In my last two essays, I looked first rightward and then leftward for insights into the challenges we face and how best to surmount them. Now I’ll look back at my old intellectual home, libertarianism. Although its relevance to contemporary problems has been in decline so far in the 21st century, when I look toward the longer term, I get the sense that at least some of my old libertarian instincts will prove to be vitally important in steering us away from catastrophe and toward a flourishing future.
Thanks for another great essay. The part about your intellectual journey particularly resonated with me, although I've taken a different path. In particular, reading your book Against the Dead Hand was a turning point for me in understanding the incredible power of capitalism to raise standards of living, and that's been a guiding principle for me ever since. I believe that one day we will reach some approximation of a post-scarcity society, but even then capitalism seems important for human flourishing. In the meantime there is still a massive amount of heavy lifting to do.
I'm still struggling with the communitarian prescription, but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly why. Maybe it's that I still don't get the mechanism of action. If we take a person currently in a small town who seems deprived of economic opportunity and/or a sense of direction and motivation, what are their options now? On the economic front, they could get more education or move to a location with more labor demand overall - think shale oil areas or locations with lots of construction activity. Personally, they could join a social group or a church. It seems like we're concerned that this person isn't taking any of these options now.
With the founding of new communities, is the idea that this person will be motivated to pursue building up one of those new towns, even when they're not currently motivated to take their other options? Is the relevant variable that the new community feels less top-down than the current small town? Is the current small town particularly top-down? I just find myself confused about how social alienation manifests itself for a person now, and how that person's situation would change with this new homestead initiative. Maybe I need the short story version of the idea.
I'm reading a book, Humanly Possible ~Sarah Bakewell (700 years of Humanism). You have a lot of the Humanist in your mind, a little Petrarch, a little David Hume, a lot of Thomas Paine. . . .
Humanist don't mind being wrong. Like the Buddhists, they are forced to take the "middle-way."
Brink, a UBI can facilitate pluralism if it is rightly structured. It need to be set up under a separate Authority with its own charter, like the central bank independent of both the bank and the government. Its sole role would be to ensure that every adult resident received the UBI set to keep the labor market in dynamic balance. The money would not be 'government spending', it would be citizen spending. Each person and each local community could decide what they wanted to spend the money on. The UBI would be set by the new Authority, with the Central Bank being given the authority to create the money to be paid into each person's bank account. Most new money could be created and allocated this way, rather than via bank lending. Banks would then lend savings, rather than create the money to make their loans as they do now. If the economy needed boosting, ti would mean that there are people looking for work. In this case the UBI would be raised until the labor market was brought back into balance. At that point most people who wanted paid work would be in a job, most jobs would be filled within a reasonable time and everyone else would be doing other things with their life, as they choose. People would then be free to move in and out of paid work over the course of their life as their needs and circumstances change
Good essay, I would be interested in your thoughts on "traditionalist" conservatism, with Roger Scruton or Roger Nisbet as the most famous recent proponents.
And the decline in economic dynamism over the past few decades is complex and like all complex problems almost certainly not monocausal. Factors can also include the slowdown in scientific discoveries (nuclear physics and solid state electronics and maybe lasers being the major discoveries in post-war physics, which are not as groundbreaking when compared to the 1850-1914 era) as well as increasing global economic competition driving down profitability (Robert Brenner is the big proponent of this idea and has data to support).
Another powerful reason, it seems to me, for a devolutionist/federalist movement right now is that such a movement may be the easiest way to defuse the conflicts of values that currently threaten to tear apart liberal democracy in the US. Much as the idea of religious toleration came about when the warring Catholics and Protestants of Europe realized they simply could not achieve final victory over each other, we may need to seek a similar but hopefully less bloody detente between Red- and Blue-inclined US jurisdictions.
Now a limiting principle, it seems to me, of this devolution is that we can't in any good liberal conscience allow devolved jurisdictions to restrict the right of exit. It has to be both legally and practically possible for people who don't like the local rules to go elsewhere-- the moral horror of leaving people trapped in odious local rulesets is otherwise too great. We saw that in the 1850s with the way the Fugitive Slave Act sparked the Civil War, and we see it again today as the political descendants of the Confederacy try to fortify their enslavement of pregnant women by taking away those women's right to travel to freer states.
Suppose we sought to refocus the central government to try and perform as well as possible the limited task of ensuring that everyone has both "negative" and "positive" rights to exit their local ruleset. What would that look like? A UBI perhaps on the "positive" side, a strong right to travel without penalty on the "negative" side... what else?
The notion of “partial truths” is what makes the intellectual banquet satisfying because it allows skipping the after-dinner toasts with Jim Jones cocktails take comes with all-encompassing political ideologies of any stripe.
Other issues with a libertarian system is the problem of resolution of disputes. The theoretical solution is a neutral court maintained by some central authority, which bring back the problem of elite capture. There isn't really a practical solution to this problem.
IMO the best approach is a system where there is individual freedom within constraints beyond bans on initiation of force and slavery. The constraints would be such at the amount of wealth and power one can accumulate is limited by policy such as progressive taxes. The result here is an unequal society but the span of inequality is smaller. For example, in the postwar era in the US the ratio of highest to median incomes was about five times smaller than it is today, a positive (IMO) side effect of which was inequality between races spontaneously declined due to market action rather than explicit government policy. This does not happen today.
Thanks for another great essay. The part about your intellectual journey particularly resonated with me, although I've taken a different path. In particular, reading your book Against the Dead Hand was a turning point for me in understanding the incredible power of capitalism to raise standards of living, and that's been a guiding principle for me ever since. I believe that one day we will reach some approximation of a post-scarcity society, but even then capitalism seems important for human flourishing. In the meantime there is still a massive amount of heavy lifting to do.
I'm still struggling with the communitarian prescription, but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly why. Maybe it's that I still don't get the mechanism of action. If we take a person currently in a small town who seems deprived of economic opportunity and/or a sense of direction and motivation, what are their options now? On the economic front, they could get more education or move to a location with more labor demand overall - think shale oil areas or locations with lots of construction activity. Personally, they could join a social group or a church. It seems like we're concerned that this person isn't taking any of these options now.
With the founding of new communities, is the idea that this person will be motivated to pursue building up one of those new towns, even when they're not currently motivated to take their other options? Is the relevant variable that the new community feels less top-down than the current small town? Is the current small town particularly top-down? I just find myself confused about how social alienation manifests itself for a person now, and how that person's situation would change with this new homestead initiative. Maybe I need the short story version of the idea.
I'm reading a book, Humanly Possible ~Sarah Bakewell (700 years of Humanism). You have a lot of the Humanist in your mind, a little Petrarch, a little David Hume, a lot of Thomas Paine. . . .
Humanist don't mind being wrong. Like the Buddhists, they are forced to take the "middle-way."
Brink, a UBI can facilitate pluralism if it is rightly structured. It need to be set up under a separate Authority with its own charter, like the central bank independent of both the bank and the government. Its sole role would be to ensure that every adult resident received the UBI set to keep the labor market in dynamic balance. The money would not be 'government spending', it would be citizen spending. Each person and each local community could decide what they wanted to spend the money on. The UBI would be set by the new Authority, with the Central Bank being given the authority to create the money to be paid into each person's bank account. Most new money could be created and allocated this way, rather than via bank lending. Banks would then lend savings, rather than create the money to make their loans as they do now. If the economy needed boosting, ti would mean that there are people looking for work. In this case the UBI would be raised until the labor market was brought back into balance. At that point most people who wanted paid work would be in a job, most jobs would be filled within a reasonable time and everyone else would be doing other things with their life, as they choose. People would then be free to move in and out of paid work over the course of their life as their needs and circumstances change
Good essay, I would be interested in your thoughts on "traditionalist" conservatism, with Roger Scruton or Roger Nisbet as the most famous recent proponents.
And the decline in economic dynamism over the past few decades is complex and like all complex problems almost certainly not monocausal. Factors can also include the slowdown in scientific discoveries (nuclear physics and solid state electronics and maybe lasers being the major discoveries in post-war physics, which are not as groundbreaking when compared to the 1850-1914 era) as well as increasing global economic competition driving down profitability (Robert Brenner is the big proponent of this idea and has data to support).
Are there any libertarian writers/thinkers/books you can recommend?
Another powerful reason, it seems to me, for a devolutionist/federalist movement right now is that such a movement may be the easiest way to defuse the conflicts of values that currently threaten to tear apart liberal democracy in the US. Much as the idea of religious toleration came about when the warring Catholics and Protestants of Europe realized they simply could not achieve final victory over each other, we may need to seek a similar but hopefully less bloody detente between Red- and Blue-inclined US jurisdictions.
Now a limiting principle, it seems to me, of this devolution is that we can't in any good liberal conscience allow devolved jurisdictions to restrict the right of exit. It has to be both legally and practically possible for people who don't like the local rules to go elsewhere-- the moral horror of leaving people trapped in odious local rulesets is otherwise too great. We saw that in the 1850s with the way the Fugitive Slave Act sparked the Civil War, and we see it again today as the political descendants of the Confederacy try to fortify their enslavement of pregnant women by taking away those women's right to travel to freer states.
Suppose we sought to refocus the central government to try and perform as well as possible the limited task of ensuring that everyone has both "negative" and "positive" rights to exit their local ruleset. What would that look like? A UBI perhaps on the "positive" side, a strong right to travel without penalty on the "negative" side... what else?
Do you see anarcho-capitalism as a (perhaps extreme) version of a federation of liberty?
The notion of “partial truths” is what makes the intellectual banquet satisfying because it allows skipping the after-dinner toasts with Jim Jones cocktails take comes with all-encompassing political ideologies of any stripe.
Thanks for this. Here's a brief appreciation of liberaltarianism from a left perspective https://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/13/whats-left-of-libertarianism-2/
Other issues with a libertarian system is the problem of resolution of disputes. The theoretical solution is a neutral court maintained by some central authority, which bring back the problem of elite capture. There isn't really a practical solution to this problem.
IMO the best approach is a system where there is individual freedom within constraints beyond bans on initiation of force and slavery. The constraints would be such at the amount of wealth and power one can accumulate is limited by policy such as progressive taxes. The result here is an unequal society but the span of inequality is smaller. For example, in the postwar era in the US the ratio of highest to median incomes was about five times smaller than it is today, a positive (IMO) side effect of which was inequality between races spontaneously declined due to market action rather than explicit government policy. This does not happen today.