TGIF: Year-End Downers

One always hopes to end the year on a high note, but politically speaking, at least, that is difficult again in 2022. One searches in vain for advances in individual liberty and setbacks for power.

Sure, with the receding of the pandemic, life has returned to normal in many respects. But the ratchet effect that Robert Higgs identified still is the rule. After a rise in government power in response to a crisis (real or imagined), the drop-back is never complete because those who wield power have had their appetite whetted. The precedent itself presents a new threat. If the federal and state governments could so easily shut down virtually all of society (because of a virus that threatened mainly old and sick people), they could do so again. What's even more ominous is how so-called public-health officials and other government agents stigmatized dissenters, no matter how good their credentials, who might have stoked public opposition to the historic infringement of their liberty.

Other political fronts are no more encouraging. The central government is spending obscene amounts of money, so it obviously doesn't need a pandemic to get away with it. Congress has allocated $858 billion to the Pentagon, which is apparently more than the Biden administration asked for. Some $44 billion more is in the offing in support of Ukraine against Russia, bringing the year's total to over $100 billion. (Russia's war is indefensible, but the U.S. and Ukrainian governments are not blameless.)

This military spending has bipartisan support, prompting a two-part question: why do so many "responsible" people 1) think bipartisanship is dead and 2) wish for its resurrection? In an important way, politics is not polarized nearly enough! What we need is a more pronounced polarization over opposing principles: liberty and power.

Need I point out that all that spending has bad consequences? The government will borrow a goodly portion of what it spends, and the Federal Reserve will then create money to buy up that debt. The conjured-up money will join the previously created fiat money in chasing the existing supply of goods and services, pushing prices up even more. That's inflation, which already is eating our purchasing power and savings. Interest rates are prices, by the way, which means they will rise too now that lenders expect money to be worth less in the future. This increases the government's (and our) cost of borrowing. So interest on the debt will grow, requiring more borrowing, and so on. Bad outcomes breed more bad outcomes.

Imagine if the politicians and bureaucrats did not have our best interests at heart!

For the record, as Eric Boehm at Reason reports, "The government spent $501 billion in November but collected just $252 billion in revenue, meaning that about 50 cents of every dollar spent were borrowed."

But that's not all. "And now Congress is gearing up to spend even more," Boehm writes. That's because before year's end, Congress will send Biden a $1.7 trillion omnibus (translation: everything-including-the-kitchen-sink) spending bill. 

All of this comes as the current occupant of the White House insists that the budget deficit is declining. Boehm writes,

That was always misleading, as the falling deficit was entirely the result of one-time, emergency COVID-19 spending coming off the books. The underlying figures showed all along that the deficit situation was continuing to worsen, and that President Joe Biden's policies were adding trillions of dollars to the deficit over the long term.

November's spending and revenue figures should put an end to these silly games. We're only two months into the fiscal year, but the federal government is now on pace to run a deficit of about $1.9 trillion, which would be the largest nonpandemic budget deficit ever and a huge increase from the $1.38 trillion deficit in the fiscal year that ended on September 30.

Excuse me, $1.9 trillion? In nominal terms, that's bigger than Bill Clinton's final budget. Not that it would be preferable for the government to raise taxes, mind you. What is needed are massive spending cuts via the elimination of entire departments, programs, and missions. Let's start with the military by liquidating the empire.

Enough of that bit of depressing news. Let's turn to something else: the revelation that Twitter (and presumably all the social media) worked closely with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Pentagon, and other government agencies to monitor our posts and promote their own propaganda. First Amendment violations surely occurred. Government officials need not have commanded Twitter to suppress posts they did not like. They didn't even have to wink. They're government officials, after all.

It wasn't all about keeping information about Hunter Biden's laptop and dissenting views on COVID-19 away from the public, though. The Pentagon used Twitter to spread its propaganda about Russia, China, Iran, and other subjects through covert accounts. It identified many of these accounts for Twitter so they would be protected, and for years several Twitter accommodated the U.S. military's campaign to mislead the public.

Because Twitter's new chief, Elon Musk, made these disclosures possible, one might think this is a welcome high note on which to end the year. Maybe. On the other hand, Musk does not inspire confidence. His vacillations and murky definition of "free-speech absolutist" suggest he has no clear idea of how he sees the platform. The whole thing seems so half-baked.

I could mention Congress's failure to stop the war in Yemen (damn Bernie Sanders), the threatening rise of national conservatism, and the heavy yoke of wokeism, but I'll stop. Let's rest up to resume the battle. Happy Holidays!

TGIF: The State Fuels Identity Politics

Anyone with an ounce of good sense knows that destructive identity politics is run amuck in America and elsewhere. All incentives these days seem to go in one direction: toward identifying oneself as a member of an aggrieved group supposedly due compensation through government action -- of course at the expense of people who had nothing to do with the grievance. The actual perpetrators (if any), like the actual victims, tend to have long departed this world.

Where real victims and perpetrators are still on the scene, grievances ought to be handled on an individual basis with due process, rather than through pressure-group pandering.  But we may justifiably wonder why innocent taxpayers should bear the consequences for offenses their rulers committed.

Like so many things, identity politics, as the name itself tells us, would be little more than an annoyance if the U.S. government didn't have nearly plenary power over society. But it does have it, and so the politicians and bureaucrats and their pressure groups have profited immensely from dividing us into racial, ethnic, national, and other sorts of groups. This sows the ground for social strife that harms us all.

At different times and places, such classification has been used to enslave, otherwise harm, and even exterminate despised groups; at other times, like now, it's been used to distribute taxpayer money and other benefits to politically favored groups. This stimulates people outside the government to game the system in order to win advantages at the expense of others. Incentives have consequences.

Another potential effect is to provoke a backlash from the majority that bears the burdens of favoritism. This adds yet another layer of resentful identity consciousness to the volatile mix. No one should want to see a society torn apart by racial, ethnic, or similar conflict. Too much depends on social cooperation and the benevolent toleration that underlies it.

Identity politics should be especially objectionable in a country ostensibly founded on freedom and individualism. Treating human beings as interchangeable members of racial, ethnic, or other groups is execrable collectivism.

Now imagine that the government's categories constitute a crazy quilt of arbitrariness, caprice, and pressure-group pandering. Wait -- you don't have to imagine it. You can see it in contemporary America.

What began in the late 1970s as an effort to make record-keeping consistent across government departments has since morphed, contrary to stated policy, into a political device to treat Americans differently according to their race and ethnicity. The goal was to distribute such favors as government loans, contracts, hiring, and college admissions to aggrieved group members. Differential treatment was even applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was all justified in the name of righting past wrongs, that is, using discrimination to counteract previous earlier discrimination, real and imagined. (As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated, statistical disparities are not in themselves evidence of discrimination.)

Because of the government campaign to define those groups, it's now impossible to fill out any kind of form or application without being asked to identify one's race, ethnicity, "gender" (whatever that may mean today), and "sex assigned [sic] at birth."

Thus we should thank David Bernstein of George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, for ripping away the veil of this horrendous and ridiculous system. The story he tells would be hilarious if it weren't pernicious and illiberal. As he points out in this lecture, although the government warned decades ago that the categories had no scientific foundation and were not to be used to determine "eligibility for government programs," that is exactly what happened. The obsession with these arbitrary categories extends even to medical research, which is crazy, not to mention dangerous.

In his talk Bernstein provides lots of examples of absurdity. For example, the category Asian includes Americans descended from national groups that have very little in common, such as Filipinos, Japanese, and Pakistanis. While Indians (from the subcontinent) are classified as Asian, the related Afghans are classified as white, as are Arabs and Iranians. (You can see how this could wreak havoc with medicine.)

One might think that the classification black or African American is justified for government consideration because many black Americans are descendants of American slaves and victims of Jim Crow. But how would that justify including Nigerians who freely immigrated more recently and who are doing quite well?

The category Hispanic also makes little sense. By what standard does an American directly descendant from Spaniards qualify for government favors? Americans with roots in other European countries get no favors. The Spanish came to the New World not as victims but as conquerors, so whence the victimhood? You might think that Hispanic was meant to designate the mixed Spanish and Portuguese Indians from south of the border. But if that's the case, why aren't they simply classified as Indian? Bernstein explains: that category was reserved only for Indians with roots in North America above the Rio Grande, including Canada. Expanding the category further would have unacceptably spread the benefits too thin. So pressure groups opposed it.

If the government was forbidden to dispense benefits to particular individuals and groups, it would lose the opportunity to use the arbitrary classifications that Berstein documents. On the other hand, if some reasonable classification is useful to document government mistreatment of particular groups, I'm confident that civil liberties watchdogs will find a way to handle it.

Racial and ethnic classification is a territory best kept off-limits to the state. Have we learned nothing from history?

 

Walter Grinder, 1938-2022

 I note with great sadness the passing of my friend and former colleague Walter Grinder. He was 84. Walter may be the most important libertarian that most libertarians have never heard of.

Although he made important contributions to the literature of liberty (such as his work with John Hagel on the far-reaching destructive effects of state intervention in money and banking and his introduction to Albert Jay Nock's classic, Our Enemy the State), he devoted his professional activities primarily to keeping libertarian scholars and writers informed about a wide range of literature relevant to understanding liberty. His interests covered the broadest range of disciplines, including history, political philosophy, and economics. He also helped to advance the intellectual careers of many libertarian students by putting them in contact with established academics who had similar research interests. Thus he helped the students navigate the treacherous graduate-school waters in which advocates of individualism and free markets can be at a disadvantage. In the process, he himself mentored countless students who have gone on to become accomplished professors and public intellectuals.

Over many years he did this largely unseen work at the Institute for Humane Studies, where I worked in the late 1980s. For me, one of the great joys of that job was being able to talk with Walter regularly. He was so well-read and was always so reasonable that I wouldn't have thought to undertake a writing project without talking to him first. Like his friend and colleague Leonard Liggio, he was a walking multidisciplinary bibliography. I met Walter more than a decade earlier at one of the first conferences of the old Center for Libertarian Studies. Then in 1978 I attended a Cato Institute summer seminar at which he lectured on central banking and other topics. Those lucid, erudite, and passionate lectures helped inspire my decision to leave newspaper reporting and become a full-time libertarian writer.

Unfortunately, Walter had long been plagued by bad health, but when he finally retired from IHS, he kept up his breakneck pace of looking out for and assimilating new and old important works relevant to liberty and making them known to his large email list of scholars, authors, and other liberty enthusiasts. He helped each of those individuals (me included) immensely. Despite his physical impediments, Walter's optimism and determination never seemed to diminish, I often wondered how he possibly kept at it.

Walter will be missed by the many, many people he helped and inspired. He will be missed not only because of what and whom he knew but also because of who he was: a thoroughly decent, kind, and good-natured family man. He profoundly affected all who knew him at that level. He was a pleasure to be around.

My heartfelt condolences to the Grinder family, which includes grandchildren.

For more on Walter Grinder, see Alberto Mingardi's appreciation. For Walter's perspective on subjectivism in economics, I recommend his introduction to the collection he edited of Ludwig Lachmann's writings, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process.

 

TGIF: Why Freedom Is the Goal

In online interviews and conversations I'm hearing intellectuals in the national conservative movement say that the liberal Enlightenment "project" has mostly failed because people need more in their lives than freedom. I've also heard this from a few people who have lately become disillusioned with leftism but yet are uneasy about libertarianism.

My first response is to wonder whom these critics of classical liberalism, or libertarianism, its modern-day form, have in mind. Which important and widely influential liberal political, economic, or, social thinker even implied that freedom is the only thing worth valuing? Let's name names, please. I can't think of one, but perhaps I'm overlooking someone.

Those conservatives will also insist that freedom without virtue is not just worthless but a clear and present danger. But again, which past and present of genuine liberal stalwarts would disagree? I've always understood liberalism to be distinct from libertinism. I see no grounds for confusing the two.

Classical liberalism, in its consequentialist, deontological, and eudaemonist forms, has been concerned with what makes for a proper society by some articulated standard or other, starting with the most fundamental unit of analysis, the individual. The literature is saturated with positive observations about society, the division of labor, association, and rich communities -- in a word, cooperation.

One way or another, all of that is related to values in addition to freedom; it all is related to virtue. Far from embodying an atomistic, licentious, to-hell-with-everyone-else (pseudo)individualism, libertarianism extols what I call Adamistic (Smith, that is) individualism, in which human beings "selfishly" flourish through mutually rewarding relationships of all kinds. I've also dubbed this "molecular individualism. Of course, some people will engage in vice and aggression (those aren't the same things), but as long as the state is unavailable for social engineering, free individuals using private property in association with others can peacefully protect themselves and their children from what they find abhorrent. Live and let live is the rule.

For liberals, freedom was never just an end in itself. Freedom means freedom from aggression, whatever the source, but at least implicit in the liberal vision -- and indispensable to truly understanding it -- is the freedom to produce material and nonmaterial values in a social context. We want freedom so we may live fully as human beings and enjoy fruitful lives among other people. Successful long-term participation in the market and society more widely encourages honesty, justice, and conscientiousness -- virtues by any reckoning. To understand the value of society is to understand the need for -- yes -- order, but it is specifically the bottom-up, emergent, spontaneous order that F. A. Hayek and other liberals have emphasized. (You find this in Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and countless others.)

The critics of liberalism are right of course when they say that freedom is not enough to properly address the social problems we observe today. But again, which libertarian ever said it was? The libertarian point is that freedom is the condition in which people have the best chance of dealing with problems. Liberalism doesn't promise a rose garden; it's not utopian. In fact, freedom is not the answer to any problem. Rather, it -- along with the resulting decentralization and competition -- is essential to the discovery process that enables people to deal with problems as best they can. Since no one is omniscient, that discovery process is indispensable both for the good life and the good society.

Freedom is not some magic ingredient that when sprinkled on a problem miraculously produces a solution. It's the political, legal, and social environment in which people can act to make their lives better. In the process of virtuously pursuing their rational self-interest, they make others better off too. No central coercive authority, conservative or progressive, can hope to deliver the equivalent, no matter what theory of virtue it seeks to impose. For one thing, they could never know enough.

Thus those who reject libertarianism as unequal to modern challenges show themselves to be boxing with a strawman. But worse, they deceptively pose as the guardians of virtue when they are not.

When conservatives say politics is downstream from culture, they mean that for freedom to be a good thing, people must first be virtuous. But that suggests the conservative program is to change things around and put culture downstream from politics. It's a justification for limits on freedom of speech, religion, commerce, association, etc., until the state's subjects have been prepared to live freely. But who is qualified to tutor the people or to say when the people are ready for freedom? How are their overlords to be chosen?

Liberals have long asked those questions, but not because they thought virtue is unimportant. It is because they knew how important virtue is. They also asked how people can be virtuous without being free to make choices.

Albert Jay Nock, the quirky libertarian writer of the 20th century, wrote about this in his 1924 essay "On Doing the Right Thing," Nock wanted to see human beings free precisely so that they "may become as good and decent, as elevated and noble, as they might be and really wish to be.” (See my essay "Nock Revisited.") He elaborated:

The point is that any enlargement [of state authority], good or bad, reduces the scope of individual responsibility, and thus retards and cripples the education which can be a product of nothing but the free exercise of moral judgment.... The profound instinct against being "done for our own good" ... is wholly sound. Men are aware of the need of this moral experience as a condition of growth, and they are aware, too, that anything tending to ease it off from them, even for their own good, is to be profoundly distrusted. The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed. [Emphasis added.]

That's the answer to the paternalists of all parties.

In contrast, conservatism wants the government to control the culture in the name of building virtuous people. How can they overlook the perils of this program? Once political officials assert control over culture, where does it stop? And how can they be sure that the people whose values they despise won't eventually grab hold of the muscular state they've fortified?

TGIF: On Liberty and Security

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Benjamin Franklin's famous words are often quoted because, alas, they are always relevant.

Whether Franklin meant what libertarians take him to have meant has been challenged in recent years. See this disagreement between Benjamin Wittes and Leya Delray. In defense of her interpretation, Delray argues that Franklin shed light on his meaning when he quoted himself 20 years later.

Whoever is right, for Franklin the word liberty on these occasions meant not individual freedom but colonial "self-government" independent of the king of England and those to whom he had granted land in the New World. And for Franklin, the powers of such a government include the power to tax. Franklin thus was defending the collective "freedom" of Americans through their colonial legislatures (that is, majority rule) against undemocratic rule from afar. (Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony granted to the Penn family by the king of England. The family-appointed governor had repeatedly vetoed bills from the legislature that included provisions to tax the family's proprietary estate to pay for the defense of frontier settlements during the French and Indian War. The family objected but offered instead to pay a lump sum for that defense in return for a legislative renunciation of its power to tax the family land.)

In my view, Delray makes a better case than Wittes, but whatever Franklin had in mind, we as libertarians are free to apply Franklin's words to the individual rather than the collective. After all, we're methodological individualists, who realize that no group can possess rights not possessed by its members. So let's do so. (Another Benjamin -- the French-Swiss classical liberal Benjamin Constant -- had important insights about the critical difference between individual freedom and so-called collective freedom in his must-read 1819 essay "The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns." Spoiler: Three cheers for modernity!)

Many points could be made about the trade-off allegedly required between liberty and safety, or security. For starters, can they really be traded off? The libertarian philosopher Roderick Long thinks not:

What we want is not to be attacked or coercively interfered with – by anyone, be they our own government, other nations’ governments, or private actors. Would you call that freedom? or would you call it security?

You can’t trade off freedom against security because they’re exactly the same thing.

Consider what's happening in China. In the name of delivering the impossible -- zero COVID-19 -- the people have been deprived of all liberty. Are they more secure for this deprivation? The virus is spreading apace anyway, and people are dying and suffering because whatever freedom they had previously has been curtailed. It is inspiring to see so many Chinese protesting their oppression in cities throughout the country. How sad that many other Chinese are willing brutally to police the people who are demanding freedom and justice.

Another way to look at the alleged trade-off between freedom and security is to realize that one doesn't gain actual security through state limits on freedom but rather a false sense of security. A false sense of security is worse than no sense of security at all.

When the state, even a democratic one, assumes the role as security provider, how do we know it will actually provide security rather than make us less safe? Because politicians and bureaucrats (think Anthony Fauci) say so? Because elected officials will accurately identify and appoint well-meaning and expert bureaucrats? A good deal of faith is expected on the part of the people who will be compelled to obey the resulting decrees. This model of governance also ignores the fact discovering what ought to be done in a given situation requires a decentralized competitive process in which competing hypotheses and theories are freely aired. Centralization in this realm suffers from the same fatal calculation and knowledge problems of central economic planning.

At any rate, what assurance does anyone have that the experts, who are human beings, will not err or act corruptly? We have no assurance at all. Even if a state official gets caught in a blunder or corrupt act, the likelihood that he will be held accountable is minuscule. Good luck suing that person. As for mounting an effort to defeat a politician at the polls, good luck with that too.

The doctrine that a democratic state (as opposed to a society of individual liberty and consensual social cooperation) can deliver security is actually rather peculiar. It's based on the curious principle that while we are too incompetent to manage our own lives through individual action and voluntary cooperation, we are perfectly competent to pick other people to manage our lives coercively. No one better exposed this contradiction than Frédéric Bastiat, the great 19th-century French classical liberal economist and legal philosopher. In The Law he wrote:

What is the attitude of the democrat when political rights are under discussion? How does he regard the people when a legislator is to be chosen? Ah, then it is claimed that the people have an instinctive wisdom; they are gifted with the finest perception; their will is always right; the general will cannot err; voting cannot be too universal.

When it is time to vote, apparently the voter is not to be asked for any guarantee of his wisdom. His will and capacity to choose wisely are taken for granted. Can the people be mistaken? Are we not living in an age of enlightenment? What! are the people always to be kept on leashes? Have they not won their rights by great effort and sacrifice? Have they not given ample proof of their intelligence and wisdom? Are they not adults? Are they not capable of judging for themselves? Do they not know what is best for themselves? Is there a class or a man who would be so bold as to set himself above the people, and judge and act for them? No, no, the people are and should be free. They desire to manage their own affairs, and they shall do so.

But when the legislator is finally elected — ah! then indeed does the tone of his speech undergo a radical change. The people are returned to passiveness, inertness, and unconsciousness; the legislator enters into omnipotence. Now it is for him to initiate, to direct, to propel, and to organize. Mankind has only to submit; the hour of despotism has struck. We now observe this fatal idea: The people who, during the election, were so wise, so moral, and so perfect, now have no tendencies whatever; or if they have any, they are tendencies that lead downward into degradation.

Any reasonably intelligent person ought to see that it is far easier for us to manage our own lives than to select "the right" social engineers, with their compulsory one-size-fits-all plans, to do it for us.

It is said that neither freedom nor security is free. I agree. But must we pay coercive monopoly prices for inferior services?