First impressions on reading Democracy in America

I've always wanted to read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and now I'm taking advantage of my new-found French speaking ability to read the book in French. I haven't gotten very far, but I already have some pretty striking impressions. Here they are.

• Despite claims to the contrary, it seems pretty legitimate after all to say America is in some sense a Christian nation. Sure, you can point to the theology of the Founding Fathers and say, "Hey, it's all just deism," but Tocqueville is more concerned with the angloamericans who founded places like New England. You can't look at the early settlements without seeing an explicit reference to Christian beliefs in both their goals and even their laws. If "the founders" are people like Washington and Jefferson, then okay, maybe we're just a deist nation. But if "the founders" are the Anglo-Saxons who first came to America, then we are definitely a Christian nation.
• Tocqueville's general comments on religion strike me as true today just as they were during the Enlightenment: religion was originally the friend of freedom and equality, then it became an ironic enemy, but in many ways it is still a friend and should be more so. The narrative he tells is something like this: Christian beliefs gave people access to a higher power than political power and a belief in inherent human dignity that transcends culture. This was the first step toward defeating tyranny. The next step is democracy, which Tocqueville seems to be best displayed in America, particularly New England.
• Freedom is not the ability to whatever you want, but rather the ability to do what is right. Tocqueville thus speaks highly of the strong (and religiously motivated) emphasis on education, which he says fosters freedom in the new republic.
• Townships are the nexus of democracy. Americans in the eyes of Tocqueville are successful in democracy because they build it from the ground up. In fact, Tocqueville marvels precisely at how active the local government is in the life of the people, in contrast to his own French government.
• Tocqueville gives one of the best descriptions of the modern libertarian ideal you can find. America is founded on allowing individuals to be sovereign in all things which pertain only to them, and likewise for all levels of the federal structure (towns, cities, states, and finally the federal government). Thus there is as little intervention from the top as possible.
• At the same time, Tocqueville praises townships for having governments which provide an ever-expanding array of services. It may or may not be difficult to reconcile this with modern libertarianism. (Does the growth of federal government actually get in the way of healthy, active local government?)
• Equality is practically synonymous with freedom. Tocqueville insists that there is probably no group of people on earth that has ever achieved more equality of circumstances than the Anglo-Americans. Yet he also claims that they would be the last people on earth to claim that equality of wealth is a goal worth pursuing. Equality of results is, for him, an outgrowth of freedom, but it's also more than that. In some sense, it is freedom, by definition. Freedom means that no one has any special authority given from above, which is the same as equality.
• From the very beginning there was a large difference between the North and the South. A lot of people talk about "America's" guilt in tolerating slavery, but as time goes on we seem to get less and less clear on how striking the regional differences actually were. New England, for example, never had slavery. You have to wonder if we weren't asking for a Civil War just by uniting north and south under one Constitution. (None of this is to say racism didn't exist in the North.)
• Tocqueville is highly critical of slavery, not just because of its consequences for slaves (which is the obvious criticism), but also because of its consequences for society in general. It creates a society which is less free and less progressive for everyone, not just for the enslaved. I believe he says that it makes the society less industrious, which is almost certainly correct.

Some of these impressions might be off base, who knows. What I'm mostly left with is a desire to see more of the vibrant local civic life that Tocqueville seems to love so well in young America. But how do you pull that off in an increasingly transient and mobile society? How do you unite people together by common values? And is there still room in the modern world for communities formed by common religious beliefs?

Bastiat on democracy

Frederic Bastiat makes fun of the contradiction between the socialists' view of voting rights and their view of individual liberties:

When it is time to vote, apparently the voter is not to be asked for any guarantee of his wisdom. His will and capacity to choose wisely are taken for granted. Can the people be mistaken? Are we not living in an age of enlightenment? What! are the people always to be kept on leashes? Have they not won their rights by great effort and sacrifice? Have they not given ample proof of their intelligence and wisdom? Are they not adults? Are they not capable of judging for themselves? Do they not know what is best for themselves? Is there a class or a man who would be so bold as to set himself above the people, and judge and act for them? No, no, the people are and should be free. They desire to manage their own affairs, and they should do so. But when the legislator is finally elected--ah! then indeed does the tone of his speech undergo a radical change. The people are returned to passiveness, inertness, and unconsciousness; the legislator enters into omnipotence. Now it is for him to initiate, to direct, to propel, and to organize. Mankind has only to submit; the hour of despotism has struck. We now observe this fatal idea: The people who, during the election, where so wise, so moral, and so perfect, now have no tendencies whatever; or if they have any, they are tendencies that lead downward into degradation.

And I can't resist reproducing this passage:

The claims of these organizers of humanity raise another question which I have often asked them and which, so far as I know, they have never answered: If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.

I daresay this essay is still one of the best defenses of a free society in existence. Bastiat shows us how a true egalitarian is also a libertarian.

Neoclassical Liberalism

There's a new blog called "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" and their goal appears to be to defend a political philosophy called "neoclassical liberalism." Essentially, it seems like libertarianism with a respect for social justice. Here's an excerpt from the opening post:

What we have in common on this blog is an appreciation for market mechanisms, for voluntary social cooperation, for property rights, and for individual liberty. But we appreciate those things, in large part, because of the way they contribute to important human goods – and especially the way in which they allow some of society’s most vulnerable members to realize those goods.

This may very well be the direction my own political philosophy is going right now, given my fundamental misgivings about libertarianism (for instance, I don't think the case for liberty can be grounded in the concept of "self-ownership"). I was especially intrigued by Jason Brennan's article on a "higher liberalism." So far the writers there have simply done a little bit of orientation, defining terms for future discussion. I look forward to reading how their arguments unfold.

(HT: Marginal Revolution)

MLK, Hayek, and the pursuit of freedom

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a wonderful document for many reasons, especially for his theological opposition to the dualism so prevalent in his time (and still in ours, to some degree or another). But I was fascinated to read it again today and notice the political ideals King affirms. King passionately defends the idea of natural law:

One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

Hayek vs. Schmitt

Mark Lilla's article in The New Republic on China's interest in Western philosophers contains a concise summary of Carl Schmitt's critique of classical liberalism (HT: Peter Leithart):

Schmitt was by far the most intellectually challenging anti-liberal statist of the twentieth century. His deepest objections to liberalism were anthropological. Classical liberalism assumes the autonomy of self-sufficient individuals and treats conflict as a function of faulty social and institutional arrangements; rearrange those arrangements, and peace, prosperity, learning, and refinement will follow. Schmitt assumed the priority of conflict: Man is a political creature, in the sense that his most defining characteristic is the ability to distinguish friend and adversary. Classical liberalism sees society as having multiple, semi-autonomous spheres; Schmitt asserted the priority of the social whole (his ideal was the medieval Catholic Church) and considered the autonomy of the economy, say, or culture or religion, as a dangerous fiction. (“The political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision.”) Classical liberalism treats sovereignty as a kind of coin that individuals are given by nature and which they cash in as they build legitimate political institutions for themselves; Schmitt saw sovereignty as the result of an arbitrary self-founding act by a leader, a party, a class, or a nation that simply declares “thus it shall be.” Classical liberalism had little to say about war and international affairs, leaving the impression that, if only human rights were respected and markets kept free, a morally universal and pacified world order would result. For Schmitt, this was liberalism’s greatest and most revealing intellectual abdication: If you have nothing to say about war, you have nothing to say about politics. There is, he wrote, “absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.”

Since at the moment I'm a bit immersed in Hayek, I felt like this would be a good chance to summarize Hayek's own thoughts in response to Schmitt's. (Hayek himself already attacked Schmitt's ideas several times in The Road to Serfdom.) The above critique seems to be a response to only a rationalistic conception of liberalism, which Hayek scoffed at. If we are referring to the liberalism defended by Hayek, which he took to be the classical liberalism of Locke, Hume, and Smith, then the above critique is simply wrong on every point.

Classical liberalism is not based on the autonomy of self-sufficient individuals. It is built on the study of how people stumble upon political order, rather than arriving there through deliberate design. It would hardly make sense to think of the economy, culture, and religion as autonomous spheres, since these all evolve together--indeed, the functioning of an economy mostly depends on our religious and cultural practices. Yet asserting the priority of the "social whole" would be a worse error still, since, as Hayek says, a "society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it." Classical liberalism does not treat sovereignty "as a kind of coin that individuals are given by nature and which they cash in as they build legitimate political institutions for themselves." On the contrary, liberalism mostly rejects the notion that individuals could build legitimate political institutions for themselves; yet still less can it accept that legitimate institutions arise "as the result of an arbitrary self-founding act by a leader, a party, a class, or a nation." Men do not simply speak order into being; it comes about through a slow and often painful process of evolution. (The founding of the United States, for instance, could not have come about except through the inherited tradition of the rule of law in English politics, which itself arose through a long process of trial and error.) Finally, it is simply false that liberalism says nothing about war and international affairs. Its goal has traditionally been to work toward international government; Hayek himself proposed a federal system to govern nations (see The Road to Serfdom, Chapter Fifteen).

One wonders if history could have been much different if Schmitt had better understood the philosophy he so viciously critiqued.

The Party of Life: the liberalism of F. A. Hayek

The postscript to Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty is entitled, "Why I Am Not a Conservative." For Americans aware of Hayek's influence on political developments of the past half-century or so, this title may be astonishing. Aren't conservatives the very people most influenced by and most appreciative of Hayek's work? How can he devote a whole essay to why he isn't one of them?

The whole essay is indeed confusing for Americans, and from the tone of the essay one senses that Hayek was exasperated at the confusion Americans have created over the terms "liberal" and "conservative." As I've written before, the two terms scarcely mean in American today what they have traditionally meant; the term "liberal" has probably suffered more distortion even than "conservative." For this reason most Americans reading the essay will probably experience a great deal of confusion over who exactly Hayek is talking about, excepting those who are very knowledgeable about the history of ideas. Nevertheless, this is precisely what makes the essay so relevant. It is, in some sense, Hayek's warning not to do exactly what we have done: we have so closely associated his ideas with American conservatism that we can't tell what he was actually saying.

Reponse to Mike Meredith (and all libertarians out there)

Here is a comment left on my blog by Mike Meredith:

Comment by Jameson Graber on 23 November 2010:
I mostly agree with the views you all are espousing, but I think some commenters here are simplifying the issue far too much. The criticism that the government is “doing things to other people they could never justify if they were in the private sector” is, upon a moment’s reflection, not good enough. The government has the right and even the responsibility to punish offenders of the law, whereas private citizens have no such right. Unless you intend to argue that this is not the way things ought to be (which would be arguing for anarchy) you’d better put forth a more reasonable principle which forbids the government from taking these invasive security measures. The fourth amendment should suffice.

I ran across this post on the Freeman website today and thought a couple of things odd and one humorous. First, how is it that any government has rights? As far as I can tell only people have rights. Second, from whence does government's authority to act derive? I fail to understand why anarchy is implied unless government has power that the people don't. The humor is in supposing that the constitution has force. It hasn't been worth the paper it is written on since the ink dried. Or at least since Marbury vs. Madison in 1803. It has had no force of restraint to speak of on government. And what little it has had diminishes with each passing day.

Mike

And here is my response:

Big business vs. free markets

Charles Johnson writing for the Freeman says,

British Petroleum, as a corporation, exists because governments created it – with a monopoly concession from the Shah of Iran to a company owned by the government of the United Kingdom. Like all other Big Oil companies, BP extracts the oil it sells mainly from government-controlled land and sea, through monopoly concessions, bureaucratic bidding processes, and politically granted leases. It uses government protection, liability caps, and escrow funds to insulate their business from paying the economic and social costs of their actions. In a freed market BP’s concentrated wealth and reckless business model would not exist.

Being in favor of free markets does not make you an advocate for big business. In many respects, it makes you just the opposite.

It's nice to see someone debunking the ever-present media insistence that pure capitalism caused the oil spill, and now we need the government to save us.

Capitalism vs. Corporatism

Sheldon Richman over at the Freeman online wrote a great essay asking the simple question, is American "capitalism" really so much better than European "socialism"? He summarizes his view of American economics in this way:

What counts is what the system really is. And it’s nothing like an open, competitive market void of government privilege. It’s a corporatist system in which the liberty and property of regular people are subordinated in myriad ways to the interests of a mainly business-oriented ruling elite. (Do we need further evidence than the “socialist” Barack Obama’s coziness with Wall Street — rhetoric notwithstanding — and his generous gift to the health insurance industry?) Yes, we have some degree of freedom, but it is freedom circumscribed by a system of rules and regulations aimed at producing certain broad economic outcomes for the well-connected. At the federal, state, and local level, money has always talked. Intervention is of course defended on moral grounds (say, protection of consumers and workers), but behind the scenes lurks an economic interest. “Baptists and bootleggers” are ubiquitous.

This is what I appreciate about the libertarian, or classical liberal, perspective. The fundamental difference between "conservative" and "liberal" in this country seems to have to do with where the power structure should be located. The libertarian has the courage to ask, why should the power structure have a central location at all?

This is also why Republicans always sound so hypocritical. They talk about economic liberty, but what it really comes down to is more power for corporations, which is not better than more power for the government (in fact, sometimes it is equivalent). What we need is a true capitalist party, rather than a corporatist party.

Adam Smith on the role of government

Sometimes people wonder, what do libertarians believe government should do? It always sounds as if they don't want the government to get involved at all!

Well, I don't know about libertarians, but Adam Smith had a pretty clear vision of what government should, and should not, do. From Wealth of Nations, the end of Book IV:

It is thus that every system which endeavours, either, by extraordinary encouragements, to draw towards a particular species of industry a greater share of the capital of the society than what would naturally go to it; or, by extraordinary restraints, to force from a particular species of industry some share of the capital which would otherwise be employed in it; is in reality subversive of the great purpose which it means to promote. It retards, instead of accelerating, the progress of the society towards real wealth and greatness: and diminishes, instead of increasing, the real value of the annual produce of its land and labour.

All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings; first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.

A remarkably concise yet robust statement of political philosophy, if you ask me.

Adam Smith on imperfect competition

From Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter IX:

Some speculative physicians seem to have imagined that the health of the human body could be preserved only by a certain precise regimen of diet and exercise, of which every, the smallest, violation necessarily occasioned some degree of disease or disorder proportioned to the degree of the violation. Experience, however, would seem to show, that the human body frequently preserves, to all appearance at least, the most perfect state of health under a vast variety of different regimens; even under some which are generally believed to be very far from being perfectly wholesome. But the healthful state of the human body, it would seem, contains in itself some unknown principle of preservation, capable either of preventing or of correcting, in many respects, the bad effects even of a very faulty regimen. Mr. Quesnai [a French economist], who was himself a physician, and a very speculative physician, seems to have entertained a notion of the same kind concerning the political body, and to have imagined that it would thrive and prosper only under a certain precise regimen, the exact regimen of perfect liberty and perfect justice. He seems not to have considered that in the political body, the natural effort which every man is continually making to better his own condition, is a principle of preservation capable of preventing and correcting, in many respects, the bad effects of a political economy, in some degree both partial and oppressive. Such a political economy, though it no doubt retards more or less, is not always capable of stopping altogether the natural progress of a nation towards wealth and prosperity, and still less of making it go backwards. If a nation could not prosper without the enjoyment of perfect liberty and perfect justice, there is not in the world a nation which could ever have prospered. In the political body, however, the wisdom of nature has fortunately made ample provision for remedying many of teh bad effects of the folly and injustice of man; in the same manner as it has done in the natural body, for remedying those of his sloth and intemperance.

This argument is significant to me for a number of reasons. For one, it deflates the vaunted economic achievements that many wish to ascribe to government. That is, economies have flourished not because of, but rather in spite of the meddling of government. For another, it is a nice statement of Enlightenment optimism: things naturally progress forward, in spite of many serious obstacles. It would be foolish, however, to describe Smith as a simple optimist. There are many other statements in this treatise which sound rather pessimistic. Nevertheless, this is perhaps a hopeful statement for libertarians, who will, with near absolute certainty, never be satisfied with how government handles the economy.

Adam Smith on taxes

From Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II, Part II:

"Before I enter upon the examination of particular taxes, it is necessary to premise the four following maxims with regard to taxes in general.

1. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state....
2. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to every other person....
3. Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it....
4. Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state."

I was thinking about these four maxims with respect to our income taxes. Aside from the fact that Adam Smith says taxing the wages of labor is a terrible idea, I also think our system fails miserably on the first and second of these maxims. I imagine this is fairly detrimental to our economy. That is, the tax code is so horrendously convoluted, that it is not only extremely unequal due to various loopholes, but it is far from clear how much will be owed from year to year.

One thing I will say, however, from reading this monumental treatise on economics: taxation is anything but simple. At various times I have been ideologically attracted to things like the "flat tax" or the "fair tax," but Smith's treatise has made me realize that taxation is a subtle and difficult project. Politics has probably given us very nearly the worst possible system of taxation for a country to still be as prosperous as ours; yet even if we had expert economists determining a system of taxation, I doubt it would be easy to come up with.

Still, Adam Smith is full of insights like this one, which I think libertarians and conservatives probably tout a little too much:

"High taxes, sometimes by diminishing the consumption of the taxed commodities, and sometimes by encouraging smuggling, frequently afford a smaller revenue to government than what might be drawn from more moderate taxes."

And of course, I think we can all agree with this:

"There is no art which one government sooner learns of another, than that of draining money from the pockets of the people."

Adam Smith, the prophet?

From Wealth of Nations Book V, Chapter III:

"The progress of the enormous debts which at present oppress, and will in the long-run probably ruin, all the great nations of Europe, has been pretty uniform."

It's like he could see the future.

Liberty and Unity

The Freeman has an excellent post on its web site concerning "Competition and Cooperation." The basic argument is that through competition, we actually achieve cooperation as an extended society. This might sound counter-intuitive; normally we think of competition and cooperation as opposites. But the beauty of the free market is that it allows our competition with one another on a micro level to result in cooperation on a macro level.

This can be summarized as follows. The problem of economics is to figure out how to distribute goods and services to everyone in a society. That's a pretty huge problem on the face of it. With so many people living in our society, who can possibly figure out how to distribute needed goods and services to everyone? So we break down the problem by localizing it. Let each individual decide for himself what he will give in exchange for the goods and services he desires. The enormous problem of how to distribute goods and services to everyone is broken down into millions of much, much smaller problems. This brilliant move is what makes our complex economy possible.

Breaking the problem down in this way, of course, leads to competition. I can't just sell goods for any price I want. I have to adjust according to demand and competing supply. Likewise, I can't just buy goods and services for any price I want. I have to adjust according to supply and competing demand. This is a simple consequence of the fact that resources are finite. But through the competition that ensues we actually become part of an enormous cooperative entity that solves one of the world's most difficult problems--how to distribute resources in a society.

I've compared this before to the brain. As astonishing as this might sound, the individual neurons in your brain do not cooperate with each other according to a single plan! Instead, they each individually act out of something like "self-interest." But the result is human thought, as well as the many other activities of the brain. This wouldn't be possible without a complex network of neurons all acting in a decentralized manner.

How, then, can we truly be one society? If each of us busies himself with his own interests, how can we have unity with others? I am not speaking, of course, of the people we know and interact with face to face. There is nothing about free markets that would prevent people from cooperating with people they know personally. Otherwise it would be difficult to have a family business!

I'm speaking about people we don't know--which, in this world, will always be the vast majority of people. How are we united to them? Well, let's go back to the brain again. Each neuron acts out of "self-interest." Yet because they are interconnected with one another, their collective interactions constitute the miracle of human thought.

So it is, I think, with human beings. The free market shouldn't be treated as a concession to human self-centeredness, as in, "Well, we really ought to all work together, but since that will never happen, we should try the free market, instead." Rather, the free market is the best way for us to cooperate as a society. The market's purpose is to bring us together in a way that would simply not be possible if we tried anything else.

Let me pause to make a rather abstract point. It seems to me that the question of how to distribute goods and services to a society is not merely difficult; it is on a different level altogether. I would categorize this problem as a "higher order" problem. This was the point I was trying to make earlier in "Decentralized Learning." In the brain, logical reasoning is a higher order problem than an individual neuron can solve. It is only when neurons cooperate in that decentralized way that they, as a collective, can solve this higher order problem. In the same way, economics is a higher order problem than an individual human being (or think tank, or government agency) can solve. It is only through that abstract form of cooperation known as the free market that we can solve this higher order problem.

Just as neurons in the brain are connected in an organic way (literally), the free market works precisely when we are connected to one another on a fundamental level. As the folks who write at the Freeman will tell you, the market cannot exist without the rule of law. If people lack basic respect for human life and dignity, then of course the market will fail.

But where I would probably depart from the libertarian philosophy is that I see no reason to make individual liberty the highest political ideal. I don't think the goal of society is merely to ensure each of its members can be left alone in peace. What if we were to say instead that the goal of society is to connect each of its members to one another in an organic way? This ought to safeguard against two pitfalls. On the one hand, it frees us from massive centralized authority, which invariably grows more and more tyrannical; on the other hand, it opens us to the possibility of genuine connectedness and unity with other human beings.

In terms of economics, it seems the market would work even better if we were all happy to be involved in it. Imagine a society in which people were actually excited about the idea of solving the problem of distribution through individualized market activity. Imagine if people had some sort of implicit faith that by acting in a rational way to safeguard their own well-being, they were also contributing to the aid of a greater whole, namely the society to which they were connected. I think this is already true of Americans to some limited extent. But I think people tend to caricature this kind of faith as materialistic, shallow, and selfish. It need not be any of these things. The idea that we are working together through a localized, individualized economic system is as beautiful as it is useful.

We humans need ideas to help unify us into a society. Often the free market is seen as something that works against that unity, and for that reason other ideologies have come up to compete against it. But I believe the free market is the best economic ideology, precisely because it allows us to achieve the kind of extended unity that is necessary to build a modern society.

Often you will hear the free market defended on the grounds that it is not ideology; it is just "facts." This is not my reasoning, nor do I think this reasoning is the kind we need. My grounds for supporting the free market have nothing to do with markets being "the natural state of things," or some such idea. On the contrary, I would argue that we should actively seek to create free markets. Free markets are the goal. They are not simply what happens whenever you just let everything run on its own. What happens when you let everything run on its own is that wicked people do whatever they please. That is not freedom; it is tyranny and lawlessness.

I think many people are wondering these days what basic set of ideas will give us unity as a free society. The principles of economic liberty should be included in that set of ideas, in a way that inspires people to greater appreciation of our economic system. I find the idea of an extended society working together in a decentralized way quite beautiful, even mysterious. How can it be that my tiny little decisions about what to eat and what to wear affect people all over the country and even all over the world? Yet that is how far our unity with one another extends, and it is all because of the gift of economic freedom.

Adam Smith on government spending

From The Wealth of Nations, Book II, Chapter III:

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohbiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Free meditation on personal liberties

Like the free market, this post will have no central planning. I'm just going to let my thoughts make their way onto the screen by way of my fingers.

That seems like the right way to introduce this post, not only because it excuses the fact that I have no idea what I'm going to say, but also because the topic of this post is the libertarian/classical liberal philosophy of personal freedoms. Specifically, I've been thinking about that philosophy championed by thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, which says that a free society is one in which we cannot determine ahead of time what the collective goal of society should be. Rather, we simply design government to uphold certain fundamental human rights, and then let humans interact in unpredictable ways.

There are a couple of fundamental theoretical problems with this. One is this: if no one has the authority to determine what is the proper goal for the collective, why does anyone have the authority to determine what rights an individual should have? The other problem is this: is there any set of individual human rights that is actually absolute and self-consistent?

Let me talk about the second problem first. In my view, nearly every individual right must be relativized, not merely because we haven't yet found politicians who are honest to preserve our fundamental rights, but rather because certain rights are mutually contradictory.

Consider this simple example. We believe that each person has the fundamental right to his own life, as well as the fundamental right to own property. The State, we believe, is obligated to defend both of those rights. But this is impossible, in an absolute sense. In order to protect the lives of citizens, the State must necessarily impose taxes on them. In an absolute sense, this infringes on their right to property.

One might object that this doesn't infringe on the right to property, because in fact a fair exchange has taken place: protection of life in exchange for taxes. But this is not correct, because taxes must be collected based on coercion and not exchange--otherwise the State would cease to be the State. Clearly not all coercion is unacceptable; without it we would have total anarchy.

Indeed, it would be unacceptable to make the protection of human life into a private exchange. Then the rich and powerful could afford to protect themselves more than the poor and weak. But the whole point of a State is to preserve fundamental human rights for both the strong and the weak. If the right to life is not fundamental, what more do you have? Therefore, some people must be forced to give up part of their property, even if they would rather not, and even if they don't feel they're getting an even trade.

So what if we tried to make property rights absolute by imposing a certain limit on how much the State could tax its citizens? Yet in simple economic terms, this is a price cap; it is inefficient by nature. Let's still just consider nothing but the two fundamental rights I've already mentioned: life and property. In order to defend the lives of all of its citizens, the State's costs may go up or down. During times of war, its costs will go up. During times when there is particular danger because of terrorism, costs will go up. During times when there is an extraordinary amount of crime, costs will go up. How can the State pay for these additional costs if it has no ability to tax beyond a certain rate?

Thus these supposedly fundamental rights are inherently conflicting. The State cannot preserve both in any absolute sense. What must happen, then, is some sort of collective bargaining. Because the State must have the power to coerce its citizens into paying taxes for the protection of all citizens, it will naturally always seek to tax at the highest amount it can get away with. Democratic election of government allows the citizens to keep the State in check; it allows the people to make some sort of collective bargain with the State in order to keep the price of government down.

There may be other more efficient ways than democracy of performing this kind of necessary collective bargaining, but the point is that a bargain is necessary. The right to life and the right to property are necessarily in conflict. They cannot be held absolutely. Demand that the State protect one, and you increase the risk of losing the other.

I use these two rights as illustration to make my point clearer to libertarians and conservatives, who are often prone to say that these are the two most important rights--perhaps the only two rights that the government ought to really enforce. Yet even those two rights are not consistent with one another; they are not absolute. If the right to life is absolute (and I'm inclined to side with this one over property) then the right to property is not; conversely, if the right to property is absolute, then the right to life is relative, and frighteningly so.

But I could go on to give real life examples of "rights" that we Americans have endowed ourselves with which are all clearly mutually contradictory. Let's start with one that is particularly ironic. Is it everyone's right to own a home? Our government's policies suggest that it is, yet we all know it isn't. But for those inclined to say that the right to own a home is a necessary corollary of the right to own property, let me answer: nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the two are totally opposed to one another.

For the right to own property does not mean you have the right to own any particular thing; it simply means that you have the right to keep what you have, and you have the right to dispense of what you have in any way that you see fit. If I have a car and I choose to dispense of it by giving it away, that is my right. If I choose to dispense of it by trading it for $50,000, then that is also my right, and it is the right of the fool who chooses to make such a trade to dispense of his $50,000 in that way. The right to own property means you can't tell me how to dispense of my property, nor can you tell me what I must own.

On the other hand, if everyone has the right to own a house, then no one really has the right to his own property. Because in that case everyone who wants a house is entitled to receive one from the labor of society. This means that, if necessary, someone can be forced to build a house even if he isn't getting what he wants for it. In other words, he doesn't have the right to dispense of his labor the way he chooses. His right to property is sacrificed.

This is especially the case with the idea of universal health care. Actually, the latest health care bill past by Obama and the Democrats is overtly anti-property rights, for it actually requires that a person buy a product that he or she may not want. Even if this weren't the case, any attempt to provide every person with a particular product will inevitably lead to the infringement of this right to property. It is just as I stated above; someone will be forced to dispense of his or her labor in a way that doesn't give desired compensation.

I could go on and on, of course. The right to consume whatever resource you want conflicts with your right to live in a healthy environment. The right to free speech conflicts with the right not to feel threatened or abused. The right to privacy conflicts again with the right to life--no, I'm not talking about abortion, I'm actually talking about the conflict between the desire to be protected from terrorism and the desire to have the government leave us alone.

Now many libertarians, or even conservatives, would say that the problem is that we have to get back to those fundamental rights enshrined in Mr. Jefferson's famous writing: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (property). But here is why I have started with life and property. These two alone are sufficient to illustrate the necessary tension between all rights, no matter how simple.

And that brings me back to the first point I mentioned. If one would argue that making a few individual rights absolute, while making the rights of the general society a relative thing which cannot be predetermined by human presumption, where then did those individual rights come from? Is it really any less presumptuous to think that we have determined which individual rights are fundamental than to think we know which direction is best for society? I do not argue that the two are the same thing; I understand perfectly well the distinction between individual liberties and the rights of general society. I am merely asking, who tells us that some rights are sacrosanct, while others are not so important? Mr. Jefferson was a fine man, but I would not make a deity out of him (my enrollment at the University of Virginia notwithstanding).

I don't know that there are any easy answers. Some might suggest that the best way to sort it out is to let the democratic process do its work. I suppose that's akin to the way many libertarians and conservatives suggest we just let the market do its work. The problem is that of course it doesn't work. Neither democracy nor markets are natural. Do you know why we can't just let the market do its work? Because the market doesn't exist; it is an abstract entity that we made up. All we have to rely on to "do its work" is the actual people who belong to this world. And indeed, if they can rely on someone establishing a free market in which to freely exchange goods and services to one another, I believe that people will generally find an equilibrium that is to be desired. But who can establish such a thing? I'm not sure a free market has ever existed.

Democracy, on the other hand, is far worse than the free market, in the sense that I cannot idealize it so much by claiming it has never existed. Democracy has existed, and it has done countless evils. This is because, as I have said before, the State has incentive only to implement those policies which earn reelection, and not those policies which are actually best for its citizens, or the world in general. And citizens, in turn, have every incentive to vote for those politicians that benefit them, personally, rather than voting for those that benefit the whole. Democracy is indeed the worst form of government ever invented, except for all of those other forms of government that have been tried.

All this to say that I don't think letting some societal construct "run its course" is any sort of theoretical solution to the question of how to form a free society.

I don't pretend to have the answers, or really any hint of an answer at this exact moment. Really this post is just a matter of me blurting out something that's been on my mind. I'm sympathetic and even quite enthusiastic about the classical liberal or libertarian philosophy of political economy, but I find its theoretical groundwork a little shaky. I've tried here to critique it on its own terms, using economic explanations for why individual liberties are not consistent with one another. Indeed, I think the stunning theoretical realization I've come to is that the problem of scarcity, which economists are so familiar with, extends even into the moral realm, so I don't think it's possible to formulate any two human rights that are actually mutually consistent in any absolute sense. The simple reason is that if I know I must provide two different protections to people around me, then any time I am forced to choose between them I will necessarily fail.

Well, that's enough rambling for one night. I really should have gone to bed a couple hours ago.

Great Quote from Adam Smith

The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity in his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from employing whom they think proper. To judge whether he is fit to be employed, may surely be trusted to the discretion of the employers whose interest it so much concerns. The affected anxiety of the law-giver lest they should employ an improper person, is evidently as impertinent as it is oppressive.

From The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X, Part II.

The thing that is far too often missed is how much classical liberals--defenders of the free market--cared for the rights of the poor.

Hayek on Intelligibility vs. Rationality

Unlike the Youtube commenters, who focus on whether or not intellectuals really are arrogant/stupid/evil, I think it's interesting to focus on what Hayek says about rationality vs. intelligibility.

Go back to Descartes, he says. In other words, go back to the beginning of modern skepticism: if I can't understand it, I will reject it. If it's unintelligible, it must be irrational.

Hayek's epistemology is different from that. The behavior of the free market may very well be unintelligible, but that doesn't make it irrational. We can see the general principles by which a good outcome is achieved, but it's difficult to see how particular actions in the private sector can possibly contribute to a good outcome.

Hayek therefore argues that intellectuals have a problem of epistemology, not a moral problem. They can't see the good in individual actions in the private sector, and therefore they reject the idea that those actions can contribute to the public good. Unintelligibility equals irrationality.

Just a thought: perhaps this explains something about why the Left has tended to be more secular, while the Right has retained a stronger religious backing. Those who take up modern skepticism tend to reject religion, and by Hayek's argument they will also tend to be skeptical of the free market. Perhaps it is not so much that Christianity has tended to promote free market economics as it is that the secular Left has philosophically alienated both Christians and classical liberals.

Politics and Sacramental Worldview

One of the blogs I follow, An Orthodox Christian is a Postmodern World, has a post that came out today on the recent oil spill in the gulf coast. It's short, and worth reading. Fascinating what he says about environmentalism in the Orthodox faith:

Environmental concern reflects the Orthodox understanding of the Creation as a Sacrament, a meeting place with God. Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky writes "grace is implied in the act of creation," and furthermore, that the "the world is created in order that it might be deified" and "creation can have no other end than deification."

I find it essential in these times to interact with Christian tradition that takes this kind of view of creation. In the West we've been far too influenced by the one-sided view of Protestant dualism that claims creation is secondary in God's plan; in fact, in many Protestant traditions, its destiny is simply to be utterly destroyed and replaced with something else. Not only do I find this one-sided, I actually tend to sympathize more with the view that creation has a more fundamental role in God's work of salvation. (See Romans 8:19-21)

This particular Orthodox Christian has tended to side with more socialized economics, as you can read here in his post on socialized medicine. I suspect many Orthodox, as well as Roman Catholics, agree with this approach to economics based on their tradition. What I appreciate about this approach to political life is that it take all things to be spiritual--that is, all things need to be approached using the power of the Spirit through the work of the Church. There is no secular sphere that gets to have its own secular rules.

Where I disagree perhaps most strongly with this approach is in the tradition itself. Both Catholics and Orthodox are more used to a "top down" approach, in which the individual responds to the directives of higher authorities. I concede that in many ways this works, and it's respectable for that fact alone. But on the other hand, this approach tends to institutionalize bad ideas as well as good--and even the good ideas lose their capacity for improvement. Incidentally, this is almost the exact critique I would give of socialist government.

Nevertheless, I think these Christians deserve to be taken seriously on economic and social issues (in fact I am with them 100% on more than one social issue, including abortion). As a Christian who happens to appreciate both Protestantism and the classical liberal tradition, I feel challenged to seek a more deeply spiritual explanation for my beliefs, one that can somehow interact with the more mystical tradition with which the Orthodox approach social issues.

I wonder if it's possible to be a Reformed Protestant libertarian mystic?

Decentralized Learning

As an undergraduate, one of the most thought-provoking classes I ever took was a class on the philosophy of Paul Churchland. His eliminative materialist philosophy challenged my traditional thinking, especially as I come from a Christian background, yet his whole approach to philosophy has captured my imagination and continues to shape my thinking.

What has always stuck with me is Churchland's goal of merging scientific inquiry about the brain with philosophical inquiry about the mind. Modern science has made that possible. Whereas before neuroscience came into its own, philosophers generally engaged in the philosophy of mind merely by, well, thinking.

Perhaps Churchland's most challenging idea about the mind is that it really doesn't "contain" the beliefs and ideas that we talk as if we "have." This is a direct consequence of looking at the mind as equivalent to the brain, and asking, how does the brain work? The brain, as it turns out, is a complex network of cells, each with a set of connections to other cells, with each of those connections adjusting its "weight" over time due to a series of interactions between cells. The upshot is that what we know and believe is really embedded in a set of weights that describe this neural network at a given time.

Think of it as a market. In a market, people freely exchange goods with one another. You can think of people in the market corresponding to cells in the brain, and economic exchanges as the connections between cells. The state of the market is described by all the exchanges that are taking place. The efficiency of the market is directly analogous to the efficiency or health of the brain.

In both pictures, all we can really say is that a complex network is in a certain "state" in a multi-dimensional "state space." We can never tell the whole story by boiling it all down to a collection of thoughts or ideas (in the case of the brain) or a bottom line GDP per capita or some other economic measure (in the case of the market).

How can a complex network that behaves according to an unpredictable series of exchanges be said to "learn" anything? This is where our intuition fails us, but if we challenge ourselves to think a little more abstractly about ourselves, we find some startling insights. Here is what Churchland says about learning and conceptual change in Chapter 11 of A Neurocomputational Perspective:

To cognitive creatures, the world is a highly ambiguous place. not just in the ambiguity it presents to our sensory systems, where the initial coding is typically consistent with a diversity of external circumstances, but more profoundly in the ambiguity it presents to our conceptual systems. Any conceptual framework, no matter how robust or natural its categories may seem to us, is but a single point in a practically infinite space of alternative possible frameworks, each with a comparable a priori claim on our commitment. ...

This talk of a vast space of alternatives is not merely romantic. Each of us has a history of conceptual diversity already. For you were not born with your adult framework. You came to it slowly, through a long period of development. There is indeed a space, through which each of us has a complex journey already completed. ...

Talk of conceptual "space" may seem metaphorical still, but as outlined in the two preceding chapters, recent research has shown us how to make literal and very useful sense of it. If we assume that the human brain is a multilayered network of interconnected units, we can uniquely specify its current position in conceptual space by specifying the individual strengths or weights of its myriad synaptic connections.... That configuration of weights can be directly represented by a specific point in a multidimensional space, a space with a distinct axis for each of the brain's 10^14 dimensions with at least 10 possible positions along each. Its volume is almost unimaginably vast--at least 10^(10^14) functionally distinct positions--as our guiding metaphor suggested.

That number, 10^(10^14), is far too large to fathom. 10^14, by itself, is 1 followed by 14 zeros, as in 100000000000000. So the number we're talking about is 10^100000000000000, or 1 followed by 100000000000000 zeros. I'm not going to type that out for you.

We find ourselves hopelessly incapable of contemplating the vast realm of possible states which our own brain may explore. Yet it is precisely by exploring that incomprehensible space that our brains learn. We develop categories by which to understand the world around us, we develop ideas that help us predict events in our lives, and we develop moral beliefs and attitudes that help us decide what to do next.

This has a very troubling yet delightful consequence: I am not really an "I." Although intuitively I would like to believe that there is a singular force or will driving my mind, such is not the case (if smart men like Churchland are to be believed). What we see instead is that I am the product of a series of unpredictable exchanges in a complex network. There is no central authority in this network; in essence, there is no "I" except what has arisen out of this series of exchanges.

Intuitively, I find this troubling. Surely there is an "I" lurking about somewhere, driving the machine. The image of a reasonable soul driving the body is a long-standing one that will not quickly go away. However, scientific study of the brain has provided me with an opportunity to rethink my understanding of myself in an infinitely more interesting way. I am not singular, but plural.

When I say plural I emphatically do not mean democratic. In no way do the cells of the brain cast ballots and vote on what the brain as a whole will believe. To think this would be missing the point. There is no belief contained somewhere in the brain. Beliefs are mere "cross sections" of a state in a vast state space. When I say I am plural, I mean rather who I am, what I think, and how I approach life is the sum of a series of exchanges that I neither planned from the beginning nor fully understand or control now. It is as if my mind is a marketplace, and I am merely the result that some "invisible hand" has created out of a complicated series of economic exchanges.

But if I am troubled at the thought of thinking of myself in this decentralized way, it does not surprise me in the least if we as a society tremble at the thought of thinking of our economy in a decentralized way. The desire to have centralized planning of our complex economy is probably related to the desire to believe that I have a centralized will that drives the complex network that constitutes my own mind.

To be very concrete, consider the desire for universal health care. In our day, this is commonly called a very "collectivist" goal, with the implication being that we seek the good of the whole rather than of individuals. We put our trust in politicians to carry out our collective desire to give everyone health care, because we believe that the whole society ought to be driven in part by this single purpose. In other words, there has to be some singular will driving the whole thing.

The fact that we come up with this democratically leads us to believe that we are meeting the needs of the whole society. But this is not how the brain works, and neither is it how society works most effectively. In the end, it is not democratic decisions that are most effective, but rather decentralized decisions. The latter are not as readily accepted by society, because we can't see them as directly or concretely define them as easily as the former. Yet a society that grows in a decentralized way harnesses infinitely more learning power than it ever could if driven by some central (albeit democratic) authority. (This idea is not original to me; Friedrich Hayek said much the same thing. Incidentally, Hayek was also trained as a neuroscientist.)

For many people, the thought of a truly decentralized society, in which people enjoy the freedom to make private economic decisions rather than be guided by public opinion, is scary, because it seems like a purposeless society. It has no central goal; how can such a society have a meaningful collective life?

Yet that is precisely the life of the human mind. It is not given some central goal to pursue from birth. It is given an incomprehensibly vast state space to explore as it attempts to interact with the world around it. The result is a human person--not a static, well-defined concept, but a dynamic personality which is never fully predictable.

The same can be said of a free society. While it does not appear to be given some overarching goal, yet it can be truly said to have some collective life. I reject the conservative notion that the individual is more important than the collective. I think the collective is vitally important, but I also believe that the way in which we truly grow as a collective is through individual freedom, allowing our society to grow through complex interaction between its constituent members.

In essence, a free society can be said to "learn" in a way that a socialized society cannot. Socialism depends on central planning, which leaves no room for real learning. The reason today that the average person cannot imagine a computer learning is that most of the computers we use are based on central planning: an engineer designs the machine to work according to a certain set of instructions, and the machine must faithfully carry out those instructions. However, the reality is that many computers out there can and do learn, at least in a primitive sense. This is because we have begun to design parallel processing systems which mimic the complex neural networks found in the brain.

There are many people today who wish that some centralized governing agency would engineer society in a way that we could follow the instructions exactly and achieve a desired outcome. Thus they clamor for more regulations of the market, more government spending, universal health care, and so on.

Then there are those of us who desire a free society, because we understand that real societal learning takes place without central planning. Not all of us may be able to accept the idea of a decentralized self; but at least we are able to accept the idea of a decentralized market, in which human beings acting in their own self interest actually work to the benefit of the collective.

I have not even begun to treat these ideas with sufficient care, but maybe this blog post is a start.