Who is he? What’s he all about?

Brad Smith at Division of Labour wonders aloud.
Follow the links, especially good is his Reason profile.

It depends on the institutions that allow for accurate perception of scarcities and inequalities.

Steve Horwitz reminds us not to fall for the “myth of merit.”

Success isn’t solely the province of the former varsity football star with the flat top ‘do and shiny teeth.  Success, Horwitz writes, comes to those “able to figure out what people want and to get it to them in a cost-efficient way.”  In other words, success comes to those people who are allowed to address the scarcity and inequality of life.

This is an important and comforting point.  It’s important because it reminds us that we live in a society drunken on the myth of merit.  It shapes the mainstream concept of what it means to succeed.  The myth of merit helps powerful people convince themselves and others that there is something unique to their ability to succeed; that there is something that separates the successful from the great unwashed masses who scrabble over each other for crumbs.

It’s comforting because it means that, given the right environment, human beings are inclined to serve each other.  Not through bureaucratically ordained altruism but through their own self interest.  We see this all the time.  We see people succeed who don’t fit the stereotype of success.  The dominant narrative is “there must be something special about them that helped them to [you choose: put four kids through college by running a hotdog stand, rise out of poverty to become a CEO, etc., etc.]“

Ignore the myth of merit and you will begin to see the outlines of the invisible hand.

 

And so does the Prez…

 

The Moral Equivalent of War is the title of a speech given by William James.  I think that Kerry Howley’s recent essay in Reason magazine offers a libertarian justification for the concepts James describes in that speech, as well as a justification for actual military war.

What follows is the first part of my analysis of her piece.  It will be followed by others as I delve into Howley’s essay in more detail.  I wanted first to grapple with some ideas I had about culture, and work them into a criticism of one of Howley’s points, that perceived private restrictions on liberty are as bad as any state restrictions on liberty.

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I

A few days ago I finished Kerry Howley’s controversial Reason magazine essay and read the responses to it by Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthy.  I was struck by the naiveté and cynicism of Howley’s argument, to say nothing of her freewheeling ex post manipulation of narratives of cultural change.

Her argument is naïve because it treats age-old liberal dogma as if it is novel and new and hyper-applicable to the problems of the day.  Howley buys into the liberal cultural determinist idea that there exists somewhere in the ether an ideal social state absent pesky, private restrictions on freedom.  She believes things would be better if lovers of liberty focused more energy on undermining those infringements than on protecting property rights.  Her argument is cynical because its syntax is cribbed from that dogma.  For Howley, libertarians “for whom individualism is important cannot avoid discussion of culture, conformism and social structure.”  Notice the imperative “cannot avoid” that casually informs the trio of liberal social science pet peeves “culture, conformism and social structure.”  But we can avoid such discussion; we are free human beings.  Statists, libertarians, conformists and central planners, all human and all similarly endowed with free will, can do likewise.  There is nothing obligatory about Howley’s argument, but it is deeply revealing.  For a self-described classical liberal, using such language is a major concession.  It means Howley believes there are forces at work, historical, epochal forces far stronger than individual will, and far more deeply imbued with political will to power, that must be propitiated.  A discussion one cannot avoid is not a discussion, but an admonishment, a warning.  Howley is warning those she considers “paleolibertarians” to get with the program or be brushed aside.

Culture exists quite apart from the static conception of it used to browbeat college freshmen and insensitive business executives.  Culture is not static, but is the result of the continual generation and intersection of personal narratives inside narratives of community.  Culture doesn’t stop and it doesn’t get frozen, especially in a growing, globalized economy.  But culture doesn’t exist without conformism or structure either; it doesn’t replicate without replicas, it doesn’t regenerate without standard bearers and authorities capable of determining what those replicas should look like.

It is reasonable for a liberty-minded person to chafe at the thought of standard bearers and authorities determining a culture’s traits, but reality shows us this process isn’t purely top down.  People gravitate to other cultures if they find them more valuable than their inherited culture, and the end result, the narrative those people tell, isn’t always one of clean-slate creationism.  The end result of their cultural journeys includes both their past and present cultures.

Right out of the gate, Howley risks the success of her argument by providing an example that proves how flexible culture, and the individuals that comprise it, can be:

“It was amazing to me how quickly she overturned the power structure within her family,” Leslie Chang writes in Factory Girls, her 2008 book on internal migration within China. Chang is marveling at Min, a 17-year-old who left her family farm to find work in a succession of factories in the rapidly urbanizing city of Dongguan. Had Min never left home, she would have been expected to marry a man from a nearby village, to bear his children, and to accept her place in a tradition that privileges husbands over wives. But months after Min found work in Dongguan, she was already advising her father on financial planning, directing her younger siblings to stay in school, and changing jobs without bothering to ask her parents’ permission.”

Min’s journey from rural patriarchy to urban sophistication is not a simple narrative of a young girl defying cultural norms on her own.  There is an entire city that beckons to her.  Her own father, presumably one of the people in her life with a vested interest in her staying home, is humble enough to take her financial advice once she starts earning money.  Were her culture strict enough, he could have shunned her outright.  Could her father’s willingness to accept her advice be a sign that her home culture is undergoing a transformation?  That one of its standard bearers is realizing that women should have more value if his culture is to survive?  In the language of this blog: the economic development of Dongguan created a scarcity of labor.  This scarcity painted the culture of Min’s village in stark relief.  Being an enterprising person, Min perceived it as an opportunity for her to have something more.

Howley’s insistence that libertarians cannot avoid discussions of culture, conformism and social structure gives too much weight to cultural rigidity while ignoring the sensitivity of marginalized members of the culture to its flaws and shortcomings.  The value Min’s culture placed on husbands over wives was a signal to Min that her life was less valuable to it than to a factory in Dongguan.  Min picked up on this signal and high-tailed it for a better life.  Thus we have a confluence, or compounding, perhaps, of forces: Min’s culture was pushing her out just as the factories of Dongguan were pulling her in.

That is not to say that Min is a passive cipher.  She has a will of her own that helped her see opportunity and take it, while still honoring ties to her family.  In Howley’s view, people like Min aren’t as capable of determining the value and shortcomings of their culture as they should be; they need avatars—i.e. standard bearers and authorities like Howley—to show them where and how their culture restricts their behavior and growth.

This is a curious stance for a libertarian to take, particularly in light of the work of one of this year’s selections for the Nobel Prize in economics.  Elinor Ostrom’s study of the success of communities in conserving shared resources absent the meddling of third parties shows culture and community to be both resilient and flexible.  People are capable of making choices and solving problems on their own.  If one considers the general welfare of the members of a culture a shared resource, surely those that benefit from the maintenance and alteration of that culture are those best equipped to solve problems the culture has in dealing with change.

This story is not a new one.  At one time in world history—say pre- or early-industrial revolution—labor provided by women was not very valuable.  Whether this was because of oppression, discrimination, or legitimate physical and psychological differences between the sexes , or whatever, is not within the purview of this post.  But what is certain is that economic and technological progress increased the value of each additional input of previously less valuable labor.  In other words, because production became more capital intensive, and capital intensive production became more widespread, women had more opportunity.  I don’t think you can attribute the increased presence of women in the work force to mass “I am Woman, Hear Me Roar” sing-ins. It is the result of an organic process of economic growth and cultural action and reaction.  Scarcities and inequalities came into being because of economic growth; these changes in economic topography brought traditional lifestyles into a brighter light; that light allowed closer scrutiny of a culture by those suffering from its more restrictive traits.  Challenging restrictive cultures without giving those that live within them the chance to organically modify them severs this chain of action and reaction and keeps such organic modifications from taking root and becoming substantive and real.  After all, it’s not important what Howley thinks about a culture, ex post, but what the members of that culture think about it ex ante: who and what will it protect, and when; who and what will it shun, and when; how will it maintain itself in time and space.

Here is a neat example of how much diversity can exist in a free society. Every soda in Galco’s Soda Pop Stop is made for someone who likes to drink it.  Cucumber soda.  Rose soda. Banana soda.  Coffee soda.  Sodas for every taste and budget.

The market for microbrewed beer is much the same.  Enormous variety, ample choice for everyone.

Why can’t provision of health care follow the same rules?  There is diversity in the health care market, certainly, but it’s obvious that there isn’t enough to satisfy every taste and budget.  People go without, or pay too much.  And now our elected officials are on the cusp of creating something that will make more people go without and pay too much.  Instead of creating more diversity they are going to abolish what little there is.

[BTW--I'm not blind to the irony of using a wonderland of soda to prove a point about socialized medicine.  As John Nese says--instead of drinking a diet soda, drink less of regular soda.  Sage advice for caring for one's health.]

If you don’t believe my contention that a federally subsidized “public option” will erode economic diversity, listen to this short segment from NPR’s All Things Considered. “In years past, I’ve actually had to close our business down, because I know that we are capping our income.  As crazy as that may seem, it’s more important to us to have the health insurance than the extra $1000 a month.”  That quote is from a woman interviewed in the segment whose family is enrolled in Washington state’s state-subsidized health care insurance program.  It doesn’t sound crazy at all–it’s perfectly rational for her to do so.  She’s simply doing what the state tells her to do: make less money, and we’ll subsidize your health care.

While listening to that segment, I knew I was going to hear something like the above quote.  I knew, once I learned that enrollment in Washington’s insurance program was based on ability to pay, that those enrolled would do whatever was necessary to keep their insurance, even if that meant being less productive.  And sure enough, that poor woman admits that she will do whatever it takes to keep her “cheap” insurance, even if it means she must sell fewer of her husband’s hand-made kaleidoscopes.

Here’s the thing: if she forces herself to sell fewer of them, she’s not meeting the demand for hand-made kaleidoscopes.  There is still unsatisfied demand for these things out there, but because she’s committed to keeping her state-funded insurance plan, she can’t meet it.  So demand for hand-made kaleidoscopes goes unfulfilled.  What do you think happens to the price of kaleidoscopes?  It increases.  Demand for them hasn’t changed, but market supply has shrunk.

Now imagine if the producers of every soda in Galco’s Soda Pop Stop had the same issue.  They needed to keep their sales artificially low to satisfy the income criteria for enrollment in their state-subsidized insurance programs.  Do you think there would even be such a place as Galco’s?  At the very least, the inventory at such a store would shrink considerably, and soda prices would increase.  Apply this same reasoning to every other commodity you can think of–beer, artisan cheeses, arugula, jeans, tomato paste, car tires, mustard–and the world starts to look a lot less diverse.
You can believe what you want about the vaunted “public option,” but don’t for a moment believe it will mean increased choice.

A link from Marginal Revolution yields this tasty dateline:

OTTAWA — An unemployed Gatineau man has been doing a modest but steady business in the past week by standing in line at flu clinics for people who can’t line up themselves.

I cribbed the title of this post from David Henderson’s Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom.

David’s tenth pillar is “Competition is a hardy weed, not a delicate flower.”   I’m using the hardy weed analogy in a slightly different way.  Perhaps the Canadian gentleman is competing with someone.  Maybe there are others out there doing just what he is doing, charging $14 per hour in line, maybe not.  He’s certainly making it easier for people with scarce time to compete for a chance at a flu shot.  He’s freeing up resources that cost more than $15 an hour to use.  Those that pay him to wait in line can use that time to do things they value more than $15 an hour, such as caring for their children or elderly relatives.

The strands of action this man creates by selling his time snake through the scarcity and inequality of life, much like those pesky, hardy weeds weave through the grass in your yard.  Political bread and butter is made by trying to sever these strands.  Regulators and busy-body politicians ignore the compounded scarcities of standing in line.  They despair at the overwhelming demand for vaccines, thinking the only solutions are to do like Boxer in Animal Farm–work harder and produce more–or punish people for deviating from their approved rationing procedure.

But human nature is a hardy weed, too.  It is a first rate seeker of scarcity and inequality.  Those who trust in human nature’s best aspects know they can smooth over the roughness of scarcity and inequality.   By freely exchanging his time for money, the man known as Johnny Z became an agent of the invisible hand, and let the price of his time allocate resources to those who need them.

In so doing, he created opportunity where there was previously nothing.  He filled a gap, found his niche.  Those that paid him to wait could have taken their place in line, and forfeited their time and care for their families.   Instead, they got vaccines and the chance to use their time more productively.

 

Libertarianism, wherethehellfore art thou?

That’s what I felt like screaming after reading Jacob Sullum’s execrable description of his salvia hallucinations.  The print edition of the December Reason isn’t available online yet.  [Update: IT LIVES...! Here.]  You should thank whatever god you believe in for that little fact.  [Update: If you watched some of the lame "tripping on salvia videos, please don't try clawing your eyes out.]

I almost can’t stand reading Reason anymore.  I feel miserable about that.  I want Reason to be better than it is.  Not New Yorker better, or Harper’s better, or whatever the beturtlenecked metrosexual literati think is “better.”  Just better somehow.  I don’t know.  They could start by dumping their senior editor’s lame descriptions of mind-altering substances.

Sullum’s little fantasia is dispiriting.  While liberty is being assaulted from angles too numerous to count, Aldous Sullum had to spend a weekend staring at—I’m not making this up—“the head of a human-sized cat wearing a knight’s helmet, a wizard with a flowing beard, and a wolf with glowing eyes.”

Too much of the wacky tobaccy and you become a caricature.  That’s what Sullum has done.  Sullum’s goofy little vision quest is prima facie evidence why libertarians will never have much political clout in this country.  I’ve known plenty of people whose M.O. was “mind expansion.”  I’m sure their inner space was overpopulated with leaping gnomes and gentle bedposts, but their outer space usually reeked of condescension, cigarette smoke and week-old underwear.  None of them were leaders, though they fancied themselves as such.  Most slept late and spent their best brain cells trying to rationalize why other people didn’t “get” them.  Doing all that requires more time than your garden-variety ardent political activist has to spare.  Hence the national wheel-spin that is libertarianism.

Don’t get me wrong on this; I’m anti-war on drugs.  The war on drugs is a win-win-win for government, drug cartels and users.  Governments win because the war on drugs gives cover for their less legitimate acts; it gives them plenty of raisons d’être and distracts us all from their thievery.   The cartels win because the illegality of buying and selling drugs keeps competition at a minimum, and thus prices high.  Users win because they get something to complain about and a cross to bear: “Oooh, I just need this one release—and the man just keeps me from [getting high, communing with god, seeing the black dog, dropping out, etc., etc. ad-freaking-infinitum].”  Were drugs legalized, all three parties would suddenly get back to business.  Government would start enforcing legitimate laws.  Drug cartels would stop doling out Columbian neckties and lacing hashish with Tide and get to producing cheaper, higher quality products.  Using would suddenly be bereft of counter-cultural cache.  No longer able to wax awkwardly poetical about their drug-induced visions, users would either drop the habit entirely or retreat into their own worlds, sparing us their cringe-inducing self-reverential lameness.

A year or so ago, at the height of mania about his book Liberal Fascism, I sent a frustrated fanboy email to Jonah Goldberg about a nascent liberaltarianism—a freakish mixture of liberal activism and libertarian wish-fulfillment.  Goldberg never responded—why would he?—but the point of my email was that liberaltarians were canaries in the mine shaft.  They were proof that the statist-corporatist-fascist vapors of the current political zeitgeist were strong enough to convince certain members of the libertarian vanguard that individual freedom wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  As a recovering quasi-liberal, I returned to libertarianism thinking it a bracing astringent.  Instead I found some of its principle exponents ready to make peace with paternalists and statists.  Having read Sullum, I now know the terms of the truce: we’ll let you have your bloated, over-weening state, as long as its fat folds don’t press too hard against us while we’re tripping on salvia.

The idea I’m trying to get at is that work like Sullum’s, and Kerry Howley’s, tells me that libertarianism has lost its way.  It isn’t the job of libertarians to prove drugs should be legal by doing drugs and implicitly bragging about it; it isn’t the job of libertarians to actively undermine other people’s cultural norms.  The job of libertarians is to argue over and over again that banning stuff diminishes the freedom quotient rather than expanding it; that a diminished set of behavioral choices means a diminished individual.  You don’t need to smoke pot to realize that keeping people from choosing not to stunts their growth as individuals.  People define themselves by the choices they make—unfortunately for Sullum and his chivalric man-cat—and that’s precisely why libertarians should calmly step away from the salvia plant and the idea that promoting “alternative lifestyles” is more important than promoting freedom in general.  The sad thing about Sullum’s creepy sidebar is that the larger piece in which it is featured is pretty good.  Sullum is up in arms over hair-trigger legislators itching for pre-emptive salvia bans and exaggerating the effects and prominence of salvia use.  The piece is well-written and well-researched, and none of the points he makes in it would be diminished if his personal experience with salvia were not included.  But he includes it anyway.  Why?  To be edgy?  For shock value?  Hearing users detail the wonders of their drug of choice doesn’t help the movement.  It’s called bias, and there are rational reasons why straight-laced bible thumpers think twice before believing a pothead’s list of the virtues of his beloved cannabis sativa. Potheads are similarly skeptical about the virtues of life sans-herb.  That’s their prerogative.  As libertarians, let’s dig into the virtues of this mutual prerogative and promote it as a means to the end of individual freedom and growth.

A Cafe Hayek reader relates her experience of rationing without price.

Absent price, other rationing devices are used.  Time is one.  Those who can most afford to wait in line for a flu shot will do so, and those most in need of one will have to go without.

Be sure to follow the link to the video from CBS news.  Incredible.  And notice how often the newsreader says “President Obama’s declaration of a national emergency should help hospitals treat patients more efficiently.”  Really?  How so?  By letting hospitals treat strapping teens and college students for swine flu?  So, like, we’re all supposed to pull together so that clowns who don’t need the vaccine can get them and pregnant women who do can go home without?

Sorry for the impromptu Econ 101 lesson here folks, but if you want people to have access to something, one of the things you DO NOT DO is give it away for free.  Free means “no price.”  No price means the good given away will be allocated some other way, say by the number of hours or days people are willing to wait in line.  As the poor woman in Utah said, she would have paid $200 to get the vaccine so she could protect herself and her unborn baby.  $200 is NOTHING–NOTHING–compared to the loss of a child.  NOTHING. $200 per vaccine would have signaled to the idiot twenty- and thirty- somethings who can bear the inconvenience of illness that they should go home and wait it out, and spend the $200 on a bag of weed, a case of Schlitz and a copy of Madden 2010.

Oh America, we hardly knew ye!  The nation so many millions have turned to for succor and support, guidance and strength.  How dim now the light that once shined across the world beckoning those who believe in freedom to share in its plenty.  What do we have now?  A monumental cluster-f***–a bunch of wealthy western weiners that can’t even get flu vaccine–not college educations, not jet-packs, Superbowl tickets or personal computers, but a little liquid in a tiny syringe!–to the people that need it most!

Bryan Caplan of Econlog says it’s not.

Here is his proof:

1. For national defense to be a public good, the social benefits of its existence must exceed its social costs. (From the definition).

2. The social benefits and costs of national defense are the sum of all people’s willingness to pay. (By definition).

3. On average, people’s willingness to pay for their own physical security is higher than their willingness to pay to reduce the physical security of others. (My critical assumption, which I’ll call Limited Malevolence).

4. If no country had national defense, people’s average physical security would be higher than it is now, because the danger which any given country’s national defense deters is attacks from the national defense of other countries.

5. Since the existence of national defense reduces people’s average physical security (from 4), and people’s average willingness to pay to increase their own physical security exceeds their average willingness to pay to reduce the physical security of others (from 3), the net social benefits of the existence of national defense are negative.

6. Therefore (from 1 and 2), national defense is not a public good.  QED.

I’d like to go deeper into each of the points of his proof, but for now I’ll just do something kind of scattershot.

In a post entitled “Why Most Economists Are Hawks, and Why They Might Be Wrong,” Caplan asks the reader to imagine what would happen to the frequency of suicide bombings if Israel killed the families of suicide bombers.

Why wouldn’t a suicide bomber–a person who has nothing to lose–pre-emptively kill his own family so that Israel couldn’t have the satisfaction of doing so?  Suicide bombers tend to believe in an eternal afterlife in which they’ll reunite with their loved ones (provided they and their loved ones are pious enough) so the amount of utility they get from their loved ones in the here and now is a moot point.  In his thought experiment, he assumes both the suicide bomber and the Israeli derive the same utility from family members.  This might not be the case.  Interpersonal comparisons of utility might work between two similarly financially and ethically endowed persons in the same society, but they might break down across wide cultural gaps.

This theoretical suicide bomber might value his own life and the lives of his family members much less than his Israeli counterpart.  Could it have been said that citizens of the Soviet Union valued the lives of their compatriots much less than citizens of the United States did theirs?  After all, the number of lives liquidated in the name of preserving the revolution numbered in the tens of millions.  Mao was similarly extravagant in his brutality.  The Cultural Revolution too cost millions of lives.  Given this tendency of human nature to compound suffering over time, isn’t the whole “American Experiment” thing of greater value than an experiment prominently featuring mass slaughter?  It looks much more attractive when compared to societies in which liquidating the opposition was considered necessary for the general good.

In this light, the national defense spending of a free society is a sort of conspicuous consumption; it is a signal to societies in which the value of an individual life approaches zero that free societies value it more.  I suppose it is more like a Hansonian health insurance signal.  It tells the rest of the world just how much the collection of individuals in a free society values their freedom.

Furthermore, just because the cost to provide for national security is lower than what people spend to protect themselves on average doesn’t mean national security isn’t a public good.  We live in a society that tends to value concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.  National defense is a dispersed cost.  Imagine the size of the military-industrial complex if national defense spending per capita equaled what people spend to protect themselves.

The dispersed cost of national defense is well worth it if national defense forces terrorists to take years to devise new ways of killing Americans.  In a world without national defense, invaders would merely pick off free states one at a time.  Given the number of international flights occurring each day, this would not be hard to do.  Presuming all those free people were proud enough to think only their type of freedom was worth preserving, doing so would be relatively easy task for the terrorists, and absent some kind of global hegemon like the U.S., there would be barriers to the establishment of nation-spanning defenses.

Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Economics Blog laments the utter lack of succulent Spanish ham in the United States.  We can’t import it–it might hurt us.  Our government actually produces a “guide to ham safety.”

Tucker contrasts the old feudal practice of kings and queens sending explorers out to bring back the best in foods and spices and jewels from other realms and cultures.  Now we are told not to bring back the best things from other cultures.

Our government creates scarcity and inequality for us, under the pretext of consumer safety.  We hunker down and chew our salty Easter and Thanksgiving hocks, while Europeans revel in their own culinary wonderlands.

It’s funny–the free market mind reading machine really wants to know how many people want succulent Spanish ham.  Believe me, it does.  But the government is blocking those signals, perhaps, as Tucker notes, at the behest of a shadowy ham lobby.