Most Sensible Thing I Read All Day

From a certain Michael Thomas Brown, unknown to me, commenting at Bruce Bartlett's Facebook page:

The people I know who call themselves libertarian aren't any different than other conservatives, to me. I think they call themselves that so that they can criticize Democrats, but when Republicans screw up, they can just say, "hey, don't blame me, I'm a libertarian."

 Fn,:  I savor the fact that Ron Paul walked away with 41 percent of the vote in America's bureaucratic bedroom.

The Skull Behind the Libertarian Mask

So, you're tucked up nicely in your gated bedroom community with your security guard and your private fire department, all supported by your Cayman Islands investment fund and your Cook Islands asset protection trust?  Feeling pretty good about yourself, right?

Yeah, right.  Piker.  You kick the whole thing up a notch if you moved off to Paul Romer's new charter city,   arising, if not exactly ex nihilo, then pretty much ex deserto as a free-market paradise along the north coast of Honduras. It'll all be on offer soon for "a core of people who share certain new norms" which seem to include low taxes and, uh, we'll get back to you on that. Or if this sounds just a bit too Jim Jones, you might want to join Buck Rogers on the proposed "seastead," a wholly manufactured floating city (don't call it an oil platform) a-gleam in the developers' eye for the Northern Pacific, where it ought to be able to enjoy all the blessings of freedom as long as the landlubbers keep sending the food and water.

Maybe the easiest way to get a grip on this new model is to remember what life was like when you demanded that your mom give you total control over your Own Room, complete with surround sound and 3-D gaming system, but not without access to communal breakfast cereal and air conditioning--"you" being perhaps the 15-year-old you, if not the 32-year-old who figured that after all the vicissitudes of life, still the bedroom at mom's looked like the best deal of all.

One thing you won't have to worry too much about, at least until you master the "new norms" part is anything as messy as democracy.  Indeed, one of the more refreshing wrinkles in the "new communities" movement is the degree to which it has given "libertarians" the comfort zone to rip off the mask and acknowledge that yes, well, this democracy stuff never really did make a lot of sense anyway.

I feel their pain.  It certainly is of the frustrations about living in, say, New York or San Francisco or London or--hell, even of Hong Kong or Singapore--that you have to put up with all of those refractory people who keep having ideas and intentions and purposes of their own.    How nice if you could just put all that behind you and settle down among your own (reserving,  of course, visiting privileges with the shoreside universities, restaurants, theatre strips and all else that makes life bearable between transactions).

But coming closer to home--maybe I just haven't been paying attention, but does anyone ever ask Ron Paul about this kind of thing?  It has always seemed to me that inside any good libertarian there is an authoritarian smiling out.  Would Paul agree with the more advanced proponents of the new utopianism that democracy is, after all, some kind of transitional necessity, best left behind at the earliest convenient opportunity?  If so, just exactly how does he hope to realize his vision, and on what terms, and when?   

Civil Service Libertarians

James Fuller is bemused:

Apparently federal employees have donated more money to Ron Paul than any other GOP candidate. This leads me to believe that either 1) They don’t realize he wants to fire them or 2) Everyone in government is actually like Ron Swanson.

[Do you feel the need to Google "Ron Swanson"? Go here.] I vote for a modified version of the Ron Swanson gambit, and I also think the donors know perfectly well what Ron Paul wants to do with public jobs; I'll explain in a moment. But before I get to that latter point, let me testify from a long and only moderately corrupt life that civil service employees are, taking pound for pound, among the most conservative people I've met. Recall, our search set includes not just Head Start teachers and legal aid lawyers (although some of them might surprise you); it also includes all those cops and prison guards and soldiers and spooks and security people and--and much more than that, it also includes the nameless, faceless multitudes who have done so much to keep eyeshades and sleeve garterrs and the good people at Steelcase in business. These people love good order and predictability; they're awed by authority and they think the hordes in the street really ought to show 'em some respect.

People keep rolling their eyes at the idea that Michele Bachmann worked as a tax enforcer. Doesn't surprise me. I bet she felt right at home. Wouldn't be surprised if that was where she learned it. My old friend Bob, an ink-stained-wretch variety newspaperman, in loved to tell about the right-of-Ivanhoe state-supported barracudas he used to meet on his home turf in Maryland, just over the border from Satan central. "Has that guy ever met a payroll?" the bureaucrat would snarl, with no visible betrayal of irony (Bob would answer: "have you ever carried a precinct?")

Which brings me back to point one--do they know what Ron Paul intends to do to the civil service. Answer: sure they know. And they're just pretty sure it won't apply to them. They're secure in their own minds that once the cleansing battalion sweeps through the stable, their jobs will be just as indispensable as--probably moreso than-- before.

And you know what? They are probably right. Okay, I grant, almost every libertarian has at least a wisp of principle: Ron Paul does think we could get along with a less bloaated military budget, and the occasional nutcake like Bob Barr can sometimes be discerned saying that individual due-process rights might actually have some content. But for the most part, I think you can guarantee that on the morning after the libertarian revolution, most that repressive or constraining--the most authoritarian parts--will be sittin' on top of the furnace eatin' chocolates.

Which raises my only (mild, tentative) reservation about Ron Swanson. Apparently the writers just couldn't figure out how to stage their character without at least a glimmer of cognitive dissonance. My guess is that in real life, that kind of uncertainty is a lot harder to find.   

Paul and Johnson and Cafeteria Libertarianism

I had been meaning to write a comment on the competing libertarianisms  of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, following up on the American Conservative's careful profile of the two.  Now I also have Will Wilkinson's far more entertaining bitch-slap of Paul in the New Republic (and don't overlook the excellent bit of contextualizing over at Reason).  I am tempted to dismiss Wilkinson with my favorite canard about how see!  Nobody's a libertarian!  It's all a thicket of value choices!  I could but those who know that don't need me to remind them, and those who don't are unlikely to be persuaded by a random jibe.  And Wilkinson certainly does an admirable job of just how crude and unsophisticated Paul's self-concept can be (even if he fails to notice how much this kind of criticism will inevitably also fall on himself).   And why Paul (no matter what they say at Reason) is not likely to appeal to beltway libertarians than Obama (currently) appeals to beltway liberals.

Unless I missed something, Wilkinson doesn't mention Johnson (although he gets a walk-on secondary role at Reason).  But it brings me back to the point I intended to make a few days ago.  Push comes to shove, Johnson is far more likely to appeal to sophisticated, eastern, beltway libertarians than Paul with his (as a commentator called it) paleo-paleo-conservatism.  It's partly a matter of issues (Johnson is--or has been--soft on immigration and trade, soft on drugs, at least semi-sometimes-pro-choice). But it's more a matter of style: Johnson's libertarianism, as the AC observes, is more pragmatic, more instrumental.

Which is, I suspect, about the only reason that Johnson's name even persists in the discussion.  So far as I can tell, he is about the only candidate in the race with less traction than Jon Huntsman (another who, I suspect, could muster support in the beltway even if nowhere else).  No wonder, then, that Wilkinson neglected to mention him.

Pirates, Libertarians and Infrastructure

So, you're thinking that piracy is the product of failed states?  Not quite, argues The Economist, in a piece subtitled "Why Pirates Like a Little Law and Order."  In a word "infrastructure:"

because piracy is a “market-dependent” crime. Pirates may benefit from protection from other criminals. Selling the loot requires transport and the ability to store goods. All this requires some rule of law—but not enough to cramp bandits’ style.

 So piracy does not flourish in/around Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone . They need a "sweet spot," (E's phrase)  like Cambodia or Cameroon where they can draw on the social capital they need.  Even in pirate-ridden Somalia, it appears, the real piracy comes from the more stable north rather than the utterly wasted south.

Where pirates go, libertarians may follow.  Or vice versa.  It has seemed to me that one thing missing in the libertarian argument is any sensitivity to the level of civility and order you need to make piracy libertarianism work: what by way of safe and dependable harbors, reliable night watchmen, fully stocked ATM machines you need in order to support your enterprise and exactly how you get them. It was one of the principal vices of Reaganism that it undertook to demonize not "incompetent civil servants" but "civil servants," as if you could do without the lot. Of course there is no evidence that there has ever been: even if you'd settle for the Cameroon, you don't want Haiti. On this and so much else, where Captain Kidd leads, Ayn Rand may follow.  

Alex Tabarrock Proves he is Just Another Cafeteria Libertarian

Ooh, this one ought to get him drummed out of the sodality: Alex Tabarrock shamefacedly admits that he is not that-all opposed to--no he actually likes--having the jackbooted thugs in Washington shackle us with the crime of daylight savings time.    In  a frantic rearguard attempt to retain his street cred, Alex does say he would have opposed it when first introduced but that kind of coulda woulda shoulda is hardly the sort of thing that will impress the pure in heart.

Alex fails to press the inquiry one more step, however, to ask: why should the gummint get its cotten pickin' hands on things like time-setting at all?  Why can't we perfectly well solve this problem by private agreement:  I'll meet you when the abscissa of the cosine of the shadow of my hoe handle touches 43" south latitude (as defined by the wholly voluntary recommended-south-latitude standards advisory committee)?

No word yet on whether Grover Norquist thinks daylight savings time worse than the holocaust. 

Windshield One, Bug Zero

I always think of Ron Paul as a short guy. Apparently he is not,  but that chip-on-the-shoulder, you-want-a-piece-of-me attitude so often sounds like it emanatesfrom Jimmy Cagney or  Danny DeVito--someone writhing and shouting while dangling three feet off the ground in the hand of a giant (Arnold Schwartzenegger?).

And are the Koch brothers tall?  Maybe so, although in real life (as distinct from theatre) I suppose it doesn't matter.Either way, they are the ones I picture patiently and inexorably overpowering the little weasel as he tries to horn in on the big time.  All of which may add nuance to Rortybomb's. preview of today's House hearings on "the Kochtopus:"  here's Paul again, beating up not so much on the President, or the mainstream Republican party but on his own allies sectarian adversaries in a famously fragmented libertarian movement. They say the job of every Republican president is to make his predecessor look good. Maybe the job of Ron Paul is to make the Koch brothers look good. 

The Republican Gramsci, and the Libertarians

Trying to sort out something to say re: this morning's reading. The topic is "conservatism" and the quotation marks are essential. That reading includes:

• Christopher Beam's somewhat gushy New York Magazine profile of David Brooks.

• Browser's interview by Jonathan Rauch with Mitch Daniels.

• The miscellaneous wave of conservative self-congratulation over the (alleged) rediscovery of Friedrich Hayek.

My point, I think, is that there is an utter disconnect here that nobody seems to notice, or at least not to trouble to take seriously. That's the hugely problematic intersection between "conservatism" and its scarier, perhaps smarter and crazier, brother, "libertarianism."

I doubt that there is any "conservative" in America these days (and not many "liberals") who can go more than five minutes into a conversation without saying "of course I'm a libertarian." It's like one one of the conservative stations-of-the-cross, like the one adjacent to Rush Limbaugh's backside. Well, maybe there is one who does not say it: David Brooks, not least as filtered by Christopher Beam. Unless my "find" function is taking a holiday, Beam got through six pages without surfacing any such confession. Indeed Beam only glancingly labels Brooks a "conservative;" the preferred label seems to be "Burkean:" in this case, a kind of soft dirigeism, but not as ambitious as you would get from the left.

A conservative, then, whom you could introduce to your mother. Indeed that's a riff on a remark I first heard about the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, and maybe that's the point: David Brooks as the Republican Gramsci.

Contrast Mitch Daniels, the wonky, budget-hawkish governor of Indiana. I admit to a soft spot for wonky budget hawks and so I willing to accept Daniels as one of the more--or one of the few--attractive "conservatives" in American politics. Daniels makes no bones about the fact that he sees himself as a "libertarian," in the sense of "one who is put on the planet to cut the government down to size. His booklist is mostlly pretty routine, but he does give a shoutout to one truly underappreciated modern social thinker--Mancur Olson, the author, inter alia, of Daniels' choice here, The Rise and Decline of Nations. As Rauch parses:

Olson’s thesis is that the gradual accumulation of perks carved out for special interests gradually saps the dynamism of economies and societies, leading to their decline if you don’t work very, very hard and constantly to try and counter those effects

It's an excellent point and one that isolates just what it is that proves so distinctive in Olson, as distinct from so many other more shallow "libertarians." The demon in this quotation is not "the government" but rather "the gradual accumulation of perks for special interests." As Olson understands (and so many others miss) this could be any perks--government, market, whatever.

I never cease to marvel at how well libertarians get away with it--I mean equating "constraint on freedom" with "government," as if not to notice that constrains on freedom can come from almost anywhere, and that removing "the government" (everybody supports that) may do nothing than introduce some other leviathan in its place.

I suspect one reason is that there are so many different species of "libertarian" that their implicit agendas tend to cancel each other. Thus the Wall Street trading floors are jam packed with hustlers who are perfectly content to let the rest of the world go to hell as long as they make enough money to hire their own security guards, etc--"Republicans who want to smoke dope," as it is said. There is a much larger crowd who want the government out of the way so they can impose the much more severe constraint of the theocracy. I will give this crowd at least part credit for naïveté--some really do believe that removing the mote from their own eye will ram the beam from somebody else's; they just can't seem to get their mind round the that the loving embrace of the faith can be itself a form of oppression.

You'd think that maybe Daniels, schooled by Olson, would grasp this kind of subtlety. Maybe he does; it was a short interview, and anyway he has a constituency to please. One person who does understand some of the subtleties is the ghost at the table Friedrich Hayek. I'll set aside as silly any suggestion that there has been a “rediscovery” of anyone who has proven so influential for so long (the sale of a few books is a distraction). I'll dismiss as frivolous the yapping from the running dogs of the populist fringe.

I have mixed feelings about Hayek. On the issue before the house, I suspect he is a more subtle and penetrating figure than the more popular Milton Friedman (Friedman gets the medal in the banking division, however). In the long run, though, I suspect he is not as durable a thinker as Olson.

I will give him credit, however, for seeing a lot further and more deeply than a lot of his drum-beating advocates. Example, I've always thought that Hayek has the best single (though not the only) argument against state plannng: that you can't do it because the state just doesn't know enough, and never will. He is also, be it remembered, one of the most therapeutic essays in the history of 20^th Century libertarian thought. I mean the one in which he tries to explain why market institutions are by their very nature disruptive of settled relationships, both government and private. The title of the essay is, of course, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”

Are there Libertarian Doctors?

Mark J. Perry at Carpe Diem is the scourge of cartels everywhere. Refreshingly, he doesn't restrict himself to the standard libertarian shibboleths. He's a also a great source on, say, farm subsidies, which so many of the sideshow libertarians in the RepublicanParty work so hard to protect.

A few weeks ago I posted a somewhat snarky comment asking if he'd ever taken on the medical sodality. I still don't know the answer to my precise question (I could have, but did not, search the archives). But whatever his past behavior, he's in the fray now with a typically challenging post on the costs of medical cartelization. It's a start, although I'd have to concede that it is a complicated issue, not likely to be blown away by a single blog screed (the commentators on this post, generally unsympathetic, raise some important questions).

But it does prompt me to wonder: how do libertarians feel about medical licensure? Does Ron Paul want to abolish the Board of Medical Examiners? Does the von Mises Institute advocate freedom of movement for medical professionals (giving new meaning, I suppose, to the phrase "Doctors Without Borders")?

And come to think of it, what's the attitude to other health-related nanny interference? Somehow I gather that the Food and Drug Administration is in the crosshairs. But how about the Center for Disease Control? Are we to infer that this is just another "government function" that can be served, if people want it, by a private market?

As I imply, there may be readily available answers to all these questions that I been just too passive and indolent to suss out. And I'll be frank to admit that I am so retrograde as to believe that yes, there may be some residual social purpose for these troglodyte artifacts of our dark socialist past.

But are the libertarians with me on this? And if they are--if they want to save the Board of Medical Examiners and the Center Disease Control--what business do they have calling themselves "libertarians"? Wouldn't their support for institutions of this sort imply that they, like the rest of us, are just cafeteria libertarians, picking and choosing those places where we want government service and where we do not? Put briefly, are there libertarian doctors? I mean, real libertarian doctors, not just some kind of wuzz?

Mike Huckabee Gets It

You'd think I'd get over it but for some reason I continue to marvel at that alliance of seeming opposites that we observe in the union of the libertarian and the authoritarion wings of the the Republican party. Sure all parties harbor strange unions, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But I think there is something more to it than that. Self-professed libertarians seem genuinely not to observe any inconsistency when they howl for freedom while cheerfully sticking their nose into the lives and under the blankets of others. The best comparison I can find is to recall the ease with which Confederate slaveholders or Polish aristocrats used to beat their breasts in the good cause while standing on the face of others.

This cognitive non-dissonance was in full flower at last weekend's CPAC convention, where Ron Paul walked away with the balloon. Oddly, one person who does get it is Mike Huckabee. You could say it's just sour grapes from a man who scarcely ever gets out of single digits at the CPAC convention or elsewhere. But here's Huckabee saying "CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years." Exactly so, and amazing how rare this voice is. Ironic also to see it coming from a rather nice man who fronts for such an unpleasant doctrine, criticizing a much less appealing human whose platform on the whole makes a lot more sense.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Reviewing John Cassidy's How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, Robert Solow asks and (more or less) answers a question:

Why, in the marketplace (sic!) of ideas, have the evangelists for the unrestricted market attracted so much attention and the “realists” so little? He argues, fairly convincingly, that the truth does not lie predominantly on that side of the issue. So is it that believers always make more effective advocates than skeptics do? Are we for some reason more receptive to simple answers than to complex ones? Is it that, in the nature of the case, there is more money backing one side than the other?

It isn't clear whether Solow is embracing these answers or just flirting with them, but I will embrace them: he is exactly right. "Pure" libertarianism* is always an more dramatic and more elegant and therefore an easier sell than the slow boring of the slowly boring. In this respect, ironically, the inheritors are the intellectual inheritors of the radical socialists. Socialists used to compare an actual free market with a hypothetical socialist nirvana. Libertarians like to compare an actual messy market with a hypothetical self-executing dynamo. Wonky, mainstream liberals and market realists actually like being boring. But it's not a program that wins elections.
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*Actually, there is no such thing as pure libertarianism, but leave that for another day (and anyway, the explanation is probably boring).

A Lib/Lib Alliance?

For housework entertainment, I've been Ipodding a Princeton conference the confluence (if any between libertarians and liberals. You've got three of each, plus a couple of commentators. It is uneven; a couple of the liberal profs just utter come-to-Jesus pieties about how libertarians just ought to recognize where their real home lies. Chris Hayes as the third liberal does a good job of offering an update from the trenches--turns out there actually are confirmed sightings of overlap on issues of, e.g., torture, snooping, immigration and Bushite big government predation. Still the libertarians are more fun, not least because they seem more genuinely puzzled and thereby give evidence of having thought about it more (Jacob Levy, who offered the nearest thing to a full-blown academic paper, posted his text on his own blog here).

But it's unsatisfying for one inescaable reason: the libertarians are, as Will Wilkinson of Cato suggests, pretty much ringers: all, so far as I can tell, are secularist, with indifference or downright hostility to the Republican churchy agenda. And I think they all believe in some kind of sociasl safety net--I keep hearing voices reminding us that Hayek believed in a safety net, and that Milton Friedman is the step-grandfather of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

If this is libertarianism, then as the old punchline goes, "we're only arguin' over price." We might favor, say, single payer health insurance because it achieves economies of scale. Or we might want to restrict Social Security because it is just sloshing money from one middle class bucket to another. But these are not matters of grand theory; they're details for technogeeks.

Moreover, if the panelists are indeed libertarians and they are at best a pretty rarified subset. Pop into the saloon down at the corner and it shouldn't take but a moment who find that "libertarianism" is fully consistent with the ramming of religion down other peoples' throats, and embraced by people for whom the very idea of a social safety net is enough to send beer out of the nose. The panelists might want to say that it is those guys who are not real libertarians while they themselves are the genuine article. But they're going to have to settle that issue (one hopes without broken bar stools) before they can make any progress on the left.

[Aside: in the right kind of saloon, you might even be able to win a bar bet on the issue of whether or not Hayek or Friedman favored a social safety net. Then again, merely citing chapter and verse might not do the trick.]

I will suggest a couple of further complications, more for deviltry than any serious purpose. One, these liberals and libertarians seem to believe they have found common ground on opposition to the war. Copy that, but they aren't the old ones. The paleoconservatives too, from what I understand, think that mischiveous foreign adventures are a pretty stupid idea. And two, for a moment consider Latinos, voters or illegal immigrants, for whom both sides of this debate wanted to show some respect. From what I can tell, Latino voters chart out on the issue spectrum just about the opposite of the people in this Lib/Lib alliance. These guys seeem generally comfortable with free markets (plus the proverbial safety net) and an "individualist" take on social issues--hospitable to abortin choice, gay marriage, the whole nine yards. Latinos (like the paleos?) are far more distrustful of markets in general, far less horrified at the spectre of big government, and far more retrograde on issues involving church & family.

This isn't big news; politics is always a crazy quilt. If there is any news at all, I suppose it would be (a) a lot of people from all over the spectrum are really really fed up with the incumbent and his cronies; and (b) liberals are not as entranced by government per se as perhaps they were before the Cultural Revolution. Hey, these things take time.

Milton, We Hardly Knew Ye...

I got snide about Lionel Tiger for his meanness over the death of Clifford Geertz so I had better tread carefully when I try to say something about Milton Friedman. Not much real risk here, I suppose: Milton is (was) Milton and I am I and there isn’t anything that I could say that would burnish or blight his image by an atom.

Anyway it isn’t really Milton the economist that I want to talk about (a topic on which I am surpassingly unqualified to opine) but Milton the plaster Madonna in front of the Corpus Christi parade. My point is: whatever his contribution to economics, his real fame comes from his role as a dialectition in the public forum: not exactly a front man, but a rallying-point for a whole bunch of causes, some of which have nothing to do with him and some of which are (or ought to have been) beneath his dignity.

The libertarian (I will not defame him with the much-sullied label of “conservative”)—I say the libertarian “movement,” embracing the full continuum from honest and thoughtful social critics through to barking wingnuts, have well learned the lesson that to have a cause, you need a narrative, and to have a narrative, you need characters. What ever else he may have accomplished, Milton played this iconic role to perfection. His colleague Gary Becker nailed it when he spoke of Milton’s “enormous zeal to convince the heathen.” (Quoted in Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek at 267). It’s a style of debate that we haven’t really seen since the days of Peter Abelard. It adds force, not incidentally, to Dierdre McCloskey’s point that economics has as much or more to do with rhetoric than it does with cool analysis.

The right intuitied this point a generation ago when they figured out how to demonize John Maynard Keynes, transmogrifying him into a convenient hatrack for any kind of leftist absurdism. A bit of the mirror image happened to Friedman: he gets credit for all kinds of stuff that isn’t even his affair. Just yesterday I heard a commentator who should have known better somehow associating Friedman with Ronald Reagan’s winning of the Cold War.

People, let’s review the bidding here. First, Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War. He huffed and he puffed and the house fell down—but nobody was more surprised to the Reaganites, who had never in their wildest fantasies supposed that the house was actually made out of straw. Second, only in the remotest sense did Milton have anything to do with it. He certainly thought Communism A Bad Thing. In a sense he thought Capitalism A Good Thing, but if you listened closely, you came to understand that perspective was largely hypothetical—as they used to say about Christianity, the trouble with Capitalism was that it hadn’t really been tried yet. But to conflate these insights into a single obit is not sober reporting, it’s just a kind of triumphalism, or at least a consoling bedtime story for the true believers huddled around the campfire.

It’s an old habit, really. It’s the same device that makes us anoint Adam Smith as the father of science that he never even heard of. It’s what leads us to wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think of the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D, or whether Jesus would Wear a Rolex on his Television Show (Forgotten that one? Link.). Sober minds will pore over the record to try to disentangle just how much credit for originality belongs to Friedman against, say Hayek (of whom, as it happens, Friedman spoke highly)—just as they do with Adam Smith, or Jefferson or Jesus.

So now he belongs to the ages. Sartre says somewhere that one of the downsides of being dead is that you no longer get to participate in the making of your own story. Up until yesterday, Milton continued to participate in his own story. But it may have gotten away from him some time ago, and it surely will now.