TGIF: No Cheers for Decolonization(R)

How can a libertarian oppose decolonization? Colonization not only oppressed conquered peoples, as the staunchest early classical liberals never tired of pointing out, but also burdened the taxpayers of the home country, who were forced to pay through the nose for massive a military establishment, which subsidized the profits of the politically privileged few. Imperialism stunted economic growth by depriving entrepreneurs of resources they would have invested to benefit consumers. Adam Smith showed this in The Wealth of Nations (1776), but he was later echoed by Richard, Cobden, Herbert Spencer, and, in America, William Graham Sumner.

So if colonization is bad, how can decolonization also be bad? Very simply. The people who use this term today—I'll call the current usage Decolonialism®—do not mean only that occupying powers should leave conquered people to manage their own affairs, which began happening after World War II. That was literal decolonization, and it was good if incomplete, although too often the exit was followed by tribal warfare, massacres, expulsions, dictatorship, and grievances in Africa and Asia that endure to this day.

In contrast, Decolonialism­® is something else. It insists that all vestiges, whether real or imagined, of colonization—no matter how objectively good they may be—should be purged from everything everywhere precisely because the colonial powers may have imported them. Some protestors have this in mind when they call for a "global intifada" (uprising).

It is important to understand that Decolonialism­® is just one application (along with race, sex, and more) of the Critical Theory metanarrative, according to which everyone is either an oppressor or a victim of oppression. Oddly, nonbinary thinking is impermissible in this case. The goal is to overthrow classical liberalism, private property, and the market economy by sowing doubt about almost everything people justifiably believe, such as that sex is binary, immutable, and important, and not a "social construct." The metanarrative is a form of gaslighting, a term that comes from the title of an old movie in which a conniving husband makes his wife doubt her sanity so he can commit her to a mental institution and control her wealth.

Decolonialism­® would mean removing or massively suppressing so-called Western themes from school curricula, art museums, and orchestral programs, but that's small potatoes compared to what some people have in mind. Why? Because Western civilization is seen as rotten to the core, the source of all evil, with nothing worth salvaging.

Think of what that would mean. Hardly any spot on earth would be exempt, certainly not the Western Hemisphere. Whole societies would have to be uprooted—it's sometimes called "the great reset." Never mind that parts of colonial legacy, whatever the intention, have been good for colonized peoples. (See the scene "What have the Romans ever done for us?" in the brilliant movie Monty Python's Life of Brian.)

Slated for deletion would be the English legal tradition (including the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, and the state's burden of proof), roads and other infrastructure, reason (logic, universality, and objectivity), the scientific method, written language, linear thinking, individualism, property, the profit motive, the division of labor, trade, middle-man activity—in a phrase, Enlightenment classical liberalism (precursor of libertarianism), the product of a thousand-year struggle on the ground in Europe. All of this could be, and in many cases has been, stigmatized as "Western," "white supremacist," "patriarchal," and "colonial," although some of these great customs were indigenous.

As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay write in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody, "[D]ecolonial narratives frequently attack rationality, which postcolonial scholars see as a Western way of thinking."

Advocates of Decolonization® would uproot philosophy originating in ancient Greece, despite its universalism, and not simply refute it. "That is," Pluckrose and Lindsay write, "it is not enough to add other philosophical approaches to the field one wishes to decolonize. Postcolonial Theorists insist European philosophy must be entirely rejected—even to the point of deconstructing time and space as Western constructs." These intellectuals push four themes, the authors write: "the blurring of boundaries [for instance, between male and female], the power of language, cultural relativism, and the loss of the universal and individual in favor of group identity.... These themes are explicitly central to the postcolonial Theory mind-set and decolonize movement." The authors provide ample quotations to support that claim.

On the other hand, some indigenous customs abolished by the colonial powers presumably would have to be restored, such as suttee in India, which the British abolished. Suttee, or sati, was "the act or custom of a Hindu widow burning herself to death or being burned to death on the funeral pyre of her husband." I guess cultural relativists would have no problem with its restoration.

Would abolishing everything associated with the West help formerly colonized people seeking Western living standards? Some Asians and Africans think not. Rather, they see Decolonization® as condescending and harmful. Imagine being told that reason, science, intellectual rigor, the division of labor, and material progress were not meant for you and your kind but rather were straight white male social constructs invented to keep you subjugated. (See Pluckrose and Lindsay for details.)

Moreover, could these "vestiges of colonialism" be abolished without violence? I wouldn't bet on it. It is Jacobinism, and where you find Jacobinism, a Robespierre with a guillotine is nearby.

We should add that the West is not even close to being uniquely guilty of conquering and enslaving people. No one has any cause to feel superior on this count. Conquest, murder, and enslavement occurred everywhere throughout history, including pre-Columbian North America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab and Muslim world up until a few centuries ago. Yet anti-slavery does seem to have been uniquely Western. It was the British navy that stopped the slave trade on the high seas.

Why is it always fashionable to criticize the West for its crimes but strangely impolite even to mention that the same or worse crimes were committed by non-Westerners? Is it because woke progressives have low expectations for non-Westrners? If so, how dare they call anyone else racist!

Movements such as Decolonization®, part of the larger Social Justice® cause, began in the universities, but what starts there doesn't stay there. Students are taught this insidious nonsense and then go out in the world to become popular authors, activists, politicians,  bureaucrats, and public school teachers, counselors, and administrators. (Exiting the schools is a good idea.)

In closing, we might ask: who are the true radicals, the Decolonizers® or we libertarians? That depends on what we mean by radical. We libertarians don't want to pull society up by the roots and start over, as the Decolonizers® wish to do. On the contrary, we want people to rediscover and adore those roots—reason and the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—which were never fully honored and then were smothered by the progressive weed.

If that makes the Decolonizers® more radical than libertarians, so what? They can have the word. We'll take liberty, reason, and peace.

The Law of Identity is Rubbish

Not that law of identity. A is A is not rubbish. It's still good. I'm talking about a new law of identity: each of us has an inner "gendered" spirit that might or might not be changeable at will and might be at odds with one’s body or sex. It’s the law of gender identity that is rubbish, a myth. “Trans” ideology is a fraud because there is no “trans.”

When you hear a person say he (or she) "identifies as a woman (or man)," think how Yoda might respond, "No. Be or be not. There is no ‘identify as.’" Why wouldn’t the person just say, "I am a woman (or man)"? That question needs to be asked. It might be because a man who said, "I am a woman," couldn't help but realize that he is uttering a fiction. "Identify as" is a cushion between the speaker and the truth. "I am a woman" can be falsified (or verified). "I identify (or see myself) as a woman" cannot. That’s a clue to the con going on.

While it often seems that “trans” ideologues don’t wish to question the reality of sex, we might ask, then, why they insist that sex is “assigned” rather than identified at birth. At any rate, the ideologues treat sex as unimportant. It is not: consult any biology or evolution textbook.

Maybe it's all about feelings--then again, maybe it's not. When a man says he feels he's a woman, is he not actually expressing a preference rather than a feeling? (As a kid, if I said, "I feel like an apple," my father would quip, "But you don't look like an apple.") "I prefer to see myself as a woman" is not equivalent to "I feel like a woman." After all, what does it mean for someone to feel like a woman (or man, boy, or girl)? How would a person know? Do all women (etc.) feel the same? The person has never been anything but what he or she is. What’s the objective standard by which one identifies a feeling as manness or womanness?

This question applies to areas other than sex. (The vague word gender contributes nothing to the discussion.) What does it mean to feel like a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or an atheist? How would a person know that a particular feeling corresponds to Christianness, Jewishness, Muslimness, or atheismness and not to something else? He may imagine that’s what a feeling means, but that's all it is: something imagined. He is not an infallible observer of the source of his feelings. He could be wrong, no matter how certain he claims he is. We’ve all felt, say, anxiety without being entirely sure why. Is it the upcoming dental appointment, the job interview, or a first date? That takes some sorting out. On the other hand, one’s interpretation of chest pain as a heart attack can be falsified or verified by a doctor and an EKG. The person might be experiencing indigestion and not a heart attack. The feeling itself does not contain its own explanation. All he knows is that he is in pain.

The same thing could be said of people who claim they feel like a man or a woman, a white or black person, a Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist,  etc.

Note what I am not saying. I am not saying that one cannot feel good or bad, content or uncomfortable about being one thing or another. I am saying that feeling good (or bad) about being, say, an atheist or a man is not the same thing as feeling that one is an atheist or man. (The song “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” from the 1958 musical Flower Drum Song, is about feeling joy not girlness.)

But isn’t there another problem when a man says that feeling like a woman means he prefers wearing dresses and makeup or doing any number of other things he associates with womanhood? Doesn’t the strict equation of womanhood with dresses and makeup revive unreasonable and passé rigid sexual stereotypes? Are women who prefer pants suits and no makeup lesser women? Of course not.

This is not to say that all sexual stereotyping is unreasonable. Males and females on average differ in all sorts of physical and psychological ways. Many cross-cultural studies confirm this. However, this does not justify legal disabilities for women. Enlightened thinkers have worked hard to loosen the connection between temperaments and preferences on the one hand and sex on the other. A girl who prefers toy trucks to dolls is still a girl, we used to be told--correctly. And a boy who prefers a toy kitchen set to toy soldiers is still a boy. Similarly, a competitive woman is nevertheless a woman, and a cooperative man is nevertheless a man even if the average for each sex differs. What is the case for regressing in this matter?

One tip-off that a man who says he sees himself as a woman  (or vice versa) may not really do so is his demand that others also see him that way. Why would a confident person need others to affirm his identity claim? The demand turns dark when it takes the form of insisting that other people believe what is demonstrably untrue: that men can become women and women can become men. It's as if respect and compassion require that we take on other people's fantasies in defiance of all that we have understood and observed all our lives. It does not. The demand involves gaslighting, that is, efforts to make people doubt what they know.

The demand goes darker still when the government is lobbied for measures designed to force others to behave and even use pronouns in certain ways. This includes laws that require that men who "identify as" women be allowed to enter women's hitherto safe spaces, such as bathrooms, shelters, locker rooms, and prisons. At that point, the quest for identity becomes intolerable identity politics and violates other people’s rights.

We all should be free to see ourselves in any way we please. Moreover, within the limits of objective reality we should strive to create the persons we want to be. People can genuinely say, “I know who I am,” only by deliberating about what is important to them individually and then acting to achieve their values. In a social context, this can mean pleasing others as well as oneself, such as providing goods and services in the marketplace. Note that the focus is primarily outward not inward. If you want to call the resulting emotional satisfaction a “sense of identity,” no problem. But there is no identity spirit, gender or otherwise, floating in and possibly mismatched with the body. We are not in our bodies (and so cannot be in the wrong bodies). We are our bodies, integrated conscious and self-conscious -- reasoning -- material beings.

Identity is a two-way street. We may see ourselves differently from how others see us. A person may think he is modest, while his acquaintances think he’s a braggart. While people have a right to see themselves in any way they wish, they have no right to have others see them that way. No one has the right to other people's eyes or minds.

TGIF: What Free Market in Health Care?

Federal Health-Care Industry Lobbying Leads the Pack

Contrary to a popular article of faith, America has no free market in health care—far from it. Consider this: the largest lobby in Washington, D.C., is—wait for it—the health care and health insurance industries. Last year, they spent 5.8 times the amount the "defense" contractors spent on lobbying: $800 million versus less than $200 million.

This may have many explanations, but the fact remains: a free market in health care would not see massive lobbying. Based on what Congress and regulatory agencies do, we can be sure that the health care and insurance industries are not by and large lobbying for less government. If so, they are doing a rotten job.

Michael F. Cannon, the Cato Institute's director of health policy studies, wrote a book last year showing just how much of a free market in health America does not have. To call our system a free market is a bad joke, not to mention cruelly dishonest. The details—in addition to the lobbying data—are eye-opening. It's like calling Sweden a socialist country. Wrong again, Bernie Sanders.

Cannon writes (PDF here):

In the United States ... countless state and federal laws block innovations that would improve health care access and quality. Without exception, lawmakers enact these laws in the hope of reducing costs and improving quality. Without exception, they do extraordinary and irreversible harm to patients.

This book explains how state governments prevent medical professionals and entrepreneurs from offering higher-quality, lower-cost care. It explains how Congress denies consumers both control of trillions of dollars of their own earnings and the right to make their own medical decisions. It explains how Congress makes health care increasingly less affordable, jeopardizes patient health by promoting low-quality care, and makes health insurance work against the sick.

Cannon’s work is more than a diagnosis of the sickly U.S. health care system. It's a regimen for moving America toward a "healthy" free market. The sooner we get started the better. For ages health care has been strangled by politicians, bureaucrats, regulators, and private-sector rent-seekers. They all need to be sent packing. We badly need entrepreneurship; free, flexible, private enterprise; and the profit motive—yes, the profit motive, the despised thing that has bestowed incredible wealth on so many people worldwide.

"In corners of the U.S. health sector where market forces have had room to breathe," Cannon writes, the American system has achieved astounding innovations in diagnostics, service delivery, drugs, treatments, devices, and even insurance. But it fails on many counts thanks to government preemption of private market-based efforts. A good part of the reason Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the world is government intervention. No surprise there if you understand how governments and markets work.

Cannon writes:

Among advanced nations, the United States ranks near the top in terms of government control of health spending. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) collects data on 38 economically advanced nations. The OECD reports that in the average member country, 76 percent of health spending is compulsory. That is, rather than allow consumer preferences to allocate those funds, government requires residents to allocate those funds according to the government's preferences or face penalties. In the United States, government controls a significantly larger share of health spending than the OECD average: 85 percent of U.S. health spending is compulsory.

The OECD country with the highest percentage of compulsory spending, the Czech Republic, beats the United States by only three points.

Government controls a larger share of health spending in the United States than in 30 other advanced nations, including Canada (75 percent) and the United Kingdom (83 percent), which have explicitly socialized health systems.

Some free market! Government dictates how 85 cents of every health care dollar is spent.

"Control over health spending and government-imposed barriers to accessing medication," he goes on, "are just two ways government blocks the market forces of individual choice, innovation, and competition that would otherwise make health care better, more affordable, and more secure."

Not all action is at the national level, of course. State governments heavily regulate health care and insurance. All these regulations, including licensing and the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored medical insurance, must go if Americans are to have a world-class free market in health care. Patients must be placed at the center so they can exercise what Ludwig von Mises called "consumer sovereignty."

"Day after day," Cannon concludes, "U.S. patients suffer the consequences of a century of mounting government failures. American health care is worse, more dangerous, more expensive, and less secure than what a market system would deliver." People have to rethink their moral and aesthetic biases against profit-motivated, mutually beneficial market relations. It really is a matter of life and death.

It's a Crazy World

What's to be said about people who grieve over the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza at the hands of the U.S.-backed Israeli military while simultaneously cheering the Mengele-style wrecking of children's lives in America and elsewhere at the hands of "transgender" fanatics? And vice versa.

TGIF: "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us"

The famous line "We have met the enemy and he is us" is from Walt Kelly's comic strip, Pogo. Kelly adapted the line from a U.S. naval commandant who, during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, reported to his superior, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Kelly did the parody for the first Earth Day in 1970, a pro-state, antimarket, antihuman occasion.

More constructively, we can apply Kelly's slogan to a bigger matter, namely, who's to blame for the bad policies that representative democracy turns out? Is the culprit an elite group of politicians, bureaucrats, and Big Business/Big Labor cronies, that is, a ruling class that conspires against the public interest? Or is the culprit " us," or, more precisely, the voters?

Most libertarians, like most progressives, would reply "ruling class," although David D. Friedman, a leading libertarian free-market anarchist, has been a major exception. (See The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism, 3rd ed., ch. 38, free online.) So too is economist and anarcho-capitalist Bryan Caplan.

Two important libertarian thinkers, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) and Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), also dissented from the common view that democracy is routinely hijacked. "One striking feature of the Bastiat-Mises view," Caplan writes, "is that politicians are actually tightly constrained by public opinion. On their account, democratic competition keeps elected officials in line; if they deviate from majority preferences, they lose elections and their jobs."

In his classic work The Law, Bastiat, the fantastic French classical-liberal political-economic essayist, pointed out that in a democracy with universal suffrage, the main potential threat to liberty and property would come not from a ruling elite but from the voters, who previously had no voice in the government. If voters know nothing about economics and are antimarket to boot, watch out! They will want the politicians to interfere with market relations, not realizing that intervention is harmful because it has significant opportunity costs: all the good things that would have been produced had the government not engaged in "legal plunder." The benefits of free markets are counterintuitive, and understanding requires knowledge, which the voters lack. So they favor import restrictions, business and farm subsidies, regulations, heavy spending, and other apparently free benefits.

Since the politicians want to be elected and reelected, they will cater to the voters' preferences, even if the politicians know that those preferences are harmful. Democracy supplies poison because voters demand poison. The voters' will is not substantially throttled by special interests.

Bastiat wrote:

Up to now, legal plunder has been exercised by the minority over the majority as can be seen in those nations in which the right to pass laws is concentrated in just a few hands. However, it has now become universal and equilibrium is being sought in universal plunder. Instead of the injustice existing in society being rooted out, it has become generalized.

In another place (Selected Essays on Political Economy, chap. 9), he wrote that "public opinion, whether enlightened or misguided, is nonetheless mistress of the world."

And again (Economic Harmonies, chap. 4): “Political power, the law-making ability, the enforcement of the law, have all passed, virtually, if not yet completely in fact, into the hands of the people, along with universal suffrage.”

H. L. Mencken, that keen observer of America in the first half of the 20th century, might have read Bastiat: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Caplan confirms Bastiat's view. In various writings he explains that while most social scientists, including public-choice economists, believe that special interests do thwart the voters, it is untrue. 

The "point is not that no unpopular policies exist," Caplan and Edward Stringham write after scouring the data (citation below). "But bona fide examples are hard to come by, and quantitatively significant ones are scarcer still." Time delays and "frictions" may put the politicians and voters out of sync—but only temporarily.

Voters can afford to be, in Caplan's words, "rationally irrational." In any election, each person can costlessly vote according to his antimarket biases since no single vote is decisive and the total cost of a candidate's bad policies will be shared by all.  (See The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies and the articles linked below.)

Caplan points out that Ludwig von Mises took a position similar to Bastiat's. In Theory and History, Mises wrote:

A statesman can succeed only insofar as his plans are adjusted to the climate of opinion of his time, that is to the ideas that have got hold of his fellows’ minds. He can become a leader only if he is prepared to guide people along the paths they want to walk and toward the goal they want to attain. A statesman who antagonizes public opinion is doomed to failure… [T]he politician must give the people what they wish to get, very much as a businessman must supply the customers with the things they wish to acquire.

I found that quote, like the Bastiat quotes above, in the first of two Caplan blog posts: Mises and Bastiat on How Democracy Goes Wrong, Part I, and Part II. (For more, see Caplan and Edward Stringham's "Mises, Bastiat, Public Opinion, and Public Choice.")

We might resist the claim that the people, not a ruling class, are to blame. But if we have a ruling class, it must be damned incompetent. The United States has the most progressive income tax in the West. The bottom half of income taxpayers pays only a tiny fraction (2.3 percent) of the national government's revenue from the tax. The top 1 percent pays over 45 percent. Big businesses face myriad regulations, often with exemptions for small firms. New restrictions are proposed almost every day. Antitrust prosecution always looms for the successful. Businesses and farmers get subsidies and other favors, but most people support them as socially beneficial.

Moreover, privileges granted to one industry impose higher costs on others. Tariffs for U.S. steelmakers burden steel-using companies, making them less competitive in the global market. If this ruling class is so fragmented and ineffective, maybe the concept is so imprecise that it is misleading.

When well-connected interests (who include not only business people) influence policy, Caplan writes, it's at the margin and, if anything, waters down what the majority wants. Caplans notes that more-educated people tend to understand economics better than less-educated people. Without "elite" influence, tariffs and minimum wages might be more destructive than they are.

Well, if the state is not "the executive committee of the ruling class," as Marx claimed, what is it? It's a bazaar where candidates offer goodies to blocs of economically illiterate citizens. The currency is the vote. To gain power, politicians need to win a majority—repeatedly. Yes, the people are propagandized, but just as businesses fail when enough consumers exercise skepticism about a product, regardless of advertising, so voters can exercise skepticism about the politicians' claims. People are not robots, and they encounter competing sources of propaganda/information. The joint that connects official propaganda to popular opinion is, to say the least, loose. If people are gullible, who's to blame?

What's the bottom line? No one can triumph in a struggle without first identifying the adversary. If the adversary is a shady, manipulative, nearly omnipotent ruling class, that would require one strategy. But if the adversary is the public's economic illiteracy and, as Mises repeatedly put it, its failure to grasp its "rightly understood (i.e., long-run) interest" in the free market, that's another matter entirely. Since that is indeed the case, freedom advocates should act accordingly.

The battleground is human understanding and nothing else, not even institutions, Mises says. As he wrote in Human Action, using 1930s monetary policy as an example (emphasis added):

"Whatever the constitutional state of affairs may be, no government could embark upon 'raising the price of gold' if public opinion were opposed to such a manipulation. If, on the other hand, public opinion favors such a step, no legal technicalities could check it altogether or even delay it for a short time."

David Boaz, an Anecdote

When my second daughter, Emily, was born some years ago, a friend of the family gave her a gift: a stuffed blue bear. That's it up there. That friend was David Boaz, the pivotal libertarian author, editor, and administrator who died yesterday well before his time. A few months ago, when I heard that David was seriously ill, I messaged Emily to ask if she remembered the stuffed blue bear. I wasn't sure she did. Who remembers their toys from that age? She immediately responded: "Yes. From David Boaz." She had not seen him in years, and she was just a little kid then. How could she know that? Moments later she texted me the picture you see. She had just take it with her phone. The bear was right at hand! Emily then told me that her niece and nephew, my grandchildren, Cruz and Cass, often play with "blue bear"! So David's gift was being enjoyed by the next generation! I email him about it. I hope it brought a smile to his face. I know it brought tears to my eyes.

David Boaz (1953-2024)

With great sadness I note the passing of David Boaz today, June 7, 2024, at age 70. He had been ill for some time.

He was a good man and a giant of the libertarian movement. Very much because of David's influence and example, libertarian organizations not only embraced a rigorous dedication to individual liberty, private property, free markets, and peace, but also a commitment to professionalism. He is one big reason libertarianism moved from amateur status to the big league. The value of his multifaceted work, predominantly for the Cato Institute for over 40 years, can not be overstated. Whether they know it or not, libertarians owe much to David Boaz.

I knew David as both a friend and a colleague all that time. For better or worse, I turned pro as a libertarian in part, maybe even principally,  because of him. I had been a newspaper reporter in the Philadelphia area in the 1970s and then a writing teacher for a corporate consulting firm. I had left reporting because I wanted to be a full-time liberty advocate. On a trip to San Francisco in 1978, I briefly met David while visiting the barely-year-old Cato Institute. I had no idea it would be so consequential a meeting.

In the spring of 1979 I received a phone call from a very wealthy libertarian businessman, who asked if I'd be the research director of a brand-new libertarian business organization in Washington, D.C., the Council for a Competitive Economy. Its executive director was David Boaz. I can't help but believe he recommended me for the job. At that point David was the sole staff member. A president would be hired later. (That would be Richard Wilcke, a good friend who died last year.) I proposed testing out the job in the summer (when I would be off work) before deciding whether to move permanently from my home in Delaware. My suggestion was accepted, and I moved to D.C. I loved the work. In the fall my job became permanent. For more than a year I worked day in and day out with David Boaz. Thanks to him, I learned a lot about organizations, publications, etc. We were also part of the same libertarian social circle. What a great time! We were living liberty!

And we were on a mission—promoting individual liberty and capitalism. We had fun despite our lack of success in swaying opinion in our direction. These were heady days for libertarians. Milton Friedman's PBS television series, Free to Choose, was being broadcast. Other good signs had been evident since F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974 and 1976 respectively. Things were happening. We knew our task wouldn't be easy, but we were energized and optimistic. David personified much of the libertarian movement.

When Cato moved to D.C. in 1981, David became the vice president for public policy. I eventually went on to several other movement organizations. (CCE closed shop long ago.) Now David could add foreign policy and civil liberties to his portfolio.

We became co-workers again in 1991 when I joined the Cato Institute as its senior editor. In that job I also produced Cato's first cable-TV series, The Cato Forum, which David often hosted. I recall long conversations in his office about political philosophy, economics, day-to-day politics, and how Cato could address the most important issues of the time. In those early days we had lunch together regularly, during which our libertarian conversation continued uninterrupted. I'll never forget those days.

I can attest that David was involved in every aspect of Cato's work. Content and appearance had to be of the highest quality. He saw to it. This ethic was instilled in the staff and countless interns. It was obvious in Cato's product. 

The libertarian movement was much richer for his presence. It will be much poorer without it.

David's final speech from a few months ago is here.

TGIF: Freedom or Power

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, the Austrian-school economist who learned from Carl Menger and taught Ludwig von Mises, speaks to the ages. We ignore his lessons to our peril. One hundred ten years ago, in a journal article titled "Control or Economic Law," he wrote:

[J]ust as natural phenomena are governed by immutable eternal laws, quite independent of human will and human laws, so in the sphere of economics there exist certain laws against which the will of man, and even the powerful will of the state, remain impotent; and that the flow of economic forces cannot, by artificial interference of societal control, be driven out of certain channels into which it is inevitably pressed by the force of economic laws.

In other words, contrary to what politicians say, we as a society cannot do anything "if only we have the will." Böhm-Bawerk went on:

Such a law, among others, was considered to be that of supply and demand, which again and again had been observed to triumph over the attempts of powerful governments to render bread cheap in lean years by means of “unnatural” price regulations, or to confer upon bad money the purchasing power of good money. And inasmuch as in the last analysis, the remuneration of the great factors of production—land, labor, and capital—in other words, the distribution of wealth among the various classes of society, represents merely one case, although the most important practical case of the general laws of price, the entire all-important problem of distribution of wealth became dependent upon the question of whether it was regulated and dominated by natural economic laws, or by the arbitrary influence of social control.

Böhm-Bawerk was not saying that economic laws were invulnerable to political and social interference or institutions—far from it. The government distorts the market all the time. That's why his lesson is so important. We'd hardly need to be taught about the importance of economic laws if intervention bounced off market participants like bullets off of Superman.

Price controls bring forth not an abundance of low-priced goods to help the poor but shortages of wanted products. Today many people suffer the hardship of government suppression of the building of new houses and apartments. (See Bryan Caplan's Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation.)

In any given case, how much influence market forces and nonmarket control have is not an easy question. It takes study rather than dogmatism. However, even political intervention must operate within the law of price. Repeated efforts to abolish interest on loans (usury) have failed because lenders and borrowers eagerly found ways around the prohibition. Markets—bargaining based on subjective marginal utility—will operate despite the formidable obstacles rulers place in their way. That's true for all prices. Thank goodness for that. But consumers will be harmed, and the state's ostensible objectives won't be achieved. 

Böhm-Bawerk notes that the most "selfish" single-seller in the market (assuming no government protection) must contend with the economic laws: "Generally speaking, the fear of outside competition forms perhaps the greatest safeguard against too unscrupulous a use of monopolies preying on the general public." Nothing invites competition like abnormally high prices and profits. That's why would-be monopolists turn to the government for help. Their dreams of power are doomed without it. (Antitrust law is a fraud. It protects inferior companies, not consumers.)

The same is true in a labor market where only one buyer of labor services (employer) is active. If he pays too much or too little under market conditions, economic forces will let him know -- if the government stays out. Profit or loss, success or bankruptcy? That is the question. 

Böhm-Bawerk would understand what's happening with fast-food restaurants in California, where the government has mandated a large increase in the minimum wage:

If an entrepreneur is induced, through the motive of self-interest, to select the “minor evil,” and permits a wage increase exacted from him, then an analogous motive of self-interest will urge him to reorganize the various factors of production by means of which he produces his goods. If the factor of production called “labor” has become more expensive than before, in comparison with the other factors of production, through an extorted wage increase, then it is almost unthinkable that the same relative apportionment of the various factors of production would remain the most rational in an economic sense....

California fast-food joints are closing, substituting machines for human beings, or raising prices. It's happened many times all over the country.

[T]he most imposing dictate of power ... can never effect anything in
contradiction to the economic laws of value, price, and distribution; it must always be in conformity with these; it cannot invalidate them; it can merely confirm and fulfill them.

Mises picked up his teacher's theme. As Israel Kizner writes in his book Ludwig von Mises: The Man and His Economics, quoting from his teacher's Epistemological Problems of Economics,

Mises saw the emergence of economic understanding in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as introducing a genuinely revolutionary insight into man's understanding of the conditions within which society exists.... With the advent of economic science, [Mises wrote,] "Now it was learned that in the social realm too there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same  way as they must take into account the laws of nature."

Society does not face a choice between control and economic law. Rather, the choice is between unhampered consumer-enhancing economic law and economic law twisted against consumers by bureaucrats. That is because, as Mises wrote in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, "economic laws are inexorable, and ... government interference with business cannot attain its ends but must result in a state of affairs which—from the point of view of the government and the supporters of its policy—is even less desirable than the conditions which it was designed to alter."

What Inequality?

According to research conducted by Phil Gramm, the late Robert Ekelund, and John Early, documented in The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate and summarized in this video:

• The bottom 20 percent of households have an average annual income of $13,000, according to the Census Bureau. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those households consume an average of $26,000 worth of goods each year. How can that be?
• In the standard computations of inequality that are used to justify more government spending, the incomes of the rich include taxes paid while the incomes of the poor exclude two-thirds of government benefits, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and Medicaid. (There are more than a hundred transfer programs.) The rich artificially appear richer, and the poor artificially appear poorer. It's a statistical illusion.
• When inequality is adjusted to count taxes paid by the rich and cash and noncash benefits received by the poor (net of government admin costs), measured income inequality between the top and bottom quintiles drops from 16.7:1 to 4:1. Real income inequality is a quarter of what it is said to be.
• Compared to 1967 and using inflation-adjusted dollars, two-thirds of Americans are in the top income quintile.
• People in the middle quintile have about the same income as the people in the bottom quintile, though only about a third in the bottom work.

That shines a different light on things, doesn't it?

Immigration Talk

I talk about immigration with Michael Liebowitz of The Rational Egoist.

Language, Race, and Man

"Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself." --Ernest Renan

Democracy and Free Stuff

Democracy: the matching up of people who want free stuff with politicians who promise free stuff. Problem: free stuff as they all imagine it does not exist. 

However, it does exist in the market, as explained by Frédéric Bastiat in Economic Harmonies, chapter 8, "Private Property and Common Wealth." See my discussion of that chapter.

Nation, Race, and Individual

"Nation and race do not coincide; there is no nation of pure blood. All peoples have arisen from a mixture of races....

"[T]he concept of race, in the sense in which the advocates of race policy use it, is new, even considerably newer than that of nation. It was introduced into politics in deliberate opposition to the concept of nation. The individualistic idea of the national community was to be displaced by the collectivist idea of the racial community."

--Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy, 1919

History and Peace

 "[E]very person must take his life and every nation must take its history as it comes; nothing is more useless than complaining over errors that can no longer be rectified, nothing more vain than regret. Neither as judges allotting praise and blame nor as avengers seeking out the guilty should we face the past. We seek truth, not guilt; we want to know how things came about to understand them, not to issue condemnations. Whoever approaches history the way a prosecutor approaches the documents of a criminal case—to find material for indictments—had better stay away from it. It is not the task of history to gratify the need of the masses for heroes and scapegoats.

"That is the position a nation should take toward its history. It is not the task of history to project the hatred and disagreements of the present back into the past and to draw from battles fought long ago weapons for the disputes of one’s own time. History should teach us to recognize causes and to understand driving forces; and when we understand everything, we will forgive everything."

--Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy, 1919

History and Conflict

"We cannot eradicate the past from our memories. But it is not the task of history to kindle new conflicts by reviving hatreds long since dead and by searching the archives for pretexts for new conflicts. We do not have to revenge crimes committed centuries ago by kings and conquerors; we have to build a new and better world order [i.e., the liberal market economy rooted in private property]."

--Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, 1944