Wanted: Reviewers for the Audiobook of _Salamander_

The audiobook of Salamander, my second novel, should be out in a couple of weeks, and I am very happy with it — the narrator did a better job than I could have. Audible will give me vouchers to provide free copies to people willing to review the book, anyone interested who has a place to put a review where other people might see it. Let me know by email or comments here if you are interested.

I may be able to get similar vouchers for my other audiobooks — I didn't know about that option when they came out. If so, the same offer applies.

Here is the current, probably final, version of the cover by Anna Krupitsky, who has done covers for several of my other books.

A Very Long Shot

 At the 1975 Libertarian Party Convention in New York, I gave a talk on Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia. Nozick was in the audience, and we had an interesting exchange. Someone recently asked me if there was any record of the talk. I don't have any, and that was long before the time when everyone in the audience could be expected to have a video camera in his pocket, but it occurred to me that someone might have tape recorded the talk, perhaps the whole convention. If so, I would like to put a copy on my web page.

Does anyone know of such a recording and, if so, where it is?

A Little of my New Book

As I have mentioned here, I am working on converting fifteen years of blog posts into one or more books. I have now webbed one section, chapters dealing with libertarian philosophy and related issues, for comments.

My Talks this Weekend

There is a very large virtual event, How the Light Gets In, this weekend which I have agreed to participate in. The web site doesn't make it easy to figure out when a particular speaker is speaking on what, so I am posting a link to my itinerary here. The titles of my talks are their creation, not mine. All times are BST, and I have added the PST times. The first talk, not counting the pre-recorded one, starts at nine in the morning here.

I am also giving a talk as part of a different event on October 4th, and will post something about that later.

Products I Would Like to See: Category Peanut Butter

I am currently on a low glycemic index diet. 

Fortunately, peanuts are consistent with the diet and I like peanut butter. 

Unfortunately, the standard commercial versions of peanut butter have quite a lot of added sugar, which is not consistent with the diet. 

Fortunately, a number of firms make "old fashioned peanut butter," which contains only peanuts. 

Unfortunately, such peanut butter tends to separate, with the oil rising to the top. Stirring it is messy, especially when the jar is full, and one tends to end up with hard, dry peanut butter at the very bottom.

I think it unlikely that sugar keeps peanut butter from separating, although I could be wrong, and so conjecture that one of the other ingredients added to the standard brands is what does it. If so, it should be possible to make peanut butter that does not have sugar and does not separate. 

I want it.

What I want cannot be found, at least so far by me. I conjecture that part of the reason is information cost — the fact that the old fashioned peanut butter separates is an easy signal that it only has peanuts — and in part religion. The religion in question is the popular form of nature worship that equates "natural" to "good," and so rejects "chemicals" in food whether or not there is any reason to believe that they are bad for us.

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.

 

A Question on Libertarian History

I am working on another chapter of my current book, one that starts with the letter I wrote Edith Efron back in 1978, responding to an article of hers in Reason. Her article is webbed and I have now reread it, forty some years later. One thing that struck me again was this passage:

I suspect that a critical turning point in the evolution of this movement occurred when the proponents of a constitional republic, who by definition advocate a nation-state, agreed to suspend their endless quarrel with the anarchists, on the grounds that one should not split the forces of a small pro-liberty movement. After all, the argument went, one could wait a few hundred years to debate the issue of whether the government should be merely microscopic, or downright non-existent. All, presumably, could agree on the necessity to diminish its powers. It sounded like a plausible agreement. But it wasn't. For the constitutional republicans it was a very serious error. Already traumatized by the Objectivist debacle, which had severely undercut their self-confidence, they actually had agreed to abandon a series of important areas of political thought-above all they had abandoned the affirmative aspects of their position—the value of nation, the necessity of a national culture, the value of a government, the need to defend the country, and the need for a radical reformer to formulate a political position which integrates his proposals for change with his desires to preserve ... The constitutional republicans were struck dumb. They became paralyzed, mute, and stupid. The plain fact is that repression addles the brain.

...

By agreement with the anarchists, no examination of the affirmative aspects of the nation-state or of the unifying abstractions of the nation's pluralistic culture, was allowed. Over the years, in fact, the taboo became so intense, that ugly invective broke out whenever an individual presumed to explore these areas. The invective, of course, came from the anarchists, whose sole position on nation and state is negative—and who had lost nothing whatever by the agreement.

I was an active libertarian throughout the relevant period, and cannot remember what Efron describes ever happening. As a Harvard undergraduate I attended meetings of Radicals for Capitalism, the campus Objectivist group, argued with its members, and was eventually asked to stop coming because they did not like having to defend their views against my arguments. As a member of YAF and the token libertarian columnist on The New Guard I argued with everyone from traditionalists through fellow libertarians. When, at a libertarian event, I gave a critical talk on Anarchy, State and Utopia with Nozick in the audience, the interaction was friendly. The agreement as I understood it was that anarchists and minarchists were all libertarians and could work together, not that either side was forbidden to argue its position.

I am guessing that some of my readers were also part of the libertarian movement in the sixties and seventies, the period Efron is describing. My question for you is whether your memory supports her description of the history or mine. 

One possible mistake I made in the letter was to identify the anarchists Efron was attacking with Murray Rothbard. She mentions Rothbard early on in an anecdote about the failure of an early attempt of his to interact with people on the left but not thereafter, despite the fact that, throughout the period, he was the most prominent figure in the libertarian anarchist movement. That may be because, having initiated the attempt to ally with the left in 1965 he had abandoned it by 1970, eight years before Efron wrote her article. That makes her identification of "the anarchists" with the people she is criticizing a bit odd — presumably most of them were Rothbardians who had followed him into the left but not out of it.

When I have the whole chapter done I may put it up here for comments, but at the moment I am just curious as to the difference between her account and my memory.

One Advantage to High Infection Rates

The obvious disadvantage is the risk of overwhelming the hospitals, but it occurred to me that there may also be one advantage. 

The latest evidence suggests that immunity after infection probably lasts at least four months. We don't know how much longer it lasts. Suppose that over four months everyone who can get infected does. At that point everyone is immune, so the virus has nobody to infect and vanishes away.

That is an extreme case, but four months is also an estimate of the current lower bound for how long immunity lasts. More plausibly, assume that the infection rate is high enough to push the population to herd immunity before the immunity of a significant number of those infected first wears off. At that point the number of infections starts to go down, since each infected person passes the disease on to fewer than one other. If it goes down far enough before the number of no longer immune people gets high enough to push the population back below herd immunity, it may reach the point where further transmission can be controlled by test and trace.

Suppose, on the other hand, that we hold the initial infection rate low enough so we eventually that reach a point at which people are losing immunity as fast as people are getting it, while the number immune is still below the herd immunity level. In that case the disease goes on forever, or at least until a vaccine becomes available. 

Obviously the argument does not hold if a vaccine is going to show up shortly, which at this point seems likely. It also does not hold if immunity is permanent, as might be the case. But it does imply that under some circumstances a higher infection rate is better, in the long run, than a lower.

 

How to Keep Home Schooled Kids Out of College

The University of California is apparently moving to abandon the use of standardized tests in admissions. That means that they are eliminating the only way in which home schooled kids, lacking the usual high school grades and teacher recommendations, can demonstrate their academic qualifications to a university.

My Disagreement with Murray Rothbard

I have been working on a book based on my past blog posts. The current chapter deals with my criticism of Rothbard's historical work and the attitude behind his approach to it and other things, the view that political disagreement is ultimately war not argument (my terminology, not his). 

At the end of the chapter, I point out that the question of whether Rothbard's work is honest is relevant to whether you should trust him but not to whether his views are correct and has nothing to do with our real disagreement. Here is my current draft of that part of the chapter. 

---

Our important disagreement, about which I do not think he ever commented, had to do with differing views of how the law of an anarcho-capitalist society would be produced. His was that the law would be the product of libertarian philosophy. Since there was, in his view, one correct answer to what the law should be, everyone would agree and so all courts would accept the same law.

 [I]t would not be very difficult for Libertarian lawyers and jurists to arrive at a rational and objective code of libertarian legal principles and procedures based on the axiom of defense of person and property, and consequently of no coercion to be used against anyone who is not a proven and convicted invader of such person and property. This code would then be followed and applied to specific cases by privately competitive and free-market courts and judges. (Rothbard [1965], 208[1])

There are, in my view, two problems with this. The first is that, as the history of libertarianism makes clear, libertarian thinkers disagree on many features of a just legal code. To take only the most obvious ones, some libertarians, such as Ayn Rand, support laws protecting intellectual property, others oppose them. Some libertarians, probably most, believe that abortion should be legal, since a woman is the owner of her body. Others argue that it should be illegal, since the fetus has rights that should be protected.

One might attribute these disagreements to intellectual error on one side or another, and that is probably how most of those involved in such controversies see them. But it should be obvious to anyone who has made a serious study of the law that there are many legal questions to which philosophy gives no clear answer. Consider, for example, the question of what the penalty ought to be for theft. If the convicted thief is merely required to give back what he stole, theft becomes a profitable activity, since not all theft is detected: Heads you win, tails you break even. So the penalty must be something more than that.

How much more? Rothbard’s answer was that the thief must give back twice the value he stole, but he never offered any convincing reason why it should be two rather than three or ten.[2] The rule is supposed to apply to all societies, but in a society where theft is hard to detect it will still leave the thief with a profit hence will not deter theft. That is one example of the problem, but any thoughtful legal scholar or law student could offer many more. 

The second problem with the idea of deriving law from philosophy is that it ignores the problem of making it in the interest of courts to follow that law. In market anarchy, courts and rights enforcement agencies are private businesses. They can be expected, like private businesses in our society today, to try to maximize their profits. Rothbard seems to be assuming that, once the philosophers have determined what the law should be, everyone else will choose to accept it. That might make sense if one believes both that the philosophers can show what is right and that morality is such a strong force that, once what is right is shown, everyone will want to act accordingly. But if that were true there would be no need for law and law enforcement.

I have a different solution to the problem of producing libertarian law in a market anarchist society, one which uses the self-interest of the courts and their customers rather than ignoring it. In my version, each individual is the customer of a rights enforcement agency that sells him the service of protecting his rights and arranging for his disputes to be settled. Each pair of rights enforcement agencies whose customers might interact agrees in advance on a private court and agrees to accept its verdict in conflicts between their customers, an agreement enforced the fact that they are repeat players. If my agency refuses to go along with a judgement against its customer today, yours will act similarly tomorrow. Fighting is a lot more expensive than litigating and produces less predictable outcomes, so both agencies will prefer to keep the agreement.

Private courts are profit maximizing businesses, so want to produce the system of legal rules and procedures that rights enforcement agencies will want to buy. Right enforcement agencies are profit maximizing businesses, so want to use courts with rules and procedures that their customers want to live under. Individuals are choosing rights enforcement agencies, in part on the basis of the legal rules of the courts they patronize.

It follows that the private courts will want to produce legal rules that individuals want to live under, just as private firms in our society want to produce products that their customers want to buy. In our present political system politicians want to pass laws that voters approve of, but the voter is neither able to observe and compare alternative legal systems nor to choose among them, since his vote has a near zero chance of affecting the outcome of an election. Under market anarchy, the individual can see how the legal rules of different private courts are working out and can choose among them by his choice of what rights enforcement agency to hire. He cannot, of course, have unlimited choice, since they have to be rules that other rights enforcement agencies are willing to accept, but he has much more control, hence more reason to make an informed choice, than in our system.

It follows that the laws produced under market anarchy will tend to be welfare maximizing ones. If libertarians are correct, those will tend to be libertarian. There is no guarantee that the legal system will be perfectly libertarian. But then, there is no way to guarantee the outcome of any set of institutions. The reasons to expect the laws to be reasonably libertarian depend neither on philosophers solving the problem of deducing oughts from is’s or on courts and enforcement agencies acting on philosophy rather than self interest. Only on economics.

---

It turns out that Rothbard did comment, in at least one place, on the difference between his view of an anarcho-capitalist legal system and mine, as was pointed out to me by David Gordon, who I have been corresponding with in order to make sure I do not misrepresent Rothbard. David is at the Mises Institute, a Rothbardian institution, and has been very helpful. 

But although Rothbard notes that I do, and he does not, assume that different courts may judge according to different legal rules, he does not deal with the central question of why we would expect the legal rules of a market anarchist society to be libertarian ones. His only answer to that question is: 

"Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 [footnote to my book]But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression."

That is an evasion — proof by definition. He sets up his system, courts adopt rules that permit aggression, and he gets to announce that it isn't anarchism, which has no effect on what they are doing. And by his initial definition it still is anarchy, since courts are not supporting themselves by taxation, hence are not governments. It just isn't libertarian anarchy.

If you find the argument convincing, imagine the same argument by someone on the other side. Someone says what he is in favor of is "Just Statism." You object that, for one reason or another, the state will not act justly. He responds that in that case it is not Just Statism, which is what he is proposing.

---

[1] Rothbard, Murray N. [1965]. “The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economist’s View,” reprinted in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays , pp. 205-218. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000.

[2] An extended discussion of the issue from Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty has been excerpted and webbed on the Mises Institute site. Readers may decide for themselves whether they disagree with my claim that it offers no convincing defense of his position. https://mises.org/library/punishment-and-proportionality-0.

For any Slate Star Codex Refugees

Parts of the community have moved to data secrets lox. It is not as good as SSC was, in part because Scott is not there, but it's considerably better than nothing until SSC reopens. At this point you can look at old SSC posts and comments, but there are no new ones.

A Smaller Point About the Russian Vaccine

People are claiming that the incentive for each country to get a propaganda win by developing its vaccine is bad thing and that Russia is acting badly by introducing a vaccine that has not yet been adequately tested. The only argument I can see for that is the idea that if this vaccine flops that will make people less willing to take the next one, but unless the flop kills a lot of people that seems unlikely, especially since the fact that they are bringing it out early is being widely publicized.

The other, and I think more important, side of the argument is that if the vaccine flops that means Russia has wasted some money and if it has serious side effects, they will effects on Russians. If it succeeds, the rest of the world benefits, with Russia having provided a very large scale stage 3 trial at their expense.

The Russian Vaccine

Nobody appears to have any evidence that the vaccine is either dangerous or ineffective. What people are complaining about is a lack of evidence in the other direction, both because the Russians have not been publishing information on their research and because it is being brought out prior to the usual stage three testing. My conclusion, assuming as seems likely that Putin has or could hire competent people to develop a vaccine, is that it will probably work and probably not have serious side effects. 

My basis for that is what I have read about the other vaccine projects. It seems clear that everyone else is being very careful, unwilling to bring out a vaccine until they are virtually certain of both effectiveness and safety. A vaccine that has passed the stage two testing is probably safe and probably effective, but probably is not sufficient. 

Insisting that you have to be certain a drug is safe is good rhetoric but bad science, since safety is not an option. To see whyy, consider the case of  Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a fertility drug that turned out to produce medical complications in the daughters of some of the women who had taken it. The complications took a minimum of ten to twelve years to appear and the most serious, a form of cancer, appeared, according to varying estimates, in between one in 250 and one in 10,000 of the daughters. In order to be sure a drug did not have such an effect it would be necessary to give it to something upwards of a hundred thousand pregnant women then wait fifteen years or so and do extensive analysis of the medical problems of their children. Applying that standard to protecting against every long-term risk one could think of would make the production of new medical drugs very nearly impossible.

The current global death rate from Covid is about six thousand a day, so each month by which the introduction of a virus is delayed costs about 180,000 lives. That, plus other costs associated with the pandemic, should be set against the risks of introducing a vaccine earlier, when we can be less certain of its safety and efficacy. I do not know enough about the risks of vaccines that have passed the stage one and stage two tests, how serious and how likely they are, to judge whether the caution exhibited by everyone except the Russians would or would not pass a cost/benefit test, and I doubt that current policies are based on any such calculation. But, given how cautious everyone else is being, I doubt that the risk of serious side effects is as much as 25%. If I am correct, the odds are that Putin's decision will turn out to be correct ex post, whether or not it was correct ex ante.