Left-Libertarianisms

The term "left-libertarian" has gotten a good deal of attention in recent months, at least among libertarians, in part due to an online Cato Unbound Symposium and in part due to the efforts of a number of bloggers who consider themselves left-libertarians and a few others who consider themselves critics of left-libertarianism. 

One source of potential confusion in these exchanges is that "left-libertarian" is used to label three quite different clusters of positions. In its oldest sense a left libertarian is a left wing anarchist, typically anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist;  "libertarian" is still sometimes used that way in Europe, although less often in the U.S. 

But that is not how the term is being used in the current discussion. A more recent and more relevant use is to describe positions that differ from  conventional libertarianism mainly in supporting and justifying policies that most libertarians would reject as income redistribution. The best known is geolibertarianism, based on the ideas of Henry George, a 19th century economist. Its central tenet is that since no individual has a just claim to the income from the site value of land, land being an unproduced resource, government ought to support itself by taxing all and only that income.  Two recent books, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism and  Left-Libertarianism and its Critics, both  edited by Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, discuss that and other positions along somewhat similar lines.

I find that form of left-libertarianism interesting in large part because it grows out of, and tries to solve, the problem of initial appropriation. It is  very useful for land to be treated as private property. But libertarian philosophy mostly bases its justification of ownership on creation—and land, with rare exceptions, is not created by humans.  Locke famously tried to solve the problem by arguing that humans acquire ownership over land by mixing their labor with it, but his solution  raises a number of problems. Readers who share my interest in the issue may want to look at an old article of mine in which I offered some possible, if not entirely satisfactory, solutions.

Left-libertarianism in that sense is not the version that has been getting  attention of late, although they are related. Current discussions mostly deal with what is sometimes  described as Bleeding Heart Libertarianism, BHL for short. It was that that was the subject of the Cato symposium.

My problem with BHL is that I have been unable to get its supporters to tell me what it is. Readers who wish to check that claim for themselves may want to look at the symposium, especially at the lead essay by Zwolinski and Tomasi, my response, and as much more of the conversation as they find of interest.

Supporters of BHL, or at least Zwolinski and Tomasi, want to add "social justice" to the mix of ideas that make up libertarianism, but they are reluctant to explain what that means. My own conclusion long ago was that social justice means "views of justice that appeal to people on the left," or, alternatively, "that view of justice which implies that the first question to ask about any proposal at all is 'how does it affect the poor.'"

Part of the BHL position is the rejection of the hard line rights version of libertarianism—the version which, taken seriously, implies that if I fall out of the window of my tenth floor apartment and manage to catch hold of the flagpole projecting out of the window of the apartment immediately below, I am morally obliged to let go and fall to my death if the owner of that apartment refuses me permission to trespass on his property. I reject that version too, as did the late Bill Bradford of Liberty Magazine, who is responsible for the flagpole example. But that rejection is well within the range of libertarianism conventionally defined, so cannot be what distinguishes Bleeding Heart Libertarians from the rest of us.

What about the poor? Bleeding Heart Libertarians consider concern for the poor as one of their defining characteristics but are, at least in my experience, unwilling or unable to say exactly how far that concern goes or what is its basis. The pure Rawlsian position—they seem to have some positive things to say about Rawls—gives the welfare of the poorest infinite weighting; no benefit to the not-poor, however large, can outweigh any cost to the poorest, however small. The BHL position appears to prudently stop short of that extreme. It is unclear whether it goes  further than the claim that a libertarian society would be good for, among others, the poor, a view shared by most libertarians. The further view that the fact that a libertarian society is good for the poor is an important reason to support it, while less universal, is at least shared by many other libertarians. I am left with the puzzle of just what it is that they believe that most of the rest of us don't.

My conclusion so far is that Bleeding Heart Libertarianism is simply a version of libertarianism whose presentation and contents are designed, so far as possible, to appeal to people on the left, especially academics on the left. Possibly that is unfair—but, as I believe readers can see by browsing the archive of the symposium, I did try without success to get proponents to provide me with a better definition. 

In about a week, I will be spending several days at a conference at least one of whose participants regards himself as a left-libertarian and, I think, a bleeding heart libertarian; he will have an opportunity to correct any errors in my view of the matter.

A Different Left Libertarianism

In a recent post, I distinguished three different things called "left-libertarianism" and focused my comments on the third. One of the comments to that post pointed me to an account by Roderick Long, who considers himself a left libertarian but does not fit very well into my categories. Unlike the version I discussed earlier, this one is reasonably well defined. Like libertarianism in general, it is defined by a set of conclusions, not by the particular arguments that lead to them.

Roderick's definition has two parts. First, he thinks that on a range of issues that libertarians divide on, he accepts the alternative closer to left wing views. He lists nine. I agree with him on between five and seven of them—I am unsure about what he means by "pro-secularism" or "anti-big business." I am neutral on one, being neither for nor against intellectual property. The only one where I definitely disagree with him is his "anti-punishment" position. I have no clear position on capital punishment, but think it makes sense for some forms of punishment to exist in a legal system.

The other part of his self-definition of left-libertarianism is agreeing with people on the left about a variety of issues not obviously political, for instance that race and gender are "largely social constructs." I disagree with that one and probably with some of the others.

Roderick's description of his position reminds me of several people who have come to something close to his position from what I think is the other direction—although I do not know his history well enough to be sure it is the other direction.  They think of themselves as leftists but have been convinced by, or worked out for themselves, enough of the libertarian argument to be in some sense libertarians. Examples would be Cass Sunstein, who sometimes describes himself as a libertarian, and Larry Lessig, whom I have occasionally tried to persuade that he should. 

I discussed my views of them here four years back, when explaining why I then preferred Obama to McCain. Sunstein was actually in the Obama administration for a while, but has now returned to his usual profession of converting trees into journal articles; I look forward to his account of his experiences in government when and if he provides it.

Left-Libertarianisms

A liberal in the 19^th century was a believer in small government, free markets, and individual freedom, roughly what we now call a libertarian.[1] The label  had earlier been used for left anarchists, still earlier for believers in the doctrine of free will. Early in the 20^th Century, after the opponents of liberalism stole its name, believers in classical liberalism started calling themselves libertarians.

While "libertarian" can still mean a left anarchist, “left libertarian” usually means a libertarian in the newer sense who supports ideas or policies identified with the left. The oldest and probably best worked out doctrine along those lines is geolibertarianism, based on the ideas of Henry George, a prominent Nineteenth Century economist and journalist. Its central tenet is that since no individual has a just claim to the income from the site value of land, government ought to support itself by taxing all and only that income.[2] The amount of money needed by a government, at least in the view of a libertarian, is much less than the total produced by such a tax, leaving the rest free to be distributed among the population. Thus the Georgist position provides an argument for some level of what others would regard as income redistribution.

Libertarians mostly base ownership on creation — I made it so it's mine — but land, with rare exceptions, is not created by humans.  John Locke famously argued that humans acquire ownership over land by mixing their labor with it, clearing the jungle or digging out the boulders, provided that there is as much and as good unowned land left for others, but that solution raises a number of problems. One is the question of why mixing your labor, or anything else you own, with something gives you ownership of it. As Robert Nozick put it, “If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules … mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?”

A second problem is the Lockean proviso, the requirement that your act of appropriation leaves “enough and as good left in common for others.” That is unlikely to be true of land in any densely settled country, which seems to imply that the conversion of land from commons to property must stop as soon as the amount of commons becomes small enough that reducing it further means that some people can no longer wander over the commons, feed their pigs on its acorns, collect deadwood, as well as before. A possible response is that the condition is satisfied as long as everyone is better off than he would be if all the land had remained commons, that the large gain from the greatly increased production due to treating land as property can be set against the loss from a reduction in the amount of land in the commons.

The Georgist solution raises problems too. Not only did I not create the land, we did not create it either, so how is the government entitled to remove land from the commons, giving someone the right to exclude people from land that neither he nor the government justly owns? Readers who share my interest in the issue may want to look at an old article of mine in which I offered my own not entirely satisfactory solution.

Seducing Socialists[3]

The book Markets not Capitalism: Individualist anarchism against bosses, inequality, corporate power, and structural poverty[4] (hereafter MnC) presents a form of left libertarianism that descends from the ideas of 19^th century anarchists who considered themselves socialists, individualist socialists in contrast to state socialists such as Marxists, writers such as Benjamin Tucker and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.[5] The modern left libertarians whose views are represented in MnC would like to reclaim the socialist label. They refuse to call what they support “capitalism” on the not unreasonable grounds that, to most people, the term describes a mixed economy in which governments play a large role. They reject the term “free market” on similar grounds — the existing market is not free — in favor of “freed market,” what would exist after government and its interventions were eliminated. They argue that most of the things socialists dislike about present societies would not exist, or at least be much less common, in a freed market, hence that socialists should be libertarians.

The problem is that there is no good reason to believe it is true.

For example:

The funding of public highways through tax revenues, for example, constitutes a de facto transportation subsidy, allowing Wal-Mart and similar chains to socialize the costs of shipping and so enabling them to compete more successfully against local businesses; the low prices we enjoy at Wal-Mart in our capacity as consumers are thus made possible in part by our having already indirectly subsidized Wal-Mart’s operating costs in our capacity as taxpayers. (MnC Chapter 20).

The author does not mention that, during the period of Walmart’s initial expansion, federal regulation made transport more expensive by cartelizing the trucking industry, as demonstrated by the sharp drop in costs after the industry was deregulated.[6] Nor does he mention that libertarians expect governments to produce goods and services less efficiently than private firms, making costs higher and quality lower. That gives us one government activity that made transportation cheaper, two that made it more expensive. The author mentions the one that pushes in the direction he wants, ignores the other two, and concludes that transport was less expensive due to government, benefiting Walmart.

A good analogy is subsidies to freeways and urban sprawl, which make our feet less usable and raise living expenses by enforcing artificial dependence on cars. (MnC Chapter 40).

Subsidies to mass transit, the urban alternative to cars pushed by opponents of urban sprawl, are about a hundred times as large per passenger mile as the subsidy to highways.

Walmart and urban sprawl are not the only things socialists dislike about the modern world so not the only things left libertarians would like to claim that a freed market would reduce or eliminate. Others include large corporations, wage labor, the cash nexus and income inequality. Things they would like to see replace them include workers’ cooperatives, self-employment, gift economies.

In each case there may well be ways in which government intervention in the economy pushes things in the direction they claim. But in each case, as with highway costs, there are effects  in the opposite direction as well. To demonstrate that point, here are arguments for the opposite of the conclusions offered by left libertarians:[7]

Corporate Size

A large hierarchical organization has to pass a lot of information up and down the hierarchy in order that the people at the top can know what those at the bottom are doing and those at the bottom know what those at the top want them to do. The more such information there is and the more hands it passes through, the more legible the firm’s activities are to the government, making it easier to collect taxes and enforce regulations. At the other end of the scale, in the limiting case of a one man firm, the boss cum worker does not have to trust anyone but himself to keep his secrets, which makes it easier to evade taxes — for instance by classifying consumption expenditures as business expenditures or not reporting payments in cash — or regulations. So one effect of a government that taxes and regulates is to increase the advantage of smaller firms over larger.

Another effect is to encourage gift economies, informal transactions more generally. If I do my friend’s taxes for her and she babysits my kids, neither transaction ever shows up on our income tax forms. That is one way in which the existence of government makes gift economies more, not less, common.

Another way in which the existence of government discourages hierarchical organizations is by the structure of taxation. Corporate profits pay taxes twice, once in corporate income tax and a second time as income to the stockholders, although the second may, depending on the details of tax law, be diluted by special treatment for dividends or capital gains. The same activity done in an unincorporated form, as by a doctor in private practice, pays taxes only once.

Wage Labor

One way of getting things is by paying someone else for them, another is by producing them yourself — cooking your own dinner, growing tomatoes in your back yard. One way of making a living is to work for someone else for pay, another is to work for yourself, make jewelry or art and sell at art fairs, write books. Here again, one advantage of making your living that way is that your activities are less legible to tax collectors and regulators. Arguably the shift from self-employment to wage labor over the past hundred and fifty years was one of the causes of the growth of government expenditure from about ten percent of national income in the U.S. in the Nineteenth Century to about forty percent currently.

Income Inequality

Most high income people at present get their income either as highly skilled workers, such as physicians, or successful entrepreneurs, both roles that would continue to exist in a freed market. While government activities result in some people being richer, some poorer, than they would otherwise be, their least ambiguous effect on the income distribution is through taxation. Taxing capital gains makes it more difficult to accumulate wealth. Income taxation in the U.S. at present is heavily biased against the rich: The top one percent of taxpayers pay about 29% of their income in federal taxes, the bottom quintile about 3%.[8]

The Advantage of Ignorance

The 19^th century individualist anarchists were in a better position than their modern successors to claim to offer what socialists wanted because they knew less economics. They seem to have believed that if anyone could open his own bank and print his own money, loans would be freely available — according to Tucker at an interest rate of less than one percent. They were confusing money with capital. In a system of private issue anyone can invent his own money and print it, but that does not mean that people will give him things in exchange.

At least some of them seem to have viewed rent as well as interest as a government creation.

It was obvious to Warren and Proudhon that, as soon as individualists should no longer be protected by their fellows in anything but personal occupancy and cultivation of land, ground rent would disappear, and so usury have one less leg to stand on. Their followers of today are disposed to modify this claim to the extent of admitting that the very small fraction of ground rent which rests, not on monopoly, but on superiority of soil or site, will continue to exist for a time and perhaps forever, though tending constantly to a minimum under conditions of freedom. (Benjamin Tucker, MnC Chapter 2)

A world where anyone who wanted to work for himself could get an almost interest-free loan and anyone who wanted to farm could get almost rent-free land would look to a 19^th century socialist more like what he wanted than anything twenty-first left libertarians can believably promise.

A Typology

Limiting it to libertarians in the modern  sense, there are at least four  categories of left libertarians, two of which are discussed in this chapter:

The Bleeding Heart Libertarians (discussed here and here) have constructed versions of libertarianism designed to be acceptable to the academic left, their fellow philosophy professors.

The left libertarians who view themselves as the heirs of the individualist socialists of the Nineteenth Century have constructed a version, and a presentation, designed to appeal to people who would describe themselves as socialists, more nearly the left of the labor movement than of the academy.

The Geolibertarians are distinguished not by their target audience but by their argument, offering their solution to the problem of initial appropriation as a justification for taxation to support needed government functions and what other libertarians would view as income redistribution.

The fourth group are distinguished not by their view of libertarian doctrine, which is conventional, but by their view of everything else. They are likely to regard themselves as feminists, to be concerned with racism and climate, to favor same sex marriage. On what might be loosely described as culture war issues they usually take the side identified with the left.

The groups have some overlap of members and ideas. Bleeding Heart Libertarians make use of the Georgian argument to justify income transfers. Members of the first two groups are likely to agree with the left on some culture war issues, making them at least fringe members of the fourth.

Verbal Plumage

Identification of left libertarian variants is most easily done by text, not garb or physical appearance. Bleeding Heart Libertarians speak respectfully of Rawls, whose name appears nowhere in Markets Not Capitalism. “Boss” appears forty-five times in the book but its only appearance in the contributions by Bleeding Hearts to the Cato symposium I shared with them was a reference to the book’s subtitle; it makes no appearance in Progress and Poverty, the founding document of Georgism. References to the ruling class and the oppression of workers are more likely to appear in the rhetoric of my second and fourth groups than in that of other libertarians.

One More Category

The people discussed so far mostly self-identify as left-libertarians. There are also people who think of themselves as leftists but have been convinced by, or worked out for themselves, enough of the libertarian argument to be in some sense libertarians. Examples would be Cass Sunstein, who occasionally describes himself as a libertarian, Larry Lessig, whom I have occasionally tried to persuade that he should, and Scott Alexander, the author of one of the anti-libertarian faq’s discussed here, not all of which he still agrees with. James Scott, author of at least two books that I and many other libertarians, like, is arguably another example, despite his efforts to make it clear to his readers that he is not one of those icky libertarians. I discuss him in this essay.

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[1] Nineteenth century liberals also favored expansion of the franchise. Modern libertarians mostly take no position on the details of democracy.

[2] Two recent books, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism and  Left-Libertarianism and its Critics, both  edited by Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, discuss Georgism, aka geolibertarianism, and other positions along similar lines. Henry George also argued that the single tax would have a variety of desirable economic effects.

[3] This section owes a good deal to Gary Chartier, who was generous in his time and effort responding to my questions about and criticism of his, and other left anarchists’, views

[4] Edited by Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson, Released by Minor Compositions, London / New York / Port Watson.

[5] A conveniently webbed summary of left libertarian positions is “The Distinctiveness of Left-Libertarianism” by Gary Chartier, one of the compilers of Markets not Capitalism.

[6] The industry was deregulated in 1980. “By 1985, deregulation saved shippers $7.8 billion annually due to lower common carrier rates, $6 billion due to lower private carrier costs, and $1.6 billion annually due to more rapid service. By 1998, real operating costs per vehicle-mile fell by 75 percent for truckload carriers and by 35 percent for less-than-truckload carriers.” “Forty Years After Surface Freight Deregulation,” The Regulatory Review.

“The Walmart chain proper was founded in 1962 with a single store in Rogers, expanding outside Arkansas by 1968 and throughout the rest of the Southern United States by the 1980s” (Wikipedia, “History of Walmart”).

[7] The BHL forum that contained Gary Chartier’s account of left libertarian views also contained criticisms, along similar lines to mine, by Daniel Shapiro, Steve Horwitz and David Gordon.

[8] https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/who-pays-taxes

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This essay is a draft of a chapter for something I am working on. Several links in it are to other draft chapters. As always, comments are welcome.

Hard Line Natural Rights: Alternatives To

The version of libertarianism that I refer to as the hard line natural rights position holds that individuals have an absolute right to themselves and their property, hence that any violation for any purpose is wrong. Obvious implications are that it is wrong to collect taxes for any purpose or for a starving man to steal a loaf of bread. It is a position that many libertarians not only agree with but view as defining libertarianism.

I explained my reasons for rejecting that position in Chapter 41 of The Machinery of Freedom (second edition). The Bleeding Heart Libertarians with whom I have recently been arguing reject it too. Thinking about our argument, it occurs to me that there are at least three different approaches to creating an alternative, and that part of my reason for arguing with them is that their approach strikes me as the least attractive of the three.

The first of the three approaches is to argue that the logic of libertarian rights theory leads to different conclusions than those most libertarians accept. One way of doing so is to leverage the problem of initial appropriation of unproduced resources such as land. I did not create the land my house sits on, nor did the person I bought it from or the person he bought it from, so how do I get the right to keep other people off it? It might be argued that I owe compensation to the people I am keeping off that land for violating their rights, an argument that can be used to defend  forms of taxation and/or income transfer as vindications, not  violations, of natural rights.

I have problems with all versions of that argument that I have seen, but I agree that there is a real problem. In the introduction to Machinery I argued that most income in a modern society does not come from unproduced resources, hence the solution to the problem of who is entitled to collect it does not matter very much—not a very satisfactory response, but I had no better one. Since then I have managed something a little closer to a solution, but not one I am entirely happy with. I am not convinced by the Georgists or other left-libertarians with similar approaches but I regard what they are doing as an attempt to get a modified version of libertarianism out of a solution to a real problem in the theory.

A second approach to modifying libertarian rights is the one I associate with the members of the BHL group I have been arguing with, mostly Jason and Matt. It attempts to resolve the conflict between the implications of the hard line position and their moral intuitions by importing into libertarianism ideas borrowed from modern academic philosophy. Like the first approach, the conclusion is a modified theory of rights, this time one in which the right to use force in the defense of property—this time all property, not just land—is conditional on meeting some sort of conditions of social justice.

Both approaches produce arguments that justify some amount of taxation and income transfer as compatible with rights, with the details and the justification varying within and between the approaches. The language is not identical, but if letting me use force to defend my property is unjust unless the poor are properly taken care of, then I do not have a right to both defend my property and refuse to help the poor, which makes the use of force in defense of my property a rights violation, so the essential conclusion is the same. The difference is in where they get it from.

My preference for the first approach over the second comes from my unhappiness with what I have seen of modern political philosophy, of which the work of John Rawls provides a prominent example. I have been observing it for quite a long time, having been present when the pre-publication version of one prominent variant—not by Rawls—was  being presented to an audience and had the frustrating experience of trying to persuade its author to follow his logic where it led instead of where he wanted to go. I read Rawls' A Theory of Justice early on and never was able to figure out why anyone took it seriously, beyond the fact that it provided arguments for conclusions they wanted to reach.  Reading modern philosophers I occasionally come across an interesting idea that is new to me, but not often enough to make me want to read much modern philosophy.

Which explains why when I see academic political philosophers trying to import into libertarianism ideas from modern "high" liberalism, ideas which I largely regard as pretentious fluff, my reaction is not positive. Even though they, like me, are trying to construct an alternative to hard line natural rights. For some of the reason I regard those ideas, nicely exemplified by Jason's "minimally decent lives," as fluff, see my previous post.

Which gets me to the third approach—mine. Unlike both of the others, I am not trying to produce a modified theory of rights. Like the second group, I find some conclusions of hard line natural rights strikingly inconsistent with my moral intuitions. My conclusion is that rights are not a complete account of oughts. That an act violates a right is a strong argument against doing it, but not a conclusive argument. If, to take an old example of mine, the only way of saving the human race from destruction by an approaching asteroid requires, by some bizarre set of facts, that I steal an object worth a nickle from its rightful owner, I should do it. Doing it violates his rights, which may mean that he is morally entitled to try to stop me. But a small violation of rights is more than outweighed, in my moral calculus, by an enormous benefit in consequences.

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For a more complete account of the first approach described, see:

The Origins of Left-Libertarianism

and

Left-Libertarianism and its Critics

both edited by Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner

 

Wimps, Boors, and Philosophers

I am mining my accumulated blog posts to convert them into one or more books and have started the first chapter. It is based on exchanges with a group of libertarian political philosophers who describe themselves as Bleeding Heart Libertarians. It occurred to me that the argument I was making there was related to a different argument in a different post.

My central claim in the first group of posts was that, while the BHL were offering legitimate criticisms of arguments made by their fellow libertarians, they were unwilling to apply a similar standard to arguments made by academic philosophers. They wanted to add "social justice" to libertarianism but were unable or unwilling to give a clear explanation of what it was or on what basis it could be defended. They spoke respectfully of John Rawls but were not prepared to actually defend his central argument, which, I had long concluded, hinged on a claim about as defensible as 2+2=5, even less defensible than the libertarian arguments they had attacked.

My conclusion was that what they were offering was a version of libertarianism designed to appeal to their non-libertarian colleagues.

My other post came out of the controversy over the Ron Paul newsletters, some of which contained articles attacked as racist. While I may have missed something, I do not think any of them either asserted innate inferiority of blacks or hatred of blacks qua blacks. What they did was express a derogatory opinion of particular blacks — Watts rioters or muggers — in a gleeful fashion. They were thus likely both to appeal to racists and to offend liberals — more generally, people who accept current conventions of acceptable and unacceptable speech. My guess is that both effects were intentional.

I see the clash as between people who see non-PC speech as a  virtue and those who see it as a fault, between people who approve of offending liberal sensibilities and those who share enough of those sensibilities to prefer to respect them. The former group see the latter as wimps, the latter see the former as boors.The wimps have friends on the left they respect, so prefer to think of those on the left as reasonable people who are mistaken. The boors are more likely to have friends on the right, including some, such as religious fundamentalists or neo-confederates, whom the wimps disapprove of, so in that case the pattern reverses, with the wimps seeing those they disagree with as evil or stupid, the boors seeing them as reasonable people with, perhaps, some mistaken views.

Ron Paul, or whichever of his people wrote the relevant articles, identified with and was appealing to the boors and so offended the wimps. The Bleeding Heart Libertarians are professional academics, associate mostly with people well on the left, so speak respectfully of even bad arguments that such people respect and would like to revise libertarianism to make it more palatable to their left wing friends.

Theory vs History

Yesterday, Mike Huemer and I had a debate with two anarcho-communists on the topic of left libertarianism vs right libertarianism. It can be viewed on YouTube.

One thing that struck me as interesting was a difference in how we supported our positions. While I made some factual points, my central argument was theoretical, based on the coordination problem. In order for each of us to achieve his objectives he requires the cooperation of thousands, probably millions, of others, as you can see by tracing the supply train for anything we use — what things went into making it, what went into making those things, and so forth — and considering the number of people involved at each stage. Property and trade provide a decentralized way of solving that problem.

My challenge to my opponents was to explain how, without property, they would solve that problem. They never made a serious effort to answer it. Instead, they offered what they claimed was historical evidence that it had been solved, most notably by the Catalonian anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, with a variety of other claimed factual examples.

The problem is that neither I nor they knew if any of that was true. In my experience, if you look carefully at any controversial bit of history, you can find convincing arguments for a range of very different interpretations. I have not tried the experiment, but my guess is that a sufficiently able holocaust denier could offer persuasive arguments that it would take at least an hour or two of research to debunk. I have encountered cases where a false claim, for instance that Hoover's response to the stock market crash was to cut government expenditure or that Adam Smith supported public schooling, is widely believed. Unless one happens to have already spent time and effort investigating a historical claim, there is no way to know if it is cardboard or gospel truth. Even if you have, there is probably no way, in a context like a debate, to prove its truth or falsity to your opponents and audience.

Theory, on the other hand, is something you can actually look at inside your own head, without worrying about biased or otherwise unreliable sources of factual information. My confidence that a minimum wage must always reduce employment opportunities for low skilled workers was answered not by Card and Kruger's very weak factual evidence but by their demonstration, using the conventional price theory I accept, that there was a conceivable situation in which it would have the opposite effect. I doubt that situation has much real world relevance in the U.S. at present, since it depends on the market for such labor being monopsonistic, but it might well be relevant in other environments. 

Similarly here. Persuading me that the coordination problem could be adequately solved without some equivalent of private property and trade on historical evidence would be difficult, since I would have to look at lot of historical claims, find people who disputed them, evaluate their arguments for myself. A clean theoretical argument, possibly inspired by looking at real world examples, could do it in twenty minutes. To the best of my knowledge and belief nobody has produced such an argument yet, which makes me suspect that it cannot be done.

None of that, of course, is an argument against doing empirical work — the real world sometimes has lessons to teach us that we were not clever enough to think of for ourselves. It is an argument against giving much weight to claims about such work that you have not yourself investigated with reasonable care or, short of that, seen confirmed by people who have investigated them and whose honesty and competence you have reason to trust.

 

Eugenics and Libertarianism

I’ve just been reading Matt Ridley’s very interesting book Genome, which I highly recommend. It contains, among many other things, a brief history of the eugenics movement. Compulsory eugenics, in the form of sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and similar schemes, is sometimes blamed on Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism, hence on laissez-faire beliefs, hence on libertarianism. Judging by Ridley’s account, that is almost precisely backwards.

Spencer was indeed concerned about human eugenics but, as a believer in laissez-faire, he did not propose using government to improve them. Compulsory eugenics originated with Galton and was rapidly taken up by the British left, with supporters including Shaw, Wells, Keynes, Laski and the Webbs. The idea spread across the political spectrum; Winston Churchill was one of many enthusiastic supporters. The result was an attempt, in 1912, to enact compulsory eugenics into law.

It was successfully opposed by Josiah Wedgewood, who Ridley describes as a radical libertarian. His central argument was not that it was bad science but that it was a striking violation of individual liberty. He made that argument sufficiently persuasive to force the government to withdraw the bill. Another opponent was G.K. Chesterton, best known today as a Catholic apologist and the author of some early mysteries. Chesterton was another radical libertarian, although a somewhat odd ones, to whom I devoted a chapter in the second edition of my Machinery of Freedom.

In addition to libertarian politicians such as Wedgewood and Cecil, compulsory eugenics had another important opponent: The Catholic church. Compulsory sterilization was implemented in a considerable number of countries, including the U.S. and Sweden, and almost implemented in Britain. It was not implemented in countries where the Catholic church was powerful. In that case, at least, the Church’s opposition to the latest findings of modern science put it where it belonged, on the side of the angels.

We were there too.

To be fair, I should add that there was a second push for compulsory eugenics in the early 1930’s, successful in some European countries but not in Britain. This time the failure was at least in part due to intellectual changes associated primarily with the left, the shift from belief in genetic determination of human beings to belief in social determination.

As Ridley points out, there is a different sort of eugenics that is alive and well in the modern world—decisions by parents related to the genes of their actual or potential offspring. He discusses two versions.

One is represented by the Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Disease, an organization that uses blood tests of school children to identify the carriers of genes for Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis. “When matchmakers are later considering a marriage between two young people, they can call a hotline and quote the anonymous numbers they were each assigned at the testing. If the are both carriers of the same mutation … the committee advises against the marriage.”

The other is the increasingly common practice of parents using amniocentesis to identify embryos carrying the extra chromosome that leads to Downs syndrome, and aborting them.

The Meaning of "Libertarian": A Question

Consider two hypothetical Christians. Christian A considers himself a libertarian, does not believe in the initiation of coercion, believes in property rights. He believes, however, that God, having created everything, is the rightful owner of everything. God has authorized rulers to collect taxes, censor writings, ban drugs and prostitution, enforce slavery. None of that, he will explain, is an initiation of coercion, just the enforcement of God's legitimate property rights.

Christian B does not consider himself a libertarian; if God told him to kill or enslave people he would willingly obey. He believes, however, that God's purposes will best be achieved in a libertarian society. The opportunity to sin with a prostitute will let the virtuous strengthen their virtue by resisting temptation, the truly sinful proceed on their way to Hell; prostitution should be legal. He wants to free slaves in order to let them work out their own salvation or damnation.

Christian A believes in libertarian arguments but not in libertarian conclusions, Christian B the opposite. Which is more libertarian?

Christian A is imaginary but there are libertarian philosophers, such as the Bleeding Heart Libertarians on the left or Hans Hoppe on the right, who offer what they believe to be libertarian arguments for conclusions, such as income redistribution or immigration restrictions, that most libertarians consider inconsistent with libertarianism. 

If justice really requires transfers from rich to poor or states have the right and obligation to restrict immigration in order to protect the rights of their citizens, the people who believe those things are libertarians, indeed better libertarians than we are. But if they are wrong, as I believe they are, do those conclusions make them less libertarian? What does “libertarian,” predicated of a person or a conclusion, mean?

I, arguably, am Christian B. A very long time ago I found it necessary to join the Free Libertarian Party of New York in order to attend a libertarian event. Doing so required me to “certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals.” I footnoted my signature with something to the effect that the statement was a simplified version of my actual position. The footnote was necessary because, although I do not currently advocate any initiation of force, I can imagine circumstances in which I would. Some are described in Chapters 41 and 42 of The Machinery of Freedom.

Many libertarians believe that they have derived  their libertarian conclusions from the non-aggression postulate. That is not where I got mine. Does that mean I am not really a libertarian or that I, like Christian B, am a libertarian with different arguments but libertarian conclusions?

A possible answer is that what matters is where the arguments lead. If, as some have argued, my position could be used as easily to argue for statist conclusions, that is a reason to consider me, if not a statist, at least a dangerous influence on libertarianism. If the arguments that Hoppe offers for immigration restrictions could be applied as well to almost any restriction of individual liberty favored by Hoppe and the current right, that is a reason to consider him a dangerous influence on libertarianism. 

As I do.

---

Separation of Church and State or Public Schools: Pick One

A commenter on my previous post asks what the content of a creationist course would be, readings from the book of Genesis or merely bad science, and adds that "teaching Marxist ideas of 'laws of history' is peddling a form of religious pseudo-science. Some of the environmental dogma being taught in schools is also on par with this stuff."

This suggests a more general point—is the existence of a public school system consistent with a serious commitment to the separation of church and state?

I think the answer is that it is not. While teaching a fundamentalist version of the origin of life is indeed taking a side in a religious dispute, teaching a conventional account of biology and geology is is also taking a side in that dispute, just the opposite side. I do not see how I can honestly tell a fundamentalist that it is a violation of the separation of church and state to teach children that his religious beliefs are true but not a violation to teach children that they are false.

The conventional view is, in this case, the one I believe is true. But then, if they were teaching creationism, they would be taking the side he believes is true. So what purports to be separation of church and state ends up as the opposite—the state supporting a particular view of religious questions. That comes pretty close to the established church that the First Amendment explicitly forbids.

Of course, these are not only religious questions, they are also scientific questions. But then, most religious questions are also scientific, or historical, or philosophical, questions. If the rule is that the state can teach whatever it believes is true provided that here is some basis for that belief other than religion, that leaves the state free to teach the truth or falsity of pretty nearly every religion. The doctrine of separation of church and state then becomes the doctrine that one can only teach the truth, which sounds fine as rhetoric but has some practical difficulties in a world where different people have different views of what the truth is.

So far, I have considered a case where the school teaches what I believe is true. In the real world there is no such limitation, as the quoted comment with which I started this suggests. When schools teach children that they have an obligation to take care of Mother Earth they are teaching religion, whether or not they put it in an explicitly religious form; religions are not limited to beliefs about gods. And I find it hard to draw any sharp line between religions and secular ideologies such as Marxism or libertarianism.

Eliminate all content that is in a broad sense religious and there is nothing left. Even eliminate all content that is religious in a narrow sense, where that includes claims that religions are false as well as claims that they are true, and there is not a whole lot left.

In practice, the application of separation of church and state in the American public schools usually comes down to not teaching what most of those concerned see as something that one would believe only for religious reasons. A century or more ago, that mostly meant that teaching Christianity was fine, since practically everyone took it for granted that Christianity was true. Today, insofar as matters are decided at the local level, it means that teaching things that the locals almost all agree with are fine—which can be Christian fundamentalism in some places and environmentalism and left-wing politics in others.

Problems arise when there is a conflict either between local and national views or between the views of the local parents and the views of the teachers and/or administrators running the schools. It is only at that point that what one group sees as obvious truth gets attacked by another as teaching religion.

More of My Next Book is Up for Comment

As I have mentioned here before, I am currently using the ideas from the past fifteen years of blog posts as the basis for a book or books covering, like this blog, a wide variety of topics. I am webbing the draft section by section and have just put up the fourth, a series of chapters on marriage, reproduction, and related issues. Here is the full list of chapters so far:

Ideas: A Book from Blogs

Libertarianism

Rights+
    Left Libertarianisms
    DDF vs BHL
    Libertarian Arguments for Income Redistribution
    Do Ends Justify Means?
    Moral Puzzles
    A Positive Account of Rights
  Concerning the Libertarian Movement
    Economics or Philosophy
    Problems
    Rothbard
    From Edith Efron to Peter Schwartz
    Wimps, Boors, Ron Paul and the Constitution
    Eugenics and Libertarianism
    Promoting Libertarianism
    The Rest of the World
Arguments
    Anarchy vs Minarchy
    Arguments with Interesting Leftists
    My Response to Another faq

Religion

Reasons for Belief
What Do Believers Believe?
The View of the Religious from the Outside
Auto Accidents, AIDS, Contraception and the Pope
The Puzzle of Hell Solved

Education

Thoughts on Teaching
How to Fix Law Schools 

How to Improve College Admissions 

Selecting a College
Colleges  

Diversity
Test Taking Software 

Computers, Cameras and Schools 

Education Outside of School 

Unschooling 

Judith Harris and Home Schooling 

Odds and Ends

Marriage, Reproduction, and Genetics

Mate Search
Marriage and Families
Assortative Mating
Gestational Surrogacy
Genetics and All That
Race, Gender and IQ

 

What's Wrong With Mushy?

An issue that I keep coming back to in my exchanges with various of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians is what I see as their unwillingness to offer a clear description of their position. It comes up in details of what they write, such as Jason Brennan’s use of  the phrase “minimally decent lives,” a term I have been describing as dishonest mush. It comes up in the overall pattern of the exchange, which started back on Cato Unbound, was continued on libertarianism.org, and revived here when I responded to Jason’s cartoon libertarian post. I have been trying to get the BHL people to tell me what they want to add to libertarianism as other libertarians see it, with a notable lack of success.

This raises the question I have used for my title. Jason wants to argue, in the specific case of “social justice,” that terms do not have to have clear meanings in order to be useful and he claims that lots of terms we routinely use, such as “justice” or “liberalism,” don’t. That is surely true to some extent; the meaning of words is usually at least a little fuzzy at the edges. It is true even for such  obvious classifications as male and female, since there are people whose genetics are neither XX or XY, people who are biologically male but (by their report, which I am inclined to believe) psychologically female, people who are genetically of one gender but morphologically of the other, hermaphrodites, and a variety of other sorts of people (not to mention other organisms) that cannot be neatly classified by gender. But there is still a  difference between a word that has an adequately clear meaning and one that does not. And there is a further difference between both and a word or phrase which appears to have a clear meaning, is designed to appear to have a clear meaning, but dissolves into mist or turns out to have a very different meaning when you look at it closely.

There are two problems with mush, one having to do with arguments, one with implementing them in institutions. The first may be best described in George Orwell’s classic essay “Politics and the English Language.” If you have never read it I suggest that you now do so, since it is more worth reading than this post.

Clear language promotes clear thought, fuzzy language makes possible unclear thought. The less clearly your ideas are defined, the harder it is to see problems with them, the easier to evade problems when other people point them out. That is part of why, at this point, I prefer the category of left-libertarians of whom Georgists, admirers of the 19th century economist Henry George, are the most familiar example to the ones I have been arguing with lately. The Georgist position starts from the observation that since land is not created by human effort there is a problem justifying anyone's claim to own it and exclude others. It goes on to argue for a land tax used to fund government and, possibly, provide payments to poor people. In an old article I discussed problems with one version of this line of argument and offered an alternative solution to the problem of ownership of land, although not one I find entirely satisfactory. But at least the Georgists are willing to offer an explicit argument, which makes it possible for other people to look for holes in its logic or implications that they find unattractive.

So far the BHL people I have been arguing with are not, which is why I at one point described my exchange with them as trying to nail jelly to the wall. The pattern is illustrated by their attitude to Rawls and his Difference Principle. They speak of Rawls with respect, imply that they, or at least some of them, are in favor of something with a vaguely Rawlsian flavor, but are unwilling to actually defend the argument with which he justified his principle. They think libertarianism should include something beyond natural rights but, aside from making it pretty clear that that something is not utilitarianism, are unwilling or unable to give a clear description of what.

So much for why I find mush irritating. Why do I also find it dangerous?

Suppose one concludes that people with characteristic X deserve special treatment, say a payment of a thousand dollars a year funded by other people’s taxes. Assume, first, that X is clearly defined, someone either has X or doesn’t and it is obvious to everyone which is the case. Let X be blindness, and assume for the moment that it is well defined.

There will still be costs, in addition to the direct cost of the transfers, to implementing the policy. Individuals can and will spend resources supporting or opposing the proposal, and that expenditure is a net cost. If the proposal is implemented, there may be additional costs as some people, most obviously the blind and those who provide goods and services to the blind, try to push the amount up, others to push it down. And there might be a cost due to a reduction in the incentive to avoid blindness or to cure it, although that effect is likely to be small as long as the disadvantages of being blind are  much larger than the payment, and disappears if we assume that whether you are blind is entirely outside of your control. That assumption corresponds to the usual assumption in talk about social justice that it involves consequences of characteristics that are not your fault.

Now suppose we alter the assumption just a little by replacing “blind” with “legally blind” and giving a very fuzzy definition to the latter, something like “vision bad enough to significantly reduce life opportunities,” which is not too bad a parody of the sort of definitions moral philosophers like to give for disadvantages that they think deserve some sort of compensating special treatment. All of the problems I have described now expand. Anyone with less than perfect vision has an incentive to lobby Congress to broaden the criteria. Anyone with or without perfect vision has an incentive to try to get classified as legally blind, whether by bribing the inspector, getting a well paid physician to testify that he has an obscure optical problem, or merely faking the symptoms—at the cost of the inconvenience of not driving when he might be caught doing so. Make the criteria fuzzy enough—my example might do it—and what you really have is a subsidy to anyone with enough money and/or political influence to get himself qualified as legally blind, whatever the actual state of his vision.

Which is why mush, used in philosophical arguments that are intended to justify legal rules, is dangerous.

Let me end by returning to the specific example of “minimally decent lives” and a slightly more defensible version that came up in the comment thread on the BHL blog, “basic needs.”  I begin with the latter.

A reasonably objective definition of “basic needs” might be  “enough food and shelter so that their lack would not greatly reduce your life expectancy.” To make it more precise, replace “greatly reduce” with “reduce at least in half relative to those who had such food and shelter.” What would that work out to?

There are parts of the U.S. where housing is pretty cheap, down to about $100/room/month, probably less if I searched further. Assume that people are packed in ten beds to a room, along the lines of housing for tramps in London as described by Orwell in Down and Out in London and Paris. That gets annual housing cost per person down to about a hundred dollars.

On further thought, that’s too high. There are parts of the U.S. where the weather is temperate enough so that living outdoors, perhaps with a roof to shelter you from the rain, is not a serious risk to health. So all you need is some empty land in such an area, enough roofs for everyone to huddle under when it rains, and local authorities willing to put up with the land being used as a refuge for the homeless. Cost per person close to zero. Add a little for porta-potties and a water supply.

I should probably include clothing. There is a place in Boston that my wife, daughter, and some of our friends like to visit that sells second hand clothing at fifty cents a pound. Twenty pounds of clothing should easily last a year in a temperate climate, so call that another ten dollars a year.

What about food? George Stigler, back in 1945, provided an estimate of the lowest cost diet that satisfied what was then the list of nutritional requirements. It cost a little under $40/year. A recent repeat of the calculation, using current prices and current nutritional requirements, produced a figure of about $600/year.

That again is too high, since a sizable fraction of the world’s population survives on considerably less than Stigler’s 3000 calories/day, and probably considerably less than whatever figure the more recent calculation used. Stigler's diet was for someone doing moderately hard labor—again I don’t know the assumptions in the current version. But if all we are asking is what it takes to prevent severe malnutrition for someone who is presumably sitting around unemployed, since if he were employed he would already be making more than the amount we are considering, 2000 calories/day should do it easily. And we can get a better estimate of the cost of a really minimal diet, one designed to keep you from starvation, by simply looking for the foods that have the lowest cost per calorie. The last time I looked at the problem I checked supermarket prices and calorie contents, but now we have the web and someone else has done it. The result was that 200 calories of canola oil or wheat flour cost $.07, of peanut butter $.17.

Those three items, suitably combined, let you choose your mix of carbohydrate, protein, and fat, although I expect you would need a few other things, perhaps some vitamin pills, to avoid serious nutritional deficiencies. Call the total $.10/200 calories, or $1/day. That is not allowing for the cost of food preparation, but that ought to be pretty minimal if we are only trying to provide minimal nutrition, not a tasty meal.

Adding it all up, it looks as though a serious estimate of the cost of “basic needs” in the U.S. at present, taking the term seriously as describing what it takes to stay alive, would come to something around $500/year. Is there any of the BHL authors, any modern American philosopher who uses the term, who would be willing to interpret it that way? Anyone who is not, it seems to me, is pretending to use an objective standard when what he actually intends is something more like “a standard of living I would find tolerable.”

I am not suggesting that people ought to have to live on $400/year, although one risk of making this post is that at some point in the future someone may quote me out of context to claim I am. It is not the life I would choose—although if we assume that the homeless refuge contains some interesting people and not many unpleasant ones and that some generous donor provides a large supply of second hand books I expect I would prefer it by a good deal to not living. I have included no expenditure for medical care in my calculations, which could get unpleasant, but I think the historical evidence suggests that while the lack of medical care reduces life expectancy, it is unlikely to cut it in half.

So much for "basic needs." "Minimally decent life" is harder to give any content to. For most of us, I suspect it gets interpreted as the least attractive life we would feel reasonably happy about living, which in practice probably means life at something like half whatever our annual expenditure presently is. That is not an objective standard and I think it would be hard to come up with any convincing argument, certainly with any argument convincing to a libertarian, to show that everybody is entitled to achieve it, if necessary paid for by other people.

For anyone who has not been following the argument from the beginning here are are the relevant links:

The Cato Unbound discussion

The Libertarianism.org discussion

• Matt's post
• My response 
• His response to me
• Another post by him
• My response
• Matt's response

Jason's "cartoon libertarian" post

My first response

My second response

Jason's response to me

My reresponse

Another contribution to the debate on the BHL blog, this time from Kevin Vallier

More argument can be found on the comment threads to some of those posts.

And may I humbly suggest to the people at libertarianism.org that they ought to provide a page showing, with links, the structure of such exchanges? And, if they already have done so, tell me how to find it.

Reflections on the David Weigel Affair

David Weigel is a journalist who used to cover the conservative movement on behalf of the Washington Post. He also participated in a "private" listserve populated mostly by liberal journalists. Someone leaked some at least mildly offensive comments in his listserve posts—he referred to Ron Paul supporters as "Paultards" and suggested that Matt Drudge should set himself on fire—to the media, and he ended up resigning from the Post, how voluntarily is not entirely clear.

While some commenters viewed Weigel as a liberal pretending to be a conservative in order to infiltrate, and pan, the conservative movement, it seems clear from the more informed comments that he was, and was known to be, a libertarian, having worked for Reason Magazine for some years before going to the Post. I am very bad at remembering the names of people I meet, but so far as I know I never met Weigel, and I don't read the Post. But the story involves two worlds I am a part of—libertarianism and cyberspace.

One interesting question is why Weigel was let go by Reason. Accounts by both the current (Matt Welch) and previous (Nick Gillespie) editors make it sound as though Weigel is claiming that he was fired for being too hostile to Republicans and too friendly to open borders and gay marriage—not a very plausible claim given Reason's policies. What Weigel actually wrote, however, was:

"After the 2008 election, I drove up from Atlanta to D.C. and was greeted by my editor, Matt Welch, with surprising news. It would be better, he said, if I worked somewhere else. I’d voted for the Obama-Biden ticket (having joked, semi-seriously, that I was honor-bound to vote for a ticket with a fellow Delawarean on it) and wasn’t fully on board with the magazine’s upcoming, wonky focus on picking apart the new administration. My friend, Spencer Ackerman, immediately bought me Ethiopian food and suggested I come to work at his magazine, The Washington Independent. I was dicey about the suggestion, partly because I was already doing some work for The Economist. At Reason, I’d become a little less favorable to Republicans, and I’d never been shy about the fact that I was pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders. But could I do the same work if I jumped to a left-leaning web magazine? I figured that I could, largely because I wouldn’t change at all."

The references to being less favorable to Republicans, pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders are not offered as explanations of why Welch fired him but as considerations in his decision about where to go next. Welch's account obscures this by leaving off the last two sentences of what I have quoted above. Gillespie does him one better by also eliding out a sentence from the middle of the quote; his version is:

"After the 2008 election, I drove up from Atlanta to D.C. and was greeted by my editor, Matt Welch, with surprising news. It would be better, he said, if I worked somewhere else. I’d voted for the Obama-Biden ticket (having joked, semi-seriously, that I was honor-bound to vote for a ticket with a fellow Delawarean on it) and wasn’t fully on board with the magazine’s upcoming, wonky focus on picking apart the new administration….At Reason, I’d become a little less favorable to Republicans, and I’d never been shy about the fact that I was pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders."

By eliminating all mention of the job offer Weigel was considering, Gillespie makes it look as though the final comments refer to leaving Reason. He then writes: "Similarly, the implication that Reason would be bothered by a staffer’s attacks on Republicans or support for gay marriage and open borders makes about as much sense and holds as much value as fiat currency."

Which is entirely true—but, since Weigel offered no such implication, also irrelevant. First editing down what he said to make it look as though he implied something that isn't true and then attacking him for doing so is either incompetent or dishonest.

Welch is a little better, writing "Another clarification, especially for people unfamiliar with Reason: There is, to put it mildly, zero professional sanction at this magazine for being 'a little less favorable to Republicans,' or being 'pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders.'" Which suggests that Weigel implied the contrary but stops short of saying so.

After writing the above, I described the situation to my wife. Her response was that both editors were viewing Weigel's comment through their own filters, assuming it was all about his firing and editing out of what he wrote everything irrelevant to that.

"Never attribute to malice ... ."

When I started this post, before coming across three different versions of why Weigel left Reason, I was planning to comment on the fact that for a lot of people (although perhaps not the editors of the Post) "libertarian" is now a clearly recognized category, so that "he wasn't a conservative or a liberal, he was a libertarian" is immediately comprehensible to them. I don't think that would have been true twenty years ago.

For the second half of this (already long) post, we have cyperspace and privacy. Weigel, in his explanation of the affair, quotes David Brooks at some length about the amount of confidential griping in the world of Washington politics:

So every few weeks I find myself on the receiving end of little burst of off-the-record trash talk. Senators privately moan about other senators. Administration officials gripe about other administration officials. People in the White House complain about the idiots in Congress, and the idiots in Congress complain about the idiots in the White House — especially if they’re in the same party. Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

This suggests that he may have viewed his comments to Journolist as in the same category as that sort of "off-the-record trash talk." If so, he was making a fairly serious error. One on one griping preserves the possibility of confidentiality—if the journalist quotes his off the record source, he may find sources less willing to talk to him in the future. Posts to a listserve with a hundred participants are a very different matter.

I was reminded of an even stupider mistake along similar lines that I made a few years back. In the course of a Usenet discussion, I offered my view of someone with whom I had reasonably friendly relations but of whose work I had a not very high opinion. Some time later I received an email from him asking if I had really said that, and had to confess that I had. It should have been obvious at the time that, since I was posting to a public forum, what I said was likely to eventually reach the person I said it about. But to me at the time it felt like a conversation, not a publication, so the problem simply didn't occur to me.

I have tried to be more careful since.