28 Comments

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.

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Thanks for your thoughtful comments and questions -- and for your kind words about Against the Dead Hand. What I'm hoping an economic independence movement would provide for ordinary people in small towns, big cities, and everything in between is a combination of opportunity and belonging. Most small towns today are in decline, so if you live there you feel like your world is slowly dying; if you're a high school grad living in a big metro area, you're barely keeping your head above water, there's no career path forward, so you just drift from day to day. If it were possible to get together with a group of people and build an attractive life of your own with them, and this kind of thing was happening regularly, so you feel like it's a genuine possiblility, then for these people there's now the possibility of growth instead of decline, a coherent arc to your life instead of stumbling from one dead-end job to another. And then once you actually take the plunge, your life is now functionally integrated with others in a way it never was before -- you're a member in good standing of a genuine, living community and you are a vital contributor to its success. So that's a stab at explaining both the possible appeal and the payoff to your small town person and other ordinary folks. But whether the appeal is sufficient to get things off the ground is an open question. We may be too thoroughly consumerist now for the idea of self-sufficiency to have any wide appeal; and the people most in need of an alternative pathway to flourishing may be so demoralized at present that they are stuck in their current lives and won't make a change. All I can do is describe possibilities and hope that they resonate with people.

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Capitalism did not raise living standards, technological advances made the scaling up of energy conversion possible.

On the other hand, consider The Prisoners’ Dilemma. The capitalist is the maximizer who continues to defect in order to exploit the cooperation that makes all our civilization and its benefits possible.

F*ck them.

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Sure, that's why North Korea and South Korea have the same standard of living. After all, they have access to the same technological advances.

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My point is the technology made it possible, not the capitalism. That ‘ism’ is the problem, the idea that capital is superior to idea or labour. It’s what leads to cretins like Tim Gurner presuming that ownership-of-work existed before work.

And then there’s ownership itself. Basically it seems to be an empty claim underpinned only by force, whereby the claimant relieves himself of the responsibility of stewardship. Again, f*ck that.

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Well, we disagree. I don't think capitalism implies capital superiority, I think it's just the mechanisms of free exchange and private enterprise that do enable higher living standards, together with technology. I don't find your Marxist-or-whatever talking points convincing.

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You haven’t understood my point about capitalism - moreover, it is not implied but asserted, baked into the design - and you dismiss what you don’t choose to engage with as “whatever”.

Closed mind.

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You miss a crucial point. Technological advances only take place where there's economic freedom, i.e., capitalism. China had access to all the same science as the U.S. but didn't make economic progress until it allowed a measure of economic freedom. East and West Germany, ditto; North and South Korea; Hong Kong, Taiwan, v. Venezuela, Burma, Cambodia, etc. etc. The technological advances that do take place in economically repressive regimes are merely technologies adopted from where they were originated--in capitalist countries.

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There can be a role for regulated venture capitalism but that’s not what we have. The negative externalities alone are killing us, the corruption just makes it all so much worse. Male sociopaths have created a very favourable environment for driving planetary overreach to their own short term benefit.

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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."

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Ooh, that looks like a fun book -- thanks for bringing it to my attention.

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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

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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).

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I quoted Nisbet at some length in my recent essay "Life under 'an immense and tutelary power.'" I had read his The Quest for Community decades ago, but brushed it off recently and was struck by how relevant it still is today.

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Are there any libertarian writers/thinkers/books you can recommend?

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Sure. Among my favorite libertarian thinkers today are Jacob Levy, John Tomasi, Kevin Vallier, and Matt Zwolinski. Outside the academy, Virginia Postrel is a favorite. I should also mention the libertarian journalist Radley Balko, whose work on criminal justice issues is excellent.

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Thank you for the recommendations, I have never heard of any of these thinkers so this will be interesting.

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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?

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Thanks, very interesting comments! Kukathas's Federation of Liberty is an interesting extreme thought experiment, but I agree that devolution has to be within certain broad liberal baselines, the right of exit being one of the most important. And I agree that the central government's limited but crucial job would be to provide large-scale public goods (baseline legal framework, social insurance, and support for R&D).

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Do you see anarcho-capitalism as a (perhaps extreme) version of a federation of liberty?

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Not really. Most explanations that I've read of how anarcho-capitalism would work in practice make the heroic assumption that most people in the society are happy anarcho-capitalists. They don't really come to grips with how to do libertarianism in a world where most people aren't libertarian.

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Huh. My assumption is that the protective companies would be significantly more burdensome to individual freedoms than a minarchist state would be. Look at home owner associations, for example.

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I agree. Absence of a central authority with actually existing humans (as opposed to make-believe anarcho-capitalists) looks like the Tribal Areas of Pakistan -- more Hobbesian than Rothbardian.

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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.

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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/

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Thanks, John. I remember reading this when it first came out -- kind of hard to believe it's been six years already since I moved to Niskanen (the piece of mine you link to might have been the first thing I did for Niskanen -- it was about two weeks into my tenure).

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"The libertarian insistence that only government coercion (and not cultural norms) can create unfreedom." That's not the libertarianism that I've understood for over 40 years. Government is the MAJOR source but obviously not the only one. Government is made of people within a particular culture. It will reflect the most anti-freedom parts of the culture (99% of the time) but that doesn't mean the culture cannot be a huge source of interference with liberty.

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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.

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