I have a confession to make: I invented “Free Market
Fairness.”
Well, all due credit must go to the Brown professor who
actually wrote a book by that title – John Tomasi – and now to the critics with
whom he has been engaged in a productive dialogue on the BleedingHeartLibertarians site
for the past two weeks.
But just as Tomasi was excited to discover that libertarian
economist Friedrich Hayek had briefly engaged in speculations similar to those
of left-liberal philosopher John Rawls three decades before Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice, so too did I
suggest about a decade ago – mostly in private places like an e-mail to Critical Review editor Jeffrey Friedman
– that if people’s basic pragmatic objection to libertarianism is that they
think the poor will end up starving, maybe we should all just agree to embrace
“anarcho-capitalism with a Rawlsian escape clause.”
That is, we have an anarcho-capitalist law code – property
rights recognized as (privately) legally enforceable but no government
whatsoever – but with the caveat that more conventional (and still minimal)
elements of governmental law kick in in the event that resulting conditions are
sufficiently awful. If people are
starving (or some other litmus test) – and, crucially, if no one quickly comes
up with a better voluntary solution – then and only then can you tax and
redistribute a little.
Everyone wins this way, both the liberty-seekers and the
worried left-liberals. Think of it as a
“virtual safety net,” kicking in only if needed. And I suspect it never would be. But the creepy truth, of course, is that many
people want there to be a government bossing you around all the time whether it proves necessary or not –
and, like teachers unions, they dread ever letting the public learn firsthand
whether the government can be dispensed with.
Social democrats think it’s inherently valuable to govern you.
Is it any wonder they tend to love power-worshipping philosophers
like Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Foucault despite seeming, superficially, to be on
completely different pages politically from those figures?
So, Seavey:Tomasi::Hayek:Rawls.
A couple years
later, I even made a note to myself suggesting Compassionate Capitalism as a possible title for a book on the
subject. This is, of course, another
reminder to do (quickly) instead of just
imagining (as are my notes for a
possible movie about a president fighting vampires, though I wanted to make it
Teddy Roosevelt).
•••
Of course, there are others interested in these
philosophical intersections, including Will Wilkinson, who has called himself a
“Rawlsekian” (partly Rawls-influenced, partly Hayek-influenced). It’s sort of fitting I mention Will’s and
Jacob Levy’s somewhat mushy philosophical faction six days prior to Canada Day,
since it seems like that nation, to which both of them have ties, keeps
cropping up in frustratingly-moderate political conversations (see: David
Brooks).
But the sorts of people who respect Hegel and fist-raising
campaigns for “social justice” dominate political science and philosophy
departments, so
we purportedly need to suck up to them, or at least talk to
them, somehow (though in a fluid and rapidly-changing world, I’d urge people to
question that assumption – maybe, for instance, we’d make greater progress by
not talking to them and indeed by discouraging people from attending liberal
arts colleges, or encouraging them to take economics classes instead of
political philosophy).
In any case, as a consequentialist (which Tomasi also
purports to be, despite explicitly eschewing facts and history in formulating
his own Rawls-meets-Hayek model of a just society) – and not merely as an
anti-intellectual, despite what some might think – I think I’m allowed to ask
pragmatic questions such as “If we are not merely talking about which
principles are true but also how to frame them for purposes of rhetoric,
political alliance-making, and tradition-adopting, aren’t I allowed to ask what
sorts of people will be encouraged by us adopting their language?”
Put very briefly in more technical terms: A good utilitarian
consequentialist like me actually should
ask himself not just which principles would be best in an ideal world but which
ones are likely to produce the happiest results in the form most likely to end
up being propagated among ordinary real people, a conservative – and
potentially very traditionalist – point that must feed back into the
formulation of the principles themselves, tending to keep them simple and
easily-taught, not 600 pages long and read only by professors.
(You can only add so many footnotes to the marvelous rule
“property” before most people’s eyes glaze over and the elites, experts, and
exploiters step in to run the show in the public’s stead. Might Tea Party-like and Ron Paul-endorsed
footnotes sell more easily than multiple treatises on Rawls? I’m no longer inclined to rule out any options,
but real-world evidence currently suggests the paleolibertarian path is more
fertile ground than either the leftward path or the neoconservative one.)
Most of the advocates of “social justice” I’ve read about or
met – including perhaps a majority of Democrats, feminists, and self-described
liberals (these all being minority factions in the U.S., by the way) – seem
pretty damn hostile to the free markets, property rights, and individualism
that made up most of the good points about the libertarian philosophy last time
I checked (this explains the sometimes-hostile sparring in which I’ve engaged,
roughly since the Financial Crisis began, with the so-called “liberaltarians”
who sought to drag the philosophy I love in that strange direction).
We should be very cautious about giving them an inch, but
the liberal-tarians run to embrace them with open arms, proudly displaying
their shared contempt for conservatives all the way.
•••
Is it so wrong to think the left-libertarians are either
self-destructively confused, excessively flattering to the enemy’s
sensibilities, or a bit too concerned about ingratiating themselves with the
(academic and media) powers that be (all perhaps on a subconscious rather than
conniving level)? I mean, can even as
thoughtful and diplomatic-seeming a fellow as Tomasi honestly say he’d be
engaged in showing all the parallels between our thinking and that of the
welfare-statist left if, say, there were only four people in the world who
believed in welfare-statist leftism? Can
we at least admit there’s something wrong with a philosophy (or philosophical
faction) founded on fear of being outnumbered?
If we all admit that part of the motivation for this whole
morphing “liberaltarian”/BleedingHeartLibertarian/market democracy project is
“outreach,” it’s at least fair to judge it by which direction it tends to nudge
people. Of course, the criteria for
judging are themselves in flux, which complicates things, but if the relevant
set of judges are all sort-of in agreement that something like a vague version
of traditionally-libertarian metrics – getting more people to believe in
freedom and individual happiness as good things – is the correct measure, what
is the net impact of BHL (as I’ll call it for simplicity)?
Well, lacking hard stats (certainly lacking hard long-term
stats), I’m thrown back on crude hunches and anecdotal impressions – but mine
tend to be right, I’ve gradually, humbly concluded over the past couple
decades. And I’ve yet to encounter
anyone who said they were won over to belief in markets and liberty precisely
by the liberal, mushy, open-ended quality of BHL.
On the contrary, I think the libertarian movement is growing
by leaps and bounds due to a new generation prone to make clear, short,
precise, some might say fanatical anarcho-capitalist arguments that skip right
over two centuries of classical liberal meandering and ask the hard, direct,
easily-repeated questions like “Do you own your body or do other people?” – but
at the same time BHL is pulling in the opposite direction and priding itself on
its ostensibly greater nuance and sophistication.
What if it’s both wrong and
less popular, though?
I can see a strong case for saying strict property rights
are strongly correlated to preference fulfillment – and thus to human happiness
(regardless of whether one thinks of this as a utilitarian, rule-utilitarian,
or rights-based argument). I can also
see a booming political movement of people who believe this, confirming my
rarely-spoken youthful suspicion that clarity, simplicity, and moral directness
sell in a way that number-crunching
stats and political compromise do not. I
do not see Democrats and “social justice” advocates rushing to meet the
liberal-tarians half way.
I do see things like a Catholic acquaintance of mine, a
conservative affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, expressing his excitement
that Tomasi, finally, is the libertarian who has admitted the failure of
libertarianism – the classical liberal who says that individual and property
rights can’t get the job done after all.
Meanwhile, politically-ambiguous Reihan Salam over at National Review, having read part of the
BHL site’s Tomasi symposium, expresses newfound enthusiasm, not for
libertarianism, but for the BHL idea (captured by Elizabeth Anderson) that
perhaps we should regulate workplaces to make them more “democratic” and
non-authoritarian instead of letting individuals contract for whatever office
arrangements the market will bear.
This is progress, I guess – in the wrong direction. But, hey, they’ll let us into the faculty
lounge, so who cares what happens to civilization or how the next election
goes?
•••
I was more of a gradualist myself not long ago, hoping to
nudge the right’s rhetoric in our direction in much the same way Tomasi et al
hope to nudge the left – and indeed, I’m newly content to let people try all
possible approaches simultaneously (I have met libertarians running for office,
for instance, as Republicans, as Libertarians, and as Democrats, and that’s
great – more about some of them, as well as Romney, tomorrow). But a thought more recently nudging me in a
radical direction is abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s prescient warning
that “Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.”
There is always the risk that in playing double agent you
simply become the enemy. At times, in
talking to the liberal-tarians, you feel a bit like you’re having the following
dialogue:
YOU: Bad news: social democracy causes all manner of
inefficiencies and intrusions on people’s private decisions. Worse, it appears that once strict property
rights are abandoned, things almost inevitably decay into social democracy.
A BHL: Huh. Well, don’t
despair – I have great news! If we just
abandon strict property rights, we can join the social democrats!
YOU: Uh. You may have
misheard me a moment ago...
A BHL: Stop being a dogmatist! We can preserve and improve libertarianism,
the philosophy based on the idea that you should be free to do things that
don’t violate property rights, simply by abandoning the idea that it’s
particularly important whether you violate property rights.
YOU: What?
A BHL: [Pauses.] And now we are all friends!
YOU: Is there something wrong
with you?
I notice that an earlier Wilkinson contribution to the BHL
site elicited a comment in response from a former Joseph Stiglitz speechwriter
who made the point that coercion is not special – which may tell us all we need
to know about Stiglitz, who I earlier caught flak for calling unserious. Will humanity really be better off if we play
nice with these people instead of calling them dangerous?
Indeed, I have a frightening prediction about how it all
ends: As a new wave of creepy Cass-Sunstein-like statism permeates libertarianism
and the right, instead of the BHL crowd looking with horror on what they have
wrought, revisionist egotism will persuade them that no one was talking about
liberty at all before they came
along. But they were – and more
persuasively.
On a broader and more positive note, though, I always used
to say it’d be great if libertarianism were relevant and popular enough for
people to start arguing over its internal divisions – and that in the meantime
we might as well just stick to the unpopular-enough-already case for shrinking government at all. Maybe it’s actually relevant and popular
enough now to start having those internal arguments in public. Let’s hope we don’t fly to pieces because of
it, though.
In the interests of keeping the peace while the debate
proceeds, I will adopt a newly-moderate tone at the monthly onstage debates I
host (the Dionysium), focus my intellectual efforts there on cross-pollination
and dialogue instead of crushing error, and maybe in my spare time write a book
about how we can all achieve political consensus (if I don’t have time to pitch
that, someone pay me to write on this topic – or any, really – on a regular
basis).
•••
Meanwhile, of course, there are some left-libertarians who
would have me believe that feminism is, despite all appearances, a great
expression of individual freedom, not
collectivist guilt, egalitarianism, and distrust of unplanned market
outcomes. They probably like “social
justice,” too – but, funny thing, only about a quarter of Americans call
themselves feminists and they tend to be people who hate markets, so I’m not
sure why we think that’s the direction in which to march seeking allies.
Why, look! Here’s a
tweet about social justice from SocialistGirls I saw just the other day: “The
revolutionary girl puts the fight for social justice ahead of brand names and
designer jeans and all these products of exploitation.” Sounds like a more typical use of the term
“social justice” to me than does Tomasi’s usage. Wanna have a contest where you try to recruit
people like that and I go to some Young Republicans gatherings and we see who
makes the most converts?
(I think I’d win that one even more easily than my bet with
Jacob Levy about whether government expands faster under Obama, always one
admittedly fraught with contingencies. I
wonder if he’d at least admit Milton Friedman-praising Romney sounds better
than the now continually market-bashing Obama, even if we both plan to vote for
Gary Johnson?)
Even the makers of this amusing feminist comedy
clip can’t resist including an implicit condemnation of gold
standard-praising capitalists while they’re reminding us that anyone who thinks
male and female brains differ is an idiot.
This is not a coincidence – as is pretty obvious to everyone except, it
seems, some liberal-tarians.
Maybe the whole liberal-tarian drift, with its de-emphasis
of property rights, is just an inevitable, recurring consequence of the
intellectuals controlling an idea for long enough. Sooner or later, intellectuals always end up
deciding (surprise!) that mental freedom matters more than material freedom
(speech yes, property maybe, in short). Intellectuals
easily forget this, though: Mental
freedom is pretty cheap, given that the authorities can never really get inside your skull anyway. So telling me the government will “only”
control the material, external resources of the world – while leaving me heaps
of freedom in other realms – is a bit like saying, “We’re only going to
withhold the kind of food you eat with
your mouth, but you will have complete freedom of choice when it comes to
knee-intake food. Knock yourself out!”
And so, up go my taxes, while the intellectuals chip away
at...gender preconceptions...or excessively Western cosmological models...or
something. Hey, thanks a ton,
really.
•••
BHL site contributor Jessica Flanigan not only worries
whether workplaces might sometimes be too sexist to foster sufficiently
individualist-liberal forms of autonomy, she notes in passing in one entry that
she thinks Scandinavian governments are in some respects superior to our own,
that she’s not confident empirical evidence would vindicate market economies as
the best kind, and that ultimately the empirical facts don’t matter greatly in
her conception of justice anyway (echoing Tomasi to some degree).
Wait, so on top of it all, even though they pride themselves
on rejecting non-empirical, supposedly dogmatic cases for liberty like those
created by Rand and Rothbard, they are themselves concocting non-empirical
images of the autonomous individual that are supposed to inspire people without
regard to economic facts? Who died and
made these people the kings and queens of metaphysics? As Brian Doherty points out, the academics
complain that Rand and Rothbard aren’t rigorous – but are the academics? I’m keen to see Doherty’s copy of Free Market Fairness, by the way, since
he says he scribbled a couple mentions of me and my likely objections in the
margins. Really should make that L.A.
trip this year.
(At least down-to-earth Deirdre McCloskey – who should
perhaps be made both king and queen of metaphysics – weighed
in on the BHL site with an awesome list of left-liberals’ false empirical
assumptions that I declared “the best blog entry ever,” as in turn noted at
CafeHayek.)
Is this imagineering really helping the cause? These quasi-libertarians sound like they
barely like the market themselves, and I’m supposed to think they’ve got the
master PR strategy for getting others to like it? Look, I don’t need a Ph.D. to be skeptical
about all this. It might impair my
thinking, I fear. And I really don’t want to turn this into mere
heretic-hunting – truth is the important thing, not being doctrinaire (hard as
it plainly is for the BHLs to believe anyone libertarian can disagree with them
for non-dogmatic reasons) – but: can the BHLs go two minutes without concocting
a new reason to move stateward?
I mean, this may sound like a dumb question, but: Whether
it’s Will Wilkinson dropping the “libertarian” label in favor of “liberal” or
even Virginia Postrel simply eschewing the former, do the (label-dropping)
apostates ever get more anti-government
as opposed to more statist? (It’s not
just a trick question that assumes libertarianism as the only possible endpoint
on the pro/anti government spectrum: I would accept an ex-libertarian who has
become some sort of pacifist left-anarchist as at least arguably less statist than a libertarian.) Is it so wrong to see stateward drift as a problem,
for reasons not of dogmatism but for reasons similar to the slippery-slope
concerns that made almost all of us libertarians in the first place?
Even if Virginia’s largely philosophically unchanged, her
switch is at least a small public dissociation from libertarians, which
implies...some sort of uncertainty.
There’s at least something
different going on there than in the mind of someone who says, for instance,
“I’m a libertarian even though some libertarians are stupid or crazy.” With that, we can all agree – I’m proud of my
friend Austin Petersen arguing against conspiracy theorists this weekend at the
PorcFest libertarian gathering in New Hampshire, for instance, and I can’t
blame anyone for wanting to avoid looking kooky by association.
(Then again, the youth seem to keep getting more comfortable
with enviably Dadaist kookiness – one of Tomasi’s own recent students told me
the other day that Brown’s anti-rape SafeWalk program now advertises with
ironic posters that would have been unthinkable in my dour day, showing an
immense and hungry-seeming President William Howard Taft and warning that TAFT
FEEDS AT NIGHT.)
I worry that the state remains a temptation for many people
even when they don’t claim to have new evidence it’s a beneficial thing. This is troubling. Are any of the apostates from my side really convinced there are problems only
the state can solve? I’m not, and I’m no
longer convinced that caution means erring on the minarchist as opposed to
anarchist side of things, either. Why
are you, if you really are?
(Sidenote: It appears that a fairly balanced, non-rosy but
non-apocalyptic film depiction of an anarcho-capitalist society may finally be
coming to the big screen – I mean, aside from Galt’s Gulch in the third Atlas
Shrugged movie, if that really happens next year. I mean a
film adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s Snow
Crash, which I’m pleased to say will likely seem more plausible as a
near-future scenario today than when he wrote it twenty years ago, in the hip
cyber-year 1992.)
•••
I’m certainly not just imagining the danger of the BHLs
deciding that multiple intellectual influences, including mainstream liberal
ones, ought readily to imply greater comfort with violating property
rights. In his online video dialogue
with fellow Brown prof Glenn Loury, Tomasi was quick to assure one and all that
his philosophy, unlike libertarianism proper, envisions a “range” of “social
services.” Must it? Really?
Tomasi’s retort last
Monday to his first critic in the BHL symposium contains this line that sums up
how worrying all this appears to someone who thinks (after careful, utterly
non-dogmatic consideration) that Rothbard was right:
“The scope of
my thickened set of basic economic liberties is narrow enough to permit the
regulatory and confiscatory powers of government required by classical liberal
institutions.
“As Freeman observes, in Free Market Fairness I seek
to revive a classical liberalism in a (broadly) deontic tradition, rather than
the consequentialist approach of classical liberal economist-philosophers of
the last century (and, I might add, I aim do this without falling into a
deontic libertarianism such as that of Nozick). Of course, my revival of classical liberalism
comes with a twist since, along with thick economic liberty, FMF affirms
a robust ideal of distributive justice too.”
Indeed, Tomasi
nearly skipped Nozick in one of the political theory classes he taught, his former
student noted in passing. Don’t run
quite so far away, John, hard though your path at Brown must be.
Tomasi told his second critic on the site, “Market democracy
is a (nascent) research program.” Is it really, despite the two centuries of
market liberalism he keeps invoking?
Should I not be worried about what lies ahead for it, if my only assurance, really, is it won’t be libertarianism?
(Well, thanks to a heads-up from David Boaz at the newly
Objectivist-run and no longer power-struggle-torn Cato Institute, I’m going to
check out a non-partisan online-activists gathering Tuesday night, so I can
practice my own brand of diplomacy and outreach. We’ll see how it goes.)
•••
Maybe the best thing
to do, really, is stop all forms of piggybacking on other political movements.
I mean, we all sort
of know that right and left aren’t the only options. Consider some of the others for a moment to
see how ridiculous this whole method of outreach may in fact be. I could make libertarianism sound like, say,
a form of Taoism, too – maybe you could as well, gentle reader – but absent the
sticky situation of being a minority in China, why bother, if you see what I
mean.
I could act all
triumphalist at this juncture by saying the unexpected successes of the Ron
Paul movement mean right-fusionism, not left-accommodationism, is the way to
go. But I would think there’s an even
more encouraging, less divisive message in recent gains: The potential revealed
by the Pauls’ successes means: we don't have to hide.
As for what to do
about the more short-term, concrete matter of libertarian but non-libertarian
Republican but Tea Party-loyal Rand Paul endorsing but not fully endorsing
Romney: more on that comparatively earthy, tactical topic tomorrow.
P.S. And since this
is my blog’s “Month of Religion,” I should note another outreach-oriented book,
Rev. Robert Sirico’s Defending the Free
Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy, from the Catholic-friendly
libertarians at the Acton Institute (which might well have been more or less
the name of the Mont Pelerin Society if Hayek had had his way – but his
colleagues didn’t want to name the group after Catholics like Acton and De
Tocqueville, as Jacob Levy notes).
3 comments:
Meanwhile, politically-ambiguous Reihan Salam over at National Review...
Now who's playing the diplomat?
“But a thought more recently nudging me in a radical direction is abolitionist William Graham Sumner’s prescient warning that ‘Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.’”
That quote is usually attributed to William Lloyd Garrison, although I haven't found the source. Garrison is probably whom you meant anyway, given “abolitionist.”
You are of course correct. Thanks (fixed above now).
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