TGIF: Arms Sales and Democracy

The U.S. government's role as the world's premier arms donor and dealer is now under renewed scrutiny. I can't imagine why.

But seriously...

We may legitimately ask if this role fulfills democracy's promise of, in Lincoln's words, "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Or are we justified in concluding that with the government's arms distribution, democracy falls short of its promise even more so than it does in its other functions?

This is something Chris Coyne of George Mason University and its Mercatus Center F. A. Hayek program spends a lot of time studying. In this video and published work, Coyne closely examines the international arms trade, which the U.S. government dominates. Things look bad both for the arms trade and for democracy.

David Friedman, the author of The Machinery of Freedom, has pointed out that Winston Churchill's observation about democracy -- "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms" -- is not praise democracy but actually a put-down of government per se: if democracy is the best we can do, then we've got problems. 

The intrinsic flaws of democracy have been much discussed. (Here's an unappreciated example.) The problems start with the impotence of a single vote. If by your own actions you can't affect the outcome of an election, what incentive do you, a busy person, have to invest time, money, and effort to become an educated voter? In selecting a candidate you'll use criteria other than the kind you use when buying a car, a carp, or a carpet because in contrast to the marketplace, in politics your choice is not decisive.

Most people don't like to hear that their one vote does not count. They evade the simple probability. I would ask the skeptic this: if it were legal to buy another person's vote, how much would you pay? 

Related to the problem of the impotent vote is the problem of costs and benefits. When you pick out a car, carp, or a carpet, you know you will pay the price and get (virtually all of) the benefit. So you choose accordingly. Contrast that with politics, where any one voter will pay only a tiny fraction of the full social cost and get only a tiny fraction of the total benefit, say, from a tax cut. Incentives matter. In politics, spill-over effects abound, and no one, unlike in the market, has a profit incentive to "internalize the externalities." Political operatives actually benefit from that problem because they can exploit it to justify wielding more power. That's a perverse incentive.

Democracy's other flaws relate to the politicians' and bureaucrats' limited knowledge and limited ability to create social order and to their desire to advance their own careers. These are the well-documented Austrian and Public Choice critiques of government. Some political operatives may be sincere, but if so, they are sincerely deluded in thinking their method -- coercion -- works for the rest of us.

Finally, we have the problems of asymmetrical information and lack of accountability. Voters will always be ignorant about much of the bureaucracy's operations and full consequences. Closely monitoring the state is impossible. Moreover, should voters learn about the harm the government does, the costs of really changing things are likely to be prohibitive. Forget about suing the state. All of this adds up to virtually zero accountability.

Coyne builds on this critique by taking a concept -- "noxious market" -- that is used against the free market and applying it to government arms sales. "Noxious market" is a term a philosopher coined to condemn certain alleged morally offensive private exchanges. The markets for kidneys, drugs, sexual services, and other things are said to involve sellers or buyers who are so vulnerable and ignorant that the government ought to step in to protect them and society at large.

Coyne thinks entrepreneurship can provide remedies in the private market, but then asks a good question in the interview: "What happens if we extend the logic of noxious markets to the government realm?"

So one area where we focus our research is on the international arms trade. Our conclusion is that it is a highly noxious market. It takes advantage of the vulnerable [such as the powerless taxpayers]. There are massive asymmetries [of knowledge], both domestically and internationally. And there's reason to believe it leads to really significant harms for societies where the arms go, but also the broader world as well.

In other words, he says, if the objection to noxious markets is "weak agency" in some of the participants, there is no realm in which agency is weaker than in government arms dealing and foreign policy in general. In that realm, the ruled populations on all sides can hardly know what is going really on, and catastrophic unintended consequences usually result. Where do those arms end up and who are they used against?

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is a chimera. The only alternative is a framework based on individual rights, including property and contractual rights.

 

TGIF: Cooperation versus Bigotry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TGIF: When History Didn't Begin

I agree with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. I've never written those words before. But on Oct 24, Guterres said to the UN Security Council (emphasis added):

The situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour.

The war in Gaza is raging and risks spiralling throughout the region.

Divisions are splintering societies. Tensions threaten to boil over.

At a crucial moment like this, it is vital to be clear on principles -- starting with the fundamental principle of respecting and protecting civilians.

I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel.

Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.

All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.....

It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.

The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.

They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.

But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people....

What was the reaction? Israel's government demanded that Guterres resign for justifying (sic) Hamas's crimes. According to statements from Israeli UN ambassador Gilad Erdan and foreign minister Eli Cohen, Guterres therefore is unfit for his job.

According to the officials, Guterres's offending words were these: "the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum." Those words preceded Guterres's reference to what the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank endured under Israeli occupation since 1967.

Beyond doubt, Guterres condemned Hamas's mass atrocities of Oct. 7. He clearly said that killing civilians cannot be justified. And he unequivocally called for the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages. Look at his remarks. But he has been vilified by Israeli politicians for saying in effect that history did not begin on October 7, 2023. Of course, the statement is true, but some things just may not be said.

Strangely, the Israeli government says Guterres did not condemn the horrendous Hamas violence against Israeli civilians. Israel's position apparently is that even to remind people that history did not begin on October 7 is to justify murder, kidnapping, and mayhem. It's as if trying to comprehend is to justify. But those are two different mental operations. 

The Israeli officials also presumably objected to Guterres's condemnation of the collective punishment that Israel was inflicting, again, on the rightless Palestinians in the crowded Gaza Strip, most of whom are not members of Hamas and most of whom could not have voted for Hamas almost 20 years ago because they were too young or had not even been born yet. Almost half the 2.3 million Palestinians of tiny Gaza are under 18.

So Israel is gaslighting. If we can't believe the Israeli government on something we can so easily check, how can we believe it on anything else? Just the other day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said something similar to what Guterres said, but so far without consequence: "Ultimately, the only way to ensure that this crisis never happens again is to begin setting the conditions for durable peace and security, and to frame our diplomatic efforts now with that in mind." In his requests is that Israel not reoccupy Gaza and that it end the 17-year blockade. That sounds like another way of acknowledging that the October 7 attacks "did not happen in a vacuum."

Why is Israel going after Guterres for his unexceptional statement? It wasn't just the timing. Yair Lapid, a former prime minister of Israel and a former journalist, gave the answer when he said, "If the international media is objective, it serves Hamas. If it just shows both sides, it serves Hamas... My argument is that the media cannot just claim to bring both sides of the story. If you do that, you are only bringing one – Hamas’s side...."

Really?

TGIF: The Glorious Bourgeois Peace Movement

Those of us whose pro-peace/antiwar principles are of the bourgeois classical-liberal variety need reminding now and again that we have a glorious tradition going back hundreds of years. We need not get lost in the dominant rhetoric that opposes war, empire, and its deadly accouterments from a flawed anti-individualist, anti-Western, and socialist position.

No, we can draw on a proud history of writers and activists who opposed war and intervention not just for the obvious reason --  harm to others -- but also because peace and nonintervention are required for reaping the full benefits of private property, specialization and the division of labor, free global trade, and the unobstructed movement of people in search of better lives. It would be mistaken to regard this as a union of humanitarian and so-called "economic" justifications for peace-mongering. For those classical liberals, freedom to produce, trade, and consume was simply another humanitarian reason to oppose the disruption of war.

Two of the best exemplars of bourgeois pro-market peace activism were the Englishmen Richard Cobden and John Bright, both members of Parliament, manufacturers, orators, and activists. In the mid-19th century, they built a movement that has been in the history books ever since. They are best known for opposing England's tariff on imported grain ("corn"), which raised the price of bread to enrich the land-owing aristocracy. Cobden and Bright successfully fought their battle through the Anti-Corn Law League.

Cobdden and Bright did not compartmentalize but rather explicitly linked free trade to peace and opposition to military spending and intervention. They had a friend and ally on the continent in the French laissez-faire liberal Frédéric Bastiat.

These classical liberals understood that if a social conflict is to be avoided and society is to develop for all, then the industrious members of the population -- entrepreneurs and employees, both of whom produce valuable goods through their labor -- must be free from those who use government-granted privileges to legally steal from the industrious. (Ironically, Marx credited the classical liberals with devising this class analysis, but then screwed it up by putting business creators in the exploiter class.)

Cobden and Bright were not only clear and analytical; they were also passionate. They were great orators inside of Parliament and outside. The liberals' association of peace and free trade can be seen in this example of Cobden's eloquence:

How shall a profession which withdraws from productive industry the ablest of the human race, and teaches them systematically the best modes of destroying mankind, which awards honours only in proportion to the number of victims offered at its sanguinary altar, which overturns cities, ravages farms and vineyards, uproots forests, burns the ripened harvest, which, in a word, exists but in the absence of law, order, and security — how can such a profession be favourable to commerce, which increases only with the increase of human life, whose parent is agriculture, and which perishes or flies at the approach of lawless rapine?

He finishes this passage with a rebuke to those who wanted the English government to compel foreign populations to do business with privileged government-granted monopoly interests:

They who propose to influence by force the traffic of the world, forget that affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if touched by the hand of violence; for as faith, if forced, would no longer be religion, but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments.

Cobden told his fellow members of the House of Commons:

It is only necessary that you should be agreed that war is a great calamity, which it is desirable we should avoid if possible.... My object is to see if we cannot devise some better method than war...; and my plan is, simply and solely, that we should resort to that mode of settling disputes in communities, which individuals resort to in private life. I only want you to go one step farther, to carry out in another instance the principle which you recognize in other cases -- that the intercourse between communities is nothing more than the intercourse of individuals in the aggregate. I want to know why there may not be an agreement between this country and France, or between this country and America, by which the nations should respectively bind themselves, in case of any misunderstanding arising which could not be settled by mutual decision of arbitrators.

He also warned about the government's unlimited spending on armaments: "I wish to know where this system is to end."

On another occasion, he advised, "I say, if you want to benefit nations who are struggling for their freedom, establish as one of the maxims of international law the principle of non-intervention."

These men were called "Little Englanders" for the obvious reason: they opposed the empire. Cobden also said, "I believe the progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of Cabinets or Foreign offices."

Bright was no less eloquent:

This is war -- every crime which human nature can commit or imagine, every horror it can perpetrate or suffer; and that this is our Christian Government recklessly plunges into, and which so many of our countrymen at this moment think it patriotic to applaud! You must excuse me if I cannot go with you. I will have no part in this terrible crime [the Crimean War against Russia]. My hands shall be unstained with the blood which is being shed.... [B]ut no respect for men who form a Government, no regard I have for "going with the stream," and no fear of being deemed wanting in patriotism, shall influence me in favor of a policy which, in my conscience, I believe to be as criminal before God as it is destructive of the true interest of my country." (83)

This could be said about the United States today: "What are we to say of a nation, which lives under a perpetual delusion that is about to be attacked...?"

As noted, these Manchester men of business (along with their predecessors such as Adam Smith, and successors such as Herbert Spencer) embraced Western classical-liberal values with gusto. They were ready to condemn institutions that did not live up to those values. But despite its flaws, they were not embarrassed to embrace Western modernity, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, understanding that all civilizations had flaws, such as slavery and the glorification of war, which were to be eliminated. But they knew better than to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which many people today do not.

Let's not forget these great figures who were vital to the development of today's high living standards and of the universally applicable philosophy of individual liberty, private property, free markets, and peace. This proper foundation for domestic and foreign policy was and today remains explicitly pro-freedom in all spheres and anti-aggression. Thus in the spirit of Cobden and Bright, true liberals are entitled to oppose war and empire while identifying with neither the "left" nor the "right."

TGIF: Don't Police the World

"We" -- to be precise, U.S. policymakers and their quasi-private-sector, tax-nourished enablers-beneficiaries--  must not police the world, become directly involved in wars, covertly assist belligerents, or act as arms merchants and bankers.

The central government can't be a benign policeman, even if its intentions were as stated (which they may be): international rules-based order and economic stability. But it can wreak havoc by trying. We know this because it already has. Pick your start date, but the last 30 years present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of what U.S.-sponsored "order" really looks like, thanks to an unbroken bipartisan chain of presidents and a bunch of presumptuous bumblers who wear weighty political titles from the executive and legislative branches. (The judiciary isn't off the hook either.)

The U.S. government's inherent ineptness speaks volumes. "Ought" implies "can," and the policy mavens cannot. Wishful thinking is no substitute for real thinking. Each new crisis is not so different from previous ones as to make it unique. We can and must learn from the past, even the past that is so recent it's still the present.

Government "crisis management" is a contradiction in terms. War typically has calamitous results, however optimistic the prognostications and later assessments. Helping a belligerent bloodies the hands of the helper, even if only metaphorically. Fighting proxy wars, which the policymakers might prefer to direct war these days, or engaging in covert operations is no moral shield. The horrendous consequences are foreseeable. Pleading that "We didn't intend the bad stuff" does not wash. Call it "collateral damage," whatever the policymakers call it, they enable the ruin of innocent lives and entire societies. We should have no part of it.

We know what war brings. It brings the death and dismemberment of innocents, always including children. It brings the utter destruction of the things that make life possible, such as food, water, homes, hospitals, and infrastructure. The chance of killing only bad guys is zero. I think the government's own war simulations would agree. Hypothetical rosy scenarios offered in somber tones from secure stateside arms chairs don't count. Even moves intended as defensive may understandably be perceived as aggressive, bringing snowballing countermoves that threaten more innocents and risk turning a local conflict into a big-power confrontation. The danger of nuclear war always looms.

Before considering joining in a war, assume the worst. Then don't join. It's the safe bet.

On top of that misery, intervening in wars sets the stage for terrible events to follow: revolution, dictatorship, government control of everyday life, atrocious recriminations, and plain chaos. That's the safe bet too.

Intervention also sets the stage for aggrieved foreigners who want revenge against the country that is seen to have enabled their adversaries. If that is not the lesson of at least the last 30 years, what is? Direct and indirect participation in wars can come home to roost traumatically. Policing the world or arming one part against another is no recipe for security. And let's not forget the excuse the U.S. government seizes to spy on and censor Americans in the name of national security.

The likely human cost of an interventionist foreign policy is prohibitive, but that's not the only cost. The money price tag is also gigantic, and the U.S. government doesn't have the money. It has to borrow it -- the debt is larger than the GDP and growing -- and that means Federal Reserve monetary creation and the theft of our purchasing power. It's a subtle form of taxation that politicians use when they believe that the taxpayers don't want a tax increase.

Finally, there is the lack of consent. It would be bad enough if the arrogant policymakers sowed their destruction on their own dime and in their own name. But they don't. They presume to speak for us and to make us pay for their adventures. I never signed that blank check, did you?

But they don't need our consent. The game was rigged long ago. Hypothetical consent is good enough, and most people go along because they're busy living and virtually powerless anyway. They also heard about it in the government's schools.

Helping other governments fight wars is crazy. That's not isolationism because the position embraces free trade with the world (unmanaged by governments) and the free movement of people. The word is nonintervention. When war breaks out, government personnel should be permitted to do only one thing: call for a cease-fire!

TGIF: Extend Tolerance to Commerce

Perhaps you've noticed that we live in intolerant times. Many people claim to be endangered by the mere spoken or written expression of views on a range of issues. This has led to direct action to disrupt speakers on college campuses and elsewhere and to indirect government efforts to censor users of social media, which so far the courts have frowned on.

Believe it or not, this has had a silver lining. It's elicited articulate renewed defenses of free speech and tolerance -- long taken for granted.

But the tolerance movement should go further to include what the late philosopher Harvard Robert Nozick called "capitalist acts between consenting adults." Those are also known in sum as the free market, an unfortunately unnoticed option these days. When it comes to human action, we find wide and increasing support for a host of government measures that interfere with the freedom of individuals to trade with one another on their own terms. Those who have become disillusioned with the intolerant so-called left seem to think the free-market alternative is unworthy of consideration. This may also be true of those who are disillusioned with the intolerant so-called right. They may embrace freedom of conscience, but they draw a line at freedom of exchange, as if conscience had no part in that.

This line seems arbitrary. A product innovator or builder of an enterprise is a creator who may well be as passionate about this chosen life purpose as a writer or an artist. (Ayn Rand stressed this.) The creator offers the product to consumers (or downstream producers), who are free to decide if what's offered on given terms will serve their purposes. They are of course also free to decide that they do not want the offering and to go their own ways. Freedom of conscience permeates life in the marketplace, make no mistake about that.

Why should the work of people who dedicate their lives to such creations rank lower in our estimation than the work of artists? Is it because their products improve "only" material well-being and not spiritual well-being? That's not a good reason. We are not ghosts.

More pertinent, why should the government interfere in consensual transactions deemed merely "economic"? You can see the discrimination in the matter of free speech. Generally, freedom of speech, at least until recently, has been sacrosanct. The First Amendment says it must be. But commercial speech can be and has been regulated and even banned in various ways. It gets no respect.

The courts have long distinguished between so-called fundamental liberties and non-fundamental liberties, a distinction for which no support exists anywhere. What we think of as economic liberties are in the second category and so are deemed less worthy of protection from the government. That means politicians and bureaucrats can put themselves between consenting parties and either forbid or regulate transactions without even the semblance of a compelling reason. They just need to tell the judge that a decree is aimed at some articulated objective. Those who are interfered with may not tell the meddlers, "Mind your own business. If you think you have a better way of doing things, start your own business." That would get them heavily fined at the least. The consequences could be more severe.

Let's look at some common examples, so common they are taken for granted. We have minimum product standards (outlawing less-expensive options), the minimum wage (creating unemployment), price controls such as rent control and so-called gouging bans (creating shortages), housing regulations and zoning (ditto), restrictions and taxes on trade with foreigners (creating higher prices), immigration control (preventing the free exchange of labor, etc.), occupational licensing (barring the choice of one's work), industrial policy (picking winners), and drug and other "vice" prohibition (including the drinking of raw milk!). More could be added. In each case peaceful individuals are prevented from peacefully dealing with each other on mutually agreeable terms. Their freedom of conscience is intruded on by politicians and bureaucrats. Contracts are acts of conscience.

I object to the widely accepted distinction between personal liberty and economic liberty. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, people select means to achieve all kinds of ends. Economics is a method of understanding the means-ends framework, but it does not provide grounds for distinguishing among ends. All ends are important to those who pursue them or else they would do something else. There is no personal and economic liberty. There is only liberty, which each person has a right to exercise in the pursuit of happiness.

If you believe people should respect each other, then you logically must extend that respect to freedom of commerce.

TGIF: Why Is Government Stuff Called "Public"?

Government facilities and services -- which are actually disservices overall -- are called "public" while services that are efficiently responsive to the public are dubbed "private." Why is that?

That way of framing the distinction could be intended to subtly denigrate the marketplace, or "private sector," where profit "selfishly" motivates people who, in the process, improve strangers' lives every day. That sector's record is noticeably better than the "public sector's." So we're taught to believe that the government's motives are purer -- the unselfish pursuit of the "public interest" by "public servants." That supposedly makes them superior to the profit-seekers, no matter how effective real producers of wealth -- entrepreneurs, investors, managers, and workers -- are.

The Public Choice school of political economy has established the more common-sense view that people don't become morally superior to the rest of us when they take government jobs. They're just people, except that the perverse incentives unique to the political/bureaucratic realm differ drastically from the productive incentives that distinguish the enterprise realm. We should call government jobholders "public" self-servants to lay bare that basic fact. They may be sincere in their rationalizations about helping people, but that doesn't change what they do -- coerce people, starting with the taxpayers. In contrast, people in the market have to ultimately satisfy free consumers or find something else to do.

Think about what we know as the public schools. Has anyone ever heard of a school that wasn't open to members of the public? Who else is there? Great Britain has it closer to the truth. Public schools are called "private schools," and government schools are called "state schools." Since everywhere you look, parents have to pay for the lousy and expensive government system whether or not they send their kids there, and many parents can't afford to pay twice, we might call the government's facilities "conscript schools."

But they are called "public" because that's who owns them -- theoretically, but not realistically.

With other "public services," even less choice exists. Consider public utilities. Most people can't choose their water, electric, and gas companies, although this is not entirely unheard of. Since competition has appeared in places, these so-called natural monopolies don't seem so natural after all. Had competition been legal everywhere, suitable technologies might have been invented long ago.

We do find alternatives to government in ways that might strike some as surprising. Two irreplaceable centers of government are said to be the courts for resolving disputes and the police for security against harm-doers. For a long time people have sought to peacefully resolve disputes without the inefficient and at times corrupt government courts. In the Middle Ages, merchants from all over the world traded their goods at fairs in Europe. Disagreements over contracts sometimes arose. So the merchants sought a fair and efficient alternative to the local princes' courts. The outcome was the complex and spontaneous Law Merchant. Disputes arising over contracts, which in effect created private law for the parties, were taken before people who had acquired reputations for being knowledgeable, fair, and efficient. The merchants valued speedy resolutions so much that they agreed not to appeal rulings against them. It was more important to move on to the next transaction. Failure to abide by a ruling would get around and limit future opportunities.

The Law Merchant was so good that it evolved into the commercial law that much of the world operates under today. We can see signs of it in private arbitration, which today is big business. Many contracts we sign specify that disagreements will be resolved in what amount to private courts. Unfortunately, the U.S. government claims the authority to nullify arbitrators' rulings on vague grounds. If that were impossible, arbitration would likely be even more common than it is today. The government won't compete fairly.

Similarly, private security companies watch over shopping malls, factories, colleges, and other facilities. It's also a big business. The government's "services" are inadequate despite high taxes, so people find alternatives, and businesses respond, fully liable when they screw up. That doesn't happen with government police.

Who owns government facilities? Most people would say that in a democracy the public owns them. But that really isn't so. Members of the public can't sell or buy shares or do other things that real owners do. They never consented to being owners. That's just a symbolic claim. In cases of real ownership, people acquire property rights through unambiguous volitional action involving contracts with reasonably clear terms. The social contract exists only in the imagination.

Aren't the real owners of government facilities those who actually control them? A rough guide might be whoever has the authority to put up "no trespassing" signs, which adorn much "public" property. (Private property has those signs too, but that's because two kinds of private property exist: the kind that is open to the public and the kind that is not, such as homes.)

We shouldn't be led astray by the fact the people can vote for officeholders, who then in theory act as the people's agents. The accountability of those pseudo-agents to the so-called owners is virtually zero when you consider how politicians and bureaucrats can easily misdirect attention from the bad consequences of their actions and/or their culpability for those consequences. Besides, one vote barely counts, and campaigns to really change things are prohibitively expensive and subject to free-rider problems.

In contrast, accountability is powerful in for-profit society. Bankruptcy is an ever-present threat to unresponsive and irresponsible businesses, and reputation imposes significant discipline. Injured parties also can sue people in the market. Suits against the government are often not allowed or limited.

It's time to open to competition as many government functions as feasible now. What seems impossible today may not seem that way next year. So let's look for new moves toward better and cheaper services -- not to mention liberty.

TGIF: A Market for Law?

Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished.

--Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1792

Sometimes an idea that at first sounds nuts isn't really nuts at all. Case in point: the market-anarchist principle that people should be free to buy the law and protection they want in the market.

Even a subscriber to Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism might raise an eyebrow because Rothbard formulated a libertarian law code that he expected would be carried out in a market-anarchist society. In contrast, the market-for-law market anarchist doesn't see things that way. How would a single code even be implemented? It's not as if libertarians agree on everything. Think of intellectual property, abortion, defamation, and more.

David Friedman, a veteran anarcho-capitalist, explicitly favors a market in law, not just in police and arbitration (that is, court) services. Here's how Friedman describes it in The Machinery of Freedom (chapter 29; free pdf here):

In such an anarchist society, who would make the laws? On what basis would the private arbitrator decide what acts were criminal and what their punishments should be? The answer is that systems of law would be produced for profit on the open market, just as books and bras are produced today. There could be competition among different brands of law just as there is competition among different brands of cars.

In such a society there might be many courts and even many legal systems. Each pair of rights enforcement agencies agree in advance on which court they will use in case of conflict. Thus the laws under which a particular case is decided are determined implicitly by advance agreement between the agencies whose customers are involved. In principle, there could be a different court and a different set of laws for every pair of agencies. In practice, many agencies would probably find it convenient to patronize the same courts, and many courts might find it convenient to adopt identical, or nearly identical, systems of law in order to simplify matters for their customers.

As Friedman sees things, individuals would not directly choose among the competing arbitration firms. They would choose defense firms according to the services offered. Those firms would typically have contracted with others about which arbitration firms they would use if their clients were in a conflict. (Insurance companies already do this.) Customers of course would know about this and would choose defensive firms partly on that basis. The defense firms and arbitrators want to attract customers. These are profit-seekers, remember. Also remember that individuals are customers here, not taxpayers or subjects -- an important distinction.

The incentives to submit to and abide by binding arbitration without state-backing would be strong. A defense firm or a customer known for ignoring adverse rulings would have problems doing business in the future. This is the "discipline of constant dealings," Friedman writes. Its powerful influence cannot be ignored. Even now, it plays out everywhere. It is not mainly due to the state that people generally keep their contracts and even less formal promises. The government did not make eBay or the credit card a success. Rating systems are powerful. What Friedman has in mind is essentially an enlargement of the function of the ubiquitous contract, which creates obligations -- law, really -- for the parties, with binding arbitration by a specified agency in any dispute. (If the government didn't have the power to overturn arbitrators' rulings, this private alternative to courts would be even bigger than it is now.)

Wouldn't the defense firms simply fight when their clients had a conflict? That's what many people expect. But why expect it? Friedman reminds us that violence is costly in many ways, even for the winners. Understandably, it's not the business way of thinking. For one thing, a firm would have to pay its employees a steep hazard premium, raising its costs above those of competitors willing to negotiate.

Is this a perfect arrangement? No, but what other earthy arrangement could be perfect when it consists of fallible people all the way down? (See last week's TGIF, "Limited Government's Bait and Switch.") Governments have hardly been a guarantee of individual liberty. Think about the United States!

It's not impossible that everyone in an area who intends to commit murder or theft will patronize a defense firm that protects rights violators. But how likely is that to succeed? Most people don't plan on murdering or stealing and would buy protection against the few that might. (The streets, etc., would be private, remember.) Even would-be criminals don't want to be killed or stolen from. But what about states that commit murder, even mass murder, and theft, as they often have? What's the recourse?

Further, the objection that defensive firms might get together and become a new state also falls short. If people get used to seeing themselves as customers, they won't want to be turned back into taxpayers and subjects. Ideology matters. Friedman writes in chapter 36:

Anarchist institutions cannot guarantee that protectors will never become rulers, but they decrease the power that protectors have separately or together and they put at the head of rights enforcement agencies men who are less likely than politicians to regard theft as a congenial profession.

Some will object that law and the protection of rights and freedom should not be matters for bargaining. But what's the alternative? Who could seriously deny that all political systems entail bargaining? This is true even of a constitutionally limited government conceived by explicit champions of individual freedom. The Constitutional Convention in 1787 featured bargaining. So did the earlier deliberations over the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. Even small groups rarely are of one mind. But we're not talking about small groups.

Obviously, bargaining goes on every day: between legislators, between legislators and constituents, and between the legislative and executive branches. It goes on among Supreme Court justices. Political campaigns are a form of bargaining. 

Where there are people and scarce resources, there is disagreement and therefore bargaining. It's the human condition. Better that people negotiate and enter defense contracts they choose than submit to a state monopoly: in politics, unlike the market, bargaining has victims, namely, the mass of people who had no real say. In the market, individuals make the deals that best fit their circumstances.

So a market for law isn't so crazy after all. It sounds great. Remember, market incentives and political incentives are entirely different. In the market, individuals choose knowing that what they choose is what they will get and that the costs and benefits will fall mostly on themselves. So they tend to make reasonably informed decisions.

In the political "market," individuals get one impotent vote each, which means that the candidate (policy set) they "choose" is not necessarily what they will get and that even if they get what they want, each voter knows he will experience only a tiny part of the total benefits and costs. The rest will fall on a large group of other people. Under those circumstances, few people have any incentive to choose in an informed way.

Finally, we may wonder whether the market would tend to produce pro-liberty laws. After all, maybe lots of people will want something else, like alcohol prohibition. Again, we can't have guarantees, no matter the system. But liberty has something in its favor: a pro-freedom asymmetry. Namely, people would probably be willing to pay more to protect their private lives from busybodies than others would be willing to pay to run other people's lives. The prohibitionists would have to foot the whole bill all by themselves. There would be no taxpayers.

Friedman gets the last word (chapter 31): "People who want to control other people’s lives are rarely eager to pay for the privilege; they usually expect to be paid for the services they provide for their victims.... For that reason the laws of an anarcho-capitalist society should be heavily biased toward freedom."

Also see:
John Hasnas, "Toward an Empirical Theory of Natural Rights."

Edward P. Stringham, ed., Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice (an anthology that contains a debate on market anarchism's practicality and stability).

TGIF: Limited Government's Bait and Switch

In a fundamental respect, libertarian minarchism (minimal, or limited, government) and market anarchism (or anarcho-capitalism) have something important in common: neither can guarantee individual rights.

But there's a big difference: unlike market anarchism, minarchism appears to offer a guarantee, which allegedly makes it preferable to market anarchism. Actually, it's a false guarantee, a bait-and-switch. So it's not preferable to market anarchism, at least on those grounds.

However, what market anarchism can do is show how everyday incentives will tend to protect liberty (and already do now). Minarchism can't credibly say the same thing because constitutionally limited representative democracy is riddled with well-known perverse political incentives. That makes market anarchism the better bet.

It's instructive to watch the recent Soho Forum debate on the proposition "Anarcho-capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity." Yaron Brook, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, took the affirmative, and Bryan Caplan, libertarian professor of economics at George Mason University, took the negative. I think Caplan demolished Brook's case, which isn't exclusive to Ayn Rand Objectivists. This was a debate between two people starting from similar premises in favor of individual freedom, rational self-interest, and competition.

While what follows may not convince anyone to advocate market anarchism, it should eliminate a big argument against it.

Most limited-government advocates think that only a monopoly government can produce the objective law and fair and peaceful adjudication/enforcement that human beings need to flourish. The problem, as indicated, is that minarchism is all talk. It can't deliver.

Remember the old joke in which a tourist asks a grumpy local how to get somewhere? The local responds, "You can't get there from here." That's the problem. Brook's theory of constitutionally limited government promises to get us to a place we cannot go because it doesn't exist. Why not? As Dr. Seuss might say, because it's people all the way down. Limited-government advocates ignore this obvious fact.

Contrary to its fans, limited government is conceptually impossible. It, not anarchism, is a "floating abstraction." If this standard argument for limited government disappears, what's left?

Any advocate of liberty who knows even a little U.S. political history should see the problem for minarchism. In freedom-loving quarters, the American constitutional system wins kudos  -- the obvious serious contradictions such as slavery excepted. But what about the government's horrendous expansion since 1789? Isn't that a hint that something did not quite work?

Some Americans began complaining about the bigness of the national government at the turn of the 19th century! And let's not forget that the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, denied the national quasi-government the power to tax and regulate trade. Within a few years, that changed. Wasn't that a bad omen?

Anarcho-libertarian abolitionist and businessman Lysander Spooner's 1870 "The Constitution of No Authority" concluded, "But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain -- that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”

The Constitution has not guaranteed freedom. Brook himself called today's U.S. government a "gang." So what could have been different, minarchists? A nation full of perfect Objectivists? Good luck with that.

The Soho Forum debate, which I highly recommend, could have been over early when Caplan identified the impossible guarantee. Brook responded that his ideal government would "strive" to make that guarantee. Caplan pointed out that a striven-for guarantee is not a guarantee.

Undeterred, Brook resorted to the catechism "A proper government is the means by which we place retaliatory use of force under objective control and objectively defined laws ... for the purpose of protecting rights."

Caplan called this mere "tautological." You can define the term proper government as an objective and reliable rights-protector. But in the real world, how do you get there from anywhere? It sounds Platonic. It's more like a version of the ontological argument.

Brook also said that the banishment of force from society "doesn't just happen. That's not something you negotiate. That is just something that is." (My emphasis.)

"Just is"? What does that mean? How does it materialize -- immaculate conception? And how would it be maintained? Is the state an infallible Objectivist Mr. Spock? Or Gort, the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still? (The original movie costarred Patricia Neal, who ironically also played heroine Dominique Francon in the film version of Rand's The Fountainhead.)

Remember, it's people all the way down -- from inception of the government to maintenance. People are fallible. They disagree. They change their minds. They ask for free stuff from politicians. Some will even be corrupt and dishonest when they run for office. And, as Public Choice shows, the ones in government are prone to bias in favor of their careers. No one can reasonably hope to keep a government limited, nonaggressive, and efficient -- a square circle indeed. Is a New Man required? (See my take on someone who long grappled with this question, Anthony de Jasy.)

Pro-market economist Harold Demsetz warned against the "Nirvana fallacy": positing an unachievable "ideal" as an alternative to anything that can be achieved. That's what we have here in limited government. If it isn't on the actual menu, we must determine the best actual alternative.

Caplan repeatedly challenged Brook with this basic objection, but Brook bobbed and weaved. (See the exchange starting here.) He seems not to have read anything but Rand's 1960s essay on the need for government, predicting routine widespread violence under market anarchism. But she was answered many times. Brook casually dismissed the voluminous market-anarchist historical, economic, and ethical scholarship as a mere intellectual exercise.

It was good to hear that Book supports free immigration. Among its many virtues, it would be a potential escape from tyranny. But why shouldn't people be free to "migrate" from one rights-protecting institution to another without changing location? Brook says a location (undefined) must have one law. But Western Europe doesn't have one law. Yet he agreed with Caplan that, unlike in previous eras, a war between, say, France and Germany or Norway and Sweden is unthinkable and will very likely remain so.

Caplan noted that what keeps the big governments in those countries from fighting (which would be made possible by taxation and conscription) is people's general expectation of peaceful dispute resolution. That would apply even more to accountable, reputable, and competitive businesses selling security to free customers.

War isn't impossible in Western Europe and elsewhere, just unlikely in our more pacific era. (See Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.) Yes, Russia and Ukraine are at war. But how many of the almost 200 countries in our anarchist world without a super-government would rather fight costly wars even for the winner than settle disputes diplomatically? (For an analogy, think of what two auto insurance companies routinely do when each has a client in a conflict. The companies already have contracts to deal with each other peacefully. They couldn't afford a Randian war of all against all.)

Well, why does market anarchism, unlike minarchism, inspire reasonable confidence about the chances of protecting liberty? That's a topic for another day, but suffice it to say that, as Caplan argues, rational self-interest, free competition, the need for a good reputation, and today's general expectation of peaceful conflict resolution provide our best chance. This doesn't mean pushing the "anarchist button," which doesn't exist anyway. It means showing people that major alternatives to the state already exist, including arbitration and private security firms.

It is said that freedom isn't free. Protection of freedom certainly isn't free. But we need not be forced to pay monopoly prices for inferior services and even rights violations in order to enjoy our freedom.

More reading

Roderick Long, "Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism."
Sheldon Richman, "The Constitution of Anarchy," in America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.
David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism, 3d ed.

TGIF: Hurrah for Real Globalization!

Globalization, like the free market and classical liberalism generally, isn't wildly popular these days, is it? People blame globalization for all sorts of bad things, and the raps are usually bum. In truth, to the extent that governments keep out so-called foreign people, goods, and money, they make nearly everyone poorer. Even the few immediate beneficiaries pay a price in the long run.

So who speaks up for real globalization? I have to add the adjective real because counterfeit globalization has been circulating for a while. That's politically managed commerce where governments, most prominently the U.S. government, manage cross-border private trade and migration. When that happens, we -- especially the poorest people in the world -- not only miss out on the full wealth-creating benefits of worldwide freedom, but we also suffer all kinds of consequences that follow from bumbling politicians and bureaucrats making decisions for the rest. Let's have no more of that, if you please.

One of the top voices favoring real globalization is Deirdre N. McCloskey, the Cato Institute Distinguished Scholar and specialist in classical liberal history. McCloskey has been writing big and important books on how it was the growing acceptance of bourgeois virtues and culture over hundreds of years that lifted the world materially. McCloskey calls it the "Great Enrichment." Most people don't appreciate how rich we are in the West and how rich the world's absolute poorest could be in fairly short order. Freeing individuals and the market is the key

A new essay by McCloskey, "Globalization Creates a Global Neighborhood, Benefiting All," is featured in a 12-part Cato series called "Globalization: Then and Now." It's an apt title for what McCloskey sets out to do.

It begins:

The word “globalization” delights some and terrifies others. But it’s merely the gradual emergence [in] our world of a single economy.

It’s a natural and beneficial result of humans doing what humans have done since the beginning, making their families better off by working hard, inventing new stuff, keeping alert, looking around, making little deals, etc. The result of all this human liberty of choice has been globalization. At various scales of time, it’s been happening from the caves to the modern world, or from 1350 to 1800, or from 1776 to 2024.

That's right. The international movement of people and wealth is not new, although it was never embraced wholeheartedly and uninterruptedly. Governments and other barriers, such as self-defeating cultural biases against foreigners and markets, got and still get in the way. But when those barriers are lowered or, better, are removed and governments loosen their grips, a single unified market emerges, with its tendencies toward one price through arbitrage (buy low, sell high), increased specialization and division of labor, higher productivity, more and cheaper known goods, and more innovation -- that is, new things. Hence, people are enriched across the board, no matter where they began.

Prosperity has even spread to communist China and India, thanks to economic liberalization. (Political liberalization, on the other hand, was not embraced by China's rulers, and the future of economic liberalization is by no means certain.) The same wealth-enhancing process would spread to other poor areas if rulers and bad values were repudiated by the people longing for better lives. It's already happening, and McCloskey has the data. (The West can help by not insisting that the poor countries pretend that fossil fuels are destroying the planet -- they aren't. The poorest people need them badly, as do we all.)

"It’s all about liberty," McCloskey writes.

In light of all this, why is "Buy American" so popular? It's because people never learned to think economically or overcome self-defeating biases. That goes for politicians too. Spending more than necessary to buy so-called American-made goods (Really? No foreign parts whatsoever?) leaves buyers less money with which to buy other things (also hurting the makers of those things) and leaving foreign producers less money with which to buy American goods that can compete without government help. Don't worry about the "balance of trade," which Adam Smith knew was "absurd" in 1776. (Have you checked your trade deficit with your Amazon lately? Probably not.)

And if the nation should "protect" itself from other nations' exports, shouldn't each U.S. state protect itself from the other states' exports? How about each city and town? Or each neighborhood? Heck, let's go all the way down to household self-sufficiency. That would create maximum employment. It would also create maximum poverty. Specialization and the division of labor saves and enhances lives, and as Adam Smith noted, "The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market."

This is not to say that no one loses in the short run from the market's dynamism. But should the automobile and personal-computer industries, which have benefited everyone a million ways beyond description, have been throttled to protect (in the short run) the relative few in the buggy and typewriter industries? Such thinking would have sentenced us to cave-dwelling. It's absurd to think change can be stopped anyway. People won't permit it. What we should do is safeguard all freedom so the few immediate losers can adjust speedily, smoothly, and comfortably. The richer the society, the easier that is.

As McCloskey points out, U.S. manufacturing employment, which has fallen since 1945, is not the same thing as manufacturing output, which has diminished less than employment as world production has grown. American workers have gotten more productive, so fewer are needed to make a given array of products than previously. But that frees up those workers to make things or, importantly, to provide services we couldn't afford yesterday. Human wants are infinite. It's labor that is finite. We'll always need stuff, and we're waiting to see what new things innovators will offer us to make life better.

For all these reasons, McCloskey tells Americans, "Quit being fearful about globalization.... Globalization is part of liberty."

TGIF: Free Speech Affirmed -- Pretty Much

The preliminary injunction against federal censorship of social-media users has survived the Biden administration's appeal. However, it remains on hold until Sept. 22 while the Supreme Court considers the matter.

The latest ruling, 78 pages long, by a panel of Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges, affirmed the core of District Judge Terry Doughty's July 4 preliminary order, but the revised order has two big differences. The appellate judges exempted some defendants and narrowed Judge Doughty's list of prohibited actions to just one modified but broad prohibition. We'll have to see how that works out, but the court has certainly admonished Biden officials for censoring Americans' speech by systematically leaning -- sometimes very heavily -- on the social-media companies.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which represented some of the plaintiffs, commented, "Today’s order should stop that conduct."

Recall that Judge Doughty's ruling in the suit filed by Missouri and Louisiana on behalf of its residents, along with several private individuals, including COVID-19 dissident Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. Doughty had agreed that the plaintiffs had shown that the federal government, through repeated contacts with social-media personnel, had perpetrated “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” He likened the Biden administration's efforts to "an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”

The upshot of the ruling is that when the government "suggests" to Facebook or X that certain posted material is, well, unhelpful, concerning, or even dangerously misleading, it constitutes implicit censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Why? Because some government officials are in a position to punish (through antitrust action, civil-liability rules, or regulation) uncooperative parties. Therefore, even recommendations or pleas to remove or suppress posts necessarily carry a veiled threat. In the present case, the appellate judges write, the threats were sometimes stark naked.

It is well-established in law that what the government may not do directly -- say, block expression -- it may not do indirectly, such as by pressuring private companies to in effect censor.

The judges' panel recapped the findings:

For the last few years—at least since the 2020 presidential transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officials—hailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies—urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials. That went on through the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 congressional election, and continues to this day.

Enter this lawsuit. The Plaintiffs—three doctors, a news website, a healthcare activist, and two states—had posts and stories removed or downgraded by the platforms. Their content touched on a host of divisive topics like the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Plaintiffs maintain that although the platforms stifled their speech, the government officials were the ones pulling the strings—they “coerced, threatened, and pressured [the] social-media platforms to censor [them]” through private communications and legal threats.

The judges pointed out in great detail that the "platforms were apparently eager to stay in the officials’ good graces" and did not just wait for suggestions about stifling dissent. That sounds like the Stockholm syndrome. But their efforts to please their overseers weren't always enough: "The officials were often unsatisfied. They continued to press the platforms on the topic of misinformation throughout 2021." A powerful thirst can be hard to quench.

The judges reversed the injunction against three defendants: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (which Anthony Fauci ran until he retired), the State Department, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The judges wrote: "We find the district court erred in enjoining these other officials. Put simply, there was not, at this stage, sufficient evidence to find that it was likely these groups coerced or significantly [encouraged] the platforms."

The White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI continue to be enjoined.

A preliminary injunction, of course, aims at future behavior, which the government unsurprisingly objects to. In rejecting the defendants' appeal, the judges responded refreshingly, "The district court found that the Plaintiffs submitted enough evidence to show that irreparable injury [from First Amendment violations] is likely to occur during the pendency of the litigation."

Put another way, the district and appellate judges do not believe the executive branch when it says in effect, "We didn't do it, and we promise never to do it again."

As for the modification of Judge Doughty's prohibitions, the judges found that his list had too many vague and overlapping items. So it struck down all but one and modified it. The edited version now reads:

Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.

That looks pretty good, doesn't it? We'll see how all this works out in practice. The next move is the Supreme Court's.

 

 

TGIF: Who Rules? That Is Not the Question

Today's two major contenders for political power seem to be elitists and populists. Funnily enough, both types are present in each of the big tribes known as progressive/liberal and conservatism, left and right, or Democratic and Republican. (Here's the lowdown on paleoconservative elitists.)

However, the elitist/populist framework should leave everyone dissatisfied. It omits too many details. Namely, it presents a contest apparently over who should rule: an anointed elite or "the people," which is not always well-defined. I put the term in quotes because the whole people cannot possibly rule.

The common framework ignores the far more fundamental question: which rules? In other words, what are the rulers, whoever they are, proposing to do? Exactly which orders are to be enacted as legislation and imposed by force? Are there to be limits on this rule? By what means? What happens if the limits are breached, as they have been constantly over the years?

That's what libertarians care about first: the rules. Who rules comes second. But everyone should care about this. Under certain rules, it wouldn't matter who was "in charge." Imagine a rule against anyone -- even "rulers" --  initiating force in any way against anyone else.

The problem is that the rules typically administered by the state, including representative democracies, shouldn't exist. We shouldn't want anyone enforcing those rules because they are bad rules. They may constitute legislation, but, as F. A. Hayek and others have taught, they are not (natural) law.

We cannot assume that populist, or unfiltered democratic, rule would be preferable in all circumstances to elitist rule. I think of the self-styled "extreme libertarian" H. L. Mencken's famous observation, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Take the Federal Reserve System -- please! If a gun were held on me, I'd choose the current system over a Fed run by Congress or by plebiscite. I'm not sure that's a tough call, but I'm marking on a steep curve. (Ron Paul wanted to end the Fed, not hand it over to "the people.") 

In The Myth of the Rational Voter, libertarian economist Bryan Caplan reports that surveys consistently indicate that better-educated individuals tend to give more sensible answers on economic-policy questions than the general, less-educated population do and thus are less, say, anti-trade and anti-foreign.  What might that mean for trade, immigration, and even monetary policies? Of course there shouldn't be trade, immigration, and monetary policies. They override individual freedom, cooperation, and spontaneous order.

Look across the Atlantic and consider Brexit. With good reason, a majority of Britons didn't like policies being made by distant and largely unaccountable politicians and bureaucrats. Most voters chose to exit, that is, they opted for decentralization. At the same time they favored nationalism and national sovereignty, that is, immigration control and protectionism.

Notice what wasn't on the ballot: individual sovereignty -- not just for Britons but for everyone. In the Brexit case, decentralization coincided with more national government power over the freedom to trade and to deal with would-be migrants. That's hardly a win if the standard is individual liberty. (Decentralization has a potential advantage: it lowers the cost of voting with one's feet.)

It's not that "the people" are stupid -- far from it. While most of us are reasonably competent in normal life, in the political realm we face special incentives and disincentives that make us act stupid. When one vote is impotent, why would most individuals spend scarce time and money studying complicated subjects to investigate whether to vote for Smith or Jones? They might as well vote their feelings and biases. Besides, most individual voters will bear a only microscopic fraction of the total expense that the winning candidate will help to impose. Bad incentives all around.

Admittedly, democracy as a way to pick officeholders is certainly preferable to violence in the streets, but that is faint praise. We can do better.

But we don't want an elite to rule either. Elitism's track record here and elsewhere is nothing to brag about. It includes war, depression, and other lamentable political maladies. Of course, the rejection of elitism doesn't mean the wholesale rejection of expertise, as some people seem to think. That would be irrational. Who doesn't consult a doctor when ill? No, what must be avoided is endowing select experts with access to political power. The damage can be seen in the recent pandemic.

The alternative to elitism isn't more democracy, which would trade one form of authoritarianism for another. The alternative is individual liberty in markets and civil society, and that calls for the strictest limitation on -- as we work for the elimination of -- all coercive political power. The objective is to free all peaceful relations from government. Instead of elitism and populism, let's have individual liberty and cooperation.

TGIF: Tribalism and the Dark Art of the Package Deal

Tribalism not only lives; it rules -- even more than I thought! I've been reading Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis's book The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America. It's certainly clarified my thinking.

The Lewis brothers are a historian and a political scientist. What they show is something that I and many others have only partly understood. But for me, that's changing now. (Here's an interview with them.)

Their thesis is that the terms left, right, liberal, progressive, conservative, Republican, and Democrat do not indicate opposing sides of a single basic ideological principle that would make their respective policy programs coherent. Instead, those labels identify two social/cultural tribes that are based on something other than ideology. The disparate components of their respective policy package deals change, depending on contingent events, but the tribes endure with few defections. Compare "right-wing" Republican leaders Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. You can do the same with the "left."

What do those labels really mean? You can't say, for example, that the left is for big government and the right is for small government: too many shifts and inconsistencies have occurred. Think of their changing attitudes toward free speech, foreign intervention, surveillance and the intel apparatus, free trade, the rule of law, and even tax cuts.  Republicans have joined Democrats in opposing even future cuts to doomed Social Security and Medicare. Why don't the media report that the Republicans have moved to the left on entitlements? Anything they do is called a move to the right; anything the Democrats do is a move to the left. How can that be?

Have you heard the cliche "This isn't your father's Republican [or Democratic] Party?" Tribal change is not new. (That was lifted from an Oldsmobile advertising slogan.)

When you come right down to it, members of Team Red hate members of Team Blue because they wear the wrong color jersey and vice versa.

The Lewises' "social theory" explains the scene better than the prevailing "essentialist theory." If the two tribes had ideologically driven platforms, each side's members could coherently (but not necessarily correctly) say, "My team's positions are all good because of our underlying vision, and the opposing team's positions are therefore all bad. But if their lists of positions are grab bags determined by something other than a worldview, then the members can't reasonably say that.

The authors ask us to imagine that supermarkets offered just two pre-loaded shopping carts to choose from. You'd pick the one that had more things you liked than disliked. But you wouldn't say that every item in your basket manifests a consistent worldview and so is better than every item in the other one. But that's how most people think of their political tribes.

Libertarians have more or less known this since the modern movement arose after World War II. As young libertarians, my friends and I wondered how so-called conservatives and so-called liberals could be pro-freedom in some ways and anti-freedom in others. Why weren't they consistent?

We wondered how a political spectrum could make sense when it had totalitarian Josef Stalin at one extreme and totalitarian Adolf Hitler at the other. The authors ask a similar question: what use is a spectrum that puts Milton Friedman, a staunch advocate of individual liberty, the free market, and limited government, on the same side as Hitler, a staunch advocate of national socialism and the total state? Is a center-right person moderately pro-free market or moderately pro-Nazi? Is a center-left person moderately pro-welfare state or moderately pro-Bolshevik?

If the Lewises are correct, we should be wary about common phrases like moving further to the left/right or becoming more progressive/conservative. The reason is that there is no single-issue spectrum with fixed points to move along. The tribes define, not reflect, what it means to be rightwing, leftwing, conservative, and liberal/progressive.

If you have doubts about this, try stating the principles that unify the conservative and progressive programs or the party platforms. You can't do it. If you ask a conservative or progressive what principle unifies his program, his answer, write the Lewises, will be a post-hoc rationalization. The tribes could exchange positions (and have) and still rationalize their new programs in terms of their previous answers.

This phenomenon need not apply to every group. Libertarians are united on a central principle -- individual liberty -- and their policy positions show it. (They sometimes argue about how to derive or apply the principle, but that's a different matter.) Their policy preferences are predictable when we know that principle. Tribal policies are predictable because we know the color of the jerseys. What does support for abortion rights have to do with high taxes on the wealthy? What does opposition to abortion rights have to do with support for tariffs on Chinese goods?

How do people choose a tribe if not by principle? Lewis and Lewis say that a person's choice can have a variety of sources: parents, friends, a single heartfelt issue (abortion, say), or a charismatic leader. But once he's joined, his incentive is to embrace the whole package deal. Exceptions exist, but they are exceptions.

So enough with left and right, conservative and progressive (or liberal). Those labels obscure thought and fuel tribal antagonism. They are also harmful to libertarians who would benefit from public clarity. The only phrase I dislike more than conservatives and libertarians is libertarians and conservatives.

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.