Tag: rational choice

Four Options When Government Gets in the Way of Your Dreams

Four Options When Government Gets in the Way

Illustration by Matthew Drake

 

This article is adapted from a presentation given at FEE and SFL seminars.  Co-authored with James Walpole for The Freeman.

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We all want to live free, but we have a problem: governments don’t always want us to.

From seemingly mundane rules (like banning raw milk sales) to the truly horrific (like taking your house from you or throwing you in jail), the state is probably going to mess with you at some point in your life. It will throw taxes and fees and fines and rules at you and erect roadblocks and regulations inhibiting your progress — especially if you’re trying to do something new and innovative.

What can you do?

You do have options. Grave as the stakes may sometimes be, you must first accept this outlook: it’s all a game. If you treat it that way, you’re more likely to find a way forward rather than simply cowering in fear or trembling with anger.

Here, then, are four options when you’re faced with the game of government interference.

1. Play the Game

This is the strategy you’re probably most familiar with. It’s what we’re all encouraged to do. Whether through voting, lobbying, or holding office, you can try to take on the state while playing by its rules. You can try to change it from the inside. This is a strategy we cannot recommend.

In business, this strategy leads to the phenomenon economists call “regulatory capture.” Many companies become involved in lobbying and political action to prevent hostile regulations. It’s understandable. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign donations and dinners trying to sway politicians and regulators to delay a vote, join coalitions, or carve out exceptions.

It’s a tough, slow process, one that involves endless compromise of principle and decency, and the few who succeed end up with political power and the ability to gain more. They end up using that power not just to expand their own freedom but to crush the freedom of competitors.

But any changes you make will be temporary. Laws passed in one decade are easily repealed in the next, especially if they limit state power. The bigger loss is a personal one. If you play the game long enough, the game ends up playing you. You become a part of the power structure you were trying to fight.

2. Defy the Game

When the state crushes your dreams, you can fight back. History is full of people who stopped taking oppression for granted and started resisting. Look at the civil rights movement in the United States, the Hungarian revolt against Communist rule, or even Uber’s commercial rebellion.

Today, the ridesharing company is operating illegally in dozens of cities, and it’s already paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for its drivers who are caught violating local laws. The company is growing fast enough to absorb the damage, and while governments don’t like Uber, customers love it. In Uber-hostile cities like New York, riders are standing up for their favorite way to get around. The “rebellion” has been a huge success.

But rebellion plays out in more desperate ways in the rest of the political world. For people and companies without the money and reputation of Uber, successfully defying the game is hard. While you can get tremendous satisfaction from sticking it to the man, you might end up in jail. You might be killed. In other words, playing this way means you might run into the real power of the state in its rawest form.

3. Change the Game

Changing the game is about recognizing the incentive structures and putting external pressure on the government to bend. Often, all you need to do to win is to hold the state to its own rules.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds, and the people who try to change the game in this way have to be heroic, if not martyrs. They’re taking the longest route. Game-changers lower the cost of information to the public while raising the cost for government to break its own rules or be thuggish. This group includes lawyers, journalists, public intellectuals, and everyday citizens.

Look at the case of occupational licensing. Municipal and state governments throughout the United States require entrepreneurs to give up money and time to comply with regulations. Many would-be entrepreneurs are stopped dead in their tracks by competition-killing regulations.

Before the Institute for Justice (IJ) challenged the regulation, eyebrow threaders in Texas were required to train for 750 hours before they could set up shop. Before another IJ case in 2011, Texas required bakers wanting to sell cookies to the public to rent commercial kitchen space and obtain food-handling permits.

Changing the game isn’t limited to the courtroom. Governments will break their own rules if they can get away with it. Both IJ cases included concerted efforts to raise public awareness about the unfair consequences of the regulations while simultaneously challenging them in court. These efforts raised the stakes for any judge who wanted to rule for the status quo. It also resulted in politicians jockeying to change the law before the court case was even settled so that they could take credit and benefit from the positive PR. Think about the state lawmakers who jumped at the chance to restrict eminent domain after theKelo outrage.

This is one of the biggest pros of changing the game: if you’re successful, you’ve kept your own integrity, and you’ve helped to protect others from the dream crushers in government.

The problem is that you may not win. You can spend years of your life fighting the battle to change the game and lose — plenty of people have, from the Dred Scott case to the Kelo decision. Even if you do win, the victory is too often short-lived: as soon as public awareness and scrutiny abate, courts will “reinterpret” hard-fought constitutional changes put in place to restrict government.

4. Ignore the Game

Entrepreneurs in the last decade have made international-trade and immigration restrictions less and less important. Today, anyone can telecommute to work in the United States from a call center in India, an Internet cafe in Bangladesh, or a personal laptop in Mexico. These innovations allow labor to move freely, and the inventors never needed to lobby politicians.

You can quit, exit, and opt out of the games government uses to stop you. You can move. You can pull your kids out of school. You can alter your business plan. You can quietly sidestep the obstacles placed before you.

There are major benefits to ignoring the game. For one thing, you don’t have to think about politics. Psychologists and philosophers have long told us to not worry about things not under our control. By ignoring the game, you can be politically ignorant and much happier. You don’t have to fight court battles or Internet comment threads. You can focus on creating, not protesting.

Ignoring the game isn’t always as satisfying as defying it, but ignoring the game offers an immediate sense of personal freedom. It allows you to create a freer life for yourself while providing an example that others can learn from. Over time, if enough people ignore the game, it begins to wane in importance and power.

How Will You Respond?

If your goal is to live free, first understand the game and know the rules. The way you respond to the game is then up to you. The strategy you choose will have more influence over your quality of life than any near-term victory or defeat will.

You may respond to the government in many different ways throughout your life, but if you treat it like a game, it will be less likely to ruin you.

Three Types of Racism

  1. Scientific Racism: “Some races are biologically inferior and should therefore be treated differently.”
  2. Cultural Racism: “Some races are culturally inferior and should therefore be made to adapt to the superior culture.”
  3. Institutional Racism: “Some institutions have bad incentives that attract scientific and cultural racists and enable them to act on their racism without fear of bad consequences.”

All three forms of racism exist.  I think the first two statements above are false, while the third is true.

Those who believe in either of the first two are not likely to change easily, and almost never through direct argument.  A steady drip of experience could potentially affect them, and more likely a generational change.

The third type of racism is the kind that can be meaningfully alleviated by ignoring, defying, or innovating around the bad institutions.  When the bad institutions are undermined the first two forms of racism tend to shrivel and go into hiding.  The existence of bad institutions protects and perpetuates racist beliefs and actions.

In the long term, markets do not reward racism.  Free association does not perpetuate it.  It is for this reason that racists everywhere are always forced to go to violent state institutions to codify racism in the face of market pressure in the opposite direction.  When the market isn’t racist enough, the law is invoked.

You can justifiably scream about people’s horrible beliefs, but until you alter the incentives they face the outcomes are unlikely to change.

Sometimes You Have to Create a Chip on Your Own Shoulder

NBA great Stephen Curry has a chip on his shoulder.  It’s clear when you watch him play.  Even as he’s gotten better, it’s grown bigger.  This is what great performers do.  They play with a chip.

Steph is a great example of how the factual truth of a situation by itself does not dictate what kind of orientation we have toward it.  There are two stories about Steph Curry, both true.

In one story he was born with great genes to an NBA star dad and volleyball playing mom.  He grew up with plenty of money and access to basketball training facilities, coaches, mentors, and opportunities galore.  He honed his skills, went to a good school, played well, got drafted for good money, and continued excel with a great team and organization around him.

By this account, which is factually correct, he is one of the most fortunate people on earth.  How could this gifted athlete have a chip on his shoulder?

In another story Steph grew up with more pressure than most people could imagine.  His star athlete parents had done more than most kids could ever hope to in sports.  He lived under their shadow.  He didn’t grow as tall as he should have for basketball, and was too skinny.  Despite practicing the sport almost from birth, not a single major college was interested in him.  He ended up at a tiny liberal arts school.  He played well, but he was not fortunate enough to be on a team with any hope of a national title.  Despite his amazing shooting ability and NCAA tournament performance, Steph was questioned as an NBA talent.  He was seen as too small, and mostly just a shooter without a full range of skills.  He entered the league with virtually no hype compared to most future MVP’s.  He had to scratch and claw through a historically great Western Conference for the first several years of his career before making it to the finals.  When there, even though the team he led won, he did not get finals MVP.

By this account, which is factually correct, he is one of the biggest underdog greats in sports history.  How could this constantly overlooked late-bloomer not have a chip on his shoulder?

Steph can choose which set of facts to focus on and which narrative to tell himself.  Off the court, Steph is likely aware of the great life he’s had and thankful for it.  Remembering the best facts about ourselves is a powerful defense against self-pity.  Yet it seems pretty clear that, come game day, he’s thinking about the second story.  He’s not just happy to be there.  He’s got something to prove.

At Praxis we like to tell the participants at the start of the program these two bits of professional advice:

  1. Don’t take anything personally
  2. Take everything personally

The first is a reminder to think in terms of rational choice theory.  Deciding someone is wrong or out to get you is unhelpful for determining how to work around them.

The second is a reminder to stay sharp because no one cares about your success.  In fact, if you’re doing your own thing, they probably doubt you.  Good.  Use that.  Not with malice toward them in real life, but as fuel for the narrative you weave of your own hero’s journey.

See, we can all be like Steph Curry after all!  Now go watch some amazing highlight videos.

A Tale of Two Cities Part 2: Why People are Dumb at the Ballot Box

This is the sequel to a post about the two spheres we all dwell in – the political and the civil – and how each affect our behavior.

Originally published in The Freeman.

Why do so many San Franciscans want to curb Airbnb’s innovative business model?

Proposition F would have restricted the number of nights owners could list their homes and which types of rooms could be listed; it would also have required a litany of paperwork and reporting to a city department. Listings that did not meet city standards would have incurred fines of up to $1,000 per day. The details are many, but the thrust is obvious: this proposal was to make Airbnb far less successful at creating value for customers and investors.

The proposal ultimately failed, but it wasn’t a landslide. Forty-four percent of voters supported it. Nearly half of the voters in a city that owes its recent prosperity and identity to this kind of innovative company wanted to strangle one of the geese on whose eggs they are feasting.

Most political action is signaling.

The simplest explanation is that proponents of this proposal were the minority of businesses and individuals who are in direct competition with Airbnb — hotels and those working or investing with them. True, but something deeper is at work. A surprising number of investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday residents of the city who are not involved with competing businesses voiced their support for the proposal. Some supporters were even Airbnb investors.

How could this be?

Here are five reasons (by no means an exhaustive list) why people behave so badly in the political realm.

1. Other People’s Problems

Milton Friedman famously described the four ways to spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself, your own money on someone else, someone else’s money on yourself, or someone else’s money on someone else. It’s clear that you’ll be most judicious in the first scenario, and less so in each that follows.

All political issues are a case of the fourth scenario, even when money is not directly involved. You’re voting on the use of resources that aren’t yours — the pool of taxpayer dollars that fund government bureaucracy — to solve someone else’s problem, in this case hoteliers threatened by competition and San Francisco residents supposedly being pushed out of affordable housing.

Ballot initiatives tell us that some people, somewhere, are having some kind of problem — and that we can vote to make it better. It’ll cost you nothing (at least nothing you can see at the moment), so why not?

Not only voters, but also the regulators, enforcers, and drafters of such propositions are so far removed from the issue at hand and have no personal stake in the outcome that it is impossible for them to make decisions or draft policies without unintended consequences.

2. Information Issues

Proposition F is ridiculously complex. To cast a fully informed vote on the Prop F, one would need to begin by reading all 21 pages of legal text. What’s more, the costs of obtaining the information far exceed the probability that your informed vote will be decisive. The result is what economists call “rational ignorance.”

Customers, employees, managers, and investors of Airbnb are best suited to optimize the service. Even the company’s competitors are in an excellent position to curb it or force it to improve if they channel their efforts where the information matters, namely in the markets where they stand to lose or gain.

3. Signaling for Survival

Most political action is signaling. It’s not so much that people want to buy American or recycle everything — we know this because when their own money is on the line in the real world of trade-offs, they mostly don’t. But people want to be seen as the kind of person who buys American or supports recycling. There is tremendous pressure in the political sphere to prove to everyone that you support all the right things — especially things that come at a direct personal cost to you. This proves you care about that abstraction called “society.”

Once control by force is an option, a great deal of otherwise productive energy and otherwise creative people are drawn into the crooked craft of politics.

The best thing a rich person can do in the political sphere is vote for higher taxes on the rich. The best thing an Airbnb investor can do is claim to support regulations that restrict Airbnb. You’ll get lots of cheap signal points, even if what you support would actually be bad for everyone.

4. Binary Choices

Voting is a yes or no affair. The political sphere is incapable of genuine pluralism. Imagine if markets worked the same way. What if your local grocery store sent out a survey asking you to vote on which kind of wine you wanted them to stock, or how much, or at what price (with any losses to be made up by adjusting other prices)?

Can Airbnb be improved? Of course. Can a bunch of people with no control over the outcome and little skin in the game be given an up or down vote on a single policy proposal and make it better? Don’t be silly.

The adaptability, nuance, and diversity of options, offerings, and solutions in a market are the greatest strength and the very stuff on which the startup scene was built. Cramming broad society-wide solutions into binary choices is absurd.

5. The Problem of Power

The infamous Stanford prison experiment didn’t go horribly wrong because the wrong batch of subjects was chosen: it was a case of dangerous institutions and incentives. When rules are enforced by raw power, the person who wields that power has more control than any human being can responsibly handle.

Contrary to Thomas Hobbes, it is not the “state of nature” that is a war of all against all; it is Leviathan that rewards force over cooperation and cultivates the worst traits. Once control by force is an option, a great deal of otherwise productive energy and otherwise creative people are drawn into the crooked craft of politics.

F.A. Hayek wrote at length in The Road to Serfdom about why, in the political sphere, the worst get on top. It’s a predictable outcome of a powerful state.

Democracy doesn’t keep this tendency in check so much as it directs the power toward those who are best able to appeal to the desire of rationally ignorant voters to signal the trendy positions on the latest issues.

Focus on Freedom

The innovative startup founders on the San Francisco scene are an amazing force for good when they are pursuing their own interests within the incentive structure of civil society. Not one of them would remain a positive influence if they were granted monopoly power through the ballot box. Nor would their customers: even the most forward-thinking minds in the most innovative city in the world become petty and stagnant when operating within the confines of the political sphere.

When you act as a consumer and choose which kind of vacation housing to purchase, your action sends information and incentives rippling through the market price system, helping entrepreneurs guide resources to their highest valued use. When you act as a voter to support or reject a policy, you create losers and enemies, and your vote generates a host of destructive effects.

If you want a freer, better world, you’ve got to build it in the private sphere.

A Tale of Two Cities: Civil vs. Political Society

In one city it seems the innovation never ceases.  Bright and talented dreamers from across the globe flock there to build amazing things.  They create solutions to problems both commonplace and incomprehensible.  You can find entrepreneurs and investors working round the clock on everything from entertaining apps to asteroid mining to life extension.  In the past few decades alone the denizens of this city have revolutionized the planet, put massive computing power in everyone’s pocket and all the libraries of the world at the fingertips of the majority of earth’s population.

This city is always looking forward, upward, onward.  It is relentlessly focused on solving problems and improving quality of life.  It is driven by curiosity, new frontiers, and prosperity.  From this city have come simple yet revolutionary technologies that unlock billions in dormant assets like extra bedrooms, apartments, and cars.  Customers love them.  Investors love them.  And the city can be proud of the world-changing impact made by the companies headquartered there.

There is another city much different.  This city puts up barriers and blockades to keep bright and talented people out.  It proposes solutions to problems that don’t exist.  You can find demagogues and petty tyrants working 9-5 on everything from grocery bag taxes to restrictions on tree branches.  In the past few decades alone the figureheads of this city have managed to take record amounts of money from citizens and demand record levels of compliance with confusing rules and regulations.  They’ve taken untold creative power out of every citizen’s efforts and resources out of their pockets.

This city is always looking backward and downward.  It is relentlessly focused on creating new conflicts and categorizing everyone’s relative quality of life.  It is driven by fear, doubt, and preservation of the past.  From this city have come complex and confounding ordinances that strangle active assets and reduce quality of life.  Customers have no choice.  Investors can’t divest.  And the city can take credit for world-changing companies that have relocated to other cities to escape the Leviathan.

Both cities are the same place.  In this case, San Francisco.  But many cities share the same fate.  The citizens are the same.  Yet they live in two spheres simultaneously and the institutions and incentives in those spheres are so drastically different you can barely recognize the actors in each as the same people.

Make no mistake, they are the same people.  It’s not that some people are peaceful, productive producers and consumers and some people are meddling petty tyrants.  It’s that the same person behaves in both ways, depending upon the incentives and institutions.  The political man (as in mankind) is a barbarous, tribalistic busybody.  The market man is an inventive, curious soul.

I’ll be sharing a specific recent example of this split-personality disorder and what leads to the contrasting behaviors in the two spheres in an upcoming piece for The Freeman.  Stay tuned.

Update: Here’s Part 2.

Why Do We Have to Pick Sides?

Not long ago I was discussing the famous Sons of Liberty who sparked the events leading to the American Revolution.  We grow up hearing of their exploits as heroic, bold, and founded on the highest principles.  Yet there is an alternative account too.  If their deeds are described devoid of historical context they have all the attributes we would associate with terrorists.  It was violent, destructive, thuggish, and as fueled by hate as principle.

The traditional historian will tend to whitewash these historical figures and focus only on the ultimate outcome, an independent nation, and assume that because it exists it is good, and therefore whatever led to it was also good.  The radical revisionist will brand them as evil and by extension whatever their deeds may have helped to accomplish must be bad and the right thing would have been no revolution at all.

Something about the history of whatever political jurisdiction we grow up in makes us incredibly dumb when it comes to analyzing actions and individuals.  If your dysfunctional neighbors had a nasty divorce that you knew about only through the grapevine, would you immediately proclaim one side just and the other unjust?  You’d be smart enough and staid enough to stay out of it and understand that both sides are equally likely to be in the right, if there even is a right at all.  Yet people few centuries ago with whom we share little in common got into complex conflicts and we feel the need to come down hard for or against one side or the other.

Free yourself from the patriotic reading of history which demands good guys and bad guys.  You don’t need to pick sides.  You can admire or be repulsed by all sides in historical epochs, or simply admit ignorance and have no feelings whatsoever.  The need to find the “right” side always results in fact-bending and uncomfortable association.  It makes you dumber and less happy, as there is always some alternative version you feel the need to respond to or stamp out.

History is not a football game where your team either wins or loses based on what the textbooks say.  It’s a bunch of messy stuff that already happened, and who was more or less wrong or right has no bearing on your life today unless you let it.  Don’t shackle yourself to the deeds of dead strangers.  If you want to understand history, move beyond good and evil.

Evil Doesn’t Mean Irrational

I was singing the praises of rational choice theory to a friend – telling him it can help people understand cause-effect relationships in the world and navigate better towards their goals, rather than just getting bitter – when he posed an objection.  Sure, he granted, most people are acting to get what they want and not just to torment you for its own sake, but what about those few people who may be genuinely evil, and truly revel in your misery?  How can rational choice account for this?  Don’t they destroy this worldview?  Isn’t it impossible to understand what they’re aiming at and negotiate to avoid pain?

I asked for a specific example.  He mentioned a friend of his who gets angry at people and immediately assumes evil motives.  When someone says they’ll show up at 10 and comes at 10:30, she thinks it’s because they’re simply a terrible person, and there’s no rationality behind their selfish tardiness, therefore there’s nothing she can do to cope with or avoid being the victim of it.  It’s a very helpless, disempowering way to look at things.  It’s also patently false.

Even if we grant that the person is pure evil, hell bent on her discomfort, this theory has provided no explanatory power for the particular actions taken.  Why didn’t the person just key her car or slash her tires if inconveniencing her was the goal?  Why did they show up 30 minutes late, instead of 60, or not at all?  What accounts for the particular choices made?  Clearly, some kind of calculation was involved.  If being a jerk was the goal, the person must have reasoned that showing up 30 minutes late was the least costly way to exact the most jerkiness.  In other words, they looked at costs and benefits, and made a rational choice given their preferences.

Once you strip away the emotion and realize that, evil or not, people still make rational choices about what means to employ in seeking their ends, it tends to melt away the anger and helplessness a bit.  If the person was rational enough to choose whether to be late and by how much, does it seem probable they did it just to tick you off?  Not in most cases.  Far more likely, they had a phone call, or forgot to get gas ahead of time, failed to account for traffic, or any number of other things, and they determined sacrificing 30 minutes was the least bad solution.  But even if they wanted to cause trouble, knowing they have a cost/benefit calculation just like you do can help you see possible work-arounds.  How might you change their incentives to improve the chances of punctuality?  The onus is on you to accept their preferences, whether you like them or not, and learn to get what you want anyway.

It’s much easier emotionally to just call them evil and irrational and propagate the myth of your own helplessness.  It might feel good in the moment, but it’s a terrible way to reach your goals, and it fails to explain the real world.  In fact, the vindictiveness that can result is likely to make them truly angry with you, whether they were at first or not, and want to exact revenge, perpetuating the conflict.

Worry less about the morality of others or their motives, and put more focus on what caused them to choose what they did and how you might alter what they view as in their best interest.  You’ll enjoy life more, and you might find people around you aren’t as bad as you think.

We Already Have the Solution: It’s Called Freedom

Milton Friedman once said of the political system,

“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.”

There already exists an institution that ensures people, be they right or wrong, do the right thing.  It’s called the market.

Any wish to constrain government, or keep political interests behaving in the interest of the general public, is a wish that government behave more like a market; and that the political class behave more like individuals must behave to succeed in a market.  All reform efforts aimed at making the state smaller, less oppressive, more accountable, more efficient in it’s various activities, and less arbitrary are efforts to make it completely unlike itself, and completely like the market.

What I mean by the market is the entire realm of voluntary exchange and coordination.  Politics, like all institutions, is a type of market, but not the type I mean.  It has two unique feature that no other institution has, it produces a host of things unthinkable under other institutions.

The first unique feature is coercion.  The transactions in the political system are not voluntary.  This dramatically alters the incentives and signals in all the exchanges.  “Customers” tolerate what they hate, because it’s not worth being jailed for.  The second unique feature is near universal moral approval.  Though the coercion is real and known by all, it is not only accepted, but praised and condoned.  No other institution enjoys this kind of unskeptical reception and sanction.  Without these two features, there is no state.

It is easy to see why governments produce so much of what we hate, and destroy so much value.  Any market entity that attempted to engage in a single activity the way government does would cease to become profitable and receive universal scorn.  On the market, people think it immoral and tasteless to say you’ll provide a free soft drink with a sandwich and not make good.  That kind of behavior from a corner deli wouldn’t last a week.  On the political market, people think little of a politician who promises to stop sending young people to kill others across the globe, but then sends more instead.  That kind of behavior might get you another four years.

If we wish for the wrong people to do the right things, we can engage in the monumental task of altering public belief and preferences enough that they are willing to pay the price for resisting the state.  We can work to continually alter the incentives faced by politicians on every single issue, fighting back against every incentive built into government.  Of course, the state itself resists this by its very nature, and always will.

The real solution is not the state at all, but the market.  It’s not changing the state, it’s letting it fade into irrelevancy as markets grow up around it, carrying out all the activities states try so jealously to monopolize.  Markets don’t require perfect consumers or producers.  They put bad people in the position where they must do good to succeed.

Friedman was right.  The easiest way to do it is to force political entrepreneurs out of government, and into the realm where they’ll have to be market entrepreneurs.

Individuals Act in Own Self Interest!

BREAKING: Individual’s, when given a range of choices, do things they see as most beneficial to themselves. Surprisingly, giving them titles like “public servant”, paying them with a percent of earnings taken by force from others, providing a lot of power and public trust, and offering little scrutiny do not reduce the tendency towards self-interest.

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.

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.

Rational Choice Robots Are Real (and they are us)

One of my pet peeves is when characters in movies don’t behave like real people.  I don’t mean when people teleport, or fly, or grab onto the landing gear of a moving plane – I love sci-fi, action and fantasy.  These things don’t make sense in our world, but can be perfectly consistent with the rules of the world in the film.  What gets me is when the storytellers try to convince us that the characters are normal humans, just like you an me, regardless of whether gravity is the same, yet they behave completely irrationally.

I don’t mean irrationally as in crazy, or emotional, or too short-sighted; real people do that.  I mean in ways that do not benefit them in any way, even according to what we are supposed to believe is their own subjective valuation.  Movie villains are notorious for this.  How often are they portrayed as hell-bent on a particular goal, only to stall just before realizing the goal to deliver some one-liner.  If the character is supposed to crave attention and the recognition of being witty above all else, this might make sense, but that’s not often what we’re supposed to believe about them.  How many movies portray business tycoons as so greedy for more money that they do things that will guarantee them less money?

I have a hunch that this unrealistic portrayal of humans in extraordinary circumstances stems from an unrealistic understanding of humans in ordinary circumstances.  There seems to be a failure among writers and the general public to appreciate the power of rational choice theory in explaining human behavior.  Too many people do not see everyday actions as the result of rational self-interest.  If you don’t think people pick a brand of black beans based on rational choice, then why would they pick a method of murdering their nemesis any more rationally?

Critics of rational choice theory correctly point out that real people are not robots that calculate their projected “utility” with every decision.  This critique is correct insofar is the calculation is not often conscious nor does it involve anything called a “util”.  But calculations of self-interest do occur all the time, and in dizzying complexity.  To take a well-documented example, when seat-belt laws are enacted, injury from accidents tends to increase slightly.

Economist use a rational choice model to explain that humans comfortable with a certain level of risk will maintain that level and if you make them wear seat-belts  they may compensate by driving more dangerously.  I doubt anyone consciously gets into their car after a seat-belt law is passed and says, “I’m comfortable with a 0.7% chance of death every time I drive, and this damn seat-belt lowered it to 0.5%.  I’m going to speed up!”  Still, we make subtle, marginal calculations like this all the time without realizing it.  If you crave a candy bar you may be willing to get in your car and drive at night through the rain to get one – an act that dramatically increases your risk of injury.  But if it’s snow mixed with rain, you may deem it not worth the risk.  A very minor change in risk alters your decision.

It is impossible for an economist to get inside anyone else’s head and understand their subjective preferences or what creates them.  It’s hard enough to understand what generates our own.  Absent some telepathic ability, we are left with few tools to analyze the decisions people make and the norms and institutions that result.  We could assume that people behave in completely irrational, unpredictable ways and have no expectation of generating a desired result when they take any action.  But then, why would someone act if they did not believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that acting would yield some benefit (as defined by them, not some objective standard)?  An assumption of rationally self-interested individuals is the only tool available to us, and it turns out it’s amazingly powerful.

Since value (in the economic sense anyway) is subjective, calling someone a rational chooser does not mean they have no emotions or impulses.  These things are part of what form their judgements of what is valuable.  Neither does it mean people will always choose the most effective means of getting what they desire.  No one is perfectly informed and we often have false ideas about cause and effect.  What we value also changes over time and with circumstance.  All it means is that, given the knowledge and preferences we have we will choose the actions that we perceive as yielding the greatest benefit (subjectively defined) at the time of choosing.  So simple it’s often dismissed as an unhelpful truism.  But how many times do we forget this and assume all kinds of far-fetched things about people’s choices instead?

When we apply this model, even some of the most bizarre behaviors can start to make at least some sense, given the constraints (real or perceived) and context.  (Check out some of the work of Peter Leeson).  This can help us see the root causes of behaviors and social phenomena and, if we so choose, attempt to change the cost/benefit equation and alter the situation.  Without this model we are left making wild and arbitrary guesses and claims about what motivates actions and we pursue remedies that do nothing to change the underlying incentives.  “They hate us because we’re free”, for example, might make one feel better, but it doesn’t offer any valuable insight into why someone rational enough to plan for months would conduct a seemingly irrational act like a suicide bombing.

I love a tall tale at the movies, but it would be a lot better if writers kept their characters actions consistent with the motives and values they are supposed to have.  Understanding real human behavior is the first step in creating pretend worlds that really capture the imagination of real world viewers.

Beyond Good & Evil

Since our move to South Carolina I’ve had a renewed interest in American history and, in particular, the history of the South and the institution of slavery. I’m a Yankee invader, so my notions of the South were pretty simplistic. I saw monuments and read snippets that were incongruent with the narrative I grew up with regarding the Civil War, slavery, and the South in general. It became clear how uncomfortably complex the whole mess was.

A friend recommended Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese. What an excellent book! The author filters some things through a lens of Marxian class theory, which is not really my thing, but the book is jam-packed with counter-intuitive insight and uses tons primary sources in a very enlightening way, not just a bombardment of long quotations or endless footnotes which historians sometimes do. The book is a great reminder of how much more complex the world is than we try to make it in retrospect. American slavery was not a simple story of good people and evil people. It was not a simple case of economic exploitation. It was an elaborate and highly nuanced institution with unlikely defenders and enemies. It was an evil institution, but the people within it were not necessarily evil or good.

I’ve written elsewhere about the fact that institutions can be good or evil even if the people within those institutions are not. I think it’s important to remember this. It doesn’t let us off the hook with sweeping declarations of good and evil. It forces us to look at the world as it is, and understand that people respond to incentives, and that good people can support bad institutions because of false beliefs. It doesn’t mean they aren’t accountable for their beliefs, but they mightn’t be knowingly engaging in evil.

Genovese’s book revealed that some slave owners abhorred the institution. Why didn’t they simply free their slaves? Sometimes state law prohibited or made very difficult the freeing of slaves. Some owners believed that, once freed, the slaves would risk re-enslavement by others, a much crueler life in the free but still racist North, or great hardship in a world for which they were not equipped. Whether this was true, there was some reason for slave owners to have such fears. Some freed slaves did suffer these fates. One doesn’t have to hate slavery any less or agree with the logic of these conflicted slave owners to allow the possibility that they needn’t have been pure evil. One former slave owner wrote how wrong he had been to assume that the slaves needed him and that he needed the slaves. He described how poorly most plantations were doing financially, and how the end of slavery actually improved them economically. He talked about how well the former slaves got on away from the plantation. Both of these outcomes surprised him. His worldview was so entrenched that he failed to see how the institution was harming not only the slaves but his own economic well-being.

The more difficult fact is how many slaves claimed to not want freedom, and how many chose not to take it when given the chance. One could make the material case that some slaves might have had better lives on a plantation than the other options available at the time, and that is certainly worth considering, but it strikes me that there’s something deeper at play here. There is a belief in one’s own helplessness and a fear of the unknown common to all people who have long been oppressed. When the Soviet Union fell there were stories of people who did not know what to do and longed for the security of the previous tyranny. Abused spouses sometimes exhibit similar behavior. Fear of the unknown dangers of freedom does not make the captives bad people in any of these cases. It reveals the complex nature of such institutions and reminds us that long-run oppression of such magnitude requires far more than physical force: it requires some level of belief on the part of oppressors, oppressed, and third parties that the institution is either moral, necessary, or at least inevitable.

We do ourselves a disservice if we boil everything down to good vs. evil and explain every tyranny as the result of raw physical power. People are complicated creatures who seek the most gain at the least expense and who accept or contrive all manner of beliefs to justify their choices. Or maybe the beliefs come first and determine the choices. Either way, in the long run ideas shape the institutions we live under. History and our own times are better understood when we treat people like rational actors whose choices are shaped by their beliefs rather than evil egomaniacs or saintly altruists.

There is a lot to learn from the experience of American slavery. It was a unique institution, but not so unique that it doesn’t have modern lessons and parallels. Many people failed to see beyond slavery. What evils do we fail to see beyond or imagine the world without? Robert Higgs provides some provocative food for thought here.