politics Archives • Page 2 of 2 • Isaac Morehouse

Voters are Liars

I recently heard a political commentator bemoan the results of surveys and elections. He said the sad truth, whether libertarians wanted to hear it or not, is that Americans want big government. They want handouts, high taxes, regulatory interference, and on and on. They vote for people who talk about it. They re-elect them when they deliver it. On opinion surveys they favor entitlement programs and broad intervention. I couldn’t help but laugh.

A person who studies only quarterbacks is likely to interpret an NFL game as the result of QB play. A person who immerses themselves in politics is likely to interpret society as the result of political opinion and activity. In the former case, there is at least plausible evidence that QB’s are a major factor. In the latter, it is almost entirely an illusion that politics and political sentiment reveal the broader health of liberty.

Voters are liars. They tell the truth about their opinion in the abstract, free from trade-offs and constraints, but this has little to no meaning when translated into the real world. If I asked you to vote between a person who offered a better world, and one who offered a less bad world, and promised that your vote was guaranteed to not change the outcome either way, what would you do? What could I conclude about your preferences from your vote?

If I polled you and asked whether or not you like the idea of someone giving you something for free, again promising that how you answered had no bearing on the real world, what would you say? What could I learn from that about your values?

Voting and surveys are free ways to express a sentiment or indulge in a real or desired preference. Not only that, the sentiments expressed are not about the real world. Politics is a zero sum game, completely unlike nearly every other arena of life. Imagine how different your preferences would be if everything were zero-sum like politics. What if you had to choose once for all between brands of coffee, cars or clothing? What if you could not go back, at least not for several years, and try another? What if whatever a majority in your area voted on would be applied to everyone else? Under this scenario we could poll people and ask which of three or four brands they prefer. We’d get some data, but it would reveal nothing whatsoever about what people actually value if they were choosing in the non-zero-sum marketplace and bearing the full costs and benefits of their choices.

Back to society today. Do people really favor less liberty and more government? Elections and polls are a very poor measure. Let’s not look at stated preferences about the artificial political world, but revealed preferences in the real world of win-wins, marginal decision making, internalized costs and benefits, and trade-offs. If you examine the market, what would you say people are “voting” for? Radically individualistic technology. More and more choice. Freedom from being lumped in with groups. The ability to choose everything. Private alternatives to government dominated services like transportation, information transmission, education, protection, rule-making social norms and values, health maintenance, and on and on.

Don’t listen so much to what people say, look at what they reveal by their actions. Nobody admits to loving Barry Manilow, but the guy sells a ton of records. No one says they want to abolish public education, but they keep putting their resources into alternatives to it.

Frankly, I don’t care what people say in polls or who they vote for in the fairyland of politics. What I see around me – the revealed preferences of billions of earth’s citizens – is a vote, indeed a mandate, for more freedom.

The Myth of Self-Regulation

No business, product, service or industry can self-regulate. All must and will be regulated by some external entity. The question is who or what?

In a market, regulation is inescapable. Firms are regulated by wholesalers, retailers, capitalists, workers, packagers, shippers, competitors, consumers, shareholders and public opinion. These myriad regulators are exacting. They apply pressure from every angle, on every aspect of business. Get sloppy with your purchasing practices and wholesalers make better deals with your competitors. Overlook product safety and consumers and public opinion slap you down. Make frivolous expenditures and your source of capital and shareholders head for the hills. Drive too hard a bargain with employees and productivity declines or they leave you for another firm.

Firms have room for experimentation and risk-taking, but they have full responsibility to all of these market regulators for the outcome. No firm is a “price-maker” in a market. No firm is a compensation, safety, or policy-maker in the market either. All the parties to which they answer set the terms. Oh sure, firms can do what they want; unless they seek profit. Profit demands that they obey the regulators that fill the market across the whole production chain. It’s not easy.

Firms that have become successful and large tend to get tired of the constant regulation. They want a reprieve from the demands of stakeholders. To gain freedom from the regulating market, firms seek the comfort and stability of government regulation.

Government regulation is nothing like market regulation. It’s yoke is easy for the well-connected and deep pocketed, but often unbearable for the shoestring upstart. Market regulation is blind to size, wealth, political affiliation, slickness, religion or creed. Government regulation is built upon them.

Market regulation keeps an open invitation to anyone who wants to join the ranks of regulators; though promises no one their opinions will have a final say unless they prove worthy across the market. Government regulation is strictly closed off to anyone except those long-loyal to the party in power, and promises that the elite cadre of regulators’ opinion is final and binding. Market regulation is nimble, swift, constantly adapting, inescapable and unrelenting. Government regulation is ham-handed, slow, hidebound, avoided with a little craftiness, and backs off for a favored few with the right mix of political moves.

Market regulation is created and enforced by parties that stand to gain or lose by the actions of the regulated; parties who gain real-world expertise on the regulations effects. Government regulation is created and enforced by parties with no connection to the regulated actions or items, except the few politically connected firms that agitate for it. Market regulation draws on the dispersed knowledge of millions across the globe, from experts to anonymous users. Government regulation pretends a handful of elites can outthink the millions.

Market regulation seeks only the betterment of all market participants, regardless of which firms offer it. Government regulation seeks to destroy some firms for the benefit of others, regardless of what they offer market participants. Market regulation is by the many, for the many. Government regulation is by the few, for the few.

Self-regulation is not an option. The question is who’s a better regulator, markets or government?

There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Public-Private Partnership’

It’s long been a trend for local and state governments to create agencies and entities that are supposed to enhance commercial activity in their area. There are myriad legal and logistical arrangements, but they all have some common features. They’re all reliant on government in structure and law, they all use taxpayer funds to accomplish their projects, and they all love to use newspeak phrases like, “public-private partnership” to describe their activities.

An online dictionary definition of partnership is useful:

“A legal contract entered into by two or more persons in which each agrees to furnish a part of the capital and labor for a business enterprise, and by which each shares a fixed proportion of profits and losses.”

And,

“A relationship between individuals or groups that is characterized by mutual cooperation and responsibility, as for the achievement of a specified goal.”

Clearly, government economic meddling projects do not fit either of these definitions. How can “the public” enter into a partnership? How can “the public” share in profit or loss? In reality, governments take money from people in their vicinity by force, then they give some of it to suits in an agency who give it to favored businesses and investors. “The Public” never agrees to anything. There is no mutual cooperation and certainly no responsibility or profit/loss sharing.

The absurdity of calling it a partnership can be illustrated with the following thought experiment. Imagine your friend took some money from your wallet, deposited it in his checking account, kept most of it for himself and gave the rest to another guy to start a business. No strings attached, just a gift of start-up capital. Then your friend started publicly talking about how this was a partnership between you and startup guy. After getting over your initial anger that he took your money and didn’t even consult with you before throwing it after some business venture, you try to consider the possible upsides of this unjust act. You ask him if that means you will own shares in the company. No. Does it mean you get some percentage of any profit? No. Do you get an interest payment on your stolen and loaned money? No. He assures you it’s OK though, because neither are you on the hook for any losses (besides of course the loss of the money he already took, which you’ll never see again.) In other words, this is nothing like a partnership.

What you get is money taken from you, spent on middle-men who are paid to give the rest to whatever business they want to. You are not a partner, you are a victim. Partnership implies consent. Partnership implies shared benefit and responsibility Partnership implies choice. There is no such thing as a public-private partnership.

Institutions Can Improve Even If People Don’t

Originally posted here.

Airlines are loaded with passengers who surf the Internet while soaring through the air, chatting in real-time to anyone else on the globe, posting in social media, shopping, and downloading and reading books on a wide variety of readers. Such a scene would have astonished a person living 50 years ago, to say nothing of a person living 500 years ago.

How do we account for this? A person born five centuries ago is probably just as smart as someone born today. The raw material of the human brain has not changed much during this span of time. Yet people are today infinitely more capable of accomplishing almost any task imaginable than people in 1512.

The greatest navigator of centuries past would have found it a monumental task to leave from one destination and arrive at a precise latitude and longitude halfway across the globe, and it would have taken months. Today, a half-witted teenager can use Google Maps and modern transportation to accomplish the same feat in a single day.

The greatest communicators in the past were unlikely to reach 1 million people with their ideas in a lifetime. Today, the most-incoherent celebrities can reach millions in minutes on Twitter. Conversely, if the greatest scientists today were sent back in time, they would be able to achieve almost nothing absent computers and modern lab equipment.

A weak and feeble worker today can move more tons of earth than the strongest shovel-wielding excavator of the past. Given the inherited technological progress of humanity, even an average Joe can do amazing things with ease. It does not take a superior human to achieve superior results.

Economically speaking, the marginal productivity of workers increases with the capital and technology available to them.

But let’s broaden the point to issues of morality. How can we become better people — more peaceful, cooperative, and creative — in the same spirit in which we have become more effective and productive with better technology? We need better moral “capital” and moral “technology” that enables morally superior outcomes even without morally superior people.

The moral technology I am speaking of is social and political institutions. A person born today is no more or less likely to be moral than a person born 500 years ago, but they can be more or less likely to act morally based on the institutions around them.

Moral institutions change and evolve just like technology. They can reduce or expand not only the morality of individuals on the inside, but the harm or good caused by their actions on the outside. The most saintly person born into a world where slavery was the norm would have very limited ability to stop the practice, though she could abstain from participating in it at great personal cost.

A horrendously evil person born into a world where slavery is considered abhorrent would be unable to lord over slaves, without tremendous personal cost. It is entirely possible that many people living today have it in them to be on par with the worst slave masters in history — only the opportunity for their evil does not present itself, given the progress in this area of our social and political institutions.

This does not mean that individual choices are meaningless. Far from it. A moral person can always do good within their institutional framework, and a good framework can exponentially enhance the good one can do. Individual choices are vastly important.

But in order for the world to be free of oppression by states, for example, it does not require that every individual be an angel or that the average morality of the population be better than it currently is.

How can institutions improve if morality does not? Institutions are ultimately the result of our beliefs. Better beliefs will result in better institutions, but better beliefs do not require morally superior people any more than beliefs in a heliocentric solar system require more-intelligent people.

Many people believe the Earth revolves around the sun not because they are smarter than ancient peoples, but because they grew up in a world where that was accepted. Many people believe slavery is wrong not because they are morally superior to all people from ages past, but because they grew up in a world where slavery was condemned.

The broader social narrative creates the institution. But where does this narrative come from? Here’s where individuals come in again.

Progress typically begins with iconoclasts and radicals espousing and experimenting with ideas that challenge the status quo. This is true of technological, intellectual and moral progress. The few who advance these radical ideas attract small, but influential followers, and some minds are changed by argument alone. But the real change comes when discussion turns into demonstration.

When the Wright brothers got off the ground, when slavery ended in some countries and the economy did not collapse — these occasions did more to change the prevailing beliefs about manned flight and slavery than did the necessary intellectual work that preceded them.

People do not have to possess superpowers to learn and adapt. All humans do it. Learning even to reject foundational and dearly held beliefs is possible and frequent in history, especially because the change typically takes place over several generations, so that each generation has to learn to give up only a part of the cherished belief. When it is understood that a new belief will result in better outcomes, it can be adopted with relative speed and ease, sometimes without any conscious “a ha!” moment at all.

Neither technological nor institutional progress is inevitable. History is replete with times of retrogression and collapse. When there are no radicals challenging the status quo, innovating and demonstrating new and better beliefs, it is not long before the prevailing institutions stagnate or advocates of a romanticized past win the day and drag humanity backward.

Progress is not inevitable, but progress is entirely possible even with flawed humans like us. Our beliefs can change as we learn better ways of doing things, and with our beliefs will change our institutions. Better institutions — free institutions, rather than coercive ones — will result in a better world.

We ought to continue to discuss and demonstrate the fact that states — their oppressions, confiscations, impositions, kidnapping, counterfeiting, and war — are not necessary or beneficial. Better morality is always better, but if we change the prevailing narrative about states, we can live in a stateless world even without a saintly populace.

It is a false and arrogant belief that only angelic geniuses are capable of believing that statelessness is possible and desirable. If a bunch of idiots can live in a world of technological wonder, so too can a bunch of jerks live in a world of freedom.

But Who Would Bilk the Roads?

But who would create the long lines in which to wait to be told you have the wrong documents? Who would build the bridges to nowhere? Who would pay $300 for a toilet seat? Who would lose your important items in the mail? Who would force you to turn off your cell phone while taxiing on the runway? Who would pay a horseshoer to not shoe horses? Who would pay a farmer to not grow crops?

Who would encourage the poor to buy education and housing they can’t afford? Who would encourage workers not to work? Who would encourage the generous not to give? Who would encourage the productive to stop producing?

Who would punish the innocent for doing what makes them happy? Who would subsidize some chemicals and plants and ban others? Who would perpetuate gang wars across the globe? Who would encourage and prop up organized crime? Who would jail sickly grandmothers for seeking natural pain-relief remedies?

Who would incentivise healers not to heal? Who would force entrepreneurs to become legal experts rather than creators? Who would create laws sufficient to make everyone a criminal? Who would artificially raise the price of health care? Who would artificially lower the price of waste?

Who would prevent people from seeking damages when another pollutes the water? Who would fail to maintain the forests? Who would squander the resources?

Who would help well-heeled businesses crush their competition with laws and regulations? Who would steal half of the production and spend it on stifling the other half? Who would pay thousands of agents to create thousand of rules to penalize millions of people for making a living and not properly filling out paperwork to classify and justify it all?

Who would force the children into factory schools? Who would cram bad ideas into their heads? Who would drive them to near madness with tedium and tyranny controlling their every waking minute? Who would call it bullying or a disorder when they reacted? Who would cram pills down their throats when they thought divergently? Who would lie to them about the value of schooling? Who would teach them to obey arbitrary authority instead of their own consciences?

Who would force the peaceful to pay for war? Who would encourage the violent to aggress and call it honorable? Who would give sanction to racist, hateful tendencies and call it security? Who would attack the innocent? Who would build the drones? Who would man the concentration camps?

Indeed, who would carry out the genocide? Who would massacre the millions? Who would force famines? Who would torture?

Protect Us From ‘Consumer Protection’

Back in 2007, I wrote a short piece for the Mackinac Center that showed, through a hypothetical story, how occupational licensing laws come about. It was published in a few local newspapers, and elicited its fair share of responses – primarily because shortly after I wrote it interior designers, who I chose for my example, began lobbying for exactly the kind of thing I discussed. Good timing I guess.

I responded to several angry emails, and I recently rediscovered one of my responses. I probably would say a few things differently today, but I still thought it was a fun exchange and I was reminded of it after discussing a current effort afoot in Minnesota to require interior designers to be licensed. The idea is as stupid now as it was then, no matter what state it’s in.

Below is the original article, followed by the response letter and my reply. The names have been changed to protect the ~~innocent~~ interested.

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Article originally posted here.

Michigan ranks sixth in the nation when it comes to occupational licensing, with 116 different occupations requiring state approval, according to a recent Reason Foundation report.

Michigan even has a license for reptile catchers. You’d think with only one native venomous snake, the Massasauga Rattlesnake — and a relatively benign one at that — we might not need to rank so highly in this area of policy. Apparently not.

So, why do we have all of these licenses? Who comes up with them? Here’s a hypothetical example of how such policies come about:

A lawmaker meets with lobbyists representing an association of interior designers. The lobbyists say interior designers contribute $10 million annually to the state economy and provide more than 10,000 good paying jobs. Interior designers work hard to have a good reputation, say the lobbyists, but all of that is in danger. Rogue designers who are not members of the association have been undercutting prices and providing shoddy workmanship that damages all designers’ reputations. The lobbyists tell of one such designer who made a cheap shelving unit that collapsed, injuring the customer.

To remedy this, the association proposes requiring all interior designers to be registered with the state. They propose a course of study (provided by the association, to members only) and a test administered by a state panel of design experts (largely representatives of the association). Applicants must pay a $500 fee to cover the cost of the course, the test, the panel and all other related activities. Fee money would also be used to investigate and prosecute any unlicensed designers — including levying a $500 fine for first time offenders and $1,000 for repeats.

The lawmaker likes the idea of “protecting” his constituents and introduces a package of bills, mostly drafted by design association lawyers. The legislation passes the Legislature and is signed by the governor with little fanfare, as the association lines up members to testify in favor of it and the media reprints their supportive statements on this “consumer protection” package.

That’s the side of the story that is easy for everyone to see. Here’s another side:

Jane Citizen works 40-plus hours per week to sustain her family, and because of her interest in it, started her own interior design business. She has no formal training in design, and neither time nor money to pay for it. Her customers are happy, and her business has been steadily growing by word-of-mouth. Jane has never been a member of any design associations and doesn’t have time to attend conferences or read their publications, nor does she have extra cash to pay their dues.

The new “consumer protection” act goes into effect without Jane’s knowledge. She is soon approached on the job by a bureaucrat asking to see her registration. He informs her that she is violating the law and must pay a $500 fine and cease plying her trade immediately. She must become registered or face additional fines and/or legal action. Jane doesn’t have the extra $500, nor does she have the time to take the state-required course or the money to pay for it. She has unknowingly violated the law and must cease earning her living.

Lawmakers received short-lived but positive press for “protecting consumers.” But who was protected? Jane and those depending on her income were not protected by the new law. Her happy customers who lost her skills and competitive prices were not protected. The design association was the only party protected. They eliminated competitors who drove down prices. They protected their monopoly and damaged the marketplace.

Under such a law Jane and her willing customers are “protected” from an honest and mutually satisfactory transaction. Free exchange ceases to be a natural right protected by government; instead it becomes a privilege bestowed by government. No longer can market competition ensure the best services at the best price; instead a trade monopoly, using the force of government, ensures the highest price for their service. No longer do free people choose what constitutes a fair price, a fair wage and good design; instead a government panel decides for them.

The next time you hear about “consumer protection” legislation that requires yet more licensing, check to see who it really protects. When government uses force to create and protect industry monopolies for “public safety,” it subverts our natural rights. That’s more dangerous than a room full of collapsing shelves.

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Dear Mr. Morehouse,

I am writing in reference to your Thursday, December 13, 2007 article “Consumer protection often isn’t”. It seems to me you have on [sic] idea what a [sic] educated Interior Designer has to learn before they should be able to call themselves a professional. I have a Bachelor of Science Degree from Michigan State University and almost a second degree in Art History. All of these I paid for myself working two or three jobs while taking a full load of course. I have no sympathy for your Jane Citizen!

There are university extension classes and night sessions available. She obviously wants a free ride. Thank God she didn’t want to be a BRAIN SURGEON!!!! I believe you should visit two or three of the fifteen colleges or universities in our state with Interior Design programs before you ridicule a profession. May I suggest M.S.U., Wayne State, Eastern Michigan or Kendall. All have excellent programs. If the educational aspects of a profession do not concern you why haven’t you gone after Attorneys, Architects, Doctors, Plumbers, Etc? They are all licensees.

All Interior Designers want is the recognition of time spent getting the proper credentials for practicing their profession so they can serve their clients properly thus protecting their safety and welfare.

Mr. Doe

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Dear Mr. Doe,

Thank you for your comments on my article. It seems, however, that you have misunderstood its very simple point. I made no attempt to single out any one profession in occupational licensing (I could’ve used anything as an example), nor was I attempting to besmirch the hard work and training many interior designers go through.

I have no doubt that you have worked hard, and are very talented at your profession as a result; and I have absolutely no problem with occupational licensing or certification that is voluntary. What my article warned against is licensure by force. Whenever the state acts, it backs up its laws with force.

I do not believe anyone should be forced or threatened with the use of force for choosing to not get a certain amount of training in a profession. If Jane citizen wants to offer her services, that is her business. Consumers should be free to hire whomever they choose. I have no doubt that voluntary certifications would (and do in some professions) abound, and many consumers would choose only to hire those with a consumer report stamp of approval (for example). However, the choice should be up to the individual, not for the state to impose upon individuals by force.

All state-forced occupational licensing is in effect a barrier to entry for entry-level workers and a protection for well-entrenched industry lobbies. I have no doubt that your design skills can stand on their own in a free-market, and I do not believe you need the blunt force of government to coerce customers into hiring you over a less qualified competitor. I wish you had as much confidence.

Sincerely,

Isaac M. Morehouse

Review: Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers

Any book that uses an Oxford comma in the title is immediately in my good graces. Add the nicely designed cover, the slim size, and the intriguing topic, and Edward Lopez and Wayne Leighton would have had to commit heinous rhetorical or logical crimes to turn me off of their new book, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers. Fortunately, they commit no such crimes but present a sweeping and readable examination of the forces that generate social change.

I have long been obsessed with the question of how to change the world. In my personal life, this question took me from humanitarian mission trips, to politics, to policy advocacy, to education, to developing educators, to raising support to develop educators. To borrow the old adage, I found I could do more in teaching a man to fish than giving a man a fish…then I took it further: Now I raise the capital to build the factories to make the rope to produce the nets to give the teachers to teach people to catch millions of fish.

This doesn’t mean I’ve discovered once for all the secret of changing the world; far from it. Every day my approach changes as I gain experience and learn new ideas. Madmen is, in many ways, a clear articulation of many of the ideas I’ve come to hold about social change. It details how Public Choice Theory reveals that governments have all the wrong incentives for positive change. It discusses the role of ideas, and how they are able to overcome the vested interests that Public Choice makes seem so insurmountable. It lays out Hayek’s description of social change coming from intellectuals, and spreading through the general public. But Madmen adds a new dimension, one I have not been able to integrate into my worldview until recently: the bottom-up role of culture, and the circumstance of time and place.

It is not only coherent, conscious ideology that determines what institutions will be tolerated, and therefore what incentives exist and what outcomes result. The conscious beliefs of individuals in society do play a major role, and are something we focus on perhaps because we feel capable of altering them through education and persuasion. But there is also a role for bottom-up, experiential, subconscious or tacit knowledge. The kind of knowledge that culture carries from generation to generation, passing on when it produces better outcomes.

Often no one is aware the valuable function of such cultural trends or norms. Economist Peter Leeson has done research on a variety of bizarre superstitions and practices embedded in various cultures; memes that seem to have no value. If you asked the members of that culture what the purpose was, they would likely provide an answer steeped in their religion or mythology. Yet time and again, the practices have proven efficient means of achieving desirable ends, at least compared with the known alternatives. Such cultural norms needn’t be recognized for what they are even by the people that benefit from them in order to have influence over institutions, incentives, and outcomes – good or bad.

I’ve come to believe that, when it comes to bringing about a better world, valuing freedom because we’ve experienced it and consider it normal is just as important as valuing freedom because it makes sense in the moral or utilitarian abstract. A generation that believes in the power of voluntary cooperation because they take part in it every day is no less valuable than one that reads libertarian theory.

Madmen integrates the top-down flow of ideas from intellectuals to the general public with the bottom up influence of learned cultural memes, and uses the combined forces to explain where the ideas come from that shape the institutions in which (as Public Choice reveals) incentives will lead to predictable outcomes. To create this integrated view of social change, Leighton and Lopez ask and answer three questions:

1. Why do democracies generate policies that are wasteful and unjust?

2. Why do failed policies persist over long periods, even when they are known to be socially wasteful and even when better alternatives exist?

3. Why do some wasteful policies get repealed (airline and telephone regulations) while others endure (sugar subsidies, tariffs)?

They offer answers in less than 200 pages, yet somehow manage to work in an expansive history of economic and political thought, beginning with the earliest philosophers and ending with the most current economists. This is an excellent tour of political economy as a discipline: what questions it asks, what personalities populate the field, and what competing and complimentary theories they present. There is enough detail to satisfy the wannabe economist in me, and enough colorful storytelling to sate my inner layman.

The book opens with a story of the shot-clock that saved basketball, and closes with a story of hybrid wheat that saved millions of lives. It is full of examples of social change, both good and bad, and the authors’ thoughts on why it happened when and how it did. If you are interested in how the world works from a ten thousand foot vantage point, I cannot recommend Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers enough.

How the World Will Change

(Originally posted here.)

When the world becomes free it will not be by the creation of new laws, or the removal of old, or new political leaders or any election result. It will not be because of a change in government, but because of a change in attitude toward government. It will not be because of legislation, but because of disregard for legislation.

Genuine change will come when the state is ignored, not reformed. It will come not when politicians are better, but when they are irrelevant.

When state-made law is no longer deemed necessary or important it will not be respected. When it is not respected it will not be enforced because it will not be enforceable.

This is how the world will change.

Evidence in the Face of Disbelief

The world can become free of the barbarous relic called the state. The state is a dangerous fiction whose power rests entirely on people’s belief in its necessity, or inevitability. Belief in the state is not insurmountable. It is not hard-wired into the human mind. It is not a given that a state must or will always exist. The state, like so many other superstitions now thought to be outrageous, inhumane and inefficient, can be left in the ash heap of history.

Many once laughed at the notion that an institution as old as humanity itself, the institution of slavery, would or could ever be removed. The prevailing wisdom for centuries, even among those who had discovered the moral repugnance of slavery, was that it was just a part of human nature. Reformers argued the best thing was to work for a more humane version of slavery.

Slavery was an institution that, however evil it may sometimes be and however utopians might imagine a more perfect world without it, was here to stay. Some embarked on efforts to improve the institution, to teach masters to be “good” to their slaves. Some setup rules and mores designed to limit the nastiest outcomes of the institution. But the institution itself was as unavoidable as scarcity and death.

The fatal flaw in this thinking is that slavery and government, unlike scarcity and death, are human institutions. They are, above all, mental constructs. Their physical manifestations are not physical realities humans simply encounter in nature, but realities we create, and humans only create by first imagining. An idea does not become an action unless the individual actor believes that the idea is worth acting on. To subjugate another human being, or to condone or allow the subjugation of one by another, one must first have the idea of subjugation and must believe that acting on it is preferable to ignoring or condemning it. Scarcity and natural death need no such human consent. The old saying about death and taxes turns out to be only half true.

If the state, like slavery, is the result of the ideas held by people it is not inevitable. Some day humanity could look back on the institution called the state with the same sense of shame and wonder that we now have about slavery. How could so many people – many of them good people – live their lives day in and day out surrounded by an institution so inhumane, so nakedly violent and demeaning? Did they really think it was necessary? Did they not understand how degrading it was? It will be hard to understand how so many humans thought the state was inevitable, tolerable and even good. As sure as slavery became a hated relic, so can the state.

How It Happens

When slavery ended it was not by changes in rules or laws or political leaders. Such changes often quickly follow changes in belief and mistakenly receive the credit, but they are never the cause. Slavery ended as people’s ideas about it changed. People began to believe it was not only an evil, but an unnecessary one. People began to believe it so evil that they were willing to tolerate the short-term sacrifices of ending it in order to reap the long-term improvement in the human condition.

The calculation of cost and benefit changed as people’s sense of morality trumped their sense of conservative institutional stability. The unknown outcome of ending slavery became an acceptable risk when considered against the known evil of the institution, which became an unacceptable reality.

Political Reform

Political reform can never bring about liberty. It can on rare occasion expand a bit of liberty for a few, but as long as that expansion occurs via political methods, it means bargaining that often takes away freedom in some other arena, or the long-term furtherance of trust in the state. The political game is about reshuffling and re-enforcing the necessity of the state.

The political game attracts great attention, and as such many suggest using it as a means of educating people about the power of liberty. Politics as education is only valuable in the long term to the extent that it educates people that politics is at bottom bad and government cannot ever be good. If it merely inspires people to advocate that the state do to things better, it is not, in the end, going to make society more free. It is disbelief in politics and in the state that leads to freedom.

The Chinese army fired on their fellow citizens in Tiananmen Square. This massacre was not caused by political leaders and generals saying, “Shoot”; but by men in the Chinese army deciding to shoot. It was not caused ultimately by bad leadership, but by a belief in the necessity of obeying orders. There will always be people with a will to power; a desire to control. Only when the rest don’t believe that power to be necessary and therefore do not obey does freedom reign.

Shift Focus

Humans want to solve problems in the most immediate and direct way possible. We want to know where the problem of restricted liberty begins. We discover the source in a gradual progression. First the focus is on people – the wrong political leaders. This quickly generalizes to political parties or groups, then to policies or laws, then to agencies and institutions, and finally to the state itself.

Here it seems we’re at the core of the problem: the state itself. Not any of the personalities or parties or bureaus or laws under its aegis. But a further shift in focus is required. The state is not the root of the problem. The real problem is not an institution, but an idea. It is the idea that government is necessary. That’s the culprit and final basis for every bad thing the state has ever done.

To a small degree, a shift in focus is happening now. A great many people don’t believe that a particular politician will solve the problems created by the state. An increasing number don’t believe one party is more likely than another to do so. It is more common to hear institutions or the incentives built into the system of government blamed. This is progress. It is, however, still rare to hear the existence of the state itself blamed, and rarer still to hear blame placed on the idea that a state is necessary.

The belief in its necessity gives rise to the state, which by definition is full of bad incentives that attract and nurture bad people in bad parties. To say the people, parties, or policies are the problem would be like blaming the sidewalk for breaking your leg after you walked off a tall building because you were ignorant of the staircase and elevator. Frustration with the sidewalk is useless and ignorant. The proper response would be to question the necessity of walking off the building; perhaps in so doing you would discover other less painful methods of achieving your goal and reaching the ground floor.

There is no form or arrangement of a state that can guarantee liberty. The answer is always peace, markets, and voluntarism. The ring of power cannot be wielded for good, but must be thrown into the fire before it uses good for evil.

Changing Lives and Changing Life

I do not wish to downplay the possible outcomes of attempts to reform the state. By such efforts lives can be changed. A court decision can save an individual or a whole neighborhood from being bulldozed by the state. The removal of a regulation can change the life of an entrepreneur and allow her to pursue her dream. These activities are analogous to disaster relief or soup kitchens; they can genuinely change lives and offer welcome relief. They can change lives, but they cannot change life.

Disasters will still come and go. The conditions that brought about hunger are not ameliorated with the appetite of the person receiving soup. The liberty-crushing actions of the state do not cease when it ceases to crush one neighborhood or regulate one industry for some period of time. The state will – must – continue to seek its own expansion, and it will push at every weak point it finds to do so, ensuring that an endless stream of lives will remain to be helped, but that the conditions of life itself will not be fundamentally altered. Treating disease is noble, but it is different than eradicating disease.

Changing lives is good and fulfilling work. But for those courageous enough to dream, changing life itself is bliss, and can only be done by undermining, not improving the state.

What to Do?

The only tactic worth pursuing is enlightenment. Enlightenment of self and of others, and both continuously. This does not mean telling people what to believe or what to do. It is more akin to discovery than education. A teacher may help you discover truth by providing information, but the discoverer has to have curiosity and openness. It is the discoverer himself who chooses to discover.

Become a free person, and your freedom will be a beacon to others who are searching. Create liberty in your own life, exchange ideas, be open to the power of human creativity. Free your own mind and you will begin to help others to free theirs not by telling them what to believe, but by demonstration and discussion.

The market does not produce new innovations and technologies because smart people tell others what to design; instead it is a constant dynamic give and take, show and tell, creation and imitation, trial and error, the greatest ongoing play of economic exchange.

The building of a free-society needn’t wait until the state is limited or absent; indeed the state will not wither until the free society is first built to replace it. The explosive power of ideas will destroy the foundations of the state as free people continue to live and breath those ideas and demonstrate the life, energy, fun, progress and fulfillment in freedom.

This does not mean everyone who wants liberty must do the same thing. Demonstrating and discussion the ideas of a free society is such a broad and evolutionary task that it opens endless doors. The differences we have in ability and interest lead to numerous efforts, and enlightenment leaves ample room for differentiation.

Our differences will manifest in which “others” we exchange with, and what methods and mediums we use. But it must be an exchange of ideas and the building of a free society. It cannot mean deceiving, cajoling, “nudging”, forcing, bribing, or dictating. These, in the end, will only lead to less freedom.

Liberty not inevitable, but it is possible. A state that does not trample liberty is not possible. So long as the state is deemed necessary it will exist, and the state will always grow beyond its originally desired limits. The state will prey upon society until it destroys it, and then destroys itself. But if the belief in the necessity of the state remains, the deposed state will soon be replaced by a new one and the process will begin again.

The only foundation that society can be built on without collapse is a belief in statelessness.

It must be belief. Consequential (practical) and deontological (moral) arguments against the state miss the point. People will accept an inefficient and immoral system if they believe it necessary. Once they find it unnecessary, they will abandon it and give moral or practical reasons for doing so, but the belief in the necessity of the state must go first.

Imagine Liberty

Ludwig von Mises described three preconditions to human action. An individual must have dissatisfaction with his current condition, a vision of something better, and a belief in the ability to achieve that vision.

Everyone has dissatisfaction with government. Almost no one has a vision of something better. People have visions of a differently structured “necessary evil”, but their lack of imagination makes them keep the modifier, “necessary”. The Proverb says that for lack of vision people perish.

If we open up our imagination there is abundant evidence of order without the state. Non-state norms and institutions produce the majority of the world we see around us. Historically, society precedes the state, and there is ample evidence of stateless solutions to problems we are taught to believe only the state can solve.

Beyond past or present evidence, an application of our knowledge of human potential can also help us envision what could be. Science fiction writers imagine unheard of technologies by looking at technological advances in the here and now. They extrapolate and predict where human ingenuity, if it continues on its present course, may go. The best social thinkers do the same with society.

Some advocates for liberty do have a vision of something better. They can imagine multifarious social arrangements without the state. But most still lack the third condition of human action; a belief in the ability to get there. After so many vein attempts at revolution and political activism it seems there is no answer. But in some ways, the second condition of action is the answer to the third. If enough people can imagine a better solution, they will cease to support an inferior one (even in the face of the unknown, if they believe it to hold promise) and cease to prohibit new experiments. People with imagination too small to envision an automobile may very well accept restrictions on road building. But people who can’t envision the specific manifestation of the automobile, but can imagine human progress and invention capable of surprising them will be reticent to restrict the construction of something with unknown promise.

This is why we needn’t all share the same, or even a very specific, vision of a stateless world. We must, however, be brave and broad-minded enough to see in human relations the potential of order without the state.

For those who can imagine such a world, the task is to open others up to the same possibility. Show them, intrigue them, inspire them. Where imagination is wanting, so is liberty.

When It Happens

Perhaps the beginning of the end of the state will be gradual. Maybe state efforts to restrict minor activities will be increasingly ignored. Bans on food and drink may be laughed at and become unenforceable. Perhaps it will slowly extend to ignoring bigger and bigger restrictions.
Perhaps it will start with a bang. The prohibition of drugs may simply come to an abrupt end, and sooner than anyone expects. Public schooling may suddenly become so little used and so uncompetitive in the face of educational innovation that it disappears.

It may happen without a big production. The visage of the state may not even die with its function. The royalty of England still exist, but they are longer relevant in regulating daily life. They exist as reflection or memory of what was once believed. Some Native American tribes perform rain dances not because they believe, as they once did, that they will bring rain, but as an homage to their past. The state may transform similarly. It may never “go away”, but it may cease to have meaning except as a tradition. Parades and pomp may remain while power over our lives withers.

Fast or slow, big or small, conscious or unconscious as it may be, the world will change. The state can be a relic of the past, harder to understand as time moves on, like slavery in America today. In so many ways the trend is well underway and we are already in a mostly stateless world, though it is little appreciated or understood. It may be a matter of merely realizing what is already true: the state is not, and never has been necessary.

Realistic and Radical

The dissolution of the state doesn’t rely on people to become better or morality to change, or for the next step in evolution. It is a fallacy that government is inevitable and necessary. It could wither away in no time. It is only a matter of us changing our beliefs, paradigms, and theories of world. It only requires that we realize that it is not necessary. I say only, but the power of imagination necessary to see that the state is not is no small thing. Opening our minds to this possibility is the greatest and most promising intellectual and practical adventure.

Why Corporations Don’t Support Freedom

There is a common assumption that advocacy of free-market ideas is funded in large part by big corporations. As much as I wish the many great organizations and projects that are educating in liberty received financial support from large corporations, almost none of them do, and when they do it is in very small amounts when compared to the other things such firms support.

But why? Businesses are constantly hampered and harassed by government regulation, taxation, and the uncertainty of the legal landscape one day to the next. Don’t they stand to gain from laissez faire? Well, yes, businesses stand to gain tremendously from market freedom. Entrepreneurs, owners, employees, consumers, and every other market participant stands to gain. Businesses of all sizes stand to gain, provided they can produce what consumers demand.

Aye, there’s the rub.

You see, while business stands to gain from free exchange, nobody knows which specific businesses will be most successful in a competitive environment. Consumers are a tough bunch to please. It takes a lot of work, and there’s a lot of uncertainty. The creative destruction of the market is a little daunting to a businessperson who dwells on it for long. It’s easier, for those who can afford it, to cozy up to the state and ensure that it’s restrictions and interventions hurt you a little less than they harm your competitors. If you have resources enough and play your cards right, you might even be able to get policies that make you more profitable or put your competitors out of business entirely.

The result? Bigger businesses tend to support state intervention, because they have the lawyers and money and can hire the guns of government. It is entirely possible that some of these very businesses would fare better under economic freedom, but they don’t know for sure, so they go the somewhat safer route of state cronyism. Smaller businesses typically aren’t organized enough and lack the resources to manipulate policy in their favor. Worse still, the unimaginable number of new ventures that would have been created were it not for government impediments have no voice at all; we don’t even know who would have created them.

In short, freedom is good for business, but scary to businesses.

When it’s Good to be a Failure

I’m a failure according to my own definition.

The current me doesn’t think I’m a failure – I’m pretty happy about where I’m at in life and feel I’m doing what I love at the moment. It’s one of the versions of me from the past that thinks I’m a failure.

There was a time (I shudder to recall) when I thought being an elected politician was the way to live and spread freedom. I went to work in the legislature to see how to become a lawmaker. During that time I met a lot of people who didn’t know me before and haven’t kept up since. They knew the Isaac who defined success as being an elected official. Friends and relatives saw me working in politics and could foresee what a successful end in that realm looked like in their minds. For these people, my life won’t be a success until I achieve what I was then pursuing.

Along the way I learned more about myself. My goals didn’t change, just the way I visualized achieving them. I was pursuing a certain ideal and a bundle of sensations. I was pursuing freedom. I was incapable of imagining anything but a crude vision of political freedom, and my worldview was so simple I thought politicians created it. Therefore I wanted to be one. Freedom is still what I want, but with more experience and knowledge I have come to believe being involved in politics would be the worst possible way to achieve it. My definition of success morphed.

This happens all the time with humans. A child may say he wants to be a firefighter only because in his world, firefighter is one of the four or five options he can imagine. It’s the one that makes him feel the most excited and good about helping people.

As they grow, children learn about a huge range of activities in the world and realize that, to achieve the feeling they desire, firefighting is an inferior method to being a paramedic, a teacher, an entrepreneur, or an X-Games athlete. It’s not that we sell out on our dreams, it’s just that our dreams were crude representations of what we thought we wanted. When we learn more, we make different decisions. C.S. Lewis talks about the, “[I]gnorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”

Once we learn what’s possible, we laugh at what we previously thought of as the ultimate achievement. This growth is all well and good until we confront people from our past who have us locked in to our previous dreams.

Sometimes people ask me when I’m going to be president, and no matter what answer I give, it seems to them like a cop-out or excuse for my own failure. They refuse to believe me when I say I wouldn’t wish political office on my worst enemy, let alone myself. They think I’m being modest.

I have a friend who went to Hollywood wanting to be an actor and now realizes his creative energies are far broader. People back home always want to know when they’ll see him on the big screen. We sometimes joke that someday, when he has millions and is producing, directing, writing and doing whatever he wants in life, his friends back home will say, “Haven’t seen you on TV…you just haven’t caught that break yet, huh?”

It can be a little weird to describe how and why your dreams and definitions of success change over time. A lot of people don’t actually want to know. They just want to know if you’re Governor yet, or an Oscar winning actor. That’s alright. Don’t fret over it and don’t spend too much energy trying to convince them you’re really not a failure. If they insist on defining success they way you did before you knew better, just let them think you’re a failure and laugh at the absurdity.

If I’m a failure for not being the silly thing I once wanted to be, it’s good to be a failure.

Why Government Fails – Public Choice for Everyone

There are innumerable arguments about the legitimacy and morality of government and its proper scope, all of which are worth exploring. Public Choice Theory examines an entirely different question than what government ought to do. It asks what government actually does.

Public Choice is the study of the operations of government using the analytical tools of economics. In short, the same assumptions about human interests and actions are applied to the political market as the market for economic goods.

The real power in this theory is its ability to reveal how poorly government works in practice. It does not address lofty notions of the ideal state, or the right and wrong of state action, but rather examines the actual operations of states to see if they are effective at achieving their stated goals.

Public Choice theory by that name is relatively new among schools of economic thought, but the application of economic insights to political institutions is not new.

This is a basic overview of the core insights of Public Choice Theory.

Why government?

The need for government is typically justified by the claim that there are certain “public goods” which cannot be supplied by the voluntary forces of the market, but are nonetheless beneficial to all members of society.

The standard analysis describes goods like roads, for example, and spends a great deal of time analyzing the incentives in the market to explain why roads will not be sufficiently provided. It is supposed that everyone would benefit from a road and it would be “non-excludable”. That is, once constructed, it would be too costly to prevent members of society from using the road whether they paid for it or not. Because of this non-excludability, rationally self-interested individuals would be unwilling to contribute to a voluntary fund for the maintenance of the road. Each individual knows that their contribution is small relative to the entire road fund, and furthermore that without their contribution, they will still enjoy use of the road. With these incentives facing everyone, no one will contribute and the road will decay. It is in no one’s individual interest to pay for road maintenance, but everyone would be better off if each person contributed.

You may substitute any number of “public goods” for roads, but the standard analysis is the same. It looks closely at the incentives in the market, deems them unfit to provide the good in question, and concludes that the good must be provided by the state.

Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that the analysis of the market is correct. (There is ample evidence to the contrary of course: Nearly any “public good” you can imagine has at some point been, or is even today, provided by the private sector, even though theorists sometimes fail to imagine how.) If we accept the inability of the market to sufficiently provide the good, there’s still something missing in the standard story.

All the time is spent analyzing what would happen in a market of rationally self-interested individuals and what the incentive structure would produce. When deemed insufficient, no time is spent analyzing what happens when government attempts to provide the good. (This is what Art Carden has colorfully dubbed the political economy of the Underpants Gnomes.) What happens if we use the same assumptions and analytical rigor when examining government provision of public goods as we do for the market?

Political self-interest

In order for government to solve public goods problems it would require selfless politicians. The political actors who use tax dollars to maintain the road would have to be counted on to discharge this duty rather than, say, spend the money on something else or give it to a subpar contractor who happens to be their friend. But if we are consistent in our analysis, we must treat politicians as rationally self-interested people too. They have every incentive to act to their own benefit at the expense of the taxpayer.

How can the self-interest of the political class be kept in check? The textbook answer is democracy.

Democracy as a restraint

Does democracy ensure that the political class will pursue the interest of the public, rather than their own? The answer is a resounding ‘no’. The reason is because voters are also self-interested.

It is well known that, statistically, an individual vote in a state or national election is meaningless. The odds of one vote changing the outcome of a national election are worse than the odds of winning the lottery. The odds of getting in a car accident on the way to the polls are greater than the odds of an individual vote making a difference. In other words, the possibility of an individual vote resulting in measurable benefits to that individual is almost nonexistent.

In order for democracy to keep the self-interest of politicians in check, voters need to have an understanding of what they’re voting on and what policies are good for the whole of society. This would take a tremendous amount of time and effort. A single bill may be several hundred pages of technical legalese, and most elected officials vote on hundreds of bills in each term. For a citizen to be informed enough to know what policies are good for society vs. good only for the politicians is incredibly costly. Yet the individual vote of a citizen has almost no chance of changing the outcome or conferring any benefit. The rational response is to be ignorant of policies, because the cost of being informed is so much greater than the chance of benefiting from being informed. A dedicated, informed voter has one vote that is cancelled out by just one ignorant voter.

The result is what economists call “rational ignorance”. Voters are ignorant of policies and positions because to be otherwise is a burden with no reward. But there are some people for whom knowledge of policies is beneficial; namely, the small groups that are directly affected by those policies.

A bill to give a $100 million subsidy to Acme co. is worth a great deal to that company. They would not be foolish to spend $99 million lobbying for its passage, as they would still come out $1 million ahead. Voters, on the other hand, have no incentive to lobby against the bill because spread out across taxpayers it might cost each just a few dollars, while active opposition – even just a letter to a Congressperson – might take hours of time that could be spent doing something worth more than a few dollars. This is why democracy results in concentrated benefits and dispersed or diffused costs. The rationale of politics is to provide benefits to concentrated interests and spread the costs as far and wide as possible – including into the future by way of borrowing or inflating to pay for it.

The obvious result is a myriad of special interests seeking benefits at the expense of the broader public. In the end, everyone is worse off, but every group has the incentive to continue to seek privileges, if for no other reason than to offset the costs they are bearing for the privileges lavished on every other group. This is why Frederic Bastiat described the state as, “That great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” It has been described elsewhere as a game where people stand in a circle and the state takes a penny from each person, then awards five pennies to one of them at the end of the round (the other five being kept by the state). The game is repeated until each person has been the “winner” of five pennies at least once. They all begrudge the loss of a single penny each round, but all eagerly expect to be the winner in another round, not realizing that at the end of the game every single person in the circle has less than they started with.

The incentives in a democratic system lead to special interests lobbying for and receiving privileges at the expense of society. Far from keeping the self-interest of politicians in check, instead democracy promotes and rewards it, so long as those politicians also provide benefits to every imaginable minority and hand the majority the bill.

But let’s ignore all that…

Let’s assume away rational ignorance on the part of voters. Let’s pretend that voters will expend every effort to become knowledgeable and constrain the self-interest of politicians. Let’s say the “will of the voters” can keep officials in check.

But what is “the will of the voters”? It is not an easy question to answer. Let’s walk through the selection of a preferred policy through the democratic process. The policy in question is what to do with troops in Iraq.

Option A: Keep troop levels the same

Option B: Increase troop levels

Option C: Remove all troops

Now let’s look at the preferences of three different voters.

Voter 1: A>B>C – Prefer to keep the same level of troops, but if any change is going to occur would rather increase troops and “get the job done” than to pull out.

Voter 2: B>C>A – Prefer to increase troops to “get the job done”, but if that’s not going to happen better to pull out entirely than keep the same level of troops.

Voter 3: C>A>B – Prefer to remove all troops, but short of that, better to leave the same number of troops there than to add more.

Whether or not you agree with the preferences of these voters, it is clear that each of them has a rational sequence of preferences among the given policy options. You probably have met people who hold each of these views. To determine the “will of the voters”, let’s put these options to a vote and see what policy the elected officials should follow…

In a vote between policy A and B, policy A would win. Two of the voters prefer A to B. If we put policy B and C to a vote, policy B would win. Finally, if we put policy A and C to a vote, policy C would win.

So what is the will of the voters? According to the votes, they prefer A>B, B>C, and C>A. In practical terms, it means the “will of the voters” is to have the same level of troops instead of more, more troops instead of none, and no troops instead of the same number. That would be like a person saying that, between Snickers, Baby Ruth and Heath bars, they prefer Snickers above all, followed by Baby Ruth, followed by Heath, which they prefer to Snickers. This is a non-transitive set of preferences, and is one of the definitions of a mentally impaired person. The will of the voters is a logical impossibility. This is called vote cycling, or Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.

You can see how, based on the structure of the voting process, entirely different preferences can emerge. This means that even if the voters were well informed, democracy would fail to provide a clear “will of the voters” for politicians to be accountable to. Take this simple example of three clear policies and substitute a number of politicians each with positions on dozens of different policies and it is utterly impossible to know what the “will of the voters” is based on the results of elections.

Okay, let’s also ignore all that…

Let’s go a step further. Let’s pretend that voters are not only informed, but that by some magic the “will of the voters” is clear as day and easily ascertainable through the democratic process. If we grant these two monumental assumptions surely democracy will serve to protect the interest of the public at large from those of politicians and special interests…right? Unfortunately for democracy, its problems are even greater than rational ignorance and the impossibility of a clear “will of the voters.” The “will of the voters” may actually be for policies that are harmful to those voters themselves and the public at large. This is what Brian Caplan has called “Rational irrationality”.

Voting is not the same as purchasing something in the market. To vote is to express a preference, while to purchase something is to demonstrate a preference. Voting, like filling out an anonymous survey, is “free”. You can voice whatever preference you like without being held accountable for the result. Imagine if a grocery store sent a survey to nearby residents and asked them to vote for what items they would like on the shelves. It’s not hard to see what a disaster this would be for patrons of the store. People may vote for bizarre items just to be funny. People may vote for items they think they ought to buy, rather than items they actually do buy; or items they think their neighbors should like, rather than what they do like.

When people are asked whether they like it when companies outsource production to countries where labor is cheaper, most will say no. Yet many of these same people purchase lower priced items produced overseas instead of more expensive domestically produced alternatives. Their stated preference is for American made goods, but they demonstrate by their actions that they see foreign goods as more beneficial to their own well-being. It is “free” to say you want to protect American manufacturing jobs, and it may feel better to voice that opinion, but if faced with the costs that result from the outcome of a protective tariff, people may choose otherwise.

Voting is a free way to indulge irrational biases. Voters do not vote for policies that they themselves favor, but for policies that make them feel good to vote for. They vote for the candidate who promises to stop immigration because it feels right on an emotional level, yet they hire the migrant worker to landscape their business because it benefits them more than the alternative.

Voting separates the voter from the results of his vote, and creates an incentive to use votes carelessly and in ways contrary to his actual interest. Even if we grant the most generous assumptions imaginable – voters who are fully informed no matter the cost to them and the fact that they have no chance of benefiting from being informed, and a democratic process that can clearly express a single “will of the voters” across a complex range of issues – democracy still provides incentives for policies that harm the public by their own definition.

Public goods revisited

We began the exploration of how government works by assuming it was the solution to public goods problems. Government was supposed to the solve those instances where it is in no individual’s interest to bear the cost of overcoming a problem, but where everyone would be better off if all would share the cost. What Public Choice reveals is that, rather than solving public goods problems, democracy is the greatest public good of all. It is in no individual’s interest to bear the cost of being informed and voting their true preferences, but in order for the system to work everyone would have to sacrifice their self-interest to the greater good.

Regardless of the moral standing of the state, the practical outcomes of government activity are inferior to what the market produces. Even in cases of so-called “market failure”, it may be better for the government to take no action than to intervene and make things worse with the even greater “government failure” embedded in the incentives of the state. In other words, whether or not government is an evil, it may be an unnecessary one.

Hope?

To reduce the harmful effects of the perverse incentives in government, it must be reduced to its smallest possible form. The scope of activities taken on by the state must be narrowed as far as can be accomplished. Many practitioners of Public Choice theory advocate constitutional checks, supermajorities and other adjustments to government procedures in the hope that these will change the incentives and create a more accountable government. The flaw in this approach is that the parties responsible for making such changes are themselves part of the government apparatus and face all the same incentives they are hoping to overcome.

If followed to its logical conclusion, pure Public Choice theory would lead us to believe that the state would be all-encompassing even now. The incentives are aligned, for example, so that there should be mandates on every facet of our lives in every industry and the sphere of freedom should be nonexistent. Yet this is not the state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Why, given the incentives in the system, has the state been restrained at all, little though the restraint may seem to us?

In the final analysis, it is the beliefs of the public that create the ultimate check on the state. If the public has a firm belief that alcohol should be legal, the interests of bootleggers and Baptists will not be sufficient to bring prohibition back. We cannot reasonably expect incentives to be overcome or people to act against their self-interest, but we can and do see incentives change as people’s view of what is in their self-interest changes. Most people would not find it worth their while to attempt to stop the passage of a subsidy to Midwestern beet farmers; but a great number of people consider it worth their while to attempt to stop the passage of a new prohibition bill.

Only when it is widely believed that farm subsidies are as absurd as alcohol prohibition will the incentives change enough to produce a more restrained state.

Further reading

Public Choice, A Primer – Eamonn Butler

Beyond Politics – Randy T. Simmons

Government Failure – Gordon Tullock, Arthur Seldon, and Gordon L. Brady

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*I am indebted to Professor Benjamin Powell for the basic structure of the arguments in this article, which he presents in a lecture for the Foundation for Economic Education.

*I am indebted to Matthew Mitchell for the example of vote cycling.

*This was originally posted at LibertarianChristians.com. I thought it prudent to repost here because there are so few basic intros to Public Choice and because many would-be readers who are not interested in Christianity or Libertarianism may overlook it at the original site.

Elections Don’t Matter

This was written for the Shotgun Blog during election season.

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“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.” – Milton Friedman

Amidst the din surrounding the U.S. presidential elections there is much debate and discussion over which candidate can best lead the nation in the right direction. The right direction to me is towards greater freedom. Which candidate can move us there?

None of them.

This is not because of the specific field of candidates we have to choose from this election; this is always the case. As Milton Friedman pointed out (quote above), the nature of politics is such that a politician will only be able to do as much as he or she can get away with. No president, no matter how much he or she wanted to, could enact reforms more radical than what the general populace finds acceptable. In the end, all governments – monarchies, autocracies, democracies – can only do what the majority of the populace allows. Even a powerful tyrant, in the long run, cannot resist the will of the majority of people if they are motivated enough to oppose him. It is the ideas that they hold which determine their motivation.

Ideas, not people, run the world.

In a system like ours with democratic elections, government leaders are particularly sensitive to the mood of the public. Relatively frequent elections, recall threats, loss of fundraising from would-be supporters, and constant media coverage create a high price for unpopular decisions. Even the ability to change policy after being elected without sufficient popularity is limited – since multiple branches of government are needed to enact policy an unpopular leader will have little luck convincing congressional colleagues to go out on a limb for him.

Why then have we moved away from freedom in many areas? Because in the battle of ideas, temporary comfort, promises of impossible “equality”, lack of self-respect and responsibility, and a desire for the state to impose our tastes upon others by force have had too many victories.

Freedom will not keep without constant maintenance. Freedom is an idea. Ideas must be continually re-stated, defended against the trends of the day, taught and passed down, communicated and re-communicated in ways relevant to each generation. If we give an inch, the deceptive lures of state-sponsored “comfort”, “equality”, “fairness”, “niceness”, etc. will quickly creep in and gain a mile.

The ideas we hold, the value we place on freedom, our understanding of why it matters, our interpretation of history and the warnings it provides against statism – these are what determine the policies of the nation. Indeed, choose the candidate that seems best. Choose the one that you believe can best restrain the urge to take more power and trample more freedom. But know that in the end it is what you believe, and what others around you believe and how strongly we believe it that will determine what the politicians do.

Is freedom your passion this year, or is it the candidate of the month? The former can truly transform the world forever; the latter can only follow our mood swings. Don’t expect your vote or candidate to change the world – nothing worth having can be had so easily. I hope to change the world with ideas; the candidates will follow.

“I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics. If Men were Wise the Most arbitrary Princes could not hurt them. If they are not Wise the Freest Government is compelled to be a Tyranny. Princes appear to me to be Fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools, they seem to me to be something Else besides Human Life.” – William Blake

Aristotle on Mixed Economies

This is an article I wrote some time ago for the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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A friend recently commented that he has found wisdom in moderation. He said it seems that truth and goodness are found not at the extremes, but at the place of balance between extremes. This can be very true.

As Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, “Virtue must have the quality of aiming at the intermediate.” In Aristotle’s examples, it is cowardice and recklessness that are the extremes, courage the middle ground. It is drunkenness and uptightness that are extremes, and moderate drinking the mean.

My friend went on from this concept to state that he believed in neither socialism nor capitalism, but in a mixed economy — or what he called a “messy middle ground.” There are two main problems with this conclusion.

The first is that statements like this in the abstract are meaningless. To construct a pretend spectrum, and place various actions and beliefs on it and then to choose the “middle” between them does not give meaning to that middle in and of itself. That is, without actual arguments and definitions regarding what that middle choice or belief is, it is simply a made up point on an imaginary spectrum on which other ideas are arbitrarily placed. Using this logic, I could claim that, since the mean is always good, green beans and omelets are both extremes and I prefer the middle ground.

Most often, those advocating an idea simply because it is in the “middle” of their mentally constructed spectrum do so because they lack any real arguments about the idea itself. For the idea of a middle ground or moderation to have any meaning, the extremes must first be defined and understood as opposite responses to a common problem, and must be placed on an ordinal value spectrum, such as a standard of basic morality that always holds falsehood as bad and truth as good.

The second problem with the conclusion that, since even Aristotle recognized moderation as the source of virtue, a mixed economy is better than capitalism or socialism is that it departs from the logic used in the earlier examples of courage and moderate drinking.

Courage and moderate drinking were the mean because either an excess or a deficiency was problematic. However, both courage and moderate drinking are extremes in another sense. Courage is a word that describes the good state of mind in the face of danger. There is no case in which courage itself is bad or not to be desired, since it is by definition the proper balance between cowardice and recklessness — you cannot have too much courage, nor too little, only too much fear or too little. There is either courage or noncourage (cowardice, recklessness), just as there is either truth or falsehood. In this sense it is an extreme.

Perhaps this sounds like a simple matter of definitional difference. There is, however, a fundamental difference here, meant to show that moderation is only good if it is moderating between two bad extremes and to a good mean, and not if it is moderating between a good and a bad. As Aristotle put it:

But not every action nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g., spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and suchlike things imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excess or deficiencies of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong.

The midpoint between murder and nonmurder is not the good choice — nonmurder is. However, the moderation between not caring a lick about the actions of another and caring so much you would use violence to control them is a good middle ground — but this middle ground is not to be confused with socialism.

Socialism is a system where government uses force to tell people what decisions they can and cannot make. There may be degrees of freedom within different socialist systems, just as a prisoner may be treated better or worse by different wardens, but if you are not free, you are not free.

Capitalism is an economic system that allows people to make choices free from government intervention. All government intervention is backed by the threat of violence — if it were not, it would not be a government policy, but rather a voluntary recommendation, or a rule of a voluntary association. The fact that one cannot avoid taxation and obedience to a government without physical consequences proves that it is not a voluntary institution, but rather one backed by force.

Advocating a “mixed economy” or a middle ground between socialism and capitalism is nothing more than advocating a middle ground between threatening your neighbor with violence if he doesn’t do your will and not threatening him with violence. If he resists, it becomes the same as the “middle ground” between murdering and not murdering. In that sense, capitalism is an extreme, just as courage is an extreme against noncourage.

In another sense, there is a middle ground economically. The middle ground is between caring so much about the economic decisions people make that you would threaten them with murder to control them, and caring so little that you would allow them to harm themselves or others. By definition, you cannot escape the second extreme by application of the first. You cannot care about individuals by threatening them with violence. Such care must come peacefully and voluntarily: by persuasion, not force.

The middle ground in this case is not socialism — or control by threat of violence — but a capitalist system in which individuals voluntarily look out for one another, and peacefully persuade others to look out for themselves and others. Capitalism is not a virtue in the way that courage is a virtue; it is rather a framework that avoids the extreme of violent coercion. Avoiding the one extreme, as a capitalist system does, does not guarantee avoidance of the other extreme, just as not being reckless does not guarantee you will be courageous. But again, avoiding the extreme of neglecting others cannot be achieved by embracing the extreme of coercing them.

The true middle ground is to accept a capitalist system — i.e., avoid the extreme of coercion — and choose personally to care for and about others, and persuade them to do the same — i.e., avoid the extreme of neglect. Since caring for others is a highly subjective, individual concept, no form of coercive economic arrangement can bring it about; one can only allow it to occur.

In one sense capitalism is an extreme in that it is the opposite of coercion. In another sense, capitalism is simply a system that allows individuals to choose the middle ground between coercion and neglect. Socialism, on the other hand, is an extreme in both cases; it is the opposite of freedom and it is not a middle ground between coercion and neglect; it is itself coercion.

Attempting to find a middle ground between coercion and freedom is a bad idea.

Finding a middle ground between coercion and neglect is a good one.

Capitalism is the only system that allows for both of these. We should not stop advocating capitalism, nor should we stop caring about ourselves and others in peaceful, voluntary ways.

I find it no less disturbing when someone says both capitalism and socialism are extreme and they seek a middle ground than if someone were to say both love and cruelty were extreme, and they therefore seek a middle ground. Some vices or virtues are found in moderation; some are found in absoluteness. As Barry Goldwater famously said,

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! — Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Capitalism is just. Socialism is unjust. There is no “messy middle.”

Christianity and Freedom

Is there a dichotomy between law and love?

After reading an article I wrote (Palm Sunday and Politics), a friend of mine told me he thought I espoused a sort of dualistic view of Christian life. As if Christ came only to preach a spiritual transformation as something entirely separate from physical life.

Upon a rereading of the article, I can see how one might draw that conclusion. That is not, however, what I meant to communicate. Indeed, I view life as holistic, with all elements – spiritual, emotional, mental, physical – inextricably intertwined. I view the Christian life as wholly transformative, of the spiritual life as well as the others listed above. I do not see a dichotomy between the spiritual and physical life as far as my Christianity is concerned.

That said, there was a dualism expressed in the post. It was not a dichotomy between the spiritual and physical life, but a dichotomy between peace and force – and by force I am referring to the initiation of physical violence, or the threat of it.

The things I believe as a Christian affect every aspect of my life. My goals in life spring from my theistic view of the world and the resulting actions that view brings. Things like caring for those in need, learning humility, showing love and offering freedom to others–these are goals because of my acceptance of the Kingdom Jesus preached.

These beliefs and duties are physical as much as anything else. What they are not is violent.

To attempt to achieve these goals by initiating force against others is antithetical to the ends themselves. Though physical force may be justified in some instances (such as self-defense, though Christ and many others refrained even from this and chose martyrdom), I do not see any way in which the initiation of violence can be seen as a moral way to advance the work of Christ. When Jesus taught kindness to the poor, do you think he meant it by first doing violence to the rich or middle class? When he taught righteousness, do you think he meant making others righteous on threat of fine or imprisonment?

I do not.

If we do not feel justified in using force to advance these goals individually, why should we feel justified doing it as a group, or hiring it out to others?

Everything government does is done by force. If it’s a new law or regulation, it is backed by threat of fine, imprisonment, or (if you are persistent enough in resisting) force to the point of death. If it is a welfare program, it is funded by tax dollars, which are not given voluntarily. Try not paying your taxes long enough and you’ll find that indeed, force is what’s ultimately behind tax collection. If it were not, funds would be collected by a voluntary association, not government. Government has nothing to give but that which it first takes, and it takes by force or the threat of it.

If you’ve accepted the Christian life, it should indeed transform your entire being and all your actions. Far from believing Christ’s example and words regarding righteousness or care for the poor to be merely spiritual commands, I see them as part of the holistic goal of His kingdom, and involving physical actions. However, I do not see these ends as a justification for violent means.

To attempt to use government to achieve Christian goals is to, ultimately, use physical force. This not only corrupts government, it corrupts the goals themselves and diminishes the true depth of the work of the Kingdom. It reduces a life-transforming message delivered by loving believers into a program for political preferences pushed by a religious interest group.

Oh, and it just so happens that the way human nature works, peaceful and voluntary means of helping the poor and promoting moral behavior achieve unimaginably more than any force-backed government initiative ever can. The genius of creation is manifest in economics – free individuals acting to prosper individually achieve more for their fellow man than mandatory efforts. What is moral, it turns out, is also very efficient.

Christians should not only daily examine their hearts to see if their goals and actions are in line with the ultimate Truth; they should also ask themselves if the means they are using to accomplish those goals are righteous. Sometimes a government program would be easier than doing the work of Christ ourselves, or organizing voluntary efforts. Then again, Christ never said it would be easy.

Palm Sunday and Politics

When He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes.” Luke 19:41–42

As Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to shouts of, “Hosanna” and cloaks and palm branches thrown on the road before him, it seems it must have been a joyful experience. But instead of taking joy in the cheers of the people, Jesus wept over the city.

I’m no Biblical scholar or Jewish historian, but what little I’ve studied of the Bible and the history of the time suggests that the kind of savior the people expected was not the kind Jesus came to be. And for their misplaced hopes, he felt pain.

When Jesus came into the city that day the people gathered to see him and many began to think he may be the Messiah that had been promised the Jews for hundreds of years. They were under the control of the Roman Empire and its various local puppet governments. Understandably, when the Jews learned the promises of a savior and King in the line of their great king David, they expected a Messiah who would free them from Roman rule.

When Jesus entered the city they waved Palm Branches and shouted, “Hosanna.” History suggests these were significant, even dangerous political gestures. Hosanna was a Hebrew word that meant, “Save, now!” and had a very physical connotation. It was not at that time a cry of spiritual or abstract salvation, but a very real shout for physical salvation, which had specific meaning to a people under Roman rule. The Palm branch was a nationalistic symbol for the Jews, a symbol that had appeared on the last coins made when Israel was free. That is perhaps why the Pharisees told Jesus to “rebuke” his disciples – because to openly praise one they thought came to defy their rulers was politically dangerous.

As the crowd of people saw Jesus entering the city, they saw a political savior; one who might at last rise up and free them from the Romans, and they cheered His arrival. But He wept. He wept because they did not know, “The things which make for peace.” He had not come to free them primarily from political bondage.

Jesus did not intend to be a political figure. He seemed to largely ignore the Romans, and even saved His criticisms and rebukes not for the political leaders, but for the leaders of His own people; their spiritual leaders. When He taught righteousness it was never backed by force. When He told the rich man to give all he had to the poor the man walked away; Jesus did not force him to obey, but instead let him go. He refused to use earthly law to punish a prostitute by stoning; instead he told her, “Go and sin no more,” and left her free to decide. He did not come to spread his Kingdom with the tools of earthly kingdoms – force and coercion. He did not come to offer political freedom. He came to offer freedom from something much deeper.

To conflate the work of Christ with the work of worldly politics is to miss the meaning of His life, death, and resurrection. To claim that a Christian must vote for a specific policy or politician, that Christians must use government to enforce our morals – to prohibit bad behavior or to force good behavior – is to reduce the work of Christ to the work of a politician. He is not too weak or insignificant for political battles; political battles are too weak and insignificant for Him. The kind of freedom and righteousness He offers is far too great, too personal, to be advanced by physical force (which all politics boils down to); politics is beneath the spiritual life, not above it.

Physical freedom is a worthy goal. Defending oneself from violence and oppression is not immoral. But as a Christian, to use government to enforce the morality you believe in through law, backed up by the agents of the state, is to contradict Christ Himself.

It is that desire to look to Christ as a way to accomplish political goals that made Him weep as He entered Jerusalem. They looked for peace through a political savior; He knew the peace He brought was much deeper and could be had regardless of the physical conditions around them. Politics is force. Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem that day had been prophesied by Zechariah, who described Him as, “Gentle.”

Let us emulate Him when we attempt to alter the world around us. Let us never forget that the freedom He brings transcends this world, and His peace cannot be attained or spread by force.

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Read the follow-up to this post, Christianity and Freedom.

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