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.

Special Pleading and How to Recognize It

Political arguments often start with a conclusion someone wants to defend. He comes up with an argument to defend it. Sometimes the argument, carefully examined, leads to the wrong conclusion. Examples:

Income Redistribution and Initial Appropriation

Justifying ownership of things made by human beings is easy: I made it, I own it. That does not work for things such as land that were not created by human action. Locke’s solution was that one makes unowned land into your property by mixing your labor with it, clearing the forest or digging out the boulders — provided that there is as much and as good land left for other people. 

Eventually we will run out of good unowned land, so each person who propertizes a piece of land is depriving some future person of the opportunity to do so: The exception swallows the rule. Some libertarians solve this problem by converting Locke’s “as much and as good” to the requirement that nobody is made worse off by the conversion of land from commons to property. They conclude that anyone who is made worse off is entitled to compensation — a libertarian justification for welfare payments, that being the conclusion they wanted an argument to justify:

The problem that appears here is that, although the regime of private property obtained in the process of original appropriation leads to social prosperity and, by this, to the betterment of condition for many members of that society, the Lockean proviso is deeply individualistic and there may be cases – or even a generalized phenomenon – in which some individuals are actually worse-off as a result of the original appropriation.

(Zwolinski, Matt, “Property Rights, Coercion, and the Welfare State: The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income for All.” The Independent Review 19, no.4.)

The argument may justify income transfers, but the wrong ones. Someone blind or crippled may be deserving of help, but his odds of survival in the world as it is are much better than they would be in the much poorer world we would be in if land had never been treated as property, so he is entitled to no compensation. Someone big and strong and good at living in the jungle, with the skills to enslave weaker people and make them serve him, on the other hand, might well be worse off when the jungle is converted to private farms.

I do not think that is the conclusion people who want a libertarian justification for welfare payments or a basic income were looking for.

Reparations for Slavery

Black slavery in America was a massive wrong by almost anyone’s standards, so it is natural to ask whether anyone is owed compensation for it and from whom. Present African-Americans have not been enslaved and are better off than their ancestors’ descendants would be if there had been no slavery, but arguably they inherit their ancestors' claims.

Who are they claims against? Most present-day Americans are descended from people who never owned slaves, mostly people who came to the New World after slavery was abolished. The people who initially captured the slaves, on the other hand, had at least as much responsibility as the people they sold them to, arguably more. The slaves were captured by Africans. Given eight or nine generations from then to now, it’s safe to conclude that almost everyone in the relevant parts of Africa has some slave hunting ancestors.  So if the basis for compensation is inherited debt, the argument for taxing the present inhabitants of West Africa to compensate Afro-Americans is stronger than the argument for taxing the present inhabitants of the U.S., making reparations on net a transfer from poor to rich rather than the other way around.

Not the conclusion that people making the argument wanted.

Selective Arguments

A weaker form of the same problem occurs when the argument supports the conclusion only if you are very selective in which parts of it you look at. I encountered examples recently in Markets Not Capitalism, a book of essays by people who self identify as left libertarians. Their project, implied if not stated, is to persuade socialists that they should be libertarians by showing that most of what socialists dislike about present “capitalist” societies is the product of government intervention and  would not exist, or at least exist much less, in a “freed” economy.

 Leftists dislike Walmart:

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).

They also dislike urban sprawl, aka suburbs:

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).

The subsidy is real, since only part of highway expenditure is paid for by transportation taxes and fees, but it is only part of the story. Until 1980, eighteen years after Walmart was started, trucking was cartelized by the ICC, greatly increasing its cost. Further, the highway system is built and maintained by governments and libertarians expect governments to produce goods and services  less efficiently than private firms. One effect made transport less expensive, two made it more expensive. That leaves the question of whether Walmart would do better or worse in a freed market open — unless you take care to only mention the one effect that fits your argument.

There is a further problem with the anti-urban sprawl part of the argument. The subsidy to highways, if entirely allocated to passenger transportation, was about one cent a passenger mile. The subsidy to mass transit, the urban alternative to automobiles, was about a dollar a passenger mile. Insofar as government subsidies affected the choice between automobiles and transit it biased it in favor of transit, suggesting that abolition of government would lead to more suburban living, not less — although of course there might be other effects in the opposite direction.

 A very long time ago I wrote two poems about William Marshal, who was born the fourth son of a minor baron, before he died was regent of England, and in between for a decade or two one of the top tournament knights in western Europe. He is also the only knight of the period for whom we have a biography written shortly after his death by someone with access to the subject's retainers and relatives. I thought there was material for additional poems earlier and later than the ones I wrote, so titled them Gesta Gugliemi II and III.

I have now written Gesta Gugliemi I. Comments welcome. I am particularly interested in how well it works for readers who are not already familiar with the relevant history.

       Gesta Gugliemi I

 

When Henry’s son was lost at sea

He chose his daughter his heir to be

And since succession is seldom tame

Twice swore his nobles to back her claim.

 

But Stephen of Blois, his sister’s son,

Beat Matilda in the race to run

Across the channel to London town

And claim the kingdom and the crown.

 

Through fifteen years of civil war

The royal cousins battled sore,

Ravaging England South to North

While bishops and barons switched back and forth.

 

Sir John the Marshal was Stephen’s man

But after Matilda came to land

He called to mind the oath he swore

And loyally served her the rest of the war.

 

When Stephen’s queen broke Winchester siege

John fled the fight with his lady liege;

His stand at the ford bought her time to fly,

He saved the lady, lost an eye.

 

Ten years later, John’s sentinels see

An army coming for Newbury,

A mighty host meets their staring eyes

With Stephen leading, a grim surprise.

 

At Newbury castle the first attack

In a desperate fight was beaten back,

But supplies were few, the garrison small,

By siege or storm it would surely fall.

 

The constable bargained a day of grace

To ask John’s leave to yield the place;

Sir John prayed three to ask his liege

To bring an army and break the siege.

 

For which he offered to agree,

If it was found at the end of three

That she could not come with sufficient might,

He would yield the castle without a fight.

 

King Stephen, when the terms were heard,

Feared the Marshal might break his word,

So as a pledge that it would be done

Demanded young William, John’s second son.

 

The host went off for another fight

And as soon as Stephen was out of sight,

Expecting no help from his lady liege,

John stocked the castle against a siege.

 

When Stephen returned there met his sight

A wall well manned and a gate shut tight,

When he asked Sir John to keep his word

This, I am told, is what he heard.

 

“You have my leave to storm or siege

But I hold this castle for my liege;

If I lose one son I have still his brothers

And hammer and anvil to forge me others”

 

They built a gallows to hang the boy.

Young William thought it a clever toy,

Young William started to play and swing,

Which touched the heart of England’s King.

 

It was proposed another day

To send him home by trebuchet;

Without a thought of fear or harm

He climbed right up the throwing arm.

 

It was by innocence, not art,

Young William won proud Stephen’s heart

And so survived to prove in time

The savior of the royal line.

 

When the rebel barons held London town

And Louis of France claimed the English crown

King John on his deathbed gave William care

Of his kingdom and his child heir.

 

At seventy years, with lance and sword,

As Earl of Pembroke and Leinster’s lord,

He made the French and the rebels run

And saved the throne for a dead king’s son.

 

William served five kings of the Angevin line;

The last of the five was a child of nine.

And thanks to his loyalty and skill

English kings rule England still.

Dave Smith's Response to Me

Someone pointed me at a podcast by Dave Smith responding to my post criticizing his position on immigration. His basic argument, borrowed from Hoppe, has two parts:

1. In an anarchocapitalist society, private communities would be entitled to control who enters them.

2. As long as the government exists and owns property,  it is entitled to control the property just as a private owner would be. Smith's example is a public school excluding men from the girl's washroom. Since it is going to control the property it should control it in ways in which much of the population wants it to. Most of the population is against open borders, just as it is against letting men into the girl's washroom, hence it is appropriate for the government to control immigration.

The podcast is vague on what government property it is talking about. Smith puts the argument as if the government owns the border, but there is lots of private property adjacent to Canada, Mexico, or the ocean. To make the argument work you must, as Hoppe does, argue that the government is entitled to exclude immigrants from all government property. Since that includes the entire highway system, that comes close to excluding them from the entire country.

It does not seem to have occurred to Smith, perhaps not to Hoppe, that that line of argument justifies very nearly everything the government now does that libertarians oppose. A majority of the population believes that prostitution and drug use should be illegal. Hence, by their argument, as long as there is a government controlling property it is entitled to ban anyone who is a prostitute or patronizes one, anyone who uses or sells drugs, and similarly anyone who pays less than the minimum wage or practices medicine without a government license, from the use of any government property.

One odd thing that struck me about the podcast was that  Smith did not seem to have gone over the post he was responding to in advance. He read it aloud, commenting as he did so, and showing no awareness of which of his arguments were answered later in the post. 

Thus, for example, he quoted me writing that  “In the society as it now exists transactions between current Americans and new immigrants are voluntary, just as they would be in a fully libertarian society” and objected, at great length, that in the society as it now exists nondiscrimination law and tax funded government expenditures force transactions that are not voluntary. Only after doing so did he quote the next paragraph, where I stated the argument he had just made and, in the following paragraph, rebutted it by pointing out that open borders do not imply instant citizenship and can be combined with restrictions on what government services noncitizens are entitled to.

Responding to my point that citizenship is not a protected category under discrimination law, Smith pointed out that national origin is. But someone who discriminates against noncitizens is not discriminating on the basis of national origin, he is discriminating on the basis of citizenship. The employer is perfectly happy to hire a citizen of Mexican or Indian origin, just not a non-citizen of Mexican, Indian, or any other origin.

A good deal of Smith's later argument took it for granted that an immigrant imposes large net costs on the people already here. That is not clear even if immigrants have the right to use the public schools and collect welfare since they will also, like other people, pay taxes to fund the public schools and the welfare system. It is still less clear under the system I proposed where immigrants would not be entitled to such benefits until they become citizens.  Some, such as use of the highway system, cannot easily be separated off, but immigrants, like other people, will pay gas taxes and highway tolls.

In other parts of his response Smith did not seem to be following my arguments, not surprising if he first encountered them while doing the podcast and had to respond in real time. He goes on at great length about how the choice isn't between zero government restrictions and all government restrictions without ever noticing that one of the bits of my post that he makes fun of is a criterion for distinguishing — something he does not offer.

Ideally I would like to interact with him directly but, although he said on the podcast that he would be happy to have a back and forth with me, so far he has neither invited me to appear on his podcast nor suggested a debate.

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.

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Cancel Culture, Progressive Organizations, and Generalizing

An interesting article by Ryan Grim in Intercept describes how a variety of progressive organizations in recent years have found themselves paralyzed by internal conflicts involving accusations of racism, sexism, and similar offenses. Pretty clearly, the accusations are a mix of responses to real problems, responses to imagined problems, and weapons by which one member of an organization can attack another.

Being Black has by no means shielded executive directors or their deputies from charges of facilitating white supremacy culture. “It’s hard to have a conversation about performance,” said the manager. “I’m as woke as they come, but they’ll say, ‘He’s Black, but he’s anti-Black because he fired these Black people.’” The solution, he said: “I buy them to leave, I just pay them to leave.”

Inner turmoil can often begin, the managers said, with performance-based disputes that spiral into moral questions. “I also see a pattern of … people who are not competent in their orgs getting ahead of the game by declaring that others have engaged in some kind of -ism, thereby triggering a process that protects them in that job while there’s an investigation or turmoil over it,” the foundation official added. Such disputes then trigger broader cultural conversations, with battle lines being drawn on each side.

It sounds as though many on the left recognize the problem:

During the 2020 presidential campaign, as entry-level staffers for Sanders repeatedly agitated over internal dynamics, despite having already formed a staff union, the senator issued a directive to his campaign leadership: “Stop hiring activists.” Instead, Sanders implored, according to multiple campaign sources, the campaign should focus on bringing on people interested first and foremost in doing the job they’re hired to do.

One interesting question is whether it will occur to progressives to generalize their experience. If their ideology, including the willingness to enforce it at the organizational level by attacking other members of the organization for being insufficiently progressive, makes organizations unable to accomplish anything, what happens to the country if most people became progressives? 

Which, presumably, is what they are trying to accomplish.

Open Borders: The Libertarian Argument

The traditional libertarian position, the position I argued for in my first book, is support for open borders. That was also the traditional American policy. For the first century of the country’s history, anyone who could get here was welcome to come. Limits on Chinese immigration were imposed in the late nineteenth century but broader restrictions only came in in the nineteen-twenties and did not, at the time, apply to immigrants from other parts of the New World.

Murray Rothbard switched his position from opposing restrictions on immigration to supporting them as part of his adoption of a paleolibertarian strategy of alliance with the right, followed by Hans Hoppe and others. In trying to understand their argument, I have used two sources, an article by Hoppe and a webbed debate between Dave Smith, a prominent figure in the libertarian party and the Mises Caucus that currently controls it, and Spike Cohen, the most recent vice presidential nominee of the LP. Cohen supported open borders, Smith opposed them, using arguments largely borrowed from Hoppe.

The argument against open borders follows three related lines. The first starts with the idea that in the ideal libertarian society all property would be private and an individual, firm, or voluntary community would be free to exclude or admit anyone. Since what we actually have is a society in which much property belongs to government, the nearest we can come to that is having the government control who can come. Since, Smith argues, a considerable majority of the population opposes open borders, the government should restrict immigration on their behalf.

The problem with that argument is that, with no restrictions on immigration, individual employers are still free to employ or not employ immigrants, individual property owners to sell or not sell to them, landlords to rent or not to rent to them. In the society as it now exists transactions between current Americans and new immigrants are voluntary, just as they would be in a fully libertarian society. Government restrictions on immigration do what private restrictions in a stateless society could not do, prevent other people from interacting with immigrants.

That brings us to the second line of argument, that in America as it now is, some of the interactions with immigrants will be involuntary. Immigrants will collect welfare payments and send their children to public schools paid for by the taxpayers. Anti-discrimination law might force employers to hire immigrants, landlords to rent to them, even if they didn’t want to. Immigrant voters, if there were enough of them, could vote to tax other people and spend the money on themselves.

Open borders do not imply instant citizenship. While there were no restrictions on immigration in the early history of the U.S. there were restrictions on naturalization. Such restrictions could be retained in an open borders system; libertarian theory does not imply that everyone who comes can vote. Citizenship is not a protected category under current non-discrimination law, so those laws would not prevent employers or landlords who wanted to refuse transactions with some or all immigrants from doing so. Carrying the argument a little further, welfare law could exclude non-citizens, although if it did it would be only just to also exclude them from having to pay the taxes that funded welfare. So far as the public schools are concerned, libertarians, at least the same ones who argue for immigration restrictions, support decentralization. A legal regime with open borders could give every school district the option of serving or not serving non-citizen immigrants. Again, justice suggests that, if a school district rejects the children of non-citizens, the taxes that fund the schools, including property taxes on property they occupy, should not be owed by the parents or their landlords. That would come as close to mimicking what would happen in a stateless libertarian society, where all schools were private, as is practical in the existing system.

Hoppe’s proposal along these lines was that any immigrant should be allowed in if a citizen is willing to sponsor him, where the sponsor would then be responsible for any costs the immigrant imposed on others, paying fines for any crimes he committed, damage payments for any torts, presumably also paying the cost of sending the immigrant’s children to a public school. The argument, presumably, is that the sponsor, by letting the immigrant in, is an indirect cause of all such costs. It is not an absurd argument, but the notion of indirect liability that it depends on has implications that I do not think either Hoppe or his supporters would accept. If I sell you a gun, I am an indirect cause of any crimes you commit with it. Should I be permitted to do so only if I agree to be liable for the cost of such crimes? If I sell you a car … . The normal legal rule in a free society is that individuals are responsible for their own offenses. There is no obvious reason why the rule for immigrants should be different.

Hoppe’s proposal also makes little sense in other ways. Unless he intends immigrants to function like slaves or indentured servants, working for a single employer or those he lends them out to, they will be engaged, like other people, in a multitude of voluntary transactions with lots of different people. It makes no sense for all of those transactions to hinge on the permission of a single sponsor, who could presumably withdraw that permission any time he chose or, if he cannot, is liable for acts over which he has no control.

The third line of argument is that, as long as some property is owned by the government, the government is entitled to control its use. As Dave Smith points out, an adult man does not have the right to go into the girls' room of a public school; government property is not and should not be a commons. Hence the government may, if it chooses, refuse to allow immigrants it has not approved to use public property. Since public property includes almost the entire highway system, that makes it hard for an immigrant not approved by the government to do anything in the country much beyond employment in a farm on the border.

Here again, the argument proves too much. The government’s control of the public school is accepted because it is for the purpose of the school, the same purpose it would have if private. Most people, almost certainly most libertarians, would be outraged if the school announced that the girls’ room was only available to girls whose parents promised not to own firearms, or not to publicly criticize the mayor, or not to do something else they were legally entitled to do. In that case the control over public property would be being used not for the purpose of that property but as a way of coercing people.

Similarly here. If roads were private, their owners might require some form of driver’s license in order to make their roads safer. If the roads are public, it is not unreasonable for them to require a driver’s license and refuse to allow an immigrant without one to drive. But that does not justify forbidding a legal driver from carrying the immigrant. What Smith’s argument is proposing is the government using its control over public property not to serve the purposes of that property but to prevent voluntary transactions between its citizens and foreigners.

Suppose we accept the argument. A private owner is entitled to refuse to allow anyone not vaccinated onto his property. Hence the government is entitled to impose a vaccine mandate, enforced by forbidding anyone not vaccinated from using public property. It is entitled to effectively lock urban residents into their homes by forbidding them from using the public roads or sidewalks. It is entitled to ban drug use, prostitution, very nearly any of the activities libertarians believe it is not entitled to ban, by denying the people who do those things access to any public property.[1] The exception swallows the rule.

I conclude that libertarians ought to support open borders. They may want to qualify that by including the condition that immigrants not receive all the rights of citizens, such as the right to vote or to receive government benefits, until they have been naturalized.

 

 

 

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[1] Dave Smith responded to the argument about using control of government property against drug users, raised by Spike Cohen in their debate, by saying that it was legitimate to forbid addicts from shooting up on government property. He did not consider that the same argument would justify forbidding anyone who shot up anywhere, including his own property, from ever using government property.

Interpersonal Utility Comparisons

One common criticism of utilitarianism is that we have no way of way of trading off utility gains to one person against utility losses to another in order to say whether the net change is an increase or decrease in total utility. That is not a problem for much of economic theory, which can be done not only without interpersonal comparisons but without assuming anything more than individual preferences. But it is a problem for the idea of economic efficiency, a criterion of goodness derived from Marshall’s definition of an economic improvement. Marshall, a utilitarian, offered the concept of an economic improvement as corresponding, albeit imperfectly, to a change that increased total utility.

We can and do make interpersonal utility comparisons, although not very well. A parent making decisions that affect his children is implicitly asking himself whether doing something one child wants to do and the other doesn't will increase the former's happiness more than it decreases the latter. Someone deciding which friend to give a gift to is doing it in part on which he thinks will be made happier by it. I signal my feelings, including preferences, in facial expressions, voice tones, and the like; others appear to do the same, giving me some idea of the strength as well as the ordering of their preferences and comparing to mine.

I cannot know another person’s preferences with certainty but I have no serious doubt that the disutility to a random stranger of being tortured to death is greater than the disutility to me of stubbing my toe.

The Need for Interpersonal Utility in Economics

Alfred Marshall defined the value of an outcome to an individual, positive or negative, as the largest amount he would be willing to pay to get it or prevent it. He defined an economic improvement as a change whose total value was positive, meaning that the value to those who benefited by it was greater than the disvalue to those who lost by it. He offered the concept as an imperfect proxy for a utility increase on the grounds that although a given amount of money might represent more utility for one person than another such differences would usually average out for changes that affected many people. Put in modern terminology, an economic improvement is an increase in economic efficiency and an outcome is efficient if it cannot be improved.

A Pareto improvement, a concept originated by Vilfredo Pareto, is a change that benefits at least one person and harms nobody, avoiding the need for any interpersonal comparison of amount of benefit and harm. An outcome is Pareto efficient if it cannot be improved. The problem with substituting the Pareto versions of improvement and efficient for the ones based on Marshall’s approach is that almost no change affecting a significant number of people is a Pareto improvement, hence almost all outcomes are Pareto efficient.

Hicks and Kaldor tried to solve that problem with the concept of a potential Pareto improvement, a change that would be a Pareto improvement if combined with a suitable set of payments from people who gained to people who lost. If gainers gain more than losers lose, making the change a Marshall improvement, there should be some set of transfers that fully compensates the latter while leaving some gain for the former so, in almost all circumstances, something is a potential Pareto improvement if and only if it is a Marshall improvement.[1] Since the transfers are not actually made, a potential Pareto improvement is not an actual Pareto improvement — some people gain, some lose — so justifying it as a criterion for what changes are good or bad requires the same interpersonal utility comparison as Marshall’s approach.

It just makes the fact less obvious.

In order for economists to conclude that abolishing a tariff or a minimum wage law or practically any other change is (or is not) good for the country, an improvement, they must be willing to bite the bullet, treat utility as interpersonally comparable.

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[1] I describe a situation in which something is a Marshall improvement but not a potential Pareto/Hicks-Kaldor improvement in "Does Altruism Produce Efficient Outcomes? Marshall vs Kaldor." Journal of Legal Studies, 1987 Vol. XVII, (January 1988).

 

Why Not Sell Single Shoes?

Shoes, in my experience, are always sold in pairs. Should they be?

I can think of at least two arguments against. One is that sometimes one shoe of a pair wears out or gets damaged and you have to throw the whole pair away. This is particularly likely if your feet are not perfect mirror images of each other. Mine are not — my right foot has some lumps on it, apparently normal and non-dangerous sorts of lumps that sometimes occur with aging. The result is that my right shoes wear out faster than my left. Since I have been buying the same shoes from the same seller for years, I now have two pair — possibly a third if I looked harder — plus a number of unpaired left shoes.

That, of course, suggests the other advantage to selling single shoes. When I get new shoes they are comfortable on the left foot, tight on the right. Eventually, after time to stretch, they are loose on the left foot, comfortable on the right. But if I could buy a right shoe one size wider than the left ...

My European Speaking Trip

is finally happening. Here is the schedule.

I am not listing a couple of events that are entirely closed. For the rest I give links to information about where, when, and who, if necessary, to contact.

Why Global Temperature Doesn’t Matter for Global Crop Yield

Looking at a little of the literature on the effect of climate change on agriculture, I noticed something that seems to be a mistake — perhaps someone here can explain why it isn’t.

Crop yields depend, among other things, on temperature, with an optimal average temperature for each crop — about 15°C for wheat, for example (Lobell 2012). If temperature goes up by a degree, yield in an area that used to be 15° and is now 16° goes down a little. This seems to be one of the effects that goes into estimates of reduced yield as a result of climate change.

But it shouldn’t. The same warming that shifts 15° up to 16° also, somewhere a little farther north in the northern hemisphere or south in the southern, warms 14° to 15°, 13° to 14°, and so on. If wheat was being grown between, say, 13° and 17°, the area of cultivation can shift by one degree towards the pole and continue to have a temperature range of 13°-17° and the same temperature-related yield as before.

I can see two possible objections to this argument. The first is that the land a little closer to the pole may be less well suited to growing wheat in respects other than temperature. That is obviously possible but why would you expect it? Is there any reason why land that happens to have the ideal temperature for growing wheat is also more likely than other land to have the ideal soil or the ideal amount of rain? If not, then on average the shift is to land about as well suited in other ways and now ideally suited in temperature. A more careful analysis might find a deviation from that in either direction, land a little closer to the poles a little better or a little worse, but why should we expect either?

The second objection is that shifting the area of cultivation is costly — wheat farms have irrigation systems suitable for growing wheat, appropriate farm machinery, are owned or managed by people experienced in growing wheat. You can’t just pick all that up and shift it a hundred miles further north.

How serious an issue this is depends in part on how fast the shift happens. Looking at maps showing average temperature, it seems to go down as you move towards the poles by about a degree every hundred miles, with a good deal of variation. At current rates of climate change, global temperature should be going up by about a degree every thirty years. So shifting the area of cultivation to keep the temperature at which wheat is being grown constant should require moving it by about three miles a year, with farms at the warm edge of the zone shifting to crops with a higher optimal temperature such as maize (18°) while farms at the cold edge are shifting from barley or vegetables to wheat.

The real pattern would, of course, be more complicated than this, but why isn’t it the right first approximation? If so, then reduced yield with warming should not be included in the effect of climate change on agriculture. What should be included is the large increase in total arable land as temperature contours shift towards the pole, since it is cold, not heat, that restricts the area of land suitable for agriculture.

Am I missing something? Alternatively, is all of this already being included in models of the effect of climate change on agricultural output? If so, perhaps someone can point me at examples.