big government. It's because I think that big government has a way of causing good people to do bad things. Many people seem to have trouble accepting that evil can result from intellectual mistakes and/or systemic problems, but it can. I do not think that it was out of hatred for truth or justice that George W. Bush dragged us into two never-ending wars, or that Barack Obama started a secret "kill list" outside the bounds of the rule of law. On the contrary, these men believe in their country, and they will do "everything it takes" to defend it.

That "everything it takes" part can be really scary. Even, and perhaps especially, in the hands of good people.

Indeed, sometimes libertarianism comes across as a political philosophy which celebrates poor traits in humanity, such as greed and selfishness. On the contrary, I don't celebrate these things at all; I just don't have the same irrational fear of them that others do. In fact our great mistake as a society is to celebrate our own optimism and idealism.

Why fear greed and selfishness? They will forever be unpopular. On the other hand, idealistic politicians with a heart of gold and a vision for the country--they really frighten me. Why? Because people actually put their hopes in them!

A common objection I hear is that libertarians are as utopian as socialists. Socialists believe that we should try to organize society in such a way that all of her efforts are directed toward the common good by means of a democratic state. Clearly utopian--no state worked or ever will work like that. On the other hand, the libertarian view of the state is that it ought simply to enforce the basic rules of justice, not play favorites, and not intervene in the lives of citizens when no injustice has been committed. And that, unfortunately, has never happened either!

But the two kinds of utopianism are not equivalent in spirit. While socialism rests on a belief in a kind of society that has never existed, libertarianism merely rests on the hope for a government that has, unfortunately, never existed. Indeed, all libertarianism demands is that government help, rather than hinder, those natural forces which in fact make society work. Its demands may be too much for any real government, but they are not too much for society. What actually makes society work is not the politicians we elect, but the fact that each of us as individuals respect the life and property of other individuals.

It is an absurd mischaracterization of libertarianism to say that libertarians are against working together for the common good. Au contraire ! The amazing thing about this global civilization we live in is that we already do work together for the common good, whether we appreciate that fact or not. The system of global capitalism that is in place is mostly not our doing. It is rather the unforeseen result of billions of decisions along history's long and complicated path.

And I think that civilization is remarkably resilient. I am hardly a fan of the belief that progress is inevitable. What feels like progress often isn't, and often the path that actually leads to progress is not ideal. But freedom is ultimately difficult to destroy. It arises from the moral traditions we have inherited, and whether we realize it or not we will mostly continue to persist on those traditions: respect for human life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Democracy often blinds us to these simple truths. We place our hopes in the amazing gift of being able to choose our government--and it is an amazing gift--while forgetting that government does not make us free or prosperous. And you know what, that's okay. You may have voted for all the wrong reasons, but the free world will not collapse because of it.

So I remain content, not because I think government as it exists is acceptable or that I think everything is just going to be alright without any effort on anyone's part. Rather, I remain content because I know that no political election, no matter the outcome, can ever take away from humanity that which it really needs to fight for justice, truth, and peace.

Things could get bleak in the short run. I don't know. I fear the results of Obama's executive power grab, and now that he has a second term it could get worse. I fear what the Republicans will do, given that they may be even more angry after this election than before. Yes, there are lots of worries.

But in the long run, freedom is not really in the hands of these elites, elected or not. And that is why I remain a happy libertarian...

...who will cheerfully continue to blast America's current political policies, mostly because it's just so darn fun!

Why I think Obama and Romney are essentially the same

There are many reasons why libertarians disapprove equally of Romney and Obama. One could note policies on the war on terror, drone strikes, the NDAA and related national security policies, Guantanamo Bay, etc. Or one could even point to the fundamental similarities in their economic philosophy, which always requires the government to "steer the ship," and which always focuses on the middle class in an obvious attempt to strike a populist chord with America's voting population.

But I wanted to provide a very pithy evaluation of these two candidates, in anticipation of the upcoming Election Day in the US, in order to explain why a Romney presidency will most likely have a very similar effect on American society as an Obama presidency.

Both candidates share this fundamental trait on common: they really want to be good politicians. Each promises to bring but one ingredient to the White House: competence. This "competence" is expressed in all sorts of ways: the ability to run a business, pass laws, or finally "put aside politics" and do "what's best for the country." This latter phrase is never actually explained: it is a way of merely summarizing current prejudices among political elites, whose position in society renders them incapable of philosophical self-criticism.

This desire to appear above all competent to "run the country" is, sadly, a manifestation of how most Americans view politics. Modern people seem to view the government, not as a source of justice, but rather as a source of progress. Thus elections have become about which candidate has the best "vision" for the country, rather than about which candidate would be most true to the principles of our Constitution. We want our president to not simply govern, but rather "run the country."

I am hardly optimistic about the potential results of this trend.

Dualisms we live by, part 2: public and private

The dualism between public and private seems to take full force in political discussions. There are those decisions which are completely up to me and those decisions which are up to "all of us," for which one might have various conceptions. I find dualistic thinking in this area extremely damaging, for two reasons. First of all, it forces us to divide people into two kinds: those who want more freedom for the individual in his private sphere, and those who want more unity and collective action in the public sphere. You can nuance this as much as you want--maybe on some issues we need more individual freedom, on others we need more collective action, etc. But I say no matter how much you nuance it, it's still wrong. I'll explain way momentarily.

The second reason why this dualism is extremely damaging is that it gets glued to the left-right dualism. In modern political discussions, it seems that "left" means "fights for the public" while "right" means "fights for the individual." Of course one can immediately point to so many counterexamples that I will refrain from listing them. But if you're thinking in terms of right and left in the first place, that's already a setback to rational discussion.

Reality is far more complex than the public/private dualism can ever explain. What is my "private" sphere? Is it the sphere in which I can behave without obligations? Where exactly is that sphere? I find I have obligations wherever I go. From birth I have had certain obligations to my family, then to my friends, my school, my church, and other institutions which helped shape me. And, of course, I have always had certain obligations to government. A life without obligations is most likely a life lived on a deserted island, and even though, one finds that nature itself has a way of obliging us.

Conversely, what is the "public" sphere? Is it the sphere in which all of us cooperate together? Which sphere is that? Through the market, I am able to cooperate with people I have never met, whose language I cannot even speak, and whose values are probably not my own. In other words, through a series of individual actions not obviously connected with one another the human race has learned to work collectively to create fantastic innovations in both technology and culture. Yet we don't consciously work together to do it. By contrast, when I am forced to pay taxes, am I really working with others? Since I have already listed some of the many institutions to which I have obligations, need I repeat how many different "public" spheres I already indwell?

The devastating affect of this dualism is that we have trouble imagining any more than a few ways in which people actually cooperate. Political unity, in particular, does not always mean effective cooperation, and effective cooperation does not always require political unity. If anything, I suspect an excess of unity and conformity is a hindrance to effective cooperation, and we should always do our best to warn against it.

Dualisms we live by part 1: right and left

Since moving to France, I haven't had very much time for blogging, which is a shame, because it was always a mental exercise I really enjoyed. A friend here asked me why I would spend so much time on it, particularly on political posts which may or may not convince anyone. I think I've said it elsewhere on this blog, but I think it's more of a condition than it is a commitment. I just can't help but write down my thoughts somewhere sometimes. It might as well be in a place where other people can see, right?

I decided to start a series of short posts so that I won't get overworked trying to write them down. Rather than write one long post explaining a problem I see with society, it might help to get straight to those pertinent examples which are particularly fascinating and irritating.

One of the things I do here to try to improve my French is listen to podcasts. Pretty nerdy stuff mostly, like podcasts I find on France Culture. This morning I was listening to a discussion about "la droite" i.e. "the right" in French and more generally Western politics. The whole discussion is spent trying to figure out what "the right" means. Which leads me to the first dualism we live by, or rather try to live by but can't.

Right and left. Droite et gauche. These are very useful for journalists who need to quickly derive a story about who is up against whom. The right/left spectrum is a neat way to divide every controversy in two. The most immediate problem is that no complex issue has just two sides to it. A more fundamental problem is that when people are fixated on the fight between the two perceived "major parties" of political thought, they completely neglect thinking about the more radical changes that need to be made in society. Political discussion becomes more a question of which party is more to blame for the problems of the past decade or so, rather than trying to develop a coherent strategy for moving forward. Tug of war, rather than higher ideals, dictates our political movements.

Thus, when intellectuals get together to discuss the right or the left, they have to spend the whole time nuancing their way out of talking about the right or the left. After all, both sides "evolve" over time, or maybe it's simply "a question of definitions." All of which really means: these two categories are useless, unless you really need an efficient way to win political points. And, after all, I suppose efficiency is the larger part of what makes us act the way we do.

What do we owe, and to whom?

One of those Obama moments that people have jumped on, in order to score political points, was the "you didn't build that" remark. (A quick google search reveals plenty of links on the subject.) In context, here's what he said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

Conservative pundits have tried to blatantly twist the "you didn't build that" comment beyond its original meaning--they want to imply that Obama meant that your own personal achievements are actually the achievements of society rather than you, the individual. This is a false implication, but there are some true implications which demand some sort of intellectual response. Many libertarians have done a great job of responding already, but I wanted to take some time and think about the core issue underlying this big to-do.

The take-away message from Obama's remark is that we all owe something for the services given to us by the public. So the question we need to deal with is, what do we owe, and to whom? Debt is a moral concept, relating to how we ought to exist with our fellow human beings; it is therefore not an idea that can be deduced from mere facts. The observation that other people helped me in my endeavors does not settle the question of whether I owe them something, nor does the observation that I have put in a lot of effort into my own endeavors. We will need to wrestle with some basic ideas about how we ought to relate to one another, rather than appeal to blind prejudice and desires based on instinct. For example, it is natural that I should want to keep things which I currently perceive to be mine; it is also natural that I should want others who appear to have more than everyone else to share with the rest of us. These instincts come into conflict in any society, and such conflicts can only be mediated by our morals.

Rather than delve too deeply into the broad moral question, my main goal here is to challenge one presupposition commonly held in our culture, which relates mainly to the question, "To whom do I owe?" It is undoubtedly the case that many people help me along my life's journey. Thus, there are potentially many people to whom I owe something. (It is even possible that I owe something to everyone in the world, given that they have refrained from doing any harm to me personally. For such a minimal "contribution," however, I think it natural to suppose that all I owe them in return is not hurting them!)

The question is, what does it mean that I owe something to society, and if this sentiment has any concrete meaning, is that meaning best expressed in the form of taxation by government?

Let me get the first part of this question out of the way by saying yes, I do think there is some meaningful sense in which we "owe society" a great debt for all that we achieve in each of our individual lifetimes. However, I'm afraid this sense is far from concrete. Every time we ponder the many people invovled in creating something as simple as a pencil, every time we walk through the streets of the world's great cities, every time we read the great recorded thoughts of human beings, every time we thank our parents for how much they have done for us and think how many generations of parents came before them, we realize in all of these things that we would not even exist without some seemingly miraculous order which binds human beings together in a system of cooperation. But this order, this miracle of human civilization, is indeed abstract--it is beyond our grasp, both in that it comes down to us through the gradual progression of cultural evolution and in that we can never repay this "civilization" directly (there's no "it" at all).

Politics, however, is often the art of connecting very abstract concepts to particular persons or parties, so that politicians can channel public reverence for those concepts into support for their campaigns. Thus the very abstract concept society becomes tied to the very concrete entity which is government. Paying taxes becomes synonmyous with paying one's debt to society. This is something of a superstition, however, and like many superstitions it is rather destructive.

Civilization exists because each of us individually bases her life on certain moral principles. Government is not the originator of these morals, and if it were required that government should be immediately present in all human interactions in order to regulate our behavior, civilization would utterly collapse. Most problems in ordinary life are solved by parents' natural for for their children, people caring about their neighbors, passers by stopping to give directions or call for help, businesses wanting to make a good impression on their customers, and members of a community wanting to be seen as responsible citizens. The resulting moral order is called spontaneous order because there is no one steering the ship; it is enough that individual acts morally, without knowing what the whole of society looks like as a result. Government is only necessary when certain individuals violate this order.

It is telling that most major world religions have some account of ethics being passed down either from on high or from ancient wisdom. Ironic as it sounds to modern ears, it is this reverence for what is passed down, rather than what is created by humans like us, that makes us free. Indeed, freedom is being liberated from the will of other human beings like ourselves. We can only be free, then, if we are able to appeal to principles which are higher than any human will. If a society has such a set of principles, then each member of that society can be free to do as she likes, if only she generally abides by those principles.

The danger in every democracy is the temptation to abandon our reverence for received wisdom in favor of what is called the will of the people. This concept often acts as an excuse for us to abandon the morals which allow civilization to function, contrary as they are to our instincts. By embracing this concept we endeavor to create a government which is not the product of our moral principles, but rather a brute assertion of will. Thus government becomes not so much an arbiter of justice as a channel through which every person's "voice" may be "heard." I vote, therefore I am.

The "tyranny of the majority" is a very real danger. A majority of people might decide democratically to strip an outclassed minority of basic rights which those in the majority enjoy freely. But the dangers are much deeper than this. Once the public has accepted the concept of government as an expression of collective will rather than an arbiter of justice, there is no limit to how much we owe government. All of our reverence for those abstract concepts, such as equality, justice, mercy, peace, and prosperity, becomes directed toward the government. In religious terms, we become idolaters.

The will of the people is a concept which has no concrete manifestation. Yes, we can vote democratically on yes or no questions, such as, "Should abortion be legal?" or, "Should Barack Obama be our president from 2013 to 2016?" But collective desires such as giving everyone affordable health care or giving every child a good education are not satiable through collective decision-making. The only way civilization was ever able to achieve such things in the first place was through a system of moral order which grants each individual certain rights and responsibilities, but can never predict particular outcomes.

Once this much is truly understood and admitted, then I think we can start to debate more concretely how much we owe government. I find it generally disturbing that there seems to be no theoretical limit on how much of our income we might owe our government. If one turns to the law of the Old Testament, one of the oldest "constitutions" we have (to put it anachronistically), we find a clear proportion established for all time: ten percent of everything. Surely there is some wisdom in a society embracing certain moral constraints on how much the government is allowed to take from any given citizen.

Nothing I have said should be taken to mean that government should never provide welfare money to its citizens, or that there is something morally desirable about certain individuals being rich to incomprehensible excess. What it does mean, however, is that when we call for the rich pay to their "fair share," we ought to consider whether we are thinking according to morals or simply according to instincts, according to a higher law or in the hopes of satisfying the will of the people.

The most desirable outcome of our democratic political process is that all individuals would be held equally accountable to a higher standard of moral principles, one which stands over and against our base desires. This requires a considerable amount of give and take. While it is just for a rich person to give to a poor person, it is also unjust for a person to steal from the rich to give to the poor. Taxation is a proper function of government, but unlimited taxation means unlimited tyranny.

Politicians and CEOs must all be held accountable to the same rules as anyone else. The main problem with which we should all be concerned as that these parties--the government and the wealthy private interests--are more often than not on the same side. While the average voter may be concerned with some preferred ideology or sense of American identity, the particular party in power seems to make no difference when it comes to handing out favors to big corporations. When all Americans can see and lament this state of affairs, then I hope we will see a much needed political revival.

Hayek on reason and tradition

Today's quote from F. A. Hayek is from The Fatal Conceit, chapter 1, page 21:

Learning how to behave is more the source than the result of insight, reason, and understanding. Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. It is not our intellect that created our morals; rather, human interactions governed by our morals make possible the growth of reason and those capabilities associated with it. Man became intelligent because there was tradition--that which lies between instinct and reason--for him to learn. This tradition, in turn, originated not from a capacity rationally to interpret observed facts but from habits of responding. It told man primarily what he ought or ought not to do under certain conditions rather than what he must expect to happen.

(Note: the emphasis is all Hayek's.)

This view is the result of Hayek's own studies and reflections on history and anthropology, and it provides a foundation for his anti-rationalist epistemology. I find myself lately rather hooked on this principle, as I see that it has far-reaching consequences. In education, for instance, I think we often see two schools of thought: one assumes that children are naturally gifted with the ability to think for themselves, and the other assumes that all knowledge must be handed down in the form of tradition. Hayek's principle is a little more favorable to the latter view, but even this will not suit: it is not merely knowledge which gets passed down through tradition, but a habit of thought enabling the mind to process things in an orderly fashion, for instance by the rules of deductive or inductive reasoning.

In terms of moral philosophy, I think this principle also leads us away from being (too) consequentialist in our reasoning. While it is often the case that our morals can be justified based on the general sort of consequence which we wish to avoid, there is in fact no way we can ever predict all the particular consequences of the various choices we make and the innumerable ways we make them. At bottom, we just have to accept that there are certain things you can't do, because, well, you just can't--even if you have some reason to suspect that it would be better in the long run if you did.

What goes mostly unstated in Hayek's moral philosophy is the underlying humanism implicit in his argument. Our morals have evolved to allow human beings to flourish to the greatest possible extent, given a world with ever-changing and unpredictable circumstances. This, for Hayek, is enough to place the benefit of the doubt on the morals we have inherited from tradition. On the other hand, it also justifies for him a great deal of skepticism about moral knowledge: "reluctant as we may be to accept this, no universally valid system of ethics can ever be known to us." One might call this the Incompleteness Principle of ethics, mirroring the Incompleteness Theorems of mathematical logic.

As a result, it is always possible to correct previous moral assumptions, either by showing some of our morals to be mutually incompatible or by showing empirically that some of our morals tend to do more harm than good. Such corrections can be continued ad infinitum, since no step in the process can ever produce the complete system of ethics we might strive for. What we absolutely cannot do is throw out traditional morality altogether and replace it with a plan by which we seek to deliberately conquer all obstacles to human flourishing. The dream of accomplishing this is exactly what Hayek names the fatal conceit. Not only will it not work, but it will backfire in devastating ways.

Hayek's moral philosophy is the right place to start if you want to understand the principles of a liberal social order of the "Hayekian" tradition, which, he would argue, goes at least back to the Scottish philosophers of the Enlightenment. But I think it's significant that, for a man known mostly for his thoughts on economics and politics, he had pretty brilliant insight into the complex and subtle relationship between reason, instinct, morals, and tradition.

Follow-up on Michael Sandel

Trevor Burrus weighs in on Michael Sandel's new book. He revealingly calls his review "The Moral Majority of the New Left." Excerpt:

Rick Santorum and Michael Sandel should go fishing some time. If they put preconceptions aside, they will quickly realize they have a lot in common. They both feel the “national character” is eroding and that “we” need to have a serious conversation about where our culture is going. They can even trade knowing nods over their shared conviction that, while there’s nothing wrong with certain voluntary relationships (same-sex couples and corporations), why do they have to do it in public?

Aside from being provocative, I think the review is helpful in pointing out what I think is the ultimate flaw in these moralizing arguments about markets and/or culture: who is this "we"?

Conservative and communitarian arguments are thus equivalent in form. For both philosophies, “we” are supposed to be engaging in a collective conversation about what values will run “our” lives.

I think most of us are inclined to instinctively respond to this pronoun "we." It is a word which invites people to feel like they are part of something. But once definite propositions are put on the table, so to speak, one immediately realizes how polarizing the debate can be, and how infinite in scope questions of detail can become. We should not treat our bodies as commodities. OK, but what about wearing a t-shirt with a brand on it? We should not pay students to study. OK, but what about taking them out to eat when they get straight A's? We shouldn't make a commodity out of free public theater. OK, but what if we don't really like the public theater that we're being forced to pay for?

Burrus points out that communitarians try to argue that the interconnectedness of all people and all behaviors demands that we be able to make public determinations concerning individual behavior, but actually our interconnectedness implies just the opposite. We are so interconnected that if the community has the right to make determinations on some personal choices, then it's very hard to see what limits there will be. As I just explained above, there are too many details to fight over.

Come to think of it, that's exactly what happens: the left and right are locked in a never-ending fight over which areas of our lives to invade. Some want to take away our freedom to watch pornography. OK, sounds reasonable, but what else can't we watch? Some want to take away our freedom to smoke marijuana or perhaps tobacco. OK, but what else can't we consume? (Some are already proposing limits on our sugar intake.) Some believe the government should place certain mandates on health insurance purchases. OK, so what else do we have to buy? There are infinitely many details to be worked out, and the fact is, having a "national debate" about these things is impossible. It invariably becomes a polarizing political death match in which people's opinions are constantly being shaped by the two-sided establishment. We come to accept a list of moral imperatives which have no relation to one another and no coherence with any over-arching moral philosophy. This is an inevitable result of a system which seeks to decide all moral questions democratically.

What is the alternative to this endless tug-of-war between competing cultural factions? Instead of pretending that "we" can solve these moral questions collectively, we ought instead embrace a very simple moral concept: leave individuals with the right and responsibility to their own bodies and their own property. Moral questions concerning the proper use of person and property will have to be left up to the individual. It's not as if they have to figure it all out on their own. I promise, people occasionally listen to their parents, their teachers, their pastors, or whoever they might look up to and respect. The constant sense of urgency that there needs to be some "national debate" is honestly a bit mystifying to me sometimes. It seems we are instinctively trapped in a paranoid fear of the collapse of morality and social order. The facts just don't support that paranoia.

If Michael Sandel wants to guide people toward what he thinks is a better moral life, more power to him. I guess in that way he is functioning as a pastor of sorts. But if he wants to talk about politics, I'd like to know where he is going with this.

How Markets Crowd Out Morals

That's the name of the lead essay by Michael Sandel in the latest Boston Review. Excerpt:

This economistic view of virtue fuels the faith in markets and propels their reach into places they don’t belong. But the metaphor is misleading. Altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.

I agree with Sandel, even I'm not completely sure about all of his applications. For instance, economists are in remarkable agreement, contrary to many people (like Sandel, apparently), that the selling of organs such as kidneys should be allowed. I'm not convinced that the economists are wrong on that particular issue. I am convinced, however, that the utilitarian view, in which the social good is determined by the sum total of individual subjective desires, is wrong. What's downright bizarre to me is the economist's conception of altruism and love as scarce goods.

The more libertarian I get, the more anti-market I become. That's because the market has come to be a "mere mechanism," as Sandel puts it in his criticism of the economist's view. As a mere mechanism, it then becomes a tool for technocrats to place themselves at the helm of society under the presumption that they can steer us toward economic salvation. Money is not the ultimate tool for determining behavior. Banks are not the salvation of the world. You would have thought 2008 had taught us that already.

What makes the market work, in the classical liberal conception to which I subscribe, is the fact that our morals guide us. This is the whole point of Hayek's The Fatal Conceit. If we were guided solely by instinct, we would be stuck in small hunter-gatherer societies with no grounds on which to cooperate with people outside our tribe. If we are guided solely by reason, however, we often presumptuously move to destroy the conventions and institutions which have made us successful as a species. Our morals act as a buffer between instinct and reason, guiding us through complex decisions for which our instincts are either inadequate or misleading, and for which our reason is incapable of finding a satisfactory justification even when we are making the right decision.

The market, in this view, emerged over time as a set of conventions and institutions which tend to enhance the thriving of human beings. But once we assume that the market is a product of our reason and can be given some a priori justification based on a utilitarian conception of ethics, then we tend to treat it as a system through which to organize all of society, thus "crowding out" our morals.

The way forward, in my opinion, is through what I would like to call (somewhat paradoxically) a critical respect for tradition. Our moral traditions, in particular, have made human flourishing possible. Unfortunately, we inherit these moral traditions as one big package, so to speak. When we unpack these traditions, we have to critically assess how they can fit together. Sometimes they can't, and we must abandon certain traditions altogether. Sometimes we will spend our entire lives trying to resolve our morals in ways that can't fit in any logically coherent way, but this doesn't always mean that we must choose one or the other. It is the critical struggle with our moral traditions that produces moral advances. The outright rejection of moral tradition, on the other hand, is pure folly. You can't start from nothing.

For example, there are certainly competing moral traditions which have a say in the question of selling organs as commodities. On the one hand, we have a traditional belief in the sanctity of human life, and sacred things can't simply be bought and sold. To offer up your own kidney to someone who needs it is indeed a noble sacrifice, and everyone should recognize it as such. On the other hand, there is a certain dignity to the reciprocity of a market transaction. One man needs a kidney (much) more than he needs $10,000, another man needs $10,000 more than he needs both kidneys; the trade benefits both parties. It seems to me that making such a transaction legal would not have an utterly corrosive effect on our morals. What if it saved lives? Can we really be so terribly upset by that?

On other particular examples, I mostly agree with Sandel. Should we really give each other cash presents as gifts? That seems crass, and probably for a good reason. We are not being "irrational" by attempting to put a little more thought into gift-giving than just writing a check. On the other hand, it is also quite superficial to search high and low for a "good gift" without ever truly getting to know your relatives. I'm sure Sandel understands that there are many other good reasons to be concerned with the excessive gift-giving every year at Christmas time. We have to weigh our various moral traditions, from the value of gift-giving to the dignity of simple living, from the beauty of grandiose celebrations to the virtue of thrift.

Sandel's major contribution to the discussion is not in the particulars, but rather in the general principle which he states so well: "our capacity for love and benevolence is enlarged with practice." I couldn't agree more. Aside from strange utilitarian assumptions made by economists, the real problem of modern society is the ease with which we are able to think only of ourselves. With as much affluence as we have, it is difficult to find in ourselves the desire and the discipline to make lasting commitments which are not reducible to mere transactions. Yet without such commitments, the human race would never have flourished as it has. Moreover, I'm not sure it's even possible to understand individual happiness as an idea completely independent of committed relationships. Relationships to one another give us identity, which in turn gives us meaning, which in turn gives us happiness, provided those relationships are healthy.

Of course, this makes us ask which commitments are good. Considering this is an article about the corrupting influence of money, I would have to say that governments stand out as particularly poor candidates for our allegiance. Is there any doubt that the coercive power of government is a magnet for political crony capitalists and special interests? Sandel cites an instance in which a small Swiss town was asked to host a nuclear waste site. I, for one, do not yearn for a world in which men's hearts swell with patriotic pride at the thought of storing nuclear waste for the sake of the greater good. In fact, I'm not sure I really sympathize with the Swiss townspeople for being more willing to cooperate under the condition of not receiving compensation. But perhaps the Swiss feel a greater sense of solidarity, given that they live in such a small country which has allowed itself to be relatively isolated from conflict. The United States is not such a country.

In my opinion, the commitments we ought to foster the most are those which we can see and know personally: our families, our friends, our neighbors in our communities, our colleagues, our churches, etc. I am very skeptical of people calling for commitments to large institutions such as our national government, except insofar as it is required to provide a basic social cohesion in which a variety of communities and institutions can flourish. It is pointless to love people in general and no one in particular. I think it is therefore misguided to put the interests of country before the interests of people you actually know. If your nation begins to trample the rights of your community, then loyalty to country is no longer a virtue.

Sandel doesn't really delve into politics per se, but I think he means to go there, and I'd be curious to hear what his political philosophy is. In any case, he has given us some important things to think about, and I look forward to seeing what kind of influence he has on the intellectual community. The economists, in particular, should have some interesting things to say.

Libertarianism and collective destiny

The fundamental dichotomy that reverberates throughout popular political discourse could be summarized no better than by this line from a recent Washington Post article:

Romney is promoting the God of "I": individual accomplishment and personal success. Obama is promoting the God of "we," in which the fates of all are intertwined.

Replace "Obama" more broadly with "the left" and "Romney" with "the right" and you get a pretty typical understanding of American politics. I'll hand it to the author of the article: she has a very balanced approach to this dichotomy and frames it provocatively in the context of Christianity's theological history. The whole thing is worth a read.

But that's not exactly what I'm going to talk about. What I want to talk about, instead, is what eventually one me over to "libertarianism," or perhaps more correctly "classical liberalism," in the first place. The most abiding critique of libertarianism is that the individualism on which it is based is immoral or impractical or both. Clearly we all need each other. The human race cannot survive without cooperation among different members of the species. We all owe our success to others. These observations have both moral and practical implications for our political philosophy such that the radical individualism underlying libertarian philosophy must be false.

Until fairly recently, I more or less accepted this critique of libertarianism. What changed everything for me was ultimately an essay called, "Individualism: True and False," by none other than F. A. Hayek (it always comes back to Hayek). In it, he gives the following definition of "true" individualism:

What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society. This fact should by itself be sufficient to refute the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society. If that were true, it would indeed have nothing to contribute to our understanding of society. But its basic contention is quite a different one; it is that there is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior. This argument is directed primarily against the properly collectivist theories of society which pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society, etc., as entities sui generis which exist independently of the individuals which compose them. The next step in the individualistic analysis of society, however, is directed against the rationalistic pseudo-individualism which also leads to practical collectivism. It is the contention that, by tracing the combined effects of individual actions, we discover that many of the institutions on which human achievements rest have arisen and are functioning without a designing and directing mind; that, as Adam Ferguson expressed it, "nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action but not the result of human design"; and that the spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend. This is the great theme of Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith, of Adam Ferguson and Edmund Burke, the great discovery of classical political economy which has become the basis of our understanding not only of economic life but of most truly social phenomena.

The above quote is dense, but I have decided to post it in its entirety so as not to deprive the reader of Hayek's sophisticated explanation of the core issues. Having said that, I will now try to explain what effect this passage had on me and what I think should be the real selling point of libertarianism.

To ask whether we should focus on the individual or focus on the collective is simply the wrong question. The right question is, what is a good society and how does it work? That's the question to which I believe Hayek and others have given the best answers.

A good society is one in which people cooperate. We can do far more if we specialize into different tasks and share the fruits of our labor than if we each keep to ourselves. We are also far healthier and happier if we have right relationships with one another: friends, families, and so on. In a good society, each individual has a role to play in benefiting every other individual, whether directly or indirectly.

A good society also consists solely of people who do not and cannot have access to the kind of knowledge which would be necessary to delegate to all individuals the tasks, relationships, and roles which individuals ought to play in society. It is not possible to "construct" or "plan" a good society.

Here we have a conundrum: a good society must consist of individuals working together toward the common good, but those individuals can't have any idea what precisely they are working toward.

Classical liberalism succeeds where other political philosophies fail because it (a) sees the conundrum as it is and (b) provides a solution. Which means, yes, classical liberalism is indeed concerned with our collective destiny. You must keep this in mind as you read about individual liberty, private property, constitutional constraints on government, and so on: all of these ideas are meant to provide a framework under which individuals may work together toward the common good without actually having a plan for doing so. I say this merely by way of invitation (not even introduction) to the classical liberal way of thinking; if I were to attempt to provide the complete answer, I would be stuck writing all night.

As I see it, modern American liberalism fails at point (a), since they insist that we can answer questions which are simply unanswerable, while American conservatives usually fail at point (b) by clinging to traditions which don't necessarily address this conundrum effectively.

I agree with conservatives that our moral traditions play a key role in the constitution of a good society. However, I do not agree that these moral traditions are beyond question or revision, and I also do not agree with the proposed application of said moral traditions. There many things which may be immoral to do, and yet it may also be immoral to prevent a person from doing those things.

With liberals I have a tougher time because it is generally quite difficult to get them to understand the knowledge problem. Many of my peers are attracted to liberalism because they are smart and believe that smart people ought to work together toward the common good. In this sense I, too, am a liberal. The difference is that I believe we must work toward the common good beginning with the humble acknowledgement that we don't know precisely what that is, and the broader our impact on the world the less of an idea we will have whether we have done good or bad. In my opinion this difference explains the modern liberal's obsession with statistics: the gap between rich and poor, under-representation from minorities, median incomes in third world countries, average scores on standardized tests--the list goes on and on, because there's always another aggregate quantity to try and fix. If the liberal could only understand how little we really know about where these numbers come from, he might be able to understand why I oppose his policy proposals.

I hope this is a helpful contrast. It certainly helps clarify in my own mind why I believe as I do, and why I believe America needs a different direction politically.