Why I Am a Utilitarian...

The witty, erudite, and highly intelligent Julian Sanchez convinces me that I would be insane were I to prioritize liberty over utility: that I am right to be a utilitarian:

Reason: Save Me From Myself!: Parentalism and the fear of freedom: I had not expected to see non-smokers attacking the ban on principle locked in debate with smokers who, between languorous puffs and grey exhalations, welcomed it as a means of reducing their own smoking. If the argument... sounds strange, it is not, at any rate, rare. When New York City was mulling its own smoking ban, one young "man on the street" interviewee told the Village Voice: "I'd actually be all for it, which is odd since I am a smoker myself. I think it might make me smoke less. The increase in the cost of a pack of cigarettes hasn't stopped me from smoking. I just have friends who come up to visit from Florida bring cartons for me."...

We are all, sometimes, afflicted with akrasia, those attacks of weak will that lead us to satisfy fleeting desires at the expense of our own acknowledged long-term interests. Like Ulysses lashed to the mast, we empty the pantry of sweets, hire pricey personal trainers, join rehab groups, or loudly announce an intention to start working on that novel, knowing how embarrassed we'll feel if there's no progress to report when a friend asks how it's coming.... There may even be ways for government to help us combat akrasia without overly restricting our freedoms.... [P]hilosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah offers... the example of the "self management card." When we go shopping for smokes or fatty foods or alcohol or a dose of heroin, Appiah imagines, the store is required to swipe our cards to ensure we haven't gone over a self-imposed limit.... Normal and necessary as these akrasia-countering mechanisms may be, though, they may also be symptoms of what Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan has dubbed "parentalism."... Parentalism... emerges when we begin to suspect that we ourselves are not competent to make our own choices, to yearn for someone to relieve us of the burden of choice.... The thought is not novel to Buchanan. Jean-Paul Sartre described the "anguish" that comes with our realization that we are "condemned to be free." Marxist psychologist Erich Fromm diagnosed the totalitarian movements of the 20th century as symptoms of an urge to "escape from freedom," from the displacement of a feudal world in which identities were given--a place for everyone, and everyone in his place--with a capitalist order that made who we were and what we were to become seem dizzyingly contingent....

[T]he true parentalist wants to escape not just the burdens of the act of choosing, but the responsibility for making a poor choice. Voluntary market mechanisms for filtering or restraining choice... allow us only to defer responsibility, not avoid it.... But perhaps a more important problem with parentalism is that it licenses what Sartre called "bad faith," the attempt to avoid the burdens of responsibility by denying our own freedom. Classical liberals may even inadvertently encourage this by speaking of responsibility as "the other side" of freedom, as though it were the spinach that had to be cleared away before getting to desert. But is that really so? When we make trivial choices--what to have for dinner, what movie to see, which CD to buy--what we most value is the freedom to select without constraint from many options. Yet when it comes to our most central choices--what kind of person am I to be, what work will I find rewarding?--we may take as least as much satisfaction in the feeling of responsibility for our choices, in knowing that we have shaped a life that is ours even when we have chosen badly.

Classical liberals have become good at explaining how the market order they favor promotes freedom and happiness. They have been less adept at explaining why--at least past a certain point--people ought to want that freedom, which when genuine is always at least a little frightening. In the face of the parentalist impulse, we may need to develop the case that our bad choices, the choices that make us unhappy, are as vital and precious as the ones that bring us joy.

My mind explodes when I read Julian's command to "take as least as much satisfaction in the feeling of responsibility for our choices, in knowing that we have shaped a life that is ours even when we have chosen badly." It is the libertarian version of the old communist story:

Speaker: After the revolution we will all eat strawberries and cream.
Worker: But I don't like strawberries and cream!
Speaker: After the revolution you will eat strawberries and cream--and like it!

Comments

[Maestro]

Isn't it more like the old saying about it being not so much about the destination but rather the journey?

[Brian]

Wouldn't it make more sense to look at this from an efficiency standpoint? If you get bogged down in a debate about how it affects freedom, you're not likely to get anywhere. But if you do it from the way it affects efficiency--the loss of revenue, if any, to businesses versus the savings in regards to health care, for instance--it might make it easier to arrive at a consensus.

[Bikila]

I have no food or resources, but I am grateful that I am free to live my life as I wish until I starve to death.

[Julian Sanchez]

It's not a "command," Brad, it's an observation about what many people in fact care about, even in the face of table pounding about how obviously mad it is.

[vialiy]

As I read it, Julian is not "commanding" us, he's describing a psychological phenomenon : self-esteem. Our rational actions are constrained by a deep-seated desire to be the master of our own lives. Loss of self-esteem generates shame, a very bad feeling, and we try to avoid it when we make our decisions. The self-binding strategy of rendering our intentions public serves to increase potential shame, since shame from other agents' comtempt adds up to our personal shame; it is thus an additionnal motivation to control ourselves. I think this is much more a psychological problem than a moral one.

[Jerry Miner]

Thomas Schelling's book, "Choice and Consequnce" (1985)deals with this issue (from the perspective of rationality) in his usual engaging and thoughtful way.

[wcw]

Crikey, libertarians give me hives. Good paternal
legislation, like smoking bans, solves collective
action problems. Without the bans, a minority of
smokers ruins everyone's health and clothing. The
law is not written so that Julian can muse about
incontinence and responsibility, it is an almost
shockingly effective solution to a real problem.
My guess is that either he doesn't live in an area
that has enacted such a ban, or that he does but
never got out much. I tend philosophically to the
communitarian idylls of a Kropotkin, but stinking
of ash after a night out can cure you of that fast.

[tante aime]

TANTE AIME'S REVERSE-SURFING FUNDAMENTALS

The most powerful research tool on the internet is reverse-surfing.

Begin with a random seed, let's say Findlaw's Usama bin Laden link:

http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/binladen/usbinladen5303101pn.pdf

Google the root fragment of that random seed link:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-44,GGLD:en&q=%22news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/binladen%22

Follow lines of interest as they converge:

http://www.trackingthethreat.com/content/entities/ent1113.htm

http://www.sentineltms.com

http://www.fmsasg.com/

Google converged link and suspected new interlink, say, "FMS + Pentagon":

http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/weblinks/4GW.html

Follow lines of interest as they converge:

http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/trainingmanual.htm

Any questions?

THIS REVERSE-SURFING TUTORIAL BROUGHT TO YOU BY TANTE AIME

[nate]

there are still information assymetries, even in the U.S. People do not always know what they need to make a decision. Sometimes they are intentionally deceived or misled. Ot becomes hard to make someone accept responsibility for decisions, or enjoy even negative outcomes, given they had bad or no information.

Informaton assymetry is not my idea. It was someone else - maybe Stiglitz (not sure).

[Dave Johnson]

What percentage of Americans are obese? What percentage suffer diabetes or other lifestyle diseases?

What percentage of our economy is based on selling goods that are harmful to people or the planet?

What does this say about "freedom?"

Libertarians seek to remove people from the benefit of the institutional memory of civilization, making them easy marks for hucksters. They call the accumulated wisdom "collectivism" and ridicule it. But civilization is based on reigning in negative human traits.

[VinnyD]

Without having read Appiah, I independently conceived of a self-management card a year or two ago while debating the possible legalization of casino gambling here in Maryland. I proposed that a casino be obliged to let each gambler set a limit upon entry, and to cut the gambler off when the gambler reached that limit (for, say, 24 hours). The gambler would then at least have to find another casino, which would give some time for reflection. Unlike Appiah's idea, I think this would be practical, although of course the casino owners would fight it like crazy.

[nate]

Dave Johnson:

Do you work at Kraft? (see list at site below)

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ir?s=KFT

Is your name really Dave Johnson?

[Jason]

Vinny0, several states have systems like yours: Missouri, until very recently at least, was one. The systems was based on a loss limit threshold, which in MO was 500 USD per 24 hour day. You lose 500 dollars, and you can't gamble. Systems was tracked by a handy magnetic card that also keeps track of gaming habits (table, slots, etc.) and comp points. Makes it easier to target promotions and events as well. I think MO recently changed the threshold, however, so don't know what it currently is...

[kharris]

Ones spouse and children ought to have a say in how high the gambling limit is. The notion that we are responsible for our own behavior is all well and good, but it ignores the the implications of family. Spouses' and children's welfare are overwhelmingly implicated in the decisions of the other spouse or the parents. The libertarian view of the world, it seems to me, offers very little recognition of this situation. If I am a dope fiend, go ahead and ignore the difficulties of overcoming addiction and blame me. If my spouse takes up smoking, in bed, with children down the hall, I have a problem. If talking fails, I am left having to take action. Action implies emotional strain on the kids, financial strain on everybody. Meanwhile, the risk of burning to death doesn't go away. We don't want society intervening in this situation?

Don't say the rules surrounding marriage are wrong. Those rules exist. We live in a second-best world. If my spouse smokes in bed, I need a second-best solution. What does Sanchez have to offer?

[tom f]

The individual and social will is a combined action-potential continuum like ocean water and ocean wave are a physical continuum.

My hypothesis is that social orders that attempt to deny one aspect and promote the other cause stress in individuals.

Furthermore, social orders that try and obtain a static equilibrium, fixing in place that which will be relegated to "free choice" and that which will be called "collective decision making", will also cause stress in individuals.

Unfortunately, this hypothesis is so abstract I don't know if it can be at all tested. But it was fun to formulate.

[tom f]

...and yes, I am socially conditioned to enjoy formulating hypotheses.

Kharris: "Spouses' and children's welfare are overwhelmingly implicated in the decisions of the other spouse or the parents. The libertarian view of the world, it seems to me, offers very little recognition of this situation."

Perhaps a libertarian would reason thus: you are not compelled to marry and not compelled to stay married, not even compelled to have children. Nor are coercive collectivist institutions (i.e. the govt) responsible for shielding their citizens from risks or opportunities afforded by contracts that both parties have consented to.

I don't accept the atomistic individual assumption of the libertarian creed, but I'm quite sure that libertarians salivate at the chance to show that their creed effectively addresses the everyday scenario's that you propose.

[tom f]

...and yes, I am socially conditioned to enjoy formulating hypotheses.

Kharris: "Spouses' and children's welfare are overwhelmingly implicated in the decisions of the other spouse or the parents. The libertarian view of the world, it seems to me, offers very little recognition of this situation."

Perhaps a libertarian would reason thus: you are not compelled to marry and not compelled to stay married, not even compelled to have children. Nor are coercive collectivist institutions (i.e. the govt) responsible for shielding their citizens from risks or opportunities afforded by contracts that both parties have consented to.

I don't accept the atomistic individual assumption of the libertarian creed, but I'm quite sure that libertarians salivate at the chance to show that their creed effectively addresses the everyday scenarios that you propose.

[JR]

Human beings are animal creatures with innate drives and limited perceptual and computational abilities, which evolved because they were useful in environments very different from ours. More and more, sophisticated techniques are used to harness these characteristics in ways that are profitable to corporations but harmful to individuals.

It is not an acknowledgment of "weak will" or moral failure to recognize that we have the inherent inclination to eat more fatty food than is healthy, to use anxiety-reducing drugs like nicotine in place of the instinctive fight-or-flight reaction, to be susceptible to the suggestive advertising of alcohol, to be unable to calculate odds of winning at gambling rationally and bet accordingly, to sit for hours in front of a TV set, mesmerized by the flickering image.

The cause of individual liberty is not served when people are manipulated by hidden psychological means into buying and consuming things that are harmful to us and those around us.

[johnchx]

Julian Sanchez comments: "It's not a 'command,' Brad, it's an observation..."

But the original article says: "They have been less adept at explaining why--at least past a certain point--PEOPLE OUGHT TO WANT THAT FREEDOM, which when genuine is always at least a little frightening." (emphasis added)

Perhaps "command" is a little strong...but is it really consistent with libertarian values to tell other people what they "ought to want"?

[Daniel Barnes]

This Sanchez piece reads like a page out of Karl Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies", only with a confused conclusion. The "escape from freedom" sounds like Popper's description of the rejection of the 'open society' for the closed, uncritical world of the tribe - to 'parentalism'. And of course, our freedom must include the freedom to make mistakes. But Popper's critique is more subtle than the usual tirade against state 'paternalism' we all know and love. As he points out, even the most basic functions of state, such as defence and justice, which are essential in the Libertarian argument, *are themselves paternalistic*. There is always the big parent in the background should someone punch Johnny on the nose or steal his lunch money. So objections to state intervention on the grounds of 'parentalism' or 'paternalism' are simply rhetorical. And Popper's reasoning is also utilitarian, but a negative variation that takes as its motto "Minimise misery" rather than the far more problematic 'Maximise happiness'. Because pain and pleasure are not symmetrical; we may never know how to make someone else (or ourselves) happy, but we can stitch an open wound.

Why I hear Fromm discussed 50 times more frequently than Popper (ie: hardly at all) and why 'The Open Society' is entirely forgotten I do not know. Perhaps Brian Boyd's massive forthcoming Popper biography may change things.

[PW]

I'm getting to be more and more of a left-libertarian in my dotage and find Brad's post really quite marvelous.

In the matter of smoking bans, I'd find it unacceptable if it came down from the federal government but in fact all the smoking bans I know about are community-based. Maybe I'm not a devoted or pure enough left-libertarian, or maybe what I'm not is an anarchist.

Or may I am an anarchist. After all, our liberties (and health) as individuals have diminished thanks to the political and economic power of corporations. In that sense, I guess I'm a bomb-throwing anarchist: Altria... ka...BOOM!

As for Fromm, I'll just barely accept that he was a Marxist (s-t-r-e-t-c-h) but he was certainly an analyst, not a psychologist, and he was a humanist.

[Richard DiMatteo]

I'm not particularly convinced about the worth of oddball constraints to control our urges and copping out on our responsibility for our own personal addictions, since on the few occasions when I decide not to eat that peanut cluster or buy that third martini, I would really hate to deny myself that sense of self-righteous triumph that saying no provides. That occasional triumph is why I can say yes so often without feeling the slightest bit guilty. What Mr. Sanchez does address, however, is why so many people gravitate to and desparately grasp the moral and intellectual crutch of conservative religions. No need to deal with the abyssal fear of conscience, only the nagging pangs of gratuitously imposed guilt, comforted by our own sense of unworthiness.

[nate]

interesting... what do you think of casinos where people may have incentives to get someone in the hock and get his house?

[wml]

This all reminds me of the concept of whether there is a persistent "self" over time and how it relates to libertarianism versus consequentialism. Essentially, classical libertarianism believes in a persistent self. If the self changed with time, signing and enforcing contracts that bind a future self would be as invalid as signing a contract that binds a seperate person. Only instant contracts would be valid, greatly limiting the scope of libertarianism.

The observed empirical fact that human beings do not behave in a manner consistent with time-consistent preferences could be thought of as evidence that the persistent-self hypothesis is false. (Of course, it might just be evidence that people don't behave as if they are rational)

Consequentialism is more-or-less immune to this metaphysical question of persistent self. This property has been used as a criticism (consequentialism fails to respect separate indivduals as individuals) and as an argument in favor of universal consequentialism against egoism ala Derek Parfit (why should I value the welfare of my future self, who is not the same person as current self, more than the welfare of other persons?)

Now in the case of smoking, one could think of starting smoking as a long-term contract between one's current self and one's future selves, enforced not by the state, but by the addictive nature of the drug. For a short-run gain or whim, someone binds future selves with "force" to have to smoke more and suffer health consequences. (The bind isn't iron-clad, but then again, neither are real-world government enforced contracts) If the driving force behind libertarianism is respect for liberty (and not fear of government) and one rejects the metaphysical claim of persistent-selves, then starting smoking might be condemned as wrong on liberty grounds.

In other words, there is a tension between respecting liberty and letting people addict themselves, and this tension becomes manifest if we drop the persistent-self claim. It is possible to balk at general government paternalism on liberty grounds, but be wary of freely allowing people to addict themselves to chemicals on simular liberty grounds.

[battlepanda]

Thanks for a good laff, Brad.

This kind of blind insistence on individual freedom above every other value is so sophomoric. "I can jump off any bridge I want", shouts the teenager, before slamming the door and reading some Ayn Rand.

Freedom is a beautiful thing, but only because it is such a powerful means to achieving happiness. To forget why freedom is so precious in the first place and focus on breaking down every restriction society places on its members (decisions we ultimately participated in as members of a democracy) instead is short-sighted and destructive. To borrow Elizabeth Anderson's example, we give up a little freedom by obeying traffic laws, and in return we get the greater freedom of getting where we want to with minimum danger or chaos.

[anne]

Lovely Battlepanda comment.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=4610&u=186|12|...

Great Blue Heron Preening
New York City--Central Park, The Loch.

[Sean McCann]

wml has it right. There's no reason to regard self-binding choices I make now as being more authentic than a choice I'd make in the future. Thinking otherwise isn't just bad social policy, it's weirdly absolutist.

[MTC]

"as though it were the spinach that had to be cleared away before getting to desert."

Aren't the Chinese planting millions of trees trying to prevent this kind of thing?

Or perhaps this is a Biblical reference, from Exodus or Isaiah? Maybe is it one of the parables of Jesus?

I am so confused.

[Daniel Barnes]

Battlepanda:
>To borrow Elizabeth Anderson's example, we give up a little freedom by obeying traffic laws, and in return we get the greater freedom of getting where we want to with minimum danger or chaos.

Yes. This is negative utilitarianism. Not "which will maximise happiness?", but "which will *minimise misery*?". The loss of a small freedom in the form of a tax to support a defence force is better than the major loss of freedom one might suffer without well supported national defence. Just a like a painful vaccination is better than polio, or obeying traffic laws is less painful than having accidents. Why this is so intellectually debatable I do not really understand, unless we have expectations that such laws cannot often be in error, inaccurate or counterproductive, like most human decisions. Hence they must be made minimally, carefully and revocably. But there is nothing wrong with the basic principle behind making them.

[masaccio]

Just remember, Sartre's "anguish" at the notion of the responsibility that comes with freedom, becomes heroism in Camus' hands. Read The Rebel, or The Myth of Sisyphus. Only cowards think responsibility is terrifying. Only children run for the protection of treating a sacred volume as a binding set of regulations handed down by a jealous and dangerous being in the sky, instead of a guide created by our ancestors.

[tom f]

I'm getting more pop-psychology from the libertarian-leaning posters. The presumption is that those of us, when we argue for collectivist intervention against personal liberty, are probably doing it because we are cowards or have some other pyschological shortcoming.

That's not an argument, its an ad hominem rhetorical fallacy.

My point isn't that personal responsibility is terrifying so we should avoid it. Rather, personal responsibiltity is a partial truth, a perspective; an intellectual conceit, not a verifiable and self-evident truth.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Well tom, it sounds like a bunch of reified abstract concepts to me, too! Maybe they'll all choke to death on cigarette smoke!

[Daniel Barnes]

Tom:
>I'm getting more pop-psychology from the libertarian-leaning posters.

They say even Von Mises himself advocated the draft if the enemy was at the gates...;-) And then if we're agreed on the principle, everything else is just a question of degree.

[tom f]

"personal responsibiltiy" is a social creation; "society" is a creature of humanity that only manifests as individuals with free will.

Let's not try and clean up that mess with slick philosophies.

[tom f]

...but trite paradoxes are welcome

[pat]

This is a bit off topic to Brad's original post.

In defense of libertarians, the key issue is WHO gets to decide what is good for an individual. Many posts appear to have the position that as long as it is the "community" (how is it different from government in a democratic society?) makes the call, it is OK. But majority often make terrible choices in terms of utility maximization (for a recent example, think of the 52 percent who voted for Bush). That is why a libertarian would agree to follow the majority rule only on issues that are truly collective, because even though democracy is a terrible system, it is still better than any other alternatives; but a libertarian would insist that on issues that largely about individual choices, a person should be left alone to decide for himself/herself.

Of course, in practice, very few actions will only affect one individual, but a libertarian will rather err on the side of not enough intervention, and insists that it is not sufficient for "collective" intervention just because an individual choice will have some impact on other people. A good example is homosexuality. To make it concrete, let's think of China: in China, homosexuality is still viewed by majority as obnormal, a physical illness. And it certainly affects more than the individuals involved: for one, with one-child policy, the family line will end if the only child insists on living as a homosexual and we are talking about some really misrable grandparents not-to-be. The same logic leads a Chinese to support a smoking ban is probably also going to lead them to support various "interventions" (i.e., oppressions) on homosexuals. (Come to think of it, voters in many states in the US decided to prevent gays to get married just last year.)

I sometimes suspect that what separates a liberal and a libertarian is that a liberal believes that the majority are usually right, whereas a libertarian believes that the majority can often be wrong -- and the last election in the US seems to support the libertarian's.

[Jack]

The observed empirical fact that human beings do not behave in a manner consistent with time-consistent preferences could be thought of as evidence that the persistent-self hypothesis is false. (Of course, it might just be evidence that people don't behave as if they are rational)

[donna]

I still think the answer is sealed-off plexiglass rooms for smokers....

[Keith Brown]

Yes, the "you'll be happy being free even if freedom doesn't make you happy" argument is a bad one, and Julian is wrong. But Brad and his merry band of paternalistic statists miss some important points.

If we have the ability to individually contract with private agents or even the state to control our worst urges (or have the government order a provider to contract with us), then the efficiency-based case for paternalistic collective action disappears.

If we can have casinos provide limits to people, then outlawing gambling surely violates liberty and is also inefficient. If we can have people write and enforce self-controlling contracts over gambling, then outlawing gambing becomes completely inefficient.

If potential and actual smokers can contract with the government over their cigarette taxes to reflect their individual desires for paternalism, then there is no case for collective paternalism on smoking issues.

And on smoking bans, why not implement the following:
At the beginning of each year, randomly select 25-75% of bars/restaurants and designate them non-smoking. The rest of the bars/restaurants can do what they like. You could also permit a secondary market where bars/restaurants could sell their right to allow smoking to other bars/restaurants. (And the market price of that license might tell you whether to increase or decrease the percentage of non-smoking bars/restaurants.)

That would give non-smokers who are all twitchy about smoking plenty of places to go, and the rest of us could go on having a good time. And it's far more efficient than a simple smoking ban. After all, under a smoking ban, the marginal value of allowing smoking at one place is of far greater value to smokers than it is to nonsmokers.

Thus, smoking bans still reflect the evil of a majority that can get away with pushing around a minority at the ballot box, and are therefore very, very uncivilized.

Brad and his commenters may make short work of Julian's argument, but they fail to apprehend two things:

1. As we gain the ability to write individual paternal contracts, then we don't need collective paternalism.

2. Libertarianism/Classical liberalism is perhaps our most important social contract. It insures that you won't use the state take away my freedom, and I won't use the state to take away yours. That allows us to have a state that does not devolve into a mere club in Hobbesian war of all against all. Loss of respect for that contract could destroy us.

[liberal]

Note that right-libertarianism, as espoused by most of its advocates, is a philosophy advocating the use of government force (or similar force) to crush freedom:

http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

[liberal]

Keith Brown wrote, "Libertarianism/Classical liberalism is perhaps our most important social contract. It insures that you won't use the state take away my freedom, and I won't use the state to take away yours."

Garbage. As the link I just posted shows, so-called libertarianism rejoices in using state power to take away freedom.

[Jason]

In principle, Libertarians believe in the freedom of the individual from coersion and the right of parties to form voluntary associations for mutual gain(contractual agreements). In practice, Libertarians belive that only their *own* freedom is really all that's important: freedom here being the ability to be capricious, arbitrary, and above the general Laws of society. Libertarians (in my experience) see little enough value in working toward goals that *may* benefit others more than themselves, and are generally extremely self-oriented in their views. The problem with this attitude is that it leads one to act in a manner that maximizes *personal* satisfaction, but is often dismissive of the long term, destructive effects of those actions on others. An example here would be barring poor people from receiving *any* healthcare that they could not immediately pay for; I have heard this posed as a serious solution to the healthcare debacle. The person posing this solution basically told me: "F*ck 'em. If they die, they die. It's not my problem. I can pay for my own stuff." My Liberatrian acquaintances also display a streak of immediate, primitive violence which I find quite odd considering that the philosophical underpinnings *demand* generally non-violent behavior (threat of violence being coersive).

[J Thomas]

Apart from the psychology of real libertarians (if we argue about that we're doing the same thing they were doing psychologising nonlibertarians), and apart from the political strategies of real people who call themselves right libertarians,

What do you think of Keith Brown's ideas?

Sometimes it should be possible for government to provide sophisticated complex regulation instead of simple brutal bans. It depends on technology.

Back when we didn't have much techie stuff compared to now, and not a whole lot of surplus, some governments financed themselves mostly with a salt tax. The king would grant a monopoly to one of his friends to provide salt. Sea salt and salt mines are both pretty easy to regulate. Salt is heavy and bulky and hard to smuggle. Everybody needs it. So the monopolist could make plenty of money and the king could tax his friend. The tax was roughly equitable since everybody needed salt but rich people used more than poor people. There were various ways this was inefficient but it may have been the best they could do given their resources.

Now that we have efficient information technology, we could make a start at better laws. Like, we tried Prohibition. Alcohol is sometimes very bad for people so we made it illegal. that didn't work. So some states made ABC stores, they intended to keep the price higher than simple market forces would put it, and so rational people would use less alcohol than they would otherwise and drunkards would at least give their money to the government instead of to criminals. But now -- say you had smart cards for drivers licenses. People could have an alcohol allowance on their drivers licenses, whenever you buy alcohol the system records how much you're buying. Try to buy more than is reasonable and they don't let you. People could cadge drinks but when they did they'd be admitting they were drinking more than the government recommends. I'm not sure how you'd do big drunken parties, hosts like to just provide drinks and not worry about drivers licenses, but probably something could be worked out.

And if we wanted to, the system could even be kind of voluntary. Like, you could set your own limit wherever you wanted but you might have to pay a fee to set it real high, and maybe get a tax rebate (and a car insurance discount) if you set it low.

There are lots of things we could do other than simple prohibitions. Simply making things against the law is necessary when the system has to be very simple. But we have the technology to do things that we couldn't do even 10 years ago. And people who call themselves libertarians are likely to come up with innovative approaches due to their ideology. Some of those approaches may be useful, and could be adapted to real government.

I kind of liked Keith's idea about having a lottery for restaurants to allow smoking, and letting them trade licenses. It would allow a lot of places with no smoking and also some places for smokers. I'm not sure I see why it should be a lottery with resale -- why not just have an auction and sell the smoking licenses to the highest bidders, and keep the money? A restaurant that can't afford to pay for a smoking license wouldn't benefit all that much if it randomly got to allow smoking one year in 4 or 5, what it gets is the money from selling the license. Why have a lottery to give free stuff to restaurant owners? People would look for loopholes in the laws regulating what's a restaurant; if they found one they could amke fake restaurants just for the chance to get a smoking license to sell.

Things like this are worth thinking out. Some people who call themselves libertarians are likely to have interesting ideas that are worth careful consideration.

[Northern Observer]

The more I think about Libertarian political philosophy, the more aware I am of its incredible destructive potential. Brad makes a joke of it in his post, but there is a radical root to the Libertarian ethos that quite like the Marxist ethos, is quite dismissive of human suffering. Results are seen as besides the point. Freedom comes before the citizen in this world view and it is quite sure of itself.

Neo conservatism and religious paternalism are on the way out. They've over reached and are being discredited by the War. My concern is that when the GOP fractures the hard core libertarians will get a crack at running the show and imposing their liberty on us.

Freedom without democracy is tyranny. Period.

It seems to me the key is to reconcile the ideas of Ludwig Von Mies and Karl Polanyi; reconcile the ideas of freedom with the ideas of democracy. Instead the Libertarian brain trust marches forward in righteous certainty.

[liberal]

Jason wrote, "In principle, Libertarians believe in the freedom of the individual from coersion and the right of parties to form voluntary associations for mutual gain(contractual agreements)."

That's simply false, at least as it applies to most right-libertarians ("right-wing" libertarians, as opposed to left-wing libertarians (aka anarchists)).

Libertarians clearly believe that certain privileged individuals have the right, enforced by the guns of the government, to force other individuals to pay them for access to land, even though the holders of the title to the land didn't do anything (in terms of exerting labor or investing capital) to produce the land.

[liberal]

J Thomas wrote, "Things like this are worth thinking out. Some people who call themselves libertarians are likely to have interesting ideas that are worth careful consideration."

Not really, given that most of them despise justice and freedom, as the author of
http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
points out.

[battlepanda]

Interesting...the conversation is evolving in a positive direction. How can governments move away from trying to enforce an outcome to laying down procedural rules that discourages bad social effects without the crudeness of outright prohibitions? I'd be all for that, on an empirial case-by-case basis where cost/benefit is constantly monitored, of course.

I feel a lot of sympathy for smokers, but in a way it is a habit that most vividly demonstrates the limits of pretending there is a concrete "self" remaining constant across time. How many elderly smokers, if given access to a wayback machine, would not bitchslap their younger selves silly and harangue them to stay away from the cancer sticks?

We are supposed not to have the right to sell ourselves into bondage. But, in a small way, is this not what a teenager does when they pick up cigarettes? For what in retrospect seems like trifling rewards (satisfying a curiosity, alleviating peer pressure, aspiration to an image/lifestyle) they sign away a lot of their health and a sizable sum of money extracted over a lifetime.

[mtnmarty]

Dear Brad,

We are all confused because economics has not helped us with the problem of choosing our preferences.

Economists historically have treated preferences as givens and not as endogenous to the models.

The big question is not how to maximize one's preferences, but rather what preferences should one create?

This line of thought that "it is better to be in control of preferences than to maximize preferences", is closely related to the insanity that exploded Brad's brain.

How can someone as smart as Brad even begin to apprehend the world without recognizing the mind-blowing power of the fact that some, maybe even many people really, truly prefer to be self-destructive?

Its really a masochists dream world, is it not, to prohibit masochism, thereby creating the happiness of suffering by outlawing the process of causing suffering.

The completely mind-blowing thing to the "rational liberals" is a thoroughgoing rational preference for one's own suffering.

Its all so sick, sick, sick...

[J Thomas]

Liberal, I want to encourage you to separate the message from the messenger. See whether you can find something valuable there even if the central intention is bad.

Many of the libertarians I've met were so enslaved by an ideology that they seemed to care about nothing else. They have a sense of what's fair, what's right and wrong. And if it were to turn out that the only way to make things fair was to reduce the world population to 20 million, they'd say that we should enforce fairness and let market forces adjust the population downward.

However, some of these doctrinaire people are very creative. They have to be. They argue with supporters of the status quo, who ask things like "How could we develop a freeway system without using eminent domain?". And they come up with answers that they believe would work, and examples that seem to fit their ideas.

My experience has been that I get better ideas about economics and law from libertarians than I get about evolutio from creation science guys. The libertarians are smarter, and they're working with something where there's more information, more developed theory, and where things are *supposed* to work out according to logic. They question assumptions that most of us haven't felt the need to question, and they get results that we wouldn't get.

Apart from the results they *want*, their thinking could lead to some methods that are actually workable and useful for what you want.

Ignoring their methods because you don't like their politics would be like ignoring blitzkrieg and the tactics of mobile warfare because you didn't like nazis.

[liberal]

J Thomas wrote, "They argue with supporters of the status quo, who ask things like 'How could we develop a freeway system without using eminent domain?'. And they come up with answers that they believe would work, and examples that seem to fit their ideas."

I'm well aware of the so-called creative thinking you speak of. Examples include a judicial system and military protection provided by non-State agents. Clearly the former would evolve into a system biased in favor of deep pockets, while the latter would evolve into either complete anarchy or a feudalistic system. Count me unimpressed.

"My experience has been that I get better ideas about economics and law from libertarians than I get about evolutio from creation science guys."

Well, that's setting a low standard.

Libertarians, at least the "royal" libertarians I speak of, know essentially nothing about the fundamentals of economics. To wit: the classical liberals (from whom they claim to have descended) understood that land is a separate factor of production (the other two being capital and labor), and that there's a fundamental injustice involved in allowing landowners to collect Ricardian rent from non-landowners.

"The libertarians are smarter, and they're working with something where there's more information, more developed theory, and where things are *supposed* to work out according to logic."

Hardly. They're no more intelligent than anyone else. Their distinguishing feature is that they get lots of money to support their so-called creative thinking from right-wing libertarian think tanks and right-wing endowed chairs. (Where do you think Cato and right-wing econ profs get their money?)

[J Thomas]

Liberal, I'm also unimpressed with the free-market judicial system (which failed in the obvious ways in old iceland) and many other of their ideas. But I think some of their ideas have some potential. Not necessarily in the form they present them, and not necessarily with their goals in mind.

If there are others doing that kind of thing I'd like to hear about them; the nonlibertarian economists I've listened to have wanted to talk about other things -- interesting and useful things, but not this.

I agree that I'm accepting a very low standard. But in my experience libertarians have been much more logical and much more (reasonably) creative than Creation Science guys. I didn't mean to imply that they're better than nonlibertarian economists. I think part of the reason for this is that creation scientists are looking for reasons that evolution can't work, so they tend to find things that look superficially implausible to have evolved, and argue that because they can't think of a way for them to have evolved they didn't. But (some) libertarians are looking for ways to make things work and so they have a better attitude.

I think some of their offbeat ideas are worth considering for whatever value can be dredged from them. Keith Brown posted some interesting ideas in this very thread, and they're worth considering apart from his motives.

[Kiril]

These threads are boring.

The non-smokers say, "you smokers are stinking up my air with your awful smoke."

Smokers say, "then go somewhere else where people don't smoke."

Non-smokers respond, "but all the places I want to go allow smoking. I should be able to enjoy myself when I go out. That's not fair."

Solution? Ban smoking.

Smokers say, "all the places I want to go don't allow smoking. I should be able to enjoy myself when I go out. That's not fair."

Non-smokers say, "nyaaah!"