Milton Friedman on balancing the budget

Milton Friedman, that crazy Tea Party activist (and Nobel Prize winning economist), insisted that balancing the government's budget isn't the real problem. The real fundamental question is, as you can hear at 6:42,

"The real question is, how much are you required to spend, one way or another--directly or indirectly, by taxes, by lending, by inflation--what fraction of your income are you required to devote to have other people spend it, supposedly on your behalf?"

Today it is accepted by virtually everyone that any reasonable person would accept that we need to balance the federal budget by a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases. Of course, that's what normal people must do, so clearly that is what the federal government must do. Thus, to suggest that taxes should not be increased to pay for the federal budget is taken as doctrinaire, the crazed thinking of Tea Party fanatics. Was Milton Friedman, then, simply a fanatic?

As shocking as it sounds to suggest that a great majority of the population is in error, that is unfortunately the case today (as nearly always). The government is not a for-profit business. It is not a household. It does not increase revenue by working harder or by making a better product. If this were how the government increased revenue, I'd be all in favor of it. But let's be clear, that is not what is meant when people so casually suggest "increasing revenue." What is obviously meant is increasing taxes.

Now as Milton Friedman points out in this video, government deficit is already a tax. That money has to be paid off somehow. Make no mistake, when the government spends money, it is always spending your money. The more money the government spends, the more of your money is being spent. In other words, the more the government spends, the less freedom you have.

Unfortunately, conservatives have tried to make the case that we can balance the budget like reasonable businessmen and yet not increase taxes. The government is not a business, and we don't need businessmen running the government. What we need is a government that protects, rather than degrades, our liberty. This can only be done by reducing the amount of money government forces us to spend. Raising taxes is not a morally neutral way of "increasing revenue." It is an immoral act of force, which can only be justified insofar as it is necessary to defend our country and provide a legal system which upholds individual liberty.

There are other options, of course. It is possible, in theory, that the government could charter legitimate businesses, which must play by all the same rules as other businesses in a state of free market competition. From such firms the government could, in theory, generate revenue for various programs it would like to maintain. That is, of course, never how it works in practice. Businesses with government charters almost always get special privileges. But I wanted to mention this, lest anyone think that I am dogmatically opposed to all means of providing public services through the federal government. No, all I am dogmatically opposed to is coercion, which happens every time the government spends your money without asking your permission.

A less violent society?

Steven Pinker has written a book entitled, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, in which he argues that human civilization has been evolving into a more peaceful one. I heard an interview with Pinker on NPR the other day. I found some of his statistics encouraging, and some of his arguments persuasive, but I'm a bit skeptical of the idea that human nature has actually improved.

Keep in mind that there are two very different questions one could ask. We could ask, on the one hand, whether "human nature" has improved, meaning that humans have become fundamentally more moral and genuinely more interested in the good of other human beings. We could also ask, on the other hand, whether institutions have evolved to constrain certain evil tendencies, thus producing a more benevolent societies. I suspect a positive answer to the latter question is far more likely than for the former.

Even so, even if private violence has decreased over time, this does not mean that violence in general has. I appreciated this review by Tyler Cowen, in which he makes this exact point:

Another hypothesis is to see modern violence as lower, especially in the private sphere, because the state is much more powerful. Could this book have been titled The Nationalization of Violence? But nationalization does not mean that violence goes away, especially at the most macro levels. In a variant on my point above, one way of describing the observed trend is “less frequent violent outbursts, but more deadlier outbursts when they come.” Both greater wealth (weapons are more destructive, and thus used less often, and there is a desire to preserve wealth) and the nationalization of violence point toward that pattern. That would help explain why the two World Wars, Stalin, Chairman Mao, and the Holocaust, all came not so long ago, despite a (supposed) trend toward greater peacefulness. Those are hard data points for Pinker to get around, no matter how he tries.

And here is another very good point:

When doing the statistics, one key issue is how to measure violence. Pinker often favors “per capita” measures, but I am not so sure. I might prefer a weighted average of per capita and “absolute quantity of violence” measures. Killing six million Jews in the Holocaust is not, in my view, “half as violent” if global population is twice as high. Once you toss in the absolute measures with the per capita measures, the long-term trends are not nearly as favorable as Pinker suggests.

To put it cynically, if I kill someone so that I can feed my children, it's murder; if America carpet bombs innocent civilians, it's national defense.

One more thought, which is sadly all too easy to dismiss by a great majority of the mainstream media: If not for the ideological claim advanced in the latter part of the 20th century that unborn children are not human, it would be very easy to demonstrate that violence has greatly increased in our generation. In our country alone, there have been 53,000,000 abortions since 1973. This cannot be counted as part of Pinker's data, because he cannot accept it as violence. But it's hard for me to accept that 53,000,000 bloody corpses are a sign of a more peaceful society.

Still, I think we do a disservice to society by always speaking in dreary terms, as if civilization never makes any moral progress. Slavery was once commonly accepted as a legitimate practice virtually everywhere around the world. Now it is accepted almost nowhere. That's progress.

The gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life. Moral progress is far from inevitable, but neither is it futile. It's good to be reminded of both sides; I think Pinker probably dwells on one more than the other. Still, it's probably a good read. Maybe I'll pick it up one of these days.

ReasonTV on international adoption policy

One of the more interesting pieces I've seen by ReasonTV. It's nice to see libertarians talking about real humanitarian issues, you know?

I think it's really sad that we don't think about these issues more. Our political discourse is so wrapped up in American issues, we rarely ever think about how political ideas affect those less fortunate all over the world. The "international community" is really a euphemism for a bunch of elites with mind-boggling amounts of power over the lives of other people. That kind of power is dangerous, even in the hands of good people. You'll find in this video yet another story of immense harm done in the name of good intentions.

There is also reason to question, to a certain extent, the very intentions driving international policies emanating from the UN. In the middle of the video you'll find some of the interviews critiquing the idea that there's some inherent value in a child growing up in her native culture. Any policies which seek to preserve abstract cultural identities are inherently flawed. People, including children, ought to be viewed as individuals, and we ought to work toward allowing all people the greatest possible opportunity for individual thriving. There are many people who seem to believe there is something morally desirable about preserving culture, but I confess I don't think this belief has any basis whatsoever.

I also think this is a very important issue from a sanctity of life perspective. Everyone who cares about abortion cares (or ought to care) about adoption. If life is sacred, we need some societal mechanisms by which we can care for life, and I think one of those mechanisms should be a voluntary adoption process. The problem is that government doesn't seem to want to solve issues of abuse by simply forcing laws. It seems to want to solve them by just taking over the whole process. That is precisely the way in which, on any given issue, government becomes more of a hindrance than a help. It is tragic that there isn't more widespread belief in the ability of free cooperation to take care of orphans.

Watch the video, tell me what you think.

Incomprehensible concreteness

In the past few years I've been strongly rebelling against the long-standing trend in Western thought toward seeing God as so abstract as to be incomprehensible. Whether it's the classical "three O" definition of God (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) or Anselm's ontological characterization of God as "the greatest possible being" or Descartes' imagined corollary of his own self-evident existence (okay, technically his thought was self-evident, which then implied his existence), I find most philosophical approaches start with the abstract and work their way "down." (Note how skeptical I am of this metaphor. Who says abstract knowledge is "higher" than concrete details?) And in case I don't seem to talking about things that matter in the real world, just find a random web site for Christian apologetics and look for the basic arguments. If you don't find something like St. Thomas Aquinas's five arguments very quickly, I'd be surprised.

It would be a little strange, and possibly quite offensive, if someone asked me how I knew my father existed. I knew him, and there's no other way to say it than that. I could describe to you many things about him--that he was a pastor, that he obtained four degrees in four different decades, that he was the most passionate and caring person you'd ever met, that he was brilliant and loved to teach, and on and on.... But these are simply things about him, abstracted away from the concrete existence of the man who was my father. Everyone I have ever met since I graduated from high school lacks and will always lack the actual, concrete knowledge of my father, and know words can ever give that to them.

It's a good thing, in some ways, that we have abstract language in order to communicate experiences that we can never actually share. A friend of mine just recently lost her own father. In some ways it was possible to share that pain with her, to grieve with her, and to let her know she wasn't alone. That is the benefit of having language. On the other hand, the limits of language were painfully apparent to both of us as we struggled to make verbal sense of our grief. Ironic, really, how two people can share a related experience and be mutually aware of how impossible it is to actually share it.

The concrete is far more incomprehensible than the abstract. You can know it, but you can never understand it. Love is that way. Beauty is that way. Even truth itself, at its core, is that way.

That's why I kind of resent the idea that I need a five point argument for the existence of God--or any argument, really. You either know him or you don't. And I suspect there's actually no such thing as simply not knowing him. Some people just think they should be able to understand if they really want to know. I can tell you, if that were the case, we would never know love.

Not so magical

Today I went with a friend to see Richard Dawkins speak at our very own University of Virginia. I was thoroughly underwhelmed. Perhaps it would have been better if I had gone into it knowing that it was simply a promotion for his new book, The Magic of Reality, which is essentially a children's atheist bible. Now if I just insert a few words into the title, like so:

Taking the Magic Out of of Reality

well then, yes, I think that about sums up the lecture today.

Dawkins opened his talk by apologizing that he might sound patronizing, since the book was originally aimed at children of age 12, but he hoped that the book would be valuable to people of all ages. Whenever you hear that expression, "Fun for all ages," don't believe it--the grown-ups will be bored to tears, I assure you. From his high-school level exposition of evolutionary biology to his stumbling explanation of how a prism really splits white light into colors (he wasn't quite successful today with his I-Pad apps), Dawkins was always somewhere in between putting me to sleep and offending me. Does one have to be an atheist to understand rainbows? It's amazing to me how he can consistently disparage any and all religious beliefs as antiquated myths and simultaneously reference scientists like Newton and Copernicus as intellectual giants, without ever dealing with the simple fact that such men had faith.

But that isn't the thing that really bugged me about this talk. Dawkins apparently had some desire to display genuine reverence for truth and to show just how beautiful the natural world really is. How, then, did he come up so short? This I can only explain by pointing out the tension between the desire to find beauty in the universe and the belief that only skepticism is an acceptable lens through which to view it. The word awe simply never came up. Speaking for myself, I heard not a trace of passion in his voice as Dawkins explain that our planet is but a tiny speck of dust compared to our sun, which is itself insignificant compared with the galaxy which enfolds it, which is itself but one out of hundreds of billions in the universe. If you can speak of such things without trembling, you simply have no sense of place in the universe.

The last chapter of Dawkins' book, on miracles, really says everything about the kind of philosophy into which he would like to indoctrinate young minds. He believes in strict rationalism, an approach to learning which refuses to accept anything which has not first been proved. It might be worth pointing out that the proposition that we ought to be rationalists cannot be proved, except by appealing to assumptions which themselves have not been proved. But aside from being logically self-defeating, this philosophy is not as consistent as it would appear with the reality of scientific progress. Were we to throw out the notion of trust entirely, we could not build on the work of others to form a scientific consensus. Trust in some sort of community is a necessary part of all intellectual development, including scientific. Dawkins knows this. That is why he works hard to build community among those who are like-minded. It just doesn't seem to occur to him that this desire for community might have implications for the philosophy he espouses.

This is not going to be a "refute atheism" post. I realize there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of all religions, and I encourage a healthy amount of skepticism in everyone. All I would warn against is making skepticism into an end in itself, and putting one's faith solely in mankind's ability to explain and control reality. Such faith tends to cannibalize itself; it destroys the very magic it once so longed to find.

Ron Paul flip-flops!

I found it! There is one issue on which Ron Paul has actually changed his mind: the death penalty. Check it out:

I would have to say I agree with him...

Legislating morality

What should be the government's role in legislating morality?

The claim you sometimes hear on the left is that the government should not legislate morality at all. This is complete disingenuous. All law is legislated morality. Laws aren't simply recommendations; they come backed with a threat of coercion. If the government is going to threaten to coerce me if I don't follow a particular law, they had better have a good moral argument why I should obey the law. Otherwise, they are no more than brute tyrants. In fact, the left wants to legislate morality all the time and it is completely irrational that they would call it anything else. From income redistribution to food regulations to funding social welfare programs, the left has in mind a moral vision for our country which is has every right to defend in a free society. Only don't pretend no morals are being enforced.

The right, on the other hand, will often strongly endorse the belief that all law is legislated morality. The enthusiasm is a little too strong, however, and very often the right has a very uncritical view of the relationship between morals and laws. For instance, many conservatives will go so far as to propose a constitutional amendment "to protect the institution of marriage." Yet no Republican has seriously proposed a federal ban on divorce. "Traditional values" don't seem to have a clear definition, and the phrase is mostly tossed around in order to rally support for the latest trend in conservative activism.

Libertarians, commonly speaking, tend to favor the left's position that the government ought not to legislate morality. Arguably they are more consistent in this, since they oppose government intervention in both personal and economic spheres of life. Yet unless you are actually an anarchist (in which case none of this applies to you) then you must concede that the government's role is in fact to enforce laws which protect freedom. Thus the argument I made against the left still applies: laws must really be enforced morals, or else they are nothing but tyrannical decrees.

Hopefully each of these caricatures can help warn us against pitfalls in our reasoning about these issues. The fact that we really don't think very clearly about this question shows up in political debates all the time. Very rarely to people have sound principles in mind when they decide that something ought to be law. They implicitly base their arguments on personal experience, without recognizing the unavoidable fact that our personal experience captures an exceedingly minuscule portion of reality.