Degrees of Freedom: September 2006: Politics, Philosophy and Economics from a libertarian point of view.

Why I don't like to call myself an anarchist Thursday, September 28, 2006

My political philosophy is essentially the same, at least in its conclusions, as that of anarchists such as Lysander Spooner, Murray Rothbard, David Friedman and Roderick Long. That being said, I hesitate to call myself an anarchist.

Why? Because I think the term obscures what it is that I'm actually objecting to.

Whenever I object to the actions being committed by persons acting on behalf of a state, I'm objecting to those actions themselves, without any special concern for whether or not those actions are being committed by persons acting on behalf of a state. For example, I would oppose anyone printing money and using it to manipulate the bond market. I would oppose anyone presuming the authority to reassign property rights just by calling a meeting, writing down a claim to property which before that meeting was not theirs and which the prior owner has not agreed to surrender, and then using the threat of violence to expropriate the prior owner. And so it goes with the wide range of activities that states so commonly engage in.

Specifically, I'm objecting to the acts, not to the fact that whoever commits those acts happens to be acting as an agent for a government. Whether the party engaging in those activities is acting on behalf of government doesn't make the least bit of difference to my normative evaluation. My objection is not to governments doing those things. What I have a problem with is governments doing those things.

Syndication issues Tuesday, September 26, 2006

So you've not been able to get any recent posts through your newsreader, eh? It seems that this is a consequence of my switching to blogger beta. Here's the new feed. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Leftism and statism Sunday, September 24, 2006

Chris Dillow, guest posting at Philosophy, etc. has an interesting post, "Against the statist left." I think he makes a lot of fine points that I wish more leftists would pay attention to.

That said, I can't help but think that there is an elephant in the left-libertarian living room. Consider the prescription Chris offers at the end:

What sort of policies would all this lead to? I suggest the left should support simple redistribution - a citizens' income - over complex interventions such as tax credits and minimum wages ...

Suppose that someone would rather not provide funds to be redistributed. One way to deal with this is to respect that person's wishes, and leaving that person alone, but I don't see this option catching on with too many leftists. They'd rather have a state with the power to use violence in order to compel people to provide funds for a program of redistribution.

Well: once a state has that power, the power to fund its activities through involuntary contributions, the persons in the state can use that power in all kinds of ways that no left-libertarian would ever approve of. And the persons outside of the state will attempt to manipulate the persons in the state to turn the state into an instrument by which to plunder their fellow citizens. I'm not saying that any state with the power to tax will immediately become thoroughly corrupt; there may be institutional means to reduce the risk of such stuff or slow down the process, but all the institutions in the world can't reduce the risk to zero.

I'm also not claiming that this risk must be zero for Chris' prescriptions to make sense, at least given the left wing goals of a left wing libertarian. But it does have to be a good risk, one where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. Given the centuries long history of taxation, and the accompanying centuries long history of corruption and abuse, this risk doesn't seem like it could ever be a good one unless the benefits of redistribution are orders of magnitude greater than the harm done by bad governments. By my regular libertarian lights they are not, but even for someone who agrees with the goals of left wing libertarianism, this seems to be a long shot.

Here's a quick thought experiment for a left-libertarian:

Let's say we toss an unfair coin and if it lands with heads facing up, you get to live under a government that uses the power to tax in exactly the ways that you want and none of the ways that you don't want. If it lands with tails facing up, you get to live under some government selected at random from the last hundred years.

What would be the minimum P(heads) at which you would want to take this deal? Call that number X. Now to estimate the likelihood of a real government with the power to tax using that power as you hope, we can take a quick sample: What fraction of governments have historically used the power to tax in ways that you favor and only in the ways that you favor? Call that frequency Y. If Y < X, as I suspect, why do you think letting a government have the power to fund its spending through involuntary contributions is a good risk?

UPDATE: The post linked was by Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling, not by Richard Chappell, as I had earlier claimed.

Good sense from LvMI on immigration Saturday, September 23, 2006

I've not been a huge fan of the position that the Luwig von Mises Institute has typically taken on immigration, which by my lights has amounted to "Prior interventions have created a set of circumstances in which immigration has the potential to cause problems. Therefore, the government should impose further interventions." The non sequitur there should be obvious, and apparently it is becoming more obvious to Jeff Tucker who notes that

"People who favor having federal goons arrest undocumented workers and send them home imagine that this is a great thing for American culture and society. But of course no government program quite turns out that way you expect it to."

Well, of course! Well intended government programs have bad unintended cosequences all the time. Did anyone ever think a government program to control immigration would be exceptional?

Does Studying Mainstream Economics Make You A Bad Person? Friday, September 22, 2006

Robert Vienneau recently asked the question in the title of this post. By his lights, the answer is yes. And the evidence: empirical research on the relative unwillingness of economics students to engage in cooperation. This is interesting, because it highlights (at least) one of the basic themes of modern leftism, which is the tendency to treat cooperation as ipso facto morally good. There are at least two ways in which this view is plainly wrong.

First, cooperation in and of itself is value-neutral. Cooperative behaviors can be good or bad, depending on what it is that people are cooperating to do.^[1] So empirical evidence about the tendency to cooperate can hardly be interpreted as an indication that people are good or bad. In this world, however, we can observe that while people might cooperate to do all sorts of things, in most cases where we see cooperation, it takes the form of some people cooperating against others. Unwillingness to engage in cooperation, and especially in this sort of cooperation hardly strikes me as an indication that someone is a bad person.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, those who hold the view that being cooperative is equivalent to being good (I would venture that this includes the authors of the papers Vienneau cites.) seem to be interested in only a small subset of the many types of cooperation. For example, getting a job, owning stocks and mutual funds, starting a business, establishing and honoring contracts, refraining from writing bad checks, etc., are also forms of cooperation. Whether or not people with formal economics training are more likely to engage in such forms of cooperation is an empirical question that I won't offer an answer to here. But it's disingenuous to claim that formal training in economics makes people less cooperative based only on an empirical investigation of the willingess of economics students to engage in a cherry-picked subset of the wide variety of ways that people can actually cooperate.

One form of cooperation where there is some strong empirical evidence to indicate that trained economists are more willing to cooperate involves the real world prisoner's dilemma inherent in representative politics. Alice can support negative sum policies that benefit her at Bob's expense, and Bob can support negative sum policies that benefit him at Alice's expense. Both would be better off if they cooperated to refrain from supporting any such policies (They are negative sum, after all.) but no matter what each party does, the other would benefit by defecting and supporting such policies. As the survey indicates, economists tend to be much less likely than the general public to support such policies.^[2]

All of that aside, what I find most troubling about such studies is the ease with which someone might derive a very Lysenkoist interpretation. Suppose that the study of mainstream economics increased the probability that a person would become a sociopath. Well: so what? Is that supposed to be a reason to teach or study some alternative version of economics?
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[1] Yes, I do feel silly actually writing this out.
[2] Actually, this example shows one of the limits of any analysis concerned with whether or not people are cooperating. If Bob refuses for reasons of self-interest to contribute to some agitation group that wants to impose policies harmful to Alice, does this count as cooperation with Alice or non-cooperation with the agitation group?

A common mistake Sunday, September 17, 2006

One argument that I often hear for redistributive policies is the Durkheim-eqsue notion that the wealthy owe some of their wealth to the persons they do business with or to "society as a whole." See the comments here for a recent sighting of this argument. A commenter writes

Every day to an extent people live off your labour and you live off theirs. For example if you make and sell Pizza, you live off the labour of all sorts of people from farmers to truck drivers and similarly they live off you, Maybe a market forms and some negotiation goes on and it determines how much each of you 'deserve' or maybe it doesn't..

In addition the state provides some services - police to stop people stealing your pizza and roads for the truck drivers to travel on - again a market might form and you might negotiate these, or not.

Society as a whole provides important resources like "rules of the game" which define what is profitable and what is non profitable this serves the purpose of not forcing you to negotiate everything - because if you had to do that you wouldn't get anything done..

To be sure, yes, the wealthy benefit from living in society and from their exchanges with others. But it's a mistake to reason from the fact that the wealthy have benefitted to the conclusion that the belongings of the wealthy should be redistributed.^[1]

The idea that the wealthy owe something to the persons who they do business with is based on the neglect of the fact that those who do business with the wealthy, by agreeing to sell whatever it is that they sell, their labor or their goods, relinquish any claim to whatever the later proceeds of said labor and goods may be.

Suppose that I'm a greedy capitalist with a business of my own. I need various factors of production, including labor and raw materials, to make any money at what I'm doing. But once I pay for the factors, their sellers no longer have any additional claim to the proceeds from the sale of the final product. When I pay for some factor of production, I ask the seller how much she wants to relinquish her claim to that factor. When I pay her and she relinquishes that claim, there is no reason for her to claim that I'm "living off her labor." I've already compensated her for what I purchased, be it her labor, her goods, her knowledge or her time, and I've compensated her on the terms that she set and agreed to. It is no longer hers by the terms of the arrangement we made.

The idea that the wealthy owe something to "society as a whole" is flawed in the same way, but more importantly, even if this notion were correct it wouldn't justify any of the sort of transfers that people clamor for.

Suppose that the wealthy really do obtain their wealth from "society as a whole." In fact, just to be daring, assume that the wealthy obtain their wealth at the expense of "society as a whole."^[2] Well: So what? No one has ever proposed a way of transferring wealth from the wealthy back to "society as a whole." Every proposed transfer that I've ever encountered has been a proposal to do what would amount, in effect, to transferring wealth from some individuals to other individuals. To justify this, you have to show what claim the others have on the holdings of the some. Invoking that shibboleth of "society as a whole" amounts to a red herring.

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[1] This seems too mmuch like a resurrection of the Marxist notion that if some party appears to be better off after an exchange, this party must have become better off at the expense of his trading partners and therefore owes his trading partners some compensation.
[2] I certainly don't believe this, but I'd be interested to know how anyone who rejects methodological individualism would determine what the wealth of "society as a whole" consisted of other than the sum of the holdings of all individuals.

Wings and Oysters Saturday, September 16, 2006

The praxeologically correct mode of preparation requires the use of a metal dish drainer to hold the oysters as the heat of the grill steams them.

Textbook treatments of the public goods problem

Gabriel Mihalache takes textbook author Guoqiang Tian to task over the fact that in a microeconomics text by that author, the sections congerning public goods have "no practical mechanism is given for a government to identify the optimum quantity of public goods and services, or for the actual rate of a Pigovian tax when there are many polluters or pollutes and so on."

I suppose that this shortcoming of the text is a actually a sort of perverse evidence in favor of the theory of public goods. Any such mechanism would be a public good in and of itself. According to the theory of public goods, we ought not to expect that such a mechanism will be provided.

This is the soft white underbelly of the public goods argument for state intervention into the economy: Ensuring that the state actually provides public goods is yet another public good. (That this goes unmentioned in nearly every textbook chapter on public goods is somewhat disturbing, as it would indicate either the author's unawareness of this important public goods problem, or the author's unwillingness to mention it.)

We can't just assume that the state will provide the efficient amount of this public good, because

     1. This would amount to presupposing the effectiveness of the state as a provider of public goods. (It may be, but you can't just assume it.)

     and

     2. There is too much empirical evidence to the contrary. Real governments devote precious little effort to providing this public good.

At the same time, we can't assume that private actors will provide the efficient amount of this public good, because this would contradict the theory of public goods.

But a still more serious public goods problem remains besides ensuring that the state provides public goods: ensuring that the state isn't providing public bads. Governments enjoy the power to do what even the most successful criminal operations can only dream of. Ensuring that the agents of the state don't use such powers for their own benefit and also ensuring that aspiring criminals don't enter the government and use it as an instrument to their own ends is also public good. If this public good is underproduced, then society may well be worse off than if the state had never assumed such authority in the first place. If so, then the whole public goods argument for interventionist policy is undercut entirely. Unfortunately for those who would claim that the public goods problem justifies a big interventionist state, this underproduction is exactly what the theory of public goods implies.

Seeking Co-Blogger(s) Friday, September 15, 2006

I'd like to expand Degrees of Freedom beyond a one person operation.

What I Get:

The ideal co-blogger would be exactly like me, and think exactly like me and write exactly like me. Well, not really. I'm looking for someone who shares the general outlook expressed here (libertarian, at least sympathetic to Austrian economics and absolute property rights, etc.) and who is willing to post at least on a weekly basis.

What You Get:

A soapbox. And (in case the thought occurred to you) a share of ad revenue, if any should ever trickle in. Don't count on this too much.

Interested?

Leave a comment on this post with an email address that I can use to contact you.

Liberty is prima facie good. Coercion isn't. Tuesday, September 12, 2006

The September 2006 Edition of Econjournalwatch is now available. It's all well worth reading, but Robert Frank's "Taking Libertarian Concerns Seriously: Reply to Kashdan and Klein" stands out, and not in a very good way. Here's one particularly notable passage.

But no matter how strong their preference for personal autonomy, libertarians with even a modest capacity for reason are forced to retreat from the most extreme versions of libertarianism. Some versions, for example, insist that all taxation is theft. But because of the free-rider problem, a nation in which tax payments were purely voluntary would be unable to field an army. It would eventually be invaded by some other country’s army, and its citizens would then be forced to pay taxes to the government of that country. So even people with the most extreme libertarian sensibilities generally concede the necessity of empowering government to collect taxes by force of law. They don’t like taxes but recognize that the alternative is clearly worse.

I'm no stranger to this argument (every first year econ student encounters it) and I'd love to accept its conclusion. Seriously. Unfortunately, the conclusion doesn't follow so readily. Yes, there is a free rider problem in that free actors will likely try to free ride on everyone else rather than supply the necessary resources to prevent abusive behavior by an invading government. No argument there. But Frank's solution, to have some existing government with the authority to collect taxes that might be spent on defense, replaces one free rider problem with another.

If free actors will likely free ride rather than supply resources to prevent some invading government from abusing them, it stands to reason that free actors will also fail to supply the necessary resources to prevent abusive behavior by the government that Frank proposes. If Frank wants to make this sort of argument, he ought to show that the free rider problem inherent in his proposed solution is less bad than the free rider problem that his proposed solution is supposed to avoid. I mean, how can Frank just pass over one of the main libertarian responses to the argument he makes? His neglect doesn't appear to stem from unawareness of the issue, as he writes only a few pages later,

Merely discovering that an unregulated market allocation is inefficient, I tell [Frank's students], provides no assurance that a regulatory solution will be better.

So how does Frank pass over an argument that he even makes to his students? Here's how:

Yet there remain a small number of extreme libertarians who reject all compromise. They denounce all taxation as theft and reject any attempt by the state to restrict their behavior as an infringement on their individual rights to do as they please. These libertarians are really just crybabies. [emphasis mine] Having long since forfeited any claim to be taken seriously in debate, they wield no power in defense of liberty.

In other words, resort to name calling.

To be fair, Frank's subject was the degree to which taxes on positional goods are compatible with libertarianism, and not the degree to which the need for physical security justifies taxes. If his treatment of that subject was less than perfect, well, that's hardly an unforgivable offense. On the other hand, he commits the very same sort of errors in defending taxes on positional goods.

Sure, spending on positional goods may result in a sort of prisoner's dilemma. But allowing some people to forcibly take some of the belongings of those who buy positional goods results in yet another prisoner's dilemma: everyone is better off if the people who do the taking are constrained in how much they can take and what they may do with what they take. And yet no matter how much effort everyone else makes to constrain the takers, for each individual actor, the wiser choice is to defect and do nothing to constrain the takers rather than cooperate with everyone else in constraining the takers. It might be wiser still to expend whatever resources are necessary to become one of the people doing the taking. Would the prisoner's dilemma inherent in Frank's proposal be less bad than the prisoner's dilemma he seeks to replace? I don't know and Frank gives no reason to believe that it would be.

This illustrates what seems to be at the core of all consequentialist arguments against hard core libertarianism. We can think of a range of certainty where at one end, we are totally certain that freedom would be better than coercion. At the other end, we are totally certain that coercion would be better than freedom. Near the ends, there are spaces where we can be reasonably sure that freedom would be better than coercion or reasonably sure that coercion would be better than freedom. Between those spaces, there is a region where we are just not reasonably sure if coercion would be better or worse than freedom. For any issue in that region in between, most libertarians would argue that it's better to err on the side of freedom. Yes, we'll be wrong some of the time, but at least this way we can distribute our errors to do the minimum amount of harm. That seems to me to be a sufficient justification for such an approach.

For those who favor interventionist policies, especially those who favor interventionist policies and still want to think of themselves as libertarians, this is sure to be inconvenient. It leaves the greater burden with the side calling for intervention. Unfair as that may seem, I really see no other option that is defensible on consequentialist grounds. The only other option is to assign the burden of proof to whomever calls for nonintervention. For example,

This argument is an example of what my former colleague Richard Thaler has called “sufficiency bias.” When economists afflicted with this bias confronts an argument they do not like, they rebut it by offering an argument that demonstrates the logical possibility of [interventionist policies having a bad] result. And having done so, they seem to consider the issue settled.

No. We consider the issue not sufficiently settled to justify coercion. When in doubt, we assume prima facie that liberty is the better option until the issue is settled to the contrary.

An analytical vice? Friday, September 08, 2006

Some time back, Tyler Cowen claimed to have diagnosed the libertarian vice: assuming the quality of government to be fixed. I've never actually known a libertarian who assumed this, but Cowen knows more libertarians than I do, so I'll assume he's right.

There is another analytical vice that I do see lots of libertarians engaging in fairly often: responding to non sequitur arguments for statism by looking for a way to deny the antecendent instead of just pointing out the non sequitur. The general form goes like this:

Statist: The world is imperfect, therefore some people should be allowed to make allocative decisions with other people's belongings, even without gaining their prior consent.

Vicious Libertarian: Ahh, but look carefully at the evidence you used to conclude that the world is imperfect. Did you consider the possibility that (insert possible objection)?

Statist: Yeah. We covered all the bases. We used Greek letters too.

Vicious Libertarian: Oh. (Libertarian continues to look for ways to undermine the evidence used to claim that the world is imperfect.)

See, here's how it should go:

Statist: The world is imperfect, therefore some people should be allowed to make allocative decisions with other people's belongings, even without gaining their prior consent.

Virtuous Libertarian: That doesn't quite follow.

Statist: But we're reality-based. And we used Greek letters.

Virtuous Libertarian: It doesn't follow in reality either. Or in Greek.

Just what we needed! Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Apparently the wise central planners in the Pentagon have taken note of the widespread concerns about Iraq and the War on Terror and they have now reached a new course of action: Change the name!

According to Army Col. Gary Cheek, the Pentagon's chief of strategic planning, "If we can change the name ... and find the right sequence of events that allows us to do that, that changes the dynamic of the conflict."

Right.

Link here.

You can't get to there from here! Monday, September 04, 2006

Lately, my reading list has included the fairly recent Contemporary Debates in Epistemology. It's a good book, and the debate format is interesting.

In one chapter, Michael Devitt has a very curiously titled essay essay, "There Is No a Priori." I say curiously titled, because this seems to be a conclusion that Devitt could not possibly come to know from within the framework that he endorses. This seems to be a recurring problem with arguments for any sort of hard core empiricism: they tend to be self undermining.^[1] Recall that knowledge consists of justified true belief. Devitt's claim here is either untrue or, if true, it is unjustified. Ultimately, this claim is self undermining.

See, there are certain types of claims that can be known empirically.^[2] Claims taking forms such as (1) "There exists some x such that x is an instance of A," and (2) "There exists some x such that x is not an instance of A," are both fair game for the empiricist as are claims taking more complex forms such as (3) "There exists some x such that x is an instance of A and x is an instance of B."

To be formal, we might write these sorts of claims as

1. (∃x)(Ax)
2. (∃x)(¬Ax)
3. (∃x)(Ax · Bx)

At the same time there are also some types claims which cannot be known empirically. For example, (4) "There exists no x such that x is an instance of A," and (5) "For all x, x is an instance of A."

More formally we might write

4. ¬(∃x)(Ax)
5. (∀x)(Ax)

Devitt, in fact, provides a fine example of this limit to empirical knowledge when he mentions the discovery of black swans in Australia. We can have empirical knowledge of the first and second types of claims listed above. That is, our senses are adequate to tell us that there exist some swans which are white and there exist some swans which are not white. (gray swans, for example) But no amount of experience is sufficient to give us knowledge the fourth and fifth types of claims. Our senses can never be adequate to tell us that there exist no black swans or that all swans are white or gray.

And here's the trouble. The claim that Devitt wants to argue for is that (6) "there exists no x such that x is a way of knowing and x does not depend solely on the senses," or to be formal about it,

6. ¬(∃x)(Kx · ¬Sx)

where Kx denotes "x is a way of knowing" and Sx denotes "x depends solely on the senses."

However sophisticated Devitt's arguments for this claim may be, this claim is, like (4), of a sort that could never be known empirically. It is either unjustified or false. If this claim is true, then it cannot be known empirically because knowledge consists of justified true belief. If this claim is false, then it cannot be known empirically because knowledge consists of justified true belief. If this claim is known at all, then it is certainly not known empirically, in which case a contradiction is reached.
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[1] For example, consider the logical positivist claim that all statements are either synthetic or analytic. To which category does this claim belong?

[2] I'm supposing here, for the sake of argument that these sorts of claims can be known be appeal to experience alone. If this assumption is wrong, then so is Devitt. If this assumption is correct, and my argument is otherwise without fault, then again Devitt is wrong.

Case study in the ticking of leftists: Matt Yglesias Saturday, September 02, 2006

To continue on the matter of what makes leftists tick, here's a little case study.

Matt Yglesias writes

... I've learned a lot from my various libertarian friends, from my seminar with Robert Nozick, from libertarian blogs, etc. and I think public choice economics is a very important perspective. The upshot of this is that, as a general matter, I'm considerably less enthusiastic about regulatory solutions to policy problems than are most liberals.

Sadly, though, the upshot of my libertarian-infused cynicism has mostly been to push me left of where I used to be on domestic policy issues."

So we're back to the same stumper as before: The tendency of leftists to react as they do to such arguments must be based on something. What is that thing and what would be sufficient to convince a leftist to abandon it?

Or as I asked in the comments there,

"Is there any change in your level of cynicism toward government that that would push you away from leftism? I mean, it seems to me that you can either become less cynical or more cynical about government. You tell us that an increase in your cynicism has pushed you left. Would a decrease in your cynicism toward government push you in a more e.g. libertarian direction, or would both of these push you to the left?"

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Recent Comments

olly on Sat Sep 30, 03:30:00 PM EDT: You are an anti-coercionist.

-olly
James on Mon Oct 02, 10:12:00 PM EDT: Yeah, at least for the most part. What it comes down to, for me anyway, is that I don't judge an act of coercion any differently based on whether or not a state is behind it.

Some libertarians have argued that there could be situations so severe that coercion is the right approach. Perhaps. But I don't believe there could be a situation where I'd favor some form of coercion by government and simultaneously oppose the same form of coercion by private parties.
Richard on Tue Sep 26, 08:28:00 AM EDT: A technical point: while I'd happily claim credit for the great post you link to, the honour really goes to Chris Dillow who was guest-blogging on my site. (I do agree with most of his points, though.)

On to the substance: you neglect to note that the state already has power to enforce our institution of property against private violations (e.g. theft). Now, when taxation is part of the system, then holding on to taxed items is simply another form of theft, i.e. claiming property that is not rightfully yours. The state can enforce this part of the property institution just as it does any other. The division you seek to create here is an artificial one.
James on Tue Sep 26, 11:34:00 AM EDT: "Now, when taxation is part of the system, then holding on to taxed items is simply another form of theft, i.e. claiming property that is not rightfully yours."

No. What is "rightfully mine" is not affected by what laws the state imposes, nor is it affected by what powers the state has. The inference you seek to draw here is a fallacious one.

Had you said "... simply another form of theft, i.e. claiming property that is not yours under existing law," you'd be descritively correct, but descriptive facts about the law are not authoritative onm normative questions.

On the technical point: Thanks for the correction.
Richard on Tue Sep 26, 08:59:00 PM EDT: I spoke sloppily, but my argument goes through even when we limit our attention to legal rights. (Though I think on the best theory we find that normative rights just are the legal rights that would be granted by just insitutions, and I think our current system of taxable property is one such. So the enthymatic inference goes through just fine, and is not by any stretch of the imagination an instance of the naturalistic fallacy!)

But anyway, your post is not about normative rights. It's about granting the state "extra powers", and my previous comment suffices to establish that redistributive taxation need not involve any such thing. The state has the same powers it does under right-libertarianism: namely, to enforce the legal institution of property against violations. Our dispute is simply about what the legal institution ought to be. Nothing you've said here provides any reason to favour the anti-redistributive view.
James on Wed Sep 27, 01:27:00 AM EDT: Richard,

"I spoke sloppily, but my argument goes through even when we limit our attention to legal rights.

Sure, if we limit our attention to the the matter of what rights the law recognizes, then any claim about rights which can be defended by an appeal to the law is tautologically true. So long as we don't later equivocate and treat our conclusions as though they have some normative import, I see no problem with that.

I'm not sure what the argument from your first reply is. Are you saying that if a government's taxing agency claims that I owe it some money, then that money ceases to be "rightfully mine"? And implicitly presupposing a generalized form of your conclusion to get from is to ought? Maybe you could list all the premises and standardize the argument...

"But anyway, your post is not about normative rights."

Correct.

It's about granting the state "extra powers",

No. An electronic search of my post indicates that I never even mentioned "extra powers."

Rather, my original post was about whether or not left libs are being true to their real goals and realistically evaluating the probabilities of different ways that governments may use the power to tax when they support having a government with the powers necessary to engage in redistribution (such as the power to tax).

Given the track record of how people in governments have used the power to tax, and given the signs of the partial derivatives of the objective function of the left libertarian (which I take to be increasing on redistribution and decreasing on lots of other uses for taxes), a left libertarian would have to like redistribution MUCH more than he disliked those other uses for taxes, or he'd have to have very strong priors for P(A government with the power to tax will use that power to redistribute.) and P(A government with the power to tax will not use that power to do un-left un-libertarian stuff.) or both in order to believe that E[Benefit of a government with the power to tax|Historical track record of how people in governments governments have used the power to tax] > E[Benefit of next best alternative to a government with the power to tax, whatever that next best alternative may be].

The thought experiment in my original post may be clearer. I'm not sure.

I suspect that if most left libs gave it some thought, they would come to the conclusion that the difference between their liking for redistribution and their dislike for other potential uses for taxes is not great enough to warrant this conclusion.

This suspicion may be wrong; It may be that some left libertarians see redistribution as so wonderful that a government with the power to tax is a good risk, even given the overwhelming historical tendency of governments to use the power to tax in ways that are very un-left and un-libertarian. Or they may have some P(.) values very different from what a purely frequentist approach would support.

"The state has the same powers it does under right-libertarianism: namely, to enforce the legal institution of property against violations."

I'm not that kind of libertarian. I don't have a "Why I'm A XYZ-Libertarian" post to link to, unfortunately.
Richard on Wed Sep 27, 09:07:00 AM EDT: Your argument: "once a state has that power, the power to fund its activities through involuntary contributions, the persons in the state can use that power in all kinds of ways that no left-libertarian would ever approve of."

(On a literal reading, this is clearly a worry about granting the state "extra powers", even if you didn't use those exact words. I don't see how you can deny this. You talk about "that power", in reference to a power that you think we should refrain from granting, i.e. making it an extra power over and above the bare minimum.)

My response: there is no extra power. "That power" you speak of is one that even the right-libertarian grants the state. The power to coercively interfere with tax-evaders is one and the same as the power to coercively interfere with thieves. Either way, it is simply the power to enforce the legal institution of property. There's no extra power being granted to the government here, so your quoted argument is baseless. Sure, once the gov't has the power to enforce the legal institution of property, it "can use that power in all kinds of [bad] ways", but the right-libertarian grants the government this power just the same as the left does.

(N.B. This is a power that every government has, so your subsequent talk of probabilities is similarly empty.)

Perhaps you want to run a slippery slope argument on the various ways that this single power can be used. That is, it's okay for states to use the power for right-libertarian purposes, but we should draw the line before left-libertarian policies. But that's arbitrary. There's no principled reason to draw the line just before left-libertarianism rather than just after. Either way -- whether we're leftists or rightists -- we need to be clear on what uses of the power are legitimate, and what aren't. Nothing about this provides any new reason to favour rightism over leftism.
Richard on Wed Sep 27, 09:10:00 AM EDT: (I'm just using 'rightism' as shorthand for opposing the redistributive aspects of left-libertarianism.)
James on Wed Sep 27, 10:27:00 AM EDT: "Sure, once the gov't has the power to enforce the legal institution of property, it "can use that power in all kinds of [bad] ways", but the right-libertarian grants the government this power just the same as the left does."

You admonish me for departing from assumptions of a particular right wing libertarianism which grants that there should be a tax collecting government. Perhaps it's not occurred to you that I'm not that kind of libertarian.

The first time you assumed this, I took it as a simple oversight. After this exchange...

You: The state has the same powers it does under right-libertarianism: namely, to enforce the legal institution of property against violations.

Me: I'm not that kind of libertarian.

... I guess I'm being too subtle, apparently.

When you see me suggesting a comparison of "E[Benefit of a government with the power to tax|Historical track record of how people in governments governments have used the power to tax]" with "E[Benefit of next best alternative to a government with the power to tax, whatever that next best alternative may be]," it should be clear that I'm not among those libertarians who grant that there should be a government with the power to tax, or that there is no alternative to a government with the power to tax.

Besides, I wasn't arguing that a government with the power to tax is a bad risk in light of my values and the history of governments with the power to tax. I was suggesting that it may be a bad risk in light of (1) left lib values and (2) the history of governments with the power to tax.

Neither 1 nor 2 is affected by the content of what you call rightism, nor are they affected by whether or not I am that kind of rightist. The argument is not based on any appeal to my own beliefs about whether there should be a government with the power to tax.

I suppose I am guilty of assuming that a left lib would entertain the possiblity of there not being a government with the power to tax. Here, I have to beg your patience. I'm not an expert on left libertarianism. If the left lib position is to always reject the possibility of doing without a government with the power to tax, then my argument fails; favoring a government with the power to tax might then be compatible with the goals of a left libertarian, even in light of the historical record.
Richard on Wed Sep 27, 10:54:00 PM EDT: James, you misread me. I never said anything about rightists explicitly supporting the power to tax. Indeed, I take it as the essence of rightism that they (you) wish to oppose this. (Talk about "simple oversights!") My point is simply that this wish is incoherent, resting on a false assumption that the power to tax is some "extra power" in addition to those that the rightist grants.

My argument (which should have been clear from previous comments if you bothered to read them carefully) is as follows:

Define "power1" = the power of the gov't to enforce against theft; and "power2" = the power of the gov't to enforce against tax-evasion. Now:

1) Rightists support granting the state power1. (Right? The police should stop thieves? You are "that kind of libertarian", yes?)

2) power1 = power2. They are simply two manifestations of the ONE underlying power, i.e. the power to enforce the institution of property.

Hence,
3) You are mistaken to claim that leftists grant the state an extra power ("power2") that rightists don't. EVERYONE except for the most radical anarchists grant the state this power, i.e. the power to enforce the institution of property.

(If at this point you STILL don't understand my argument, I won't waste any further time here.)
Richard on Wed Sep 27, 11:02:00 PM EDT: Though perhaps you are an anarchist rather than a libertarian, and oppose any kind of state at all (even to enforce against theft). If that is so, then you are not committed to the state power I discuss, because you oppose all state powers without exception.

But then your argument is not one against left-libertarianism specifically. It would apply equally well against right-libertarianism (of a form which allows for state policing against theft). I'm satisfied with that result.

(And apologies for the snarkiness of my previous comment. I should've paused a moment before responding. It's just that I was irritated by your misreading of my argument.)
James on Thu Sep 28, 02:27:00 AM EDT: "Though perhaps you are an anarchist rather than a libertarian"

I'll reluctantly confirm your suspicion.

I'm of the impression that one can be both an anarchist and a libertarian, and still be on the left, e.g. Roderick Long, Sheldon Richman, Kevin Carson, etc. or on the right e.g. Wendy McElroy, or plumb-line e.g. John T. Kennedy, on top of that. If you are unfamiliar with these folks, I can't recommend their material highly enough, especially Long. (See my blogroll.)

"But then your argument is not one against left-libertarianism specifically."

I promise you, it wasn't an argument against left libertarianism, and certainly not intended as an argument to the effect that left libs should become right libs. The intent of the thought experiment in the original post was basically, "Look here left lib, based on what you claim to want and the ways governments tend to act, maybe you should give up on government entirely and just be an left wing libertarian anarchist."

I suppose I could have saved us both some time had I mentioned the a-word straight off.

One reason I don't use the word so readily is that I have some qualms with the conventional wisdom that as to what the distinction between anarchy and state is. If you've never read Cuzan's Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?, you should.

There are other reasons...
Richard on Thu Sep 28, 10:46:00 PM EDT: Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification. (Sorry for leaping to assumptions, I ended up misunderstanding your point rather badly!)
Gabriel Mihalache on Sun Sep 24, 04:45:00 AM EDT: To answer your question... Maybe. Who cares? ;-)

But what does make you if you study marxism, post-keynesianism and so on?

I'd rather deal with uncooperative economics students than in a coerced-cooperation type scenario under leftist rule.

I may not pay for public TV or some other "public goods", which makes "noncooperative" but I won't put a gun to your face and restrict your basic freedom of association either... so your milleage may vary.

P.S. The fact that I have to comment in a pop-up realy inhibits my willingness to comment. I just hate it, and I can't spellcheck (I have a button in the toolbar--Firefox extension). Could you consider leaving the comment form at the bottom of the entry?
James on Sun Sep 24, 11:06:00 AM EDT: "I'd rather deal with uncooperative economics students than in a coerced-cooperation type scenario under leftist rule."

Yes, absolutely. I think it wouldn't be unrealistic to say that formal training in some forms of heterodox economics, e.g. Marxism really has made some people turn very cooperative with very bad people.

"The fact that I have to comment in a pop-up realy inhibits my willingness to comment. I just hate it, and I can't spellcheck (I have a button in the toolbar--Firefox extension). Could you consider leaving the comment form at the bottom of the entry?"

I hate it too; let me see if I can figure out how to correct this nuissance. I'll do anything to get more comments!
Taylor on Sun Sep 17, 03:28:00 PM EDT: As George Reisman has pointed out, society as a whole benefits from the "greedy" ambitions of wealthy capitalists. Without their vast resources and large amounts of capital, society would not get cheap, mass-produced goods and services.

Bill Gates has made a fortune selling software. Why did he make a fortune? Because he saw a need and provided. Bill Gates provides society with cheap, (mostly) effective software that they can use to improve the quality of their lives in various ways. Auto manufacturers provide cheap personal transportation, agricorporations provide cheap food for the masses, etc.

By engaging in commerce, the wealthy "give something back" to society every day.

Great write up.
Tichy on Tue Sep 19, 05:21:00 AM EDT: I think you are making this too easy. First of all, I don't think there can even be a rationale for who owns what to whom. No universal law, I mean - all those rules are manmade, specifically, the people who have the power (more guns, more votes which translate to power over the guns, whatever) get to make the rules.

In the trades you mentioned, who says that the starting conditions where fair? If you are a starving worker, and a rich guy only gives you an apple a day, does it make it a fair trade, just because you have no other choice? Perhaps it is fair according the current laws of the context you live in, but eventually the worker might get angry and try to kill you - try to explain to him that the trade was fair all the time?

Maybe it depends on how much you abstract things. Giving the worker only an apple per day maybe WAS fair, except the trade was not only an apple for a day of work: it was an apple and a load of resentment in exchange for a day of work. When enough resentment has piled up, you get killed by the angry workers - fair enough?

In that sense, I think "the market" is a universal rule, like gravity - by limiting the market through laws, one merely changes the conditions of the trades. The market itself is always 100% free.

I suspect it is in the interest of rich people to "give back to society" to calm the resentment. Also, property is a service provided by society, that should be payed for.

A question: while I believe in free markets, I really wonder what prevents the rich from getting richer and owning everything eventually? I suppose that question must have been answered by economics theory already, but I just don't know it well enough yet. Would be great if you could shed some insight on that.
James on Tue Sep 19, 09:27:00 PM EDT: tichy,

I appreciate your comment. I'll address only part of it here.

"First of all, I don't think there can even be a rationale for who owns what to whom...get to make the rules."

While it is descriptively correct to observe that people enforce all manner of rules upon others, this doesn't change the normative matters such as: what people have some moral entitlement to, what rules people should live by, etc. Perhaps you take the view claim that normative correctness is man-made? If so, then we disagree on that.* But note that I'm not making any descriptive claims about what rules people do follow. I'm only addressing a normative position about what rules people should follow. Specifically, the position that the poor are morally entitled to the holdings of the rich and that some agency in society should force the rich to surrender some of their holdings to the poor. When people state this position, I take it that they are asserting a claim about normative issues, and that they believe their position about the rich owing a share of their wealth to the poor is rationally defensible: "The rules should be ... and the rich owe ... to the poor because ..."

"In the trades you mentioned, who says that the starting conditions where fair? If you are a starving worker..."

The solitary fact that I'm a starving worker doesn't entitle me to use violence to take the belongings of others. If I'm starving because my employer stole what once was mine prior to hiring me, that would be unfair and I suppose that would entitle me to collect that money from my employer in addition to my wages. The reason I didn't discuss any of this in my post is not that I believe it to be unimportant. Rather, I was seeking to address a specific argument, that the rich owe something to the poor just because the rich benefit from their dealings with the poor.

"When enough resentment has piled up, you get killed by the angry workers - fair enough?"

Try and say what you mean without being flippant. Are you trying to say that the poor are entitled to sieze a share of the income of the rich because the poor might just kill the rich for resentment anyway if the poor can't take their things? That's silly. Why not make the opposite argument, that the rich are entitled to the belongings of the poor because the rich might just kill the poor out of contempt?

I suspect it is in the interest of rich people to "give back to society" to calm the resentment.

Again, I'm only addressing the claim that the poor are entitled to take the belongings of the rich. It may be in the interest of the rich to buy off the resentment of the poor. It's also in the victim's interest to pay of a robber with a gun. This doesn't strike me as indicating that the poor and the robber are entitled to what they obtain in the process.

"Also, property is a service provided by society, that should be payed for."

I have no problem with paying others for the property that I buy from them, or with paying for the enforcement of my property rights if that's what you mean. But this service is provided by various individuals, not by "society." Also, see the final para of my post. On the other hand, if you are trying to say that I owe something to other members of society in exchange for not taking my property, we have problems.

"A question: while I believe in free markets, I really wonder what prevents the rich from getting richer and owning everything eventually?"

This question arises fairly often and it's an important one, so rather than address it here in the comments, you can expect a separate post dealing with this issue in the near future.

* About your claims that rules are man-made and that there can't be a rationale for who owes what to whom: I'm a little curious that you would claim this, and then invoke fairness as though there were some sort of rules about fairness and obligation that we should live by. Why couldn't we just man-make some other rules about fairness which accommodate the rich at the expense of the poor? For example: fairness means the poor owe X% of their income to the rich. I'm not claiming that we should make such rules, but once you start from the assumption that rules are man-made, you can't have it both ways and start invoking fairness as though it has any bearing on what rules we ought to live by. If you want to be a moral skeptic or take the position that norms are not binding because they are socially constructed, then you have to at least take that position consistently.
Tichy on Mon Oct 02, 04:19:00 AM EDT: Hi James,

thank you for your reply. I was not trying to be flippant, when I said "fair enough", I meant "it is a trade". I understand your article in such a way that in your opinion, once a trade has been made, people should be obliged to accept the outcome as a fair (otherwise, why did they agree to the trade in the first place).

All I am trying to do is to factor in the bigger picture. That is, the real trade was not "two apples for a days work", but "two apples and a pile of resentment for a days work".

I don't think we can call to some notion of fairness, but I guess I think that in a way markets are always perfect, if you factor in the bigger picture. Maybe this just translates to "you get what you pay for". (I am not sure if market is the correct term for what I mean).

I am not sure, how do you derive a universal notion of normative correctness? I don't see the point of normative correctness, if it doesn't convince the robber not to shoot me. Will it help me to tell the starving worker "but you see, I could have employed your neighbour for just one apple, so it was really generous of me to give you two apples"? What reason can we give the worker to just accept his faith? What reason can we give the postal assasin not to go on a shooting spree? Or the suicide bomber? If their life is not worth living, our pleas to morals are worthless.

I am not talking about entitlement, as I have said, I think entitlement in effect is only manmade, whoever has the power (more guns, in effect), get's to define entitlement. It's nice that we as a society have developed some rules about entitlement, which hopefully make things easier for everyone. But when problems arise (society falls apart), those claims of entitlement won't hold (ie in case of a civil war, starvation, etc. - as I have read in "Collapse", the root cause of the mass killings in Ruanda was primarily hunger, and suddenly former neighbours were killing each other).

The only way I can see to justify normative rules would be in an evolutionary sense, as in "a democratic society will be more effective than a communist society, because ideas can flow more freely" - societies and their moral systems compete with each other in a evolutionary sense, so after a while, it is reasonable to assume that certain moral systems seem to be more effective than others. Such arguments can be used to convince the guns (a ka the majority of people) to accept certain rules.

"Are you trying to say that the poor are entitled to sieze a share of the income of the rich because the poor might just kill the rich for resentment anyway if the poor can't take their things? That's silly. Why not make the opposite argument, that the rich are entitled to the belongings of the poor because the rich might just kill the poor out of contempt?"

No, what I am saying is that holding a gun "entitles" you to get yourself what you want. This is independant of whether I personally hold it to be morally correct or not. But the risk of an angry mob forming has to be factored into "the rich's" strategic decisions. AYnd there have been countless examples througout history of the rich killing the poor (and vice versa) and getting away with it.

It is true that in principle individuals protect the rich's property, not society, and thus those individuals get paid for it. In modern societies it is usually the police, though, who is being paid for by society (and also, who is usually not being challenged by society). So in the end the rich pay society for the protection of their property.
Gabriel on Sat Sep 16, 10:15:00 PM EDT: Well, no, ;-) because the state is a benevolent planner so it can provide proper policies out of the goodness of its heart, it has no other objective than our bliss! ;-)

This is also why the state would NEVER EVER EVER force "bads" on you, because all it does is watch out for your welfare. ;-)

So I'd rather make the points that:

1) Public choice analysis "ruined" the identification of governmental policy with "the benevolent social planner with enough time and information processing power".

...and...

2) There are no usable mechanisms for a) creating incentives for agents to tell the truth about their willingness to pay for public goods; or b) creating an incentive scheme for aligning private and "public" goals as to provide a Pareto-optimal outcomes even if the truth is not told and people would try to free-ride. Tian's book is very complex and challenging from a technical point of view but while there has been a lot of progress in this field, no usable solution is available. (Much of this applies to the treatment of externalities, I think, when/if Coasian barganing breaks down.)

So I'm not criticizing Tian so much but rather all those economists that make the jump from any market failure to "tax this, tax that, subsidize this, etc.". Even if we assume the dubious simplifying hypothesis that the state can be thought of as "the planner", it still can't deliver.

Sorry about the long comment. I need to be more structured!
James on Sat Sep 16, 11:12:00 PM EDT: "This is also why the state would NEVER EVER EVER force "bads" on you, because all it does is watch out for your welfare."

Despite your tongue-in-cheek way of saying it, I actually like this approach because it leads straight to the sensible response of "Well, we have an institution in this society that claims to be such a state, but whether this is true is an empirical question that we have to address before we can even begin to make normative suggestions about what this real world institution ought to do."

"There are no usable mechanisms..."

Ha! You are the neoclassical arguing that such mechanisms are impossible. I'm the more-or-less Austrian arguing that the incentives facing the agents of the state are all wrong. Ironic.

In discussing the public goods problem with others, I've always been hesitant to make the argument about the availablity of the needed mechanisms for optimal interventionism. I understand it, but I'm not sure how much it proves. Sure, we can't know precisely how to assign Lindahl prices any more than we can precisely know how much more utility a poor man gets from the marginal dollar than a rich man gets from his marginal dollar. But that doesn't necessarily imply that we can't come close. Absent perfect mechanisms for designing interventions, we still have two options: the interventions imposed by the human beings in the state or laissez faire.

If the human beings in the state provide sub-optimal interventions based on the imperfect mechanisms we have available such as Clarke voting, surveys, Tiebout sorting, etc, the results could (from a utilitarian view at least) be preferable to laissez faire. So the mechanism problem is there, but it doesn't really settle the matter.

On the other hand, the public goods argument for interventionism requires one set of behavioral assumptions to show that the public goods probem even exists, and requires the outright denial of those behavioral assumptions to show that the public goods problem is solvable. Once it is shown that the argument depends on an irresolvably inconsistent set of assumptions, that puts the whole "Free riding exists, therefore the government should have to power to do XYZ!" argument to rest.

"Sorry about the long comment. I need to be more structured!"

Nah.
Genius on Sat Sep 23, 09:06:00 PM EDT: generally it is in the states interest to make the pie bigger.
A bigger pie means more to exploit even for the most evil and ruthless ruler - so while circumstances may cause a leader to produce "public bads" and under produce "public goods" overall one would think that the goods would outweigh the bads.

AND if one is in a position to be able to influence the issue and one thinks that goods are god and bads are bad - then one is likely to put systems in place that will further improve that performance.
James on Sat Sep 23, 11:09:00 PM EDT: Genius, show your work!

"generally it is in the state's interest to make the pie bigger. A bigger pie means more to exploit even for the most evil and ruthless ruler -"

Sometimes, though maybe not generally. Whether or not this is true depends on the preferences and constraints of both those in the state and those subject to its rule. If the objective function of those in the state is material consumption and taxpayers respond to incentives, then the people in the state face a Laffer curve. Finding the high point may involve raising taxes and making the pie smaller. Now once the state is setting the tax rate at the point where revenues are maximized, it is in the interest of the state to promote growth. But then a state that collects taxes at the peak of the Laffer curve is certainly not maximizing welfare. The empirical evidence doesn't appear to be on your side on this issue either. Last time I recall reading on the subject, most governments were not taxing in accordance with Ramsey rules, or at the optimal spot on the Armey curve.

"so while circumstances may cause a leader to produce "public bads" and under produce "public goods" overall one would think that the goods would outweigh the bads."

The empirical evidence is certainly not on your side. Historically, really bad governments have been the norm. I'd be interested in a more thorough theoretical explanation of why you reach this conclusion.

"AND if one is in a position to be able to influence the issue and one thinks that goods are good and bads are bad - then one is likely to put systems in place that will further improve that performance."

I assume you're still talking about public goods. (If you think a government should spend tax revenues on private goods...) If so, then there are two and only two possibilities. Either: (1) the value of the amount of resources that one devotes to promoting the implementation of systems that lead to the production of public goods is greater than or equal to the discounted expected value of those public goods or (2) the value of the amount of resources that one devotes to promoting the implementation of systems that lead to the production of public goods is less than the discounted expected value of those public goods.

If the former, then the theory of public goods is wrong. If the latter, then the state is no solution to the public goods problem because the public good of "putting systems in place" will still be underproduced.
Genius on Sun Sep 24, 07:33:00 AM EDT: > But then a state that collects taxes at the peak of the Laffer curve is certainly not maximizing welfare

Obviously not, but maximal welfare is not achievable anyway. The topic is specifically those situations that are not maximized. If you do have a non distorting way of maximising them obviously we use that instead.

>"most governments were not taxing in accordance with Ramsey rules".

Governments aren't optimal any more than people are optimal. But this argument doesnt require optimality - I thought I was pretty clear how little I was expecting from my theoretical government.

> Historically, really bad governments have been the norm.

It depends on what you compare them to. I would suggest that historically government has been far worse than optimal BUT far superior to anarchy. The former being a nonsense ideal and the latter being the automatic alternative.

> If the latter, then the state is no solution to the public goods problem.

the government is one of a number of positions where gains from activities can be gathered. you could say the government turns public goods into private goods in a sense.
Genius on Sun Sep 24, 07:35:00 AM EDT: (via having some special rights to apply force and define rules and so forth)
James on Sun Sep 24, 12:14:00 PM EDT: genius, Let me guess: You "win" a lot of arguments because the other side runs out of patience with you and gives up, right? I'm willing to defend any position that I take, but please read carefully enough to understand the arguments you are responding to. That way, your replies will at least be coherent. I'm only going to focus on one example of the problem here rather than repeat myself.

You: It depends on what you compare them to.

You offered the claim that "overall, one would think that the goods would outweigh the bads." So when I respond that "Historically, really bad governments have been the norm," it should be clear that I'm using your claim as my basis for evaluation and considering bad governments to be those which produce bads that outweigh the goods that they produce, not those which compare poorly to some other arrangement. Now, do you agree or disagree that historically, really bad governments have been the norm? Supposing that you agree, what does that indicate about your claim?

Please understand: I absolutely love to get comments (It means someone is actually reading my blog!) but if you won't put in the effort to read more carefully and respond coherently, I'm not too hopeful.
Genius on Mon Sep 25, 05:23:00 AM EDT: > Let me guess:

I do have a lot of patience.
But if you find me annoying and you'd like to have the last word on your blog thats ok, just tell me.

> "and considering bad governments to be those which produce bads that outweigh the goods that they produce, not those which compare poorly to some other arrangement. Now, do you agree or disagree that historically, really bad governments have been the norm?"

1) I know it is very PC to say "Really bad governments have been the norm"
But I would say that is false in the sense that you mean it.

Unless your one of those nieve people who thinks that Papua new Guinea is the ideal society - or one who cherry picks public goods to take as "given".

2) even IF Papua new guinea IS better than, for example China, the topic as I understood it was "public 'goods'" (in the context of public goods/bads) i.e. specifically excluding the debate over what should be done with what are naturally private goods which is probably the bulk of your objection to governments. The point being that you COULD set up a system that utilized the governments ability to use public goods even if no one has done it before.
but as I said before I think your statement is false anyway.
Anonymous on Mon Sep 25, 05:45:00 AM EDT: Actually, I thought I was clear....

Anarchy is "not government" in my lexicon. I accept it might not be in yours but I'm surprised you didn't realise it was in mine (and the third sentance in that paragraph stated it explicitly - althought you might have assumed I was just wrong?).

GeniusNZ
James on Mon Sep 25, 01:42:00 PM EDT: "I know it is very PC to say "Really bad governments have been the norm"
But I would say that is false in the sense that you mean it."

Why? And no, I'm not comparing against PNG, just comparing the good and bad produced by different governments. Don't worry; If I want to use some particular arrangement, historical or hypothetical, as a baseline for comparison, I'll say so.

"the topic as I understood it was "public 'goods'" (in the context of public goods/bads) i.e. specifically excluding the debate over what should be done with what are naturally private goods which is probably the bulk of your objection to governments."

That's one of my objections to governments, sure. Here, I was only objecting to the exposition of the public goods problem found in most textbooks for what I see as a less than rigorous handling of behavioral assumptions. Most textbooks, when they discuss the issue, mention an objective function for the "agent," but neglect to specify the objective functions of the persons that create the government, the persons that ensure the government actually provides public goods, etc.

"The point being that you COULD set up a system that utilized the governments ability to use public goods even if no one has done it before."

The act of setting up such a system would be a public good, and ensuring that it did not get degenerate into an instrument of plunder would also be a public good. If the standard behavioral assumptions behind the "public goods argument for government intervention" are correct, it is unlikely that these two public goods will be produced.

"Anarchy is "not government" in my lexicon.

Mine too! If you think I'm equating the two, can you quote the sentence?

"I do have a lot of patience. But if you find me annoying and you'd like to have the last word on your blog thats ok, just tell me."

Feel free to comment to your heart's content, but if you want to object to a position you think I'm taking, make sure I'm actually taking it. Such a practice saves time.
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You can check out my blog at donotgiveintoevil.blogspot.com. You can email me at zacharias.bush@gmail.com and I can send you other essays I have written.
Gabriel on Fri Sep 08, 05:40:00 AM EDT: I think that was Kant, not the positivists. (Re: [1])
James on Fri Sep 08, 12:09:00 PM EDT: Yes, Kant was the first (This could be argued, I suppose.) to make an issue of the analytic/synthetic distinction.

But the positivists claimed an analytic/synthetic distinction too. I would argue that the positivist version was not equivalent to the Kantian distinction, but that's another matter for another day.

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