TGIF: Cooperation versus Bigotry

We who value individualism, freedom, and social cooperation as essential to flourishing should be distressed by the hostile bigotry that has lately reared its ugly head, to some uncertain extent, on the streets and campuses of America and abroad. This is not new. In America we've seen it intermittently in both directions on racial issues just in this century. It seems related to an intolerant, zero-nuance, take-no-prisoners, and glib attitude among many contenders over racial, religious, and ethnic controversies.

Now it is showing itself in ugly group chants and more personal communication calling for violence against Jews and Arabs, and perhaps even direct harassment and assault.  A couple of people have died. Anti-Semitism and anti-Arabism should be off-limits. Regardless of the target, the unrestrained hostility is frightening on many counts, not least of which is its ominous implications for spontaneous social /market cooperation..

I couldn't possibly know whether these clashes are common or just fringe opportunism -- let's hope the latter. In the heat of a controversy it is possible to misread innocent events and words. The principle of charitable interpretation ought to apply unless solid evidence to the contrary revokes it. We should also be aware that government officials and the news media, for obvious reasons, might be inclined to exaggerate. 

The point is that much could be at stake if impressions are not exaggerated -- including the trust and cooperation that characterize market-oriented societies. Social strife can have severe consequences. Even public demonstrations can create rippling animosity.

I am not suggesting, of course, that limits on free speech and the press would be in order in the name of social cooperation. That would make no sense. For one thing, hate-speech prohibitions and the like would bolster state power with vague statutes: governments have been major disrupters of cooperation, market and otherwise, throughout history. Contrary to what we teach our children, words can hurt, but it's not the kind of hurt that justifies retaliatory force. Threatened and initiated force, though, is another story.

Similarly, restrictions on immigration and the internet, along with enhanced government monitoring and data collection, would be ludicrously ironic since those are the means of interfering with cooperation.

The right and wrong of foreign conflicts, and U.S. government complicity in them, is separate from my point. Strong convictions and feelings are entirely understandable and proper. But when become collectivist bigotry, civil peace can be put at risk. That should worry anyone who grasps the relationship among social cooperation, markets, and general well-being.

Champions of individualism reject the divisive collectivism displayed in ethnic, racial, and religious hostility. Such feeling flows from the tribalism that is a vestige of a primitive, pre-individualist distant past. A person's natal or otherwise unchosen "membership" in a group says nothing about his or her character, moral principles, or position on controversies. The right to be free of coercion is an individual-based, not group-based principle. Persons can think for themselves. That's individualism, both ethical and methodological. We abandon it at great risk.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises explained in Human Action, which he considered calling "Social Cooperation," civilization began to dawn when the earliest perceptive people realized that strangers could represent not existential threats but potential gains from trade. There lay the road to mutual self-interest and prosperity. It was long ago, but some people haven't yet learned. Samuel Johnson was onto something when he said, "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money."

I'll give Mises the final word on the link between free cooperation and prosperity, and by implication the danger from overwrought polarization (from Human Action, chapter 24, "Harmony and Conflicts of Interest", section 3, "The Harmony of the "Rightly Understood" Interests):

[N]ature does not generate peace and good will.... What makes friendly relations between human beings possible is the higher productivity of the division of labor. It removes the natural conflict of interests. For where there is division of labor, there is no longer question of the distribution of a supply not capable of enlargement. Thanks to the higher productivity of labor performed under the division of tasks, the supply of goods multiplies. A pre-eminent common interest, the preservation and further intensification of social cooperation, becomes paramount and obliterates all essential collisions. Catallactic competition is substituted for biological competition. It makes for harmony of the interests of all members of society. The very condition from which the irreconcilable conflicts of biological competition arise--viz., the fact that all people by and large strive after the same things--is transformed into a factor making for harmony of interests. Because many people or even all people want bread, clothes, shoes, and cars, large-scale production of these goods becomes feasible and reduces the costs of production to such an extent that they are accessible at low prices. The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier.

Let's not have our mutual interest get lost in the heat of controversy.

What Is Mutual Altruism?

According to Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, theft is "selfish," while trade is "mutually altruistic." If genes and people are "selfish," as Dawkins believes, why does mutual altruism, which includes all forms of cooperation, ever happen? He replies that it happens because mutual altruism benefits the parties more than "purely selfish" behavior would. This is an astounding acknowledgment. 

If that's so -- and I believe it is -- why not call cooperation mutual selfishness, mutual self-interest, or something like that? Why introduce the idea of mutual altruism if in fact such actions are more "selfish" than what Dawkins thinks of as pure selfishness. 

I admire Dawkins a great deal, but here is a case where better philosophy would have made for better evolutionary theory. As he would have it, altruism, at least in its mutual mode, is more selfish than selfishness, and that makes little sense.

No one shed more light on the mutual self-interest of cooperation than Ludwig von Mises in Human Action. See the section titled "The Harmony of the 'Rightly Understood' Interests" in chapter 24, where he writes, "The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier." Thus in the market human beings convert competition for consumption, which is the rule in the rest of the animal kingdom, into competition for production, which benefits all people.

That doesn't sound much like the law of the jungle, does it?

TGIF: Is Self-reliance a Libertarian Ideal?

An Associated Press article published a few days ago reported on disagreements among libertarians over what, if anything, the government may properly do about the coronavirus pandemic. My purpose here is not to comment on the quotes from the various libertarians. I prefer to focus on just one sentence by the author, Hillel Italie.

It's this one: "Libertarian principles of self-reliance and minimal government have been around for centuries."

Only the part I emphasized -- the reference to self-reliance -- interests me today.
At first, that term may seen unexceptional -- even to many libertarians -- in an article about libertarianism. A term like self-reliance (along with rugged individualism) is often associated with the libertarian philosophy, again, even by many libertarians. But is that term really pertinent? Or is it misleading and subversive of public understanding? I say the latter.
It's certainly true that libertarians believe that people should not rely on the government because government is force (to recall the quote erroneously attributed to George Washington). But by what reasoning does one equate eschewing reliance on the state with self-reliance? Is there nothing else but the self to rely on? Society perhaps? It's hardly a novel idea. It's especially not novel among libertarians.

Are libertarians against insurance for their lives, homes, automobiles, and medical needs? I don't think so. What's insurance? It's a large number of people, mostly strangers, pooling their resources in case of a long-shot catastrophic event that would bankrupt any one of the individuals. Insurance is the opposite of self-reliance, but it's perfectly libertarian.

Are libertarians against voluntary associations for fellowship and other nonmaterial values? I don't think so.

Is the symbol of libertarianism the hermit, Randy Weaver, or Ted Kaczynski sans letter bombs? Again, I don't think so.

Can advocates of a political philosophy who spend so much time, ink, and electrons praising free markets, global free trade, specialization, and the division of labor hold self-reliance as a core aspiration? Can the people often described by their opponents as "Adam Smith fundamentalists" be regarded as worshipers of self-reliance. No way! The Wealth of Nations is a paean to social cooperation. Libertarian hero Ludwig von Mises, author of Human Action, nearly called his magnum opus Social Cooperation. That's the second-most-used phrase in the very long book. What's the most-used phrase? Division of labor, another way to say "social cooperation."

I suspect that the term self-reliance actually works as a subtle smear of libertarians. It's a way to portray them as churlish, "selfish," antisocial. But as we can see, no grounds exist for that portrayal. When Simon and Garfunkel sang, "I am a rock; I am an island," they were singing no libertarian anthem -- not by a long shot. (Sorry, Neil Diamond, neither was "Solitary Man.")
Libertarians are in no way advocates of -- gotta love this one -- atomistic individualism. Rather, they are, as I suggested long ago, better described as champions of molecular individualism. They form associations for all kinds of reasons. (Alexis Tocqueville noticed this feature of early America's rather libertarian masses.)  Even the non-Aristotelians among libertarians agree that human beings are social animals, which means that the individual's best shot at flourishing is in a society -- as a long as it's a free society, of course.

When libertarians themselves are confused about this matter, they undercut their own case. I have often heard libertarians condemn the welfare state because it discourages self-reliance. I've even heard libertarians demonize people who accept food stamps and Medicaid or Social Security benefits.
But that's not the problem with the welfare state, or the social safety net. The problem is with the armed tax collector, not the recipients.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a social safety net. It's telling that when people are free to do so, they set up their own voluntary safety nets.

Before the growth of the national welfare state in the United States, working-class and middle-class Americans hedged against the risky, uncertain future by joining mutual-aid societies, also know as fraternal societies, lodges, and in England, friendly societies. These were not only sources of fellowship; they were also voluntary welfare organizations built on the insurance principle. (They were mostly member-owned societies, rather than for-profit companies.)

In the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th century, working men and women joined these societies, among other reasons, to obtain various insurance benefits. They paid in when they were healthy and working, and drew benefits when they were not. Societies also paid funeral benefits so that families were not left with large debts when the breadwinner died. Some organizations even kept doctors under contract to provide affordable primary care to their members and families. (The state-linked medical societies did not like this "unfair" competition that lowered their incomes.)
Importantly, the societies were competitive and often part of nationwide networks: they boasted of their superior benefits in order to attract and retain members. Moreover, blacks and other minorities responded to racial and ethnic discrimination by forming their own -- successful -- societies. (See David Beito's history, From Mutual Aid to Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. Also see my video.)

The libertarian case against the welfare state, then, is not that it undermines self-reliance. It's that the state is 1) coercive and 2) bound to provide an inferior product because it's a monopoly with captive customers (taxpayers).

Quite possibly, a libertarian may say he has something else in mind by the term self-reliance. He might mean that he thinks for himself. Fair enough. People ought to think for themselves, though even here we must issue a caveat. F. A. Hayek taught us that even someone who thinks for himself benefits by relying on knowledge that other people possess. Society -- the market specifically -- extends our intellects by enabling us to act on knowledge of which we would otherwise be ignorant. (Prices are carriers of such knowledge.) Yes, we each must sift through what we learn from others, but we could not flourish without that input.

Going back further than Hayek, Aristotle noted that much of what we can reasonably be said to know includes second-hand "reputable beliefs" picked up from society. I'm comfortable in saying I know the earth is spherical, but I could not confirm that personally. To be sure, which of these beliefs are accepted as reasonable is up to each individual; the proof of the pudding will be in the acting. (See Roderick T. Long's liberating Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand.)

Thus for a variety of reasons, self-reliance is no part of the libertarian vision. It's time we corrected the record.

TGIF: Trade Is a Labor-Saving "Device"

Updated Sept. 22, 2016
Democratic politics makes savvy people stupid, at least when they act politically. This has long been demonstrated, and it applies both to voters and policymakers. Several things account for it: the impotence of one vote, the consequent futility and hence wastefulness of acquiring information, the dispersal of the costs of government, and the resulting theatrical mood-setting farces called election campaigns.

Latest Op-Ed: Labor Outsourcing Is Not the Problem

Read it here.