TGIF: Why the State Is Corrupt

Why is government corrupt? You'll notice that I did not ask, "Is government corrupt." We've had enough experience to go right to the main question. I might have softened it with the phrase tends to be to acknowledge that not everyone in government is corrupt, at least not in the conventional sense. Lord Acton's statement was, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" -- although I wish he had added, "Power also attracts the corrupt."

At any rate, we have a question on the table. Let's go beyond the easy answer. Obviously, any government is intrinsically corrupt because it uniquely has the widely approved ("legitimate") power -- for "the common good" -- to use physical force against others who never used force against anyone. The state's personnel should know that they benefit at others' expense on the basis of this dishonest claim.

For most of the public, of course, that's not corruption. Thank the government's own schools in large part for that. As philosopher Michael Huemer points out, in challenging political authority (as others have), most people have no problem with government officials doing things by force that would be condemned if anyone else did them. No one thinks it would be proper for non-officials to extort money from their neighbors to feed hungry people or to pursue another good cause. For the government, the rules are different. Why? Huemer demolishes the popular answers. (See his The Problem of Political Authority.)

Let's leave that aside and look at what everyone would consider corruption (at least if the opposing team did it). That includes politicians or bureaucrats who benefit financially or otherwise from performing certain actions. When such transactions become known, we call them scandals. These involve privileges in the proper sense of the word, not the pseudo-privileges implied by the weird terms overprivileged and underprivileged.

So why is such corruption endemic around the world? It doesn't take much imagination to see why; it relates to the more fundamental kind of corruption already discussed. Certain politicians and bureaucrats are close to the power the government has to hand out other people's money, both directly and indirectly. A subsidy is an example of direct distribution. A tariff or competition-stifling regulation is an example of indirect distribution. In both sorts of cases money is politically and coercively transferred from some people -- taxpayers, consumers, disfavored businesses  -- to a favored person, business, or industry. Inflation, brought to you by the Federal Reserve's money creation and government borrowing, is another way to transfer wealth through the shifting of purchasing power.

Since some officials have access to such transfer power, other people outside the government will seek to benefit by currying favor with them. Reluctantly, some business people may do so just to keep up with competitors who are doing it.

History is full of stories of benefits provided to politicians and bureaucrats in return for political favors: outright bribes, campaign contributions, expensive vacations, post-retirement jobs, sinecures for family members (even relatives of presidents, if you can believe that!), and more. The buyer of favors might even be a foreign official who wants better treatment for himself or his government. Let's also acknowledge that the favor sought might be something that libertarians would approve of, such as the repeal of an unjust government policy, such as a tax, regulation, or trade embargo. Ironically, corruption could serve a good cause.

Of course, some people in government will not be tempted by corrupt offers, but others will be, and still others will be disappointed that no offers are tendered. It will be hard for voters to tell who's who. As for those who accept such offers, it would not necessarily mean they are malicious. They may really believe they are promoters of the "public good" and deserve to stay in power and enjoy its perks. I'm not saying that's a good excuse. We know how the road to hell is paved.

We shouldn't be shocked by scandals, but we should be perturbed. Attempted reforms such as mandatory disclosure and the like have not shown notable success. Proximity to power holds temptations that many will find too good to resist. As the Public Choice school of political economy teaches us, people don't become saints the moment they take government jobs.

The only way to change this is to radically reduce, check, and decentralize (if we can't eliminate) government power.

 

TGIF: On "Giving Back"

P&G, the maker of popular household brands like Tide and Downy laundry products, is giving away $10,000 in college scholarships. That's $1.5 million and 150 scholarships in all. My problem, aside from its encouraging college attendance, is with how the company is promoting the program. The television ads proclaim that the company sees the scholarships as a way of "giving back." I've written about this before, but some further thoughts might be useful.

So, to whom does P&G wish to give back? Not to existing customers exclusively. The only eligibility requirements are U.S. residency, a minimum age of 16, enrollment in or acceptance by an undergraduate program, and free registration at P&G's website. The online application does ask applicants if they are first-generation college students and where they do their laundry, which sounds creepy. The program is called a "sweepstakes", and multiple entries are apparently allowed, so the winners are apparently picked randomly. The winners' checks will be sent to the schools.

The "payback" angle that P&G touts will sound good to many people. ("Aw, that's so nice.") I suppose P&G never even considered entries by saying:

Because we at P&G are always looking for ways to increase our profits by creating goodwill, keeping our current customers from looking at rival products, and luring new customers from our competitors, we are giving away 150 scholarships worth $10,000 each. We'd prefer you to just buy our great products, but if that's what it takes to get good publicity, so be it. Enter today!

That would offend too many people, though pro-market and pro-free-enterprise people like me would be approvingly amused. Why call it "giving back"? Unearned guilt, what's why.

Adam Smith famously wrote that we do not believe the grocer puts food on the shelves because they are nice people (which of course they may well be). They do it because that's how they earn a living. Smith wasn't being pedantic. He was acknowledging that shoppers already know this. He writes, "We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages." (Sometimes we talk of our own necessities, for instance, when we can't find what we want. But we know the grocer doesn't help us out because he loves us.)

The "logic" of payback addresses the matter from the seller's, not the buyer's, side. Smith could have addressed grocers by writing:

It is not from the benevolence of the customers that you expect your income but from their regard to their own interest. You address yourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Telling this to merchants would hardly be necessary. No merchant thinks his customers are doing him a favor by shopping in his store. A salesperson asks customers, "How can I help you," not "Here's how you can help me." It's true that when transactions are complete, both the merchant and customer typically express gratitude. It's what John Stossel calls the double thank-you moment. That's an interesting peculiarity of markets. The people on both sides of the counter seem grateful. Each party knows that the other could have been somewhere else. But at the same time, each knows that the other is (properly) acting in his own self-interest. Maybe that is why we are all grateful. Or maybe we're unwittingly approving of the harmonization of diverse interests in a market setting.

P&G and every company that claims to be "paying back" act as if they think we're stupid -- that we buy to help them out and so are owed something. But I don't think that's what such companies really believe. I think they talk about payback because they, like nearly everyone else, suffer from antimarket bias. Even business people have absorbed the view that profit-making is exploitative. To assuage the guilt, they "give back" to their victims. That is sad. It's also wrong. In the absence of coercion, fraud, and government favors, no exploitation occurs.

When two people trade, we know that at that moment each is confident he is getting more than he is giving up. The trade would not happen otherwise. Afterward, one or both may have regrets, but that's a fact of life when you're fallible. Note, though, that in our competitive economy, sellers, eager to win customers, accept returns, no questions asked. That was unusual not so long ago.

As for the seller's profit, in its financial sense it results when buyers value a product so much that they are willing to pay more for it than it costs others to make and provide. It's a reward for the welfare-enhancing service of correcting price discrepancies.

Profit's bad reputation is unearned, But it's not true that only sellers can make a profit. Buyers do also, though in a non-financial sense, because they prefer the thing they obtain to the money's alternative use. Moreover, to the extent that they pay less for an item than they were willing to pay, buyers make an additional profit. No exploitation occurs, of course.

Trade is the harmony of interest on glorious display, and we should celebrate that freedom makes it possible. Now if only we could find a way to get the favor-granting politicians and bureaucrats out of the way.

TGIF: Why Liberty Matters

Why does liberty matter? It’s a fair question because, after all, not everyone thinks it matters very much, perhaps beyond some very basic point. If that’s an overstatement, we can safely say that for many people on the left and right, liberty is a lower priority than it is for libertarians and classical liberals. Most pundits and politicians, even most anti-war types, have plans for how to spend your money.

What can we libertarians say? We have lots to say. It's a multifront operation. Some libertarians press the case in terms of moral consequentialism, either utilitarian or egoist. Others take a duty-oriented, or deontological, route, stressing a rule-boundedness that may look like a rights theory. (Rule-consequentialism, as opposed to act-consequentialism, ends up looking like this.)

A third approach is eudaimonia, or virtue ethics, which has been inherited from the ancient Greeks, for example in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. In this approach, consequences are not irrelevant -- in fact, they are baked into the conception of features (virtues) that tend toward the perfection of the individual person as a rational social being. In brief, respecting other people as ends in themselves is integral to respecting oneself. I like this approach.

The problem with persuading others about all this is that proof is difficult. It's not like mathematics or physics. Aristotle wrote that the quality of proof in one area of knowledge, say, mathematics, is not to be expected in other areas, say, ethics. You have to play the hand that reality has dealt.

Modern libertarians have been debating among themselves the proper foundation of the freedom philosophy for decades. I can recall a libertarian scholars conference nearly 50 years ago when Murray Rothbard and historian friends expressed frustration over yet another panel of philosophers arguing the fine details of their respective approaches. The philosophical debate is important, but it's easy to get lost in the weeds. Does it matter to the public? Most nonlibertarians are not philosophers or interested in philosophy.

Leaving all that aside (and to people more qualified than I am), what can libertarians say to regular people? The general public often takes positions and attitudes based on cultural and media signals, but that doesn't mean we should not try to win regular people over directly, say, through the internet. Lots of opinion-makers have an incentive to ignore us.

To make our case, I want to start by saying that we know one thing clearly: each individual's life is important to him or her. People care about themselves. Each cares about other people too, but those others are important to the one doing the caring. Far from ruling out regard for others, properly conceived self-interest requires regard for others. It's self-evident. We're social beings. We flourish partly through all sorts of instrumental and constitutive relationships with others.

Each person generally wants life to be long and satisfying. We can call that flourishing. Life is a project, and it consists of many sub-projects. We are not ghosts. Projects require material things: a place to live and work, nourishment, tools, products, and so on. In a word, possessions. If people are to flourish they need to know that their possessions are secure. They need rights, including property rights, to define zones in which they can act free of compulsion. Our nature requires it, so they are natural rights.

We can sum all this up with the term self-ownership, to which no coherent alternative exists. The American abolitionists called slave masters "manstealers." How apt. In 1864 Lincoln wrote in a letter that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." (I know about Lincoln's faults.) Here's the logical corollary to that truth: if self-ownership is not right, nothing is right. That's the libertarian philosophy in concentrated form.

Does knowing this solve all social problems? Of course not. Exactly when conduct begins to become aggression can't always be decided in an armchair. Boundaries can be fuzzy; social conventions will emerge. Life is about grappling with problems. (Sowell says there are no solutions, only trade-offs.) Context matters. So peaceful dispute-resolution will always be necessary, preferably not provided by a coercive government. That doesn't keep self-ownership from being a strong and reasonable guide to grappling with interpersonal problems. On the contrary, it justifies a presumption of liberty.

Critics will ask about the blameless who have little, who wonder where their next meal will come from, and how they will get education or medical attention. Fair question, and we have answers. The primary one is that free people in a free market produce great abundance and variety, which they are eager to sell or rent to others. (Even the hampered market has done this to a great extent for a couple of hundred years.) The West's move toward markets brought the first mass production, which did not always please the aristocracy.

Moreover, the governmental causes of the worst times in history -- from war to domestic mass murder to depression -- can be readily demonstrated. They were not the product of freedom, which common sense tells you is the right way for rational social beings to live.

While these times seem unfriendly to the freedom philosophy, it's possible that this philosophy will eventually delight the people fed up with the woke progressives, national conservatives, and neoconservatives. Maybe time is on freedom's side.

TGIF: Shame on Government for Censoring Us

Alas, federal District Judge Terry A. Doughty's preliminary injunction against government censorship of us on social media has been put on hold.

So rules three members of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. But this stay of the injunction in State of Missouri et al. v. Joseph R. Biden Jr. et al. is temporary. NBC News reported a couple of weeks ago that "a different panel drawn from the [same appellate] court, which has 17 active members, will hear arguments on a longer stay." The matter could be resolved quickly though because the three judges "called for arguments in the case to be scheduled on an expedited basis."

So for now, however, we're back where we started. Judge Doughty had turned down the government's first request that the injunction be put on hold, writing,

Defendants argue that the injunction should be stayed because it might interfere with the Government’s ability to continue working with social-media companies to censor Americans’ core political speech on the basis of viewpoint. In other words, the Government seeks a stay of the injunction so that it can continue violating the First Amendment.

You gotta love this guy!

In light of the stay, let's look closely at Judge Doughty's reasons for forbidding federal agencies and personnel from indirectly censoring the public's constitutionally protected speech by pressuring social media to delete or suppress posts they dislike. He spelled out the grounds in great detail in his 155-page ruling.

Recall that the states of Missouri and Louisiana and several private individuals sued the Biden administration, claiming that it is doing what it may not do even indirectly, censoring constitutionally protected speech by putting all sorts of pressure on social-media companies. This was used to silence dissenters whether or not their posts contained true or false information. The posts and links were related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop, and other subjects. (For background, see my articles here and here.)

Under the First Amendment (and common-sense morality), of course, the government may not censor us directly. The Supreme Court has clearly said that the government also may not require private companies to do censoring for it. Any "request" from the government always carries the implicit threat of reprisal should the recipient of the request say no.

To begin with Doughty's conclusion:

The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country. Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth. [Emphasis added.]

The Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign. This court finds that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free speech claim against the Defendants.

Note that he twice says the Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their suit. That's one of the criteria for a preliminary injunction while a case is still in progress. Should the plaintiffs lose, his injunction would be null and void. But given the subject -- the First Amendment and free speech -- Doughty is pretty sure they are not going to lose. He also was persuaded by the plaintiffs that if he did not stop the government right now, "irreparable harm" would ensue.

Doughty opened his opinion with this:

This case is about the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The explosion of social-media platforms has resulted in unique free speech issues—this is especially true in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech. [Emphasis added.]

This is remarkable. Since Doughty thinks the plaintiffs are likely to prevail, he must also agree that the case "involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history."

If you wonder whether that's an exaggeration, peruse the judge's ruling. It details the offenses and justifies the application of his injunction to each of the named defendants. It's breathtaking.

 

TGIF: About Politicians

The best-selling social scientist and, it so happens, libertarian Bryan Caplan thinks politicians are immoral. Sounds promising. He's discussed this online and in one of his published blog-post collections, How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. What are we to make of his contention?

Caplan isn't using the libertarian nonaggression standard here. Even people who never heard of that standard or who oppose it ought to be at least open to his case. He's really talking about basic decency: the need to avoid gross negligence. Moreover, he thinks it's irrelevant that politicians may believe they are doing the right thing. That's not good enough; it doesn't get them off Caplan's hook.

He starts by talking about everyone and not just politicians. It won't do, he writes, for people merely to go along with what everyone else expects them to do -- not if they want to be virtuous.

[V]irtuous people can’t just conform to the expectations of their society. Everyone has at least a modest moral obligation to perform “due diligence” – to investigate whether their society’s expectations are immoral. And whenever their society fails to measure up, virtuous people spurn social expectations and do the morally right thing.

Caplan doesn't say here what he means by virtuous (from other writings we know he's a moral intuitionist), but that statement surely makes sense. Think of Socrates. No one should suspend their moral judgment or rest content with an unexamined life even in the face of social opposition. Taking into consideration the predominant opinion among most people or the most reputable people is a good starting point (as Aristotle acknowledged), but it is no substitute for thinking for oneself. One should be on the lookout for good reasons for questioning and even rejecting conventional wisdom.

Then Caplan moves on to politicians, who face an even tougher standard for obvious reasons.

Second, anyone in a position of political power has a greatly elevated moral obligation to perform this due diligence. Yes, with great power comes great responsibility. If you’re in a position to pass or enforce laws, lives and freedom are in your hands.  Common decency requires you to act with extreme moral trepidation at all times, ever mindful of the possibility that you’re trampling the rights of the morally innocent.

Of course, "trampling the rights of the morally innocent" might mean killing, maiming, or otherwise ruining people's lives. It certainly will make them poorer No one should have such power in the first place, but if someone is in power, then exercising due diligence is the least he or she can do.

How could anyone take issue with this? Again, it's just common decency. Policymakers should think hard about the likely consequences of their actions or policy proposals. Exercise care, politician, before you decree. Do no harm. No Ph.D. is required to know that.

Caplan asks, "How much time and mental energy does the average politician pour into moral due diligence?  A few hours a year seems like a high estimate." He gives them too much credit. Do they even know what due diligence is? "They don’t just fall a tad short of their moral obligations," Caplan continues. "They’re too busy passing laws and giving orders to face the possibility that they’re wielding power illegitimately."

As he notes, the problem -- our problem -- is that political systems hold no rewards for politicians who are not evil in this respect. They have no career incentive to be moral even by his low standard. "Political systems reward them for seeming good by conventional standards," Caplan writes. "If we’re lucky, this spurs leaders to do what most people consider good. More likely, it spurs leaders to spin control – packaging even their worst actions in conventional moral garb."

And we wonder why, as Jefferson pointed out, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground."

Another problem, which Caplan often writes about, is social desirability bias. Here's what he means: "When the truth sounds bad, human beings deceive and self-deceive. This deceit in turn routinely rationalizes bad policies." Voters judge proposals by how they nice sound, and politicians understand this. Policies that lock aspiring immigrants in poverty are said to "protect our jobs and culture."

Even if the politicians know better (which they usually don't), they don't want to say things that will make voters think badly of them. 

Caplan wraps up by saying,

Admittedly, if it turned out that our society’s conventional moral standards were basically right, our politicians’ vice would be harmless. That’s a much bigger question. But whatever the whole truth about morality might be, politicians ... are almost invariably guilty of pervasive gross moral negligence.  Politicians, repent!

I won't hold my breath. We need to find ways to limit, if not eliminate, the politicians' power. They are largely unaccountable. One vote barely counts; the cost of organizing is usually prohibitive; and officeholders can blame the private sector for policy failings.

But limiting power is a problem because, ruling out a revolution, we'd need their help in that endeavor, and they certainly won't want to help us.

So where does that leave us?

TGIF: Paternalists Cross the Free-Speech Line

Some pundits are puzzled that respectable mainstream Democrats and  "progressives" are no longer free-speech absolutists but rather are enthusiastic defenders of the government's massive effort to squelch expression on the social media platforms. (Glenn Greenwald is one of those puzzled pundits.)

The center-left goes so far as to smear the exposers and critics of government censorship as tin-foil-hatted conspiracy theorists. For example, Matt Taibbi is called a "so-called journalist" for his work on the Twitter Files, despite his award-winning career in investigative reporting. And look how hysterically the center-left reacted to a judge's preliminary injunction against government pressure on social media to suppress dissenting and inconvenient posts.

But why should those pundits be agape? If censorship (by which I mean government suppression of expression) is motivated at least in part by the paternalist desire to protect people from themselves, then I don't see why the censorship arrow would not be in the paternalist's quiver. Any consistent paternalist would believe that the unenlightened public can't be sensible enough to sift "information" from "mis- and disinformation" and read only the "proper" things.

Maybe the paternalists took longer to cross the free-speech line than they might have -- the First Amendment is a powerful taboo in America-- but cross it they now have. Is that so mysterious?

The statement The center-left is paternalist should occasion no controversy. We already knew that. (Of course, it has no monopoly on paternalism, but it is a strong element there.) Government interference with people's freedom to choose in the market is always proposed at least partly to protect them from themselves.

I acknowledge that the line between intending to protect people from themselves and intending to protect them from others can be blurry. Both rationales qualify as paternalistic, and both have been used to limit speech: think of the laws restricting commercial speech. But the former is definitely present.

Classical liberals have rejected that sort of paternalism. John Stuart Mill (not the most hardcore classical liberal) wrote:  "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant." (On Liberty) That is, the government should not protect people from themselves.

It's not just classical liberals and full libertarians who have criticized paternalism, or nanny statism. We've all heard that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." We've been told that the words most to be feared are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." It's been said that "a government powerful enough to do everything for you is powerful enough to do anything to you." In politics the term do-gooder is an insult.

I admit that the paternalist's defense of invasive government action might be a lie to cover another objective, such as power or unearned financial gain. But I see no reason to doubt that the expression of paternalism is usually sincere. I'm not saying that sincerity is a good defense of paternalism. We might want to despise the paternalist who really means it even more than the liar because as C. S. Lewis wrote:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Lewis was no libertarian, so here's Lysander Spooner in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority:

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.

The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.

I also acknowledge that honest paternalists are happy to join with (usually tacitly) seekers of unearned income in pressing their policy preferences. Don't forget the "bootleggers and Baptists" phenomenon. That's Bruce Yandle's term for when preachers, for example, team up with moonshiners to make or keep liquor illegal. That doesn't change what the paternalists are up to.

The point is that for a long time American paternalists drew the line at the First Amendment because censorship was such a taboo. Alas, that taboo is gone.

 

 

TGIF: Free Speech Upsets Powers that Be

The Biden administration, along with mainstream politicians and journalists, are really upset that U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty has forbidden the executive branch of the central government from communicating with social-media platforms for the purpose of censoring or otherwise suppressing constitutionally protected speech. Judge Doughty's action came in an important free-speech lawsuit filed against the government.

He wrote in an accompanying statement: 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.” 

So-called respectable government officials, journalists, and pundits -- the alleged adults in a room -- consider the judge's temporary injunction the worse thing that could possibly happen. The headline in the "progressive" publication The American Prospect screamed in panic: "Trump Judge Effectively Names Himself President." (That "Trump judge," by the way, was confirmed by the Senate 98-0.)

Imagine it: agents from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies may not even "suggest" to Facebook, Twitter, etc., that they ought to take down or hide posts that take issue with the government's official line about ... whatever. Of course, when government officials suggest something to a private party, the suggestion may be interpreted as being accompanied by the subtle threat to retaliate legally if the suggestion is ignored. Think of protection racketeer telling a shop owner, "You have a nice place here. It would be a shame if it burned down." Get the picture?

As we know, the government has been doing stuff like this for years, whether the matter was related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia's alleged collusive 2016 election tampering, and who knows what else. According to a congressional committee, the FBI apparently even collaborated with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Americans' frowned-on discussion of the Ukraine war on social media.

The posts that government agencies wanted suppressed included not only statements that were perhaps provably wrong  -- incorrect speech per se is constitutionally protected, incidentally -- but also accurate information that the government simply found inconvenient, like posts and links that might make people hesitate to get the COVID-19 vaccine, wear masks, accept totalitarian social lockdowns, or trust that the coronavirus came from a Chinese market rather than a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan, China.

Let's remember that much of the challenge to the government's take on the pandemic and other matters -- criticism belittled as "tin-foil" conspiracy-mongering -- turned out to be true. Contrary to the government's position, the search for the truth requires the freedom to openly disagree and debate. That search abhors centralization, coercion, and the exclusion of anyone but the politically anointed "experts." The right to free speech is a practical necessity if we are to pursue our well-being. Any step toward the paternalistic centralization of research and control of communication is not only immoral (by whatever standard you like) but also inimical to health, wealth, and other aspects of a fully human way of life.

In other words, as the judge acknowledged, the central government has gone to extraordinary lengths to control what the public can read and say on social media. It's as if free speech were not a pillar of liberal philosophy and tradition -- liberal in the older and best sense of a presumption of individual liberty in all spheres. Further, it's as if the first restriction on government power in the Bill of Rights was not the absolute prohibition on the infringement of free speech and press. It's a well-established principle of American law that the government may not pressure private parties to do what it itself may not constitutionally do. Yet that's exactly what happened -- repeatedly. It's a disgrace. How can the government be trusted? It never could be.

Since the Biden administration, urged on by the power elite and the insecure establishment media, does not like being told that it may not violate our freedom of speech, it asked Judge Doughty to suspend his temporary injunction while the Justice Department appeals it. Judge Doughty said no. So the action moved to the appellate court. The Washington Post said that "The Justice Department’s filing signaled that it could seek the intervention of the Supreme Court, saying that at a minimum, the 5th Circuit should put the order on pause for 10 days to give the nation’s highest court time to consider an application for a stay."

I sense desperation. The judge must have done something right. Remember that the injunction, alas, does not bar all government contact with social-media companies: he listed exceptions for actual criminality and national security. Only interference with constitutionally protected expression was included. I don't remind readers of these exceptions to comfort them -- the government will likely abuse the exceptions. I remind readers only to show that the order contains those exceptions. So what is the government so worried about? It says that the judge's order is hopelessly vague and doesn't address every possible eventuality. The answer is easy: if the choice is between vagueness in restricting government power and violating individual liberty, I know which I prefer. This is supposed to be America, isn't it? Rights precede government.

Good people have enough to be concerned about when it comes to social media restricting their expression. Yes, they are private companies, and it's easy to think of people who are so obnoxious that one wouldn't want to encounter them online.

On the other hand, no one has reason to be confident that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (Google), etc., will use exercise that right judiciously. That you have a right to do something does not mean you should do it. Can does not imply ought. YouTube reportedly deleted Jordan Peterson's interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because it contains what it regards as -- and well may be -- misinformation about vaccines. Kennedy is challenging Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. One need not agree with Kennedy on vaccines (I'm inclined not to) to be uneasy about YouTube's decision. We also can't rule out that YouTube acted in anticipation of the government's disapproval. Government casts a shadow over everything.

We mustn't call on the government to manage social media through antitrust or regulation. We should favor real competition. But we should insist on a prohibition of government action, direct and indirect, to suppress speech on those platforms or anywhere else. Judge Doughty understands that. Let's hope other judges do too.

TGIF: Good News on Free Speech -- for Now

Occasionally, the news makes one cheer. That's the case with a preliminary injunction granted this week (July 4) to stop the federal government from suppressing lawful speech on social media. U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty took the action in the case of State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. (which I wrote about last year). The pending lawsuit challenged, among other things, the government's power to cajole, lean on, and otherwise less-than-explicitly compel Twitter, Facebook, and the other platforms to remove or suppress lawful speech that federal authorities deem to be dangerous "disinformation" or "misinformation."

The government's conduct related to posts about the COVID-19 pandemic -- including masks, vaccines, and the possible U.S.-funded/Chinese-lab origin -- figures heavily in the lawsuit. But other reasons for suppression and any future suppression are also in the crosshairs. The idea behind the suit is that under the First Amendment, the government may not do indirectly what it is constitutionally barred from doing directly.

We must understand that the motives for government censorship are irrelevant. Even with the best motives in the world -- say, to safeguard public health during a dangerous pandemic -- the government may not suppress speech directly or threaten to regulate private companies if they don't do the suppressing. This, of course, is exactly what the government did, as we know from the Twitter Files and many other sources.

Of course, as a preliminary injunction, the ban is not permanent. That must await a full airing of the case. Still, it's something to cheer about. A whole slew of federal agencies and officials are ordered not to interfere with social media -- which means with the people who use social media. It doesn't mean that the platforms, which after all are private companies, can't do their own interfering. It just means that for now, government officials can't even raise an eyebrow to signal that lawful posts should be taken down. (The courts have long held that some speech, such as defamation and outright direct incitement to violence, is not protected by the First Amendment. Whether this leaves the government too much leeway is not the issue here.)

Under the judge's temporary order, the agencies and officials "are hereby enjoined and restrained from ... meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms."

But that's not all. The defendants are also prohibited from "specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such [posts] to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner [emphasis added] for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech." How about that!

Other forbidden activities name are:

urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech;

emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;

collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content posted with social-media companies containing protected free speech;

threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech;

taking any action such as urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution;

following up with social-media companies to determine whether the social-media companies removed, deleted, suppressed, or reduced previous social-media postings containing protected free speech;

requesting content reports from social-media companies detailing actions taken to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce content containing protected free speech; and

notifying social-media companies to Be on The Lookout (“BOLO”) for postings containing protected free speech.

The judge also made clear what he was not forbidding the government from doing. This includes telling the social-media companies about criminal activity and national security threats, "exercising permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern," and "communicating with social-media companies about deleting, removing, suppressing, or reducing posts on social-media platforms that are not protected free speech by the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."

Whether the government will use the exceptions to get around the injunction remains to be seen. Some worry it will, and given what we know about government officials, who would be surprised? Vigilance is the price of liberty. Nevertheless, supporters of paternalistic government suppression of free speech, including establishment reporters (!) and pundits, are alarmed by the broad scope of the preliminary injunction. (On the concerns that the injunction is both too broad and too narrow, see this.)

The injunction, wrote the judge, "shall remain in effect pending the final resolution of this case or until further orders issue from this Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, or the Supreme Court of the United States." The plaintiffs only ask the court to declare that the defendants broke the law by interfering with free speech and to forbid government officials from doing it again.

Alas, the U.S. government today can do almost anything it wants. Fortunately, a few things still stand in the way, as some recent Supreme Court rulings have demonstrated. The First Amendment is one of those things. But how long will it remain that way?

TGIF: "America First" Need Not Be Antiwar

Today's Trump-inspired "America First" faction cannot be counted on to be consistently noninterventionist and antiwar. That it may lean that way because its chief rival faction is so enthusiastic about foreign adventurism is hardly a firm assurance that it will remain antiwar in the future.

We must beware of the assumption that an interventionist foreign policy is, in contrast to America First, by nature "Any Country But America First." Admittedly, advocates of U.S. foreign adventurism often defend their policy choices in terms of the benefits to another population. But that's not all they do. They also typically invoke the security interests of the American people. It's a small world, after all, they say, and what protects others also protects us. How often have you heard interventionists agitate for war solely on behalf of foreigners? Sure, national self-sacrifice might not be good politics, but that doesn't mean that people of the interventionist mindset don't mean what they say.

My point is not that they are right, but only that they, or most of them, are sincere (though misguided). I doubt if George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq was motivated solely by regard for the Iraqis or Israelis.  Not was Barack Obama's bombing and regime change in Libya carried out on behalf of the Libyan people only. In both cases the key policymakers and their supporters believed that these actions were also good for the American people, who had been told for decades that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi threatened them. The same can be said about the people who gave us the war in Vietnam. This is not to dismiss the malign influence of dishonest people who simply enjoy exercising power or who will profit from selling weapons to the government.  But I am suspicious of such single-factor explanations.

If I'm right about this, we must ask what today's America Firsterism is defined in contrast to. Aren't the two main competing approaches to foreign policy in reality both America first, although one may be unilateralist and the other multilateralist? One might respond that a true America Firster considers only the interests of America and no one else. But is that really such a big difference? Perhaps the difference is that American Firsters would want to see immediate benefits for Americans from intervention, while the neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists are willing to wait a little longer even if foreigners would benefit sooner. But now we're quibbling about time preferences among the interventionists.

Now let's talk about Donald Trump. (I wish we didn't have to.) Trump is regarded as the architect of today's America First faction, although I don't think he used the phrase (if he's used it at all) until critics smeared him with it. While Trump fans boast that unlike his two immediate predecessors, he started no new wars, I would caution against confidence that Trumpism equals noninterventionism. First, he didn't end any wars either, and he chose to keep American troops in key areas of Syria, namely, where the oil and wheat fields are. (They're still there.) Did he end any of America's covert wars? Or stop helping Saudi Arabia from making war on Yemen? Or refuse to send lethal aid to Ukraine as Obama had done? No, he did not.

Moreover, he might have gotten us into new wars, with China and Iran, for example. He put tariffs on  Chinese imports, harming American consumers and intending to harm Chinese businesses. Trade wars can lead to other forms of warfare. Regarding Iran, Trump tore up Obama's so-called nuclear deal (Iran wasn't making a bomb) and reimposed economic sanctions. He ordered the assassination of a major Iranian military/political leader. No doubt he continued the covert and proxy war against Iran that the U.S. and Israeli governments have conducted for years. Finally, he reportedly nearly attacked Iran as his term drew to a close. It looks like we avoided a new war thanks only to contingent circumstances. Why should we be confident about a new Trump term?

Right-wing populists, like their left-wing counterparts, seem to oppose the establishment's foreign policy mostly because it consumes tax money they want the government to spend on domestic projects. That's hardly comforting to anyone who wants the government to do less and thereby consume far fewer scarce resources, which after all are produced privately.

Much more could be said against America First, for example,  that the term national interest has long been a cover for collectivism and coercion. America First is no guarantee of nonintervention. What we need is a commitment not to America First but to individual liberty first.

TGIF: Foreign Policy Matters

In an extra special way, foreign policy matters crucially to champions of individual liberty. Not that it doesn't matter to other people too -- just not in all the same ways. Anyone who understands the importance of keeping government power strictly limited in domestic matters (if such power must exist at all) will also grasp the paramount importance of constraining government power abroad. They're cut from the same cloth.

This is obvious to libertarians, but not necessarily to others. When Randolph Bourne wrote that "war is the health of the state," he expected his readers to understand that this is a bad thing because the state is dangerous. But do most people know that? For neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists, war being the health of the state is a feature, not a bug.

I think it was Richard Cobden, the 19th-century British free trader, peace activist, anti-imperialist, and member of Parliament, who demanded, "No foreign politics." He meant that the government should be too busy dismantling power at home to engage in deadly balance-of-power intrigue abroad. In America a century later, Felix Morley, the anti-interventionist and pro-market newspaper editor, said in opposing the advocates of war and central bureaucracy that politics will stop at the water's edge only when policy stops at the water's edge, which he favored.

War naturally repulses individuals because -- obviously -- it kills and disables people, most atrociously, noncombatants. It's so obviously repulsive that many soldiers have to be turned into killers during training. Another count against war is that it encourages a self-destructive, indiscriminate, and collective hatred of foreigners and even local individuals who are invidiously identified with the designated "enemy." (Russian athletes and even long-dead Russian composers are targets of hostility these days.)

But those who understand that full individual liberty is a necessity -- and not a mere luxury -- include another count in the indictment against war. It inevitably fosters the general growth of government power, which then infects all aspects of life and society. That doesn't happen all at once, but it sets in motion a deadly process that menaces everything in its path unless it is stopped. Few things approach war fever in this regard. (A pandemic and a major economic crisis can have similar effects.)

War is a great way to instill the "governmental habit": it powerfully encourages people to think that the state is indispensable for all sorts of problems -- including the control of "disinformation." F. A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serdom in 1944 because World War II had people thinking that if central planning worked in wartime, it ought to work in peacetime too. (The phrase governmental habit is from economic historian Jonathan R. T. Hughes. Hughes wasn't writing about foreign policy; in that regard, see Robert Higgs's Crisis and Leviathan.)

Just think about this century. Without the wars of the last 20 years, it would have been tougher for the government to have gotten away with its frightening surveillance powers, which have no doubt spread to matters other than terrorism. People will say it was a response to the horrific 9-11 attacks, but those must be seen out of context. While the attacks were atrocities, they did not come out of the blue. The U.S. government was hardly minding its own business before 2001. Rather, it had been fighting proxy, covert, and even overt wars in the Middle East killing thousands of people far from home.

Surveillance is not the only consequence of a belligerent foreign policy. Let's not forget the huge monetary price tag, which has to be handled through taxation and, less visibly, borrowing, followed by inflationary monetization, an implicit form of taxation. Other burdens on people's freedom include economic regulation, trade barriers through sanctions and tariffs, the militarization of local police departments, and the corruption of the news media. It's said that the first casualty of war is truth. (Noninterventionist Sen. Hiram Johnson said that in 1917.) War and government lying go hand in hand.

An especially insidious thing about foreign policy is that critics can be silenced by the war party's invoking of state secrets. The classified document is the ace up the sleeve. This doesn't happen in domestic policy. But it happens all the time in foreign policy -- which is why we should be grateful to Daniel Ellsberg (who died the other day, sad to say), Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and other whistle-blowers. Naturally, the government treats them brutally.

War is also useful to politicians in taking people's minds off other government-caused problems. Shakespeare showed that he understood this when, in Henry IV, Part II, he had the king tell his son, "Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days."

Foreign intervention, covert war, and open war are poison to a society that aspires to be free. That's another reason to say no to interventionism.

TGIF: Markets Clean Up

Donald Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, has been a great defender of individual liberty for a long time. One of his favorite projects is pointing out how innovative and usually unnewsworthy market activity, to the extent that government keeps out of the way, increasingly helps us to live in cleaner, healthier surroundings. In other words, if "the environment" matters for human well-being -- and it certainly does -- the freer that markets are, that is, the freer that we are, the better for everyone. Freedom and the wealth it generates on net make our world better.

This has been known for a long time, but many people have never learned it. (Disclosure: Boudreaux hired me to edit The Freeman magazine in the late 1990s when he became president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Working for him was a pleasure.)

I should stop there and let Boudreaux explain what he means by the environment. It's not immediately obvious. He writes that

the relevant environment for humanity is not exclusively the outdoor and often-distant environment that we think of today when we encounter this word. Humans’ environment includes more than just the likes of the outdoor air that we breathe, the condition of the oceans and of far-away tundra, and the average temperature of the globe; humans’ environment includes also the cleanliness of the buildings in which we live, of the furniture on which we sit and sleep, of the clothing that we wear, and of the foods that we eat.

By implication, the world was pretty dirty before markets prevailed in the West. Just for example; think of all that horse manure, not to mention those rotting equine carcasses in the sometimes-dusty-sometimes-muddy streets before oil and the internal-combustion engine rescued us. Most cases are not as dramatic but are just as important.

Boudreaux explains that nine years ago he began a feature on his blog, Cafe Hayek, that he called "Cleaned by Capitalism." He writes, "Each post describes – and is typically accompanied by a photograph of –  an affordable and familiar modern good that makes humans’ immediate environment cleaner, safer, and more pleasant. Each of these goods is made available to the masses by innovative, competitive markets."

Keep in mind that the spread of at least semi-free markets made mass production of clothing and other basic household goods a feature of everyday life for the first time in history. Before that, production was for the aristocracy only. The rest of the people made do with a paltry number of homemade goods. That was the case for millennia.

Boudreaux wants to do more than broaden the definition of the word environment. As noted, he wants to illustrate "the practically countless ways that innovative capitalist markets cleanse our personal environments of filth and perils that pose a far greater and more immediate threat to us than do global warming and the other the environmental conditions that are today regularly featured in the news." (There's plenty of evidence that catastrophic warming or climate change is not happening. Look up the writings or YouTube videos of Stephen Koonin, who was a top energy physicist in the Obama administration.)

And, further, Boudreaux wants to

encourage readers to understand that, while capitalist production does indeed emit pollutants into the air and water, it also – and in the process – produces goods many of which make our everyday lives less polluted. Whatever are the costs of the "seen" environmental effects of industrial production – effects such as carbon emissions and the risk of oil spills – these effects must be weighed against the benefits, including the unseen environmental benefits, of the very industrial activities that have as a by-product these "seen" environmental effects.

Here Boudreaux reminds me of Julian Simon, the late economist who documented how much richer and cleaner the world had become because human beings ("the ultimate resource") are intelligent and enterprising. (See Simon's classics, The Ultimate Resource II and The State of Humanity.) He's also making a point that the philosopher Alex Epstein makes online and in many writings. (See Fossil Future.)

"There’s no question," Boudreaux winds up writing, "that the environment in which modern humans live is immeasurably cleaner, safer, and more pleasant than was the filthy and dangerous environment in which all of our pre-industrial ancestors lived." Amen.

But stay tuned. Boudreaux isn't resting on his laurels. He has promised to start a new series on his blog: "Soiled by Socialism" and is soliciting reader help in finding examples. He doesn't mean just socialism in other countries. See his article for a preview.

Additional reading: Saving the Environment for a Profit, Victorian-Style, by Pierre Desrochers, The Freeman, May 2003.

TGIF: Condemning Tyranny Abroad and War

Can foreign-policy noninterventionists publicly criticize foreign tyrannies without giving credence to the war party? Yes -- if they try. At least I hope so. Being a noninterventionist does not require agnosticism about, much less approval of, despotic regimes.

U.S. war, of course, threatens the liberty and lives of Americans, not to mention foreigners. That's why Randolph Bourne wrote, "War is the health of the state." When private individuals condemn tyranny abroad and U.S. war against it, they are pursuing the same cause.

That many people who denounce tyranny in Russia, China, and elsewhere are enthusiasts for U.S.-led war (or proxy war) is no reason to assume that every American opponent of foreign tyranny also favors war. Principled noninterventionism must not appear to whitewash despicable regimes for the sake of damping war fever (or any other reason). For one thing, that would imply that war against acknowledged tyrannies would be good -- which it would not. Noninterventionism stands on its own merits, whatever the nature of the state's imagined threat du jour.

So one can oppose the U.S. war party while denouncing, among others, the regimes of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. The oppression of their domestic populations, China's threat to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Russia's war on Ukraine should not be played down because the war party also denounces them. That U.S. policymakers have made things worse through economic sanctions and other provocations -- like the expansion of NATO and the instigation of coups -- is no excuse for giving those atrocious regimes a pass. Bad regimes don't become good because American politicians also do wrong. 

What prompts these thoughts is a man named Jimmy Lai, who just won the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Lai, a 75-year-old Hong Kong businessman-turned-pro-liberty-publisher/activist, is in prison and faces more charges, having been oppressed by the Chinese government for his pro-freedom activities. Lai is the most famous example of China's attempt to crush the individual, but he's far from the only one.

His story is inspiring as well as heartbreaking. (See the movie "The Hong Konger: Jimmy Lai's Extraordinary Struggle for Freedom.") Born poor in China in 1947, he escaped to Hong Kong before he was a teenager. He worked in a factory and eventually started his own apparel manufacturer and retail chain, Giordano, which has been a huge success.

While until 1997 Hong Kong was been a British colony without democratic institutions, it largely had a free market and other classical liberal features. Milton Friedman celebrated its essentially laissez-faire market system in his television series, Free to Choose. Because of this freedom, which included the rule of law as well as freedom of speech and press, Hong Kong it went from very poor after World War II to very rich in short order. Bear in mind that Hong Kong has no resources: even drinking water has to be imported. But it had enterprising free people, and markets, including free trade with the world.

A better demonstration of the market in action is hard to imagine. But Hong Kong's future had a dark cloud over it: the Chinese communist government.

In 1997 the British relinquished control of Hong Kong to China under the terms of the 99-year lease Great Britain and China had signed. As part of the turnover, the Chinese communist government agreed to respect Hong Kong's autonomy for 50 years, but many doubted that the Chinese government would leave Hong Kong alone before or after 2047. It didn't keep hands off for long.

That government offered an ominous preview of the future on mainland China eight years before the British turned over Hong Kong: the horrific violence against pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. This was a decade after had China significantly liberalized economic, but not political, activity. One-party rule prevailed, and dissent was not tolerated.

As a result of the violence, according to the Cato announcement, "Lai founded Next Media (which became Next Digital in 2015) and launched Next magazine. Next became the top news magazine in Hong Kong for over 30 years." Among other claims to fame, "it was also known for its strong advocacy of free markets, lower regulation, and economic choice in all matters."

Lai's promotion of freedom, which he says was inspired by F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, started to get him in trouble. "Following a column in the magazine in 1994, in which Lai told then Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng to 'drop dead,' China began to force the closures of branches of Giordano on the mainland. Lai sold his share of that company and in 1995 launched Apple Daily, which was a combination of tabloid journalism, democracy advocacy, and a loud and clear free-market message."

That newspaper became a much-read paper, which the Chinese government would eventually shut down as it tightened the screws on Lai.

In 2014 Lai's participation in pro-democracy demonstrations got him arrested. He further irritated China's rulers five years later when on a  visit to the United States he met with high-profile government officials. Perhaps he should have skipped that part of the trip. Past U.S. government meddling in many countries has made it too easy for repressive governments to smear dissidents as foreign agents.

Cato continues:

His clashes with authorities intensified sharply in 2019, especially after the July 2020 enactment of a sweeping Chinese national security law that is now expanding mainland China’s suppression of the Hong Kong people.

Lai was arrested on February 28, 2020, and again on April 18 for alleged participation in unlawful demonstrations the previous year. Police arrested him again on August 10, 2020, for alleged collusion with foreign powers. He was arrested again and denied bail on December 3 after being charged with fraud. He was formally charged under China’s national security law on December 11.

Libertarians know how so-called national security laws can empower any government to get away with all manner of repression.

Lai was granted bail on highly restrictive terms on December 23, only to have bail revoked on December 31. Subsequent applications for bail under the national security law were denied on the grounds that he might commit further offenses. Lai was arrested again on February 17, 2021, while already in prison for allegedly helping 12 fugitives in their failed attempt to escape Hong Kong for Taiwan.

The Chinese government threw nearly everything it had at him, but all reports say that it has not broken his spirit.

On April 16, 2021, Lai was sentenced to 14 months in prison for the alleged organization of, and participation in, two unauthorized marches in 2019. In December 2022, Lai was sentenced to five years in prison for a lease violation that was then elevated to a fraud charge and subsequently investigated by China’s national security police, prosecuted by a national security prosecutor, and tried by a national security judge. A conviction in the ongoing national security case, scheduled for trial in September 2023, could result in a sentence of life in prison. [Emphasis added.]

Lai could have left Hong Kong when his troubles began, as some of his associates had done. He chose to stay and fight for the freedom of Hong Kong. That takes courage few people have.

TGIF: Immigration and Liberty

Forbidding freedom of movement to aspiring migrants strikes at the liberty not only of those individuals but also of citizens and legal residents of the United States. That's the way it is with immigration. Indeed, that's the way it is with freedom. The government can't violate the freedom of some peaceful people without also violating the freedom of others.

Ilya Somin, who teaches law at George Mason University and is a constitutional scholar with the Cato Institute, makes this point in "Three Constitutional Issues Libertarians Should Make Their Own." (The other two issues his title refers to are zoning and racial profiling.) Somin also wrote the book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

"Immigration restrictions," he writes, "massively restrict liberty and degrade human welfare. By barring entry to hundreds of thousands of people who seek freedom and opportunity in the United States, the federal government massively restricts the liberty of would‐​be immigrants and American citizens alike."

The harm to aspiring migrants is obvious. People seeking to escape crushing poverty and/or oppression are denied the freedom to move to a safer and more productive place. They are condemned to deprivation, misery, and pain at the hands of the government and gangs. (The U.S. war on drug makers and merchants in Latin America is the big reason for this.) By what right are they condemned? "Legal" immigration is more of a theoretical fiction than a real thing. Somin writes:

In theory, they can join the “line” and wait to enter legally. But for most, that line is either decades‐​long or nonexistent. And for the most part, these exclusions are based on arbitrary circumstances of parentage and place of birth, of a kind libertarians and others in the liberal political tradition consistently reject in other contexts.

He goes on: "Less widely appreciated, even by many libertarians, is the massive negative effect of immigration restrictions on the liberty of current American citizens." We don't usually think of immigration this way. (Political philosopher Chandran Kukathas does.) But every person represents an American's opportunity for gains from trade, friendship, and more intimate relationships, all the things that promote flourishing. Immigration controls control Americans too. As Somin writes:

Immigration restrictions bar millions of Americans from engaging in economic and social transactions with potential immigrants. It closes off Americans from hiring immigrant workers, getting jobs at businesses founded by immigrants (who establish such enterprises at higher rates than native-born citizens), renting property to immigrants, and benefiting from scientific and economic innovations to which immigrants also contribute at higher rates than natives.

Those who lament the government-made mess at the border have never understood that constructive responses to the new potential employees, buyers, tenants, etc. would privately and spontaneously arise if border crossing was legal.

Somin adds that "No other current U.S. government policy restricts liberty more than immigration exclusion does—and that’s true even if we focus solely on the liberty of native‐​born citizens, especially economic freedoms."

The prevention of gains from trade has profound and negative consequences for the production of wealth. Somin: "Economists estimate that free migration throughout the world would double global domestic product. That’s an enormous chunk of lost wealth for immigrants and native‐​born citizens alike."

Think of the abundance of goods, the new things, and the low prices that we're all missing out on! (See Bryan Caplan's Open Borders for details.)

Somin also sees constitutional problems with the restrictions that he laments has been neglected by even most libertarian legal scholars (including himself), not to mention others, such as conservatives, who claim to be staunch constitutionalists. "It’s far from clear," he writes, "that the original meaning of the Constitution even gives the federal government a general power to restrict immigration in the first place."

Nothing in the text specifically grants Congress or the president such authority, and leading Founding Fathers—including James Madison—argued that no such power existed. It took more than a century for the Supreme Court to rule—in the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case—that the federal government does in fact have this unenumerated power. And that decision is based on highly dubious reasoning and tinged with racism.

Somin does not foresee an imminent overturning of the ruling, but he would like to see assaults on "extensions of that ruling that have largely immunized immigration restrictions from constitutional constraints that apply to virtually every type of government policy." For example:

Immigration detention and deportation proceed with far weaker due process protections than other severe deprivations of liberty. Due process is so lacking in the system that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies have detained and sometimes even deported thousands of American citizens before they figured out their error. Such detention with little or no due process would not be tolerated elsewhere.

But do "illegal" immigrants have rights supposedly protected by the Constitution? Somin replies: "A few constitutional rights are explicitly confined to U.S. citizens. But the vast majority are phrased as general constraints on government power, and protect citizens and noncitizens alike." Thus, "[t]he exemption of immigration restrictions from many normal constitutional constraints on government power has no basis in the text or original meaning of the Constitution."

So he wants an end to the many double standards. That "would curtail many of the worst abuses of the current migration regime, and perhaps set the stage for further progress. Even incremental improvement could make the difference between freedom and oppression for many thousands of people."

Hear, hear!

TGIF: The Knowledge that Only Free Markets Disclose

As a follow-up to my recent article about F. A. Hayek's classic article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), I thought it worth extending Hayek's exploration of this area of social theory. In 1968 the Nobel laureate-economist delivered a lecture in German known in English as "Competition as a Discovery Procedure." It's an alluring title, and anyone concerned with what makes for a good and prosperous society should be familiar with Hayek's basic point.

Hayek gets right to it. He notes that standard macroeconomists are guilty of having "investigated competition primarily under assumptions which, if they were actually true, would make competition completely useless and uninteresting." By that, he meant, "If anyone actually knew everything that economic theory designated as 'data,' competition would indeed be a highly wasteful method of securing adjustment to these facts."

In other words, if all the "data" were actually accessible data, solving society's scarcity problem would be a piece of cake, at least if the government's computer was powerful enough. (I'm led to understand that, fortunately, many economists have advanced since he gave this lecture, probably in part because of his challenge.)

"Hence," Hayek went on,

it is also not surprising that some authors have concluded that we can either completely renounce the market, or that its outcomes are to be considered at most a first step toward creating a social product that we can then manipulate, correct, or redistribute in any way we please.

Unfortunately, lots of such people are still around today.

Hayek (like his teacher Ludwig von Mises) knew that he needed to show that Adam Smith's "system of natural liberty" performed a critical service to mankind that could not be otherwise performed: the production of knowledge that is needed in a changing world of scarcity in which each individual must make plans but also be ready to adjust his or her plans in light of what other free individuals are doing. And that's what Hayek did, building on Mises and others. Hayek made contributions to the economic, or "practical," case for freedom that have been woefully unappreciated. The Austrian school of economics that Hayek was part of needs to be discussed more than ever.

Just as any sort of contest would be pointless if we infallibly knew the outcome in advance, Hayek wrote, so would marketplace competition. He considered "competition systematically as a procedure for discovering facts which, if the procedure did not exist, would remain unknown or at least would not be used." (Emphasis added.)

(Although, Hayek's German title, Der Wettbewerb als Entdeckungsverfahrenh, has been translated as "competition as a discovery procedure." I regard the word process as more appropriate because, unlike procedure, it suggests improvisation, spontaneity, and serendipity. Hayek's work overflows with an understanding of what he called spontaneous, or unplanned, order.)

Hayek reiterated his theme from "The Use of Knowledge in Society" even as he extended it. He wanted to know how can we even identify goods apart from what the market discloses over time through free producer and consumer action.

Which goods are scarce, however, or which things are goods, or how scarce or valuable they are, is precisely one of the conditions that competition should discover: in each case it is the preliminary outcomes of the market process that inform individuals where it is worthwhile to search. Utilizing the widely diffused knowledge in a society with an advanced division of labor cannot be based on the condition that individuals know all the concrete uses that can be made of the objects in their environment. Their attention will be directed by the prices the market offers for various goods and services.

Bottom line: government administrators may be able to give orders, but they cannot benefit the population. The Soviet Union no doubt used up resources making things that few people wanted. Hayek went on:

This means, among other things, that each individual’s particular combination of skills and abilities—which in many regards is always unique—will not only (and not even primarily) be skills that the person in question can recite in detail or report to a government agency. Rather, the knowledge of which I am speaking consists to a great extent of the ability to detect certain conditions—an ability that individuals can use effectively only when the market tells them what kinds of goods and services are demanded, and how urgently.

It's not magic that produces the knowledge that makes abundance possible for everyone. It's freedom of action, contract, and private property in a legal-political environment in which people peacefully and cooperatively pursue their happiness. The discoveries Hayek was talking about can take place only when people can 1) freely produce and offer products and services to others and 2) freely buy or not buy according to their own judgment. This includes labor services. Without that freedom, which is limited if not precluded by central planning and less-comprehensive regulation, an economy cannot be expected to benefit a large population.

The full case for a free society obviously has a rights-based, or justice-based, component, We are reasoning social beings who seek happiness. And the also has an important epistemic component, which Mises, Hayek, and others have laid out. We want justice for all individuals, and we want them to flourish. In a world of scarcity and dispersed and tacit knowledge, the free market is required. The moral is also practical.

TGIF: No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says "no one has a right to immigrate" to the United States. "We determine as Americans," he says, "what type of immigration system benefits our country. When you're doing immigration, it's not for their benefit as foreigners. It's for your benefit as Americans. So if there's legal immigration that's harming America, we shouldn't do that either."

I'd turn that around and say that no one, including a state legislature, has a right to forbid or restrict immigration, the peaceful movement of individuals from outside to inside America. That doesn't mean that landowners cannot set rules for who enters their own property. That is not immigration policy.

We're talking about a political concept. You can see this in DeSantis's words "We determine as Americans." Apart from immigration, "we" do not "determine as Americans" who can and cannot come to my home. I do that as the owner. Normally I need no one's permission to invite or exclude. (It's more complicated in the business context, where association can be legally required rather than forbidden.) But if the person I wish to invite lacks the government's permission to be in the country, then it's a different story. That's not a natural limitation on a normal and natural right. It's the result of a decision by a group of politicians, a decision that may well conflict with what many people want to do. How dare the politicians interfere?

DeSantis says that a good immigration policy should benefit the country, or "Americans." It's hard to miss the conservative collectivism in theory and elitism in practice. The collectivism lies in what appears to be decision-making not by individuals, but by a purported entity, namely, the "country." What about dissenters? They don't matter. What counts, presumably, is the Rousseauian general will. Dissenters must be forced to be "free" by going along with the majority. In theory the majority rules.

But the elitism lies in the fact that majorities don't really rule. They pick the officeholders (although not the bureaucrats), but what happens next can hardly be called rule by the majority because what the majority may want on a given issue must pass through a very thick filter before it becomes enacted. That filter is administered by special interests inside and outside of the government that typically have preferences that can differ vastly from the majority of voters. To keep the people in the dark about this, those interests not only lie and propagandize, but they also obfuscate and use other tactics to make it difficult for the people to know what the government is really doing or to change it if they find out. (Charlotte Twight's Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans spells out the theory and history of this.)

The upshot is that DeSantis's position -- which is widely shared on the right and left-- is incoherent. "America" does not and could not make immigration policy. Democracy is a facade that blocks our view of reality.

But even if "America" could make the policy, it would be unjust, not to mention self-defeating, to block or restrict immigration. No one, not even a majority of congressmen backed by a president, has the right to tell individuals, wherever they were born, that they cannot consensually enter other people's property to live, rent, buy, work, or otherwise associate peacefully. Even if a lot of people band together, they can have no right to block free exchanges between Americans and foreigners. A group cannot have any rights that its individual members do not have. Zero multiplied by any number is still zero. So "America" has no right to keep immigrants out. The right to move about while respecting other people's rights is universal, and anyone is innocent until charged and proven guilty. The Declaration of Independence speaks of rights that precede government as belonging not only to Americans but to all people. Those rights include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What's so hard to understand about that?

The idea that the country ought to control immigration should disturb advocates of individual liberty. According to classical liberal principles, a country is not a country club with a membership committee. Rather, it's a free association where individuals and their associates may live and prosper in peace. And they are left in peace unless they harm other people's bodies or steal or damage their belongings. If one of them wants to sell to, rent to, employ, or befriend someone whom others regard as an outsider, no one has a right to interfere.

If anyone does interfere, he's not only interfering with the "outsider", he's also interfering with "insiders." It can't be otherwise, as political scientist Chandran Kukathas points out. Kukathas "put[s] freedom at the centre of the immigration question. At stake are the liberty of citizens and other residents of the free society and therefore the free society itself. To put it simply, immigration controls are controls on people. and it is not possible to control some people without controlling others. More to the point, it is not possible to control outsiders (aliens, foreigners, would-be immigrants) without controlling insiders as well…. The conclusion ... is that if we value freedom–as we should–we ought to be wary of immigration control."

Going further, Kukathas challenges the view that society is “made up of members“ and that it's “some kind of unit comprised largely of people who belong together in some way, and whose belonging entitles them to determine who may or may not become a part of that unit, or indeed even enter the geographic space or territory it occupies.”

"The thought running through this book [Immigration and Freedom]," he writes, "is that membership is an ideal that is not only overrated but also dangerous from the perspective of freedom. It is at odds with the idea of people living together freely, for it subordinates that freedom to an altogether different ideal–one that elevates conformity and control over other, freer, ways of being. If we are to live freely, we must be able to relate to one another not as members but as humans."

Where there are members, there must be nonmembers -- which licenses the politicians to do unlimited mischief. The young century has taught this lesson well.

DeSantis and all others who think "America" can forbid or restrict immigration without violating the natural rights of both foreigners and Americans, or without reducing all our own well-being, are knowingly or unknowingly mistaken. Once again we're being ruled by presumptuous social engineers, cheered on by unreflective supporters.

TGIF: Ducking Hayek

May 8 marked the 124th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel-winning economist of the Austrian school. (He died in 1992.) That makes it a good time to acknowledge one of his many contributions, his epistemic case for the free and competitive market order. It's well-suited to the information age.

One of Hayek's best-known articles was published in 1945 in the American Economic Review: "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (reprinted in Individualism and Economic Order). He got right to the point:

What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions....

This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces.... The reason for this is that the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind ... and can never be so given.

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is ... a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know.

This is an important matter of course. In a world of scarcity and incomplete knowledge, where much vital information is not "data" at all but unarticulated "knowing how," we don't want resources and labor services used in just any old way. Rather, we want them put to the best use in the eyes of diverse and fickle consumers -- and at the lowest cost possible so can we have more goods and more choices. We also want inevitable errors in production to be readily discovered and corrected. Finally, in a division of labor we want coordination to be as easy as possible.

Can we have all that? Fortunately a solution is available.

Thus Hayek wrote:

Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan....

We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function....  The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action.... It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

He illustrated the point by describing how consumers and producers tend to economize on a material (he used tin) when the price goes up, even though only a few people know why the price has gone up. The price rise will encourage people to use less and or to use known substitutes and even discover substitutes. Others will be induced to search for new supplies of that material using new technology. Innovation will result. An economy run by politicians cannot approach this process.

What the price system accomplishes when left free is no mean feat. It makes longer and more prosperous lives possible for everyone. In a world of eight billion people, the unsexy price system is literally a lifesaver on a mass scale. Keep that in mind when politicians and activists call for interference with production and commerce.

We can't acknowledge Hayek's contribution without also paying tribute to his teacher Ludwig von Mises, which Hayek indeed did in other articles. For example, "Professor Mises' [1920s critique of socialism] represents the starting point from which all the discussions of the economic problems of socialism, whether constructive or critical, which aspire to be taken seriously, must necessarily proceed." Hayek, who had favored socialism before he met Mises, also wrote that Mises's "central thesis could not be refuted." (Hayek, "Socialist Calculation I: The Nature and History of the Problem," in Individualism and Economic Order.)

Hayek was referring to Mises's 1920 pathbreaking paper, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," and his 1922 book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Mises's fundamental point, which logically precedes Hayek's later addition, was that without real, honest market prices for all inputs, the economic calculation required for rational and efficient mass production would be impossible. And, he went on, you can't have honest market prices without private ownership and markets in resources and producer goods. (The Marxists sought the abolition of private property.) Flourishing and even life itself thus depend on prices and their prerequisites -- prices that cannot be ascertained or even generated except in the market, where producers and consumers act according to their personal and often improvised preferences, make unpredictable discoveries about what circumstances they prefer, and choose among real, not hypothetical alternatives. Bureaucrats and economists cannot simulate this process, no matter how powerful their supercomputers are.

This critique was devasting to all forms of socialism (including fascism), and history has proved Mises and Hayek correct. Remember, socialism was supposed to be the all-around better way to deliver prosperity to all.

Many people who should know better pretend that Mises and Hayek never found these flaws in socialism. Shame on them. As for others who say they favor socialism, what's concerning is not that they've heard Mises's and Hayek's critiques and answered them, but that they have never heard them at all! Enter the libertarians.