Many interventions in the economy have a positive expected benefit. (I should note that libertarians can concede this point, yet argue against interventions because they infringe people’s rights etc) One great example that you point out is resolving coordination problems. Another is protecting the competitive market itself: anti-trust law, laws against false advertising, corruption laws. Others protect individuals from an unregulated market: medical licenses, tort law, health and safety regulation.
Your mention of wanting to “preclude blackmail, theft, and slavery” implies that you would like to see cooperative production between genuine equals, not relations of dominance or exploitation. Great! From this, certain things follow: the prevention of inherited structures of power through inheritance tax and less income inequality, free education for all to ensure equality of opportunity, information campaigns to help end harmful social roles/scripts/stereotypes of gender, race and sexuality. Oh dear. We seem to have strayed quite far from libertarianism.
Many interventions in the economy have a positive expected benefit. (I should note that libertarians can concede this point, yet argue against interventions because they infringe people’s rights etc)
Goalpost-shifting between consequences and virtues is characteristic of argument with libertarians, often in one argument with a single libertarian. It can be more infuriating than attempting to pin a Christian down on a claim.
Edit: Argumentative Internet self-declared libertarians, to be fair, per SMBC.
Your mention of wanting to “preclude blackmail, theft, and slavery” implies that you would like to see cooperative production between genuine equals, not relations of dominance or exploitation.
It really doesn’t imply that in the least.
Being opposed to “blackmail, theft, and slavery” does not imply that you think that we’re all “genuine equals”, nor that you’d have any particular wish for that state, nor that even if you had such a wish, it would inform your political opinions in this world where people are decidedly unequal in talents, ethics, drive, and execution.
the prevention of inherited structures of power through inheritance tax and less income inequality
I have two problems with this. First, part of the idea of personal property is that you can do what you want with it. That’s what makes it a good incentive. If what you want to do with it is give it to your kids, it’s not the governments place to stop you and accuse you of nepotism. If you want to be nepotistic, then the economy can offer you the opportunity of giving money to your kids as incentive, and we will be better for it.
The second problem is that it’s hard to stop. Unless they stop you from giving money away as well, it just means that only people who don’t know they’re about to die get taxed.
I most certainly do not think you are born with the rights to your parents money. If I did, I’d be against the use of wills.
free education for all to ensure equality of opportunity
If they just gave you money, you’d still have all the opportunity, and then some because now you can do something else with the money. It’s not a good use of resources for everyone to be educated, and subsidizing it wastes money just as surely as subsidizing corn.
information campaigns to help end harmful social roles/scripts/stereotypes of gender, race and sexuality.
That sounds like a straight-up public good. The main problem here is that you’re giving the government free reign over propaganda, and that might not be something you want to trust them with.
Personally, I’m what I’m thinking of calling a quasi-libertarian. I do think you should generally try to get the government from being involved, but what’s more important is that when they are involved, they use market forces to their advantage, rather than just ignoring them.
“It’s not a good use of resources for everyone to be educated, and subsidizing it wastes money just as surely as subsidizing corn.”
Corn doesn’t come with positive externalities, education does. Subsidizing education is surely one of the best uses of government revenue imaginable. The “how” of it is a different matter. I’m not a fan of public school monopolization of education subsidies.
As a general rule, it is efficient and wise to tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. This should be the primary function of tax policy.
Corn doesn’t come with positive externalities, education does.
Why do you say education has positive externalities?
From what I understand, education is used largely as costly signalling. As such, subsidizing doesn’t change how much people spend or recieve. It just changes the cost. For example, the government pays for high school education, thus high school dropouts are people who aren’t even willing to go to school for free. As a result, you need a high school diploma for things where the education is completely useless. If they charged for high school, not going wouldn’t mean as much, and it wouldn’t be necessary to go.
anti-trust law, laws against false advertising, corruption laws.
I’ll give you the false advertising. Anti-trust laws do not seem like an obvious win in the case of natural monopolies; for example, destroying Google and giving an equal share of their resources and employees to Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com does not seem obviously likely to improve the quality of search for consumers. As for anti-corruption laws, I’d need to see a much clearer definition before I gave you an opinion.
Your mention of wanting to “preclude blackmail, theft, and slavery” implies that you would like to see cooperative production between genuine equals, not relations of dominance or exploitation.
That’s true, but I suspect you’re using those words in a substantially different sense than I would intend. Let’s clarify: I believe that it is undesirable for someone’s freedom (in a Libertarian theoretical sense of free use of their own body, autonomy, and property) to be dependent on the amount of violent physical force that other economic players are able to muster. This does not imply most of the other things you suggest.
As it happens, I’m on the fence about public education. It seems like a good idea in principle, but having been through the process myself, I cannot endorse it with good conscience. Furthermore, I am uneasy granting the government a monopoly on indoctrination of youth, which is a major component of any education.
As for inheritance tax, I don’t think that’s either enforceable or desirable. If people want to care for their children after they are dead, that doesn’t harm me at all, and I wish them well. As for information campaigns, government propaganda, however much I may agree with this generation of ideals, is not something I particularly want to fund. Governments do not generally give power back once it’s been given to them, and, when you give a government a power, you must trust not only the current administration, but every future one for the lifespan of the country. On the whole, it seems wiser to allow private organizations to blanket the world in propaganda as they see fit.
Oh dear. We seem to have strayed quite far from libertarianism.
You certainly seem to. I think I’m comfortable where I am, thank you. This specifically is actually my complaint about much political discussion. Whenever anyone expresses any doubt about the details of their political beliefs, people from other camps flock like carrion-birds to try to convert them to the righteous path. This leads to people not discussing doubts for fear of appearing weak to the damn, dirty greens, and forces people into unnecessarily extreme positions.
On my last two sentences—I intended them as somewhat of a cheeky wink, but maybe they’re a bit snotty. I’m certainly not trying to convert anyone; and I’m all for being aware of doubts, inconsistencies and hard choices. Political discussion is just great fun.
On the particular examples:
Anti-trust law hasn’t (yet!) destroyed Google—however splitting up monopolists like Standard Oil or various cartels seems a clear win.
I guess anti-corruption laws can be taken as an extension of anti-trust (no bribing the supply manager to get the contract) or as solving problems caused by government problem-solving actions (no bribing the antitrust investigator).
Inherited wealth certainly does harm you. You and I are not on a level playing field with the son of some Saudi prince. We cannot compete fairly for jobs, or wealth. Its not ‘caring for them after they’re gone’ its giving them an unfair advantage over the rest of us.
The education point follows from this, since purchasing better education is perhaps the primary way people inherit privelege. Education in our present society is a positional good—its distribution is zero sum. Some rich woman buys an extra qualification for her daughter, your parents can’t buy it for you, she gets the job—not because shes better, but because her parents are richer than yours. Certainly hurts you.
So perhaps the type of information campaign needs the public backing of government, as this carries the legitimacy of collective action. Also, if we start from now, the ‘private organisations’ with disproportionate wealth and power will be able to produce more propaganda and preserve the status quo (that benefits them)
Anti-trust law hasn’t (yet!) destroyed Google—however splitting up monopolists like Standard Oil or various cartels seems a clear win.
This has more to do with failure to enforce anti-trust laws in a meaningful way, though. In the case of Oil and most major cartels, these are not natural monopolies: they are monopolies built and maintained with the express help of various world states, which is a somewhat different matter.
Inherited wealth certainly does harm you. You and I are not on a level playing field with the son of some Saudi prince. We cannot compete fairly for jobs, or wealth. Its not ‘caring for them after they’re gone’ its giving them an unfair advantage over the rest of us.
Economics is not a zero sum game. I doubt I’m going to find myself competing for a promotion with a Saudi prince. Rich people do not harm the poor with their wealth: they simply may not help (aside from, say, putting their money into banks and loaning it out to less wealthy people).
The education point follows from this, since purchasing better education is perhaps the primary way people inherit privelege. Education in our present society is a positional good—its distribution is zero sum. Some rich woman buys an extra qualification for her daughter, your parents can’t buy it for you, she gets the job—not because shes better, but because her parents are richer than yours. Certainly hurts you.
Knowledge is certainly not a zero sum game! Besides, if you genuinely want everyone to have an identical education, you can’t simply provide public education—you must also outlaw private schools, home schooling, and any sort of parental involvement in education: after all, why should the child of a college professor have an unfair advantage over the child of a ditch digger? That hardly seems fair.
My perspective here is colored because my public school experience was more or less entirely catastrophic, and I am predominately self-educated. If we were to force everyone to be educated at only modern public school levels, it would be an economic and cultural disaster of hard-to-register proportion.
So perhaps the type of information campaign needs the public backing of government, as this carries the legitimacy of collective action. Also, if we start from now, the ‘private organisations’ with disproportionate wealth and power will be able to produce more propaganda and preserve the status quo (that benefits them)
Large charities also have the ‘legitimacy of public action.’ Also, if you think the government won’t use its propagandizing power to preserve the status quo that benefits it, you’ve never sat through the pledge of allegiance.
Rich people do not harm the poor with their wealth: they simply may not help (aside from, say, putting their money into banks and loaning it out to less wealthy people).
Significant status differences in a society are correlated with all kinds of adverse outcomes. One causal hypothesis (with quite a bit of compelling evidence backing it) is that a lot of this has to do with the neuroendocrinological stress response triggered by the perception that others are higher status than oneself.
I don’t know if I’d classify this as rich people harming poor people, but (if accurate) it is an example of entrenched social inequality harming poor (and other low-status) people.
Many interventions in the economy have a positive expected benefit. (I should note that libertarians can concede this point, yet argue against interventions because they infringe people’s rights etc) One great example that you point out is resolving coordination problems. Another is protecting the competitive market itself: anti-trust law, laws against false advertising, corruption laws. Others protect individuals from an unregulated market: medical licenses, tort law, health and safety regulation.
Your mention of wanting to “preclude blackmail, theft, and slavery” implies that you would like to see cooperative production between genuine equals, not relations of dominance or exploitation. Great! From this, certain things follow: the prevention of inherited structures of power through inheritance tax and less income inequality, free education for all to ensure equality of opportunity, information campaigns to help end harmful social roles/scripts/stereotypes of gender, race and sexuality. Oh dear. We seem to have strayed quite far from libertarianism.
Goalpost-shifting between consequences and virtues is characteristic of argument with libertarians, often in one argument with a single libertarian. It can be more infuriating than attempting to pin a Christian down on a claim.
Edit: Argumentative Internet self-declared libertarians, to be fair, per SMBC.
It really doesn’t imply that in the least.
Being opposed to “blackmail, theft, and slavery” does not imply that you think that we’re all “genuine equals”, nor that you’d have any particular wish for that state, nor that even if you had such a wish, it would inform your political opinions in this world where people are decidedly unequal in talents, ethics, drive, and execution.
I have two problems with this. First, part of the idea of personal property is that you can do what you want with it. That’s what makes it a good incentive. If what you want to do with it is give it to your kids, it’s not the governments place to stop you and accuse you of nepotism. If you want to be nepotistic, then the economy can offer you the opportunity of giving money to your kids as incentive, and we will be better for it.
The second problem is that it’s hard to stop. Unless they stop you from giving money away as well, it just means that only people who don’t know they’re about to die get taxed.
I most certainly do not think you are born with the rights to your parents money. If I did, I’d be against the use of wills.
If they just gave you money, you’d still have all the opportunity, and then some because now you can do something else with the money. It’s not a good use of resources for everyone to be educated, and subsidizing it wastes money just as surely as subsidizing corn.
That sounds like a straight-up public good. The main problem here is that you’re giving the government free reign over propaganda, and that might not be something you want to trust them with.
Personally, I’m what I’m thinking of calling a quasi-libertarian. I do think you should generally try to get the government from being involved, but what’s more important is that when they are involved, they use market forces to their advantage, rather than just ignoring them.
“It’s not a good use of resources for everyone to be educated, and subsidizing it wastes money just as surely as subsidizing corn.”
Corn doesn’t come with positive externalities, education does. Subsidizing education is surely one of the best uses of government revenue imaginable. The “how” of it is a different matter. I’m not a fan of public school monopolization of education subsidies.
As a general rule, it is efficient and wise to tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. This should be the primary function of tax policy.
Why do you say education has positive externalities?
From what I understand, education is used largely as costly signalling. As such, subsidizing doesn’t change how much people spend or recieve. It just changes the cost. For example, the government pays for high school education, thus high school dropouts are people who aren’t even willing to go to school for free. As a result, you need a high school diploma for things where the education is completely useless. If they charged for high school, not going wouldn’t mean as much, and it wouldn’t be necessary to go.
I’ll give you the false advertising. Anti-trust laws do not seem like an obvious win in the case of natural monopolies; for example, destroying Google and giving an equal share of their resources and employees to Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com does not seem obviously likely to improve the quality of search for consumers. As for anti-corruption laws, I’d need to see a much clearer definition before I gave you an opinion.
That’s true, but I suspect you’re using those words in a substantially different sense than I would intend. Let’s clarify: I believe that it is undesirable for someone’s freedom (in a Libertarian theoretical sense of free use of their own body, autonomy, and property) to be dependent on the amount of violent physical force that other economic players are able to muster. This does not imply most of the other things you suggest.
As it happens, I’m on the fence about public education. It seems like a good idea in principle, but having been through the process myself, I cannot endorse it with good conscience. Furthermore, I am uneasy granting the government a monopoly on indoctrination of youth, which is a major component of any education.
As for inheritance tax, I don’t think that’s either enforceable or desirable. If people want to care for their children after they are dead, that doesn’t harm me at all, and I wish them well. As for information campaigns, government propaganda, however much I may agree with this generation of ideals, is not something I particularly want to fund. Governments do not generally give power back once it’s been given to them, and, when you give a government a power, you must trust not only the current administration, but every future one for the lifespan of the country. On the whole, it seems wiser to allow private organizations to blanket the world in propaganda as they see fit.
You certainly seem to. I think I’m comfortable where I am, thank you. This specifically is actually my complaint about much political discussion. Whenever anyone expresses any doubt about the details of their political beliefs, people from other camps flock like carrion-birds to try to convert them to the righteous path. This leads to people not discussing doubts for fear of appearing weak to the damn, dirty greens, and forces people into unnecessarily extreme positions.
On my last two sentences—I intended them as somewhat of a cheeky wink, but maybe they’re a bit snotty. I’m certainly not trying to convert anyone; and I’m all for being aware of doubts, inconsistencies and hard choices. Political discussion is just great fun.
On the particular examples:
Anti-trust law hasn’t (yet!) destroyed Google—however splitting up monopolists like Standard Oil or various cartels seems a clear win.
I guess anti-corruption laws can be taken as an extension of anti-trust (no bribing the supply manager to get the contract) or as solving problems caused by government problem-solving actions (no bribing the antitrust investigator).
Inherited wealth certainly does harm you. You and I are not on a level playing field with the son of some Saudi prince. We cannot compete fairly for jobs, or wealth. Its not ‘caring for them after they’re gone’ its giving them an unfair advantage over the rest of us.
The education point follows from this, since purchasing better education is perhaps the primary way people inherit privelege. Education in our present society is a positional good—its distribution is zero sum. Some rich woman buys an extra qualification for her daughter, your parents can’t buy it for you, she gets the job—not because shes better, but because her parents are richer than yours. Certainly hurts you.
So perhaps the type of information campaign needs the public backing of government, as this carries the legitimacy of collective action. Also, if we start from now, the ‘private organisations’ with disproportionate wealth and power will be able to produce more propaganda and preserve the status quo (that benefits them)
This has more to do with failure to enforce anti-trust laws in a meaningful way, though. In the case of Oil and most major cartels, these are not natural monopolies: they are monopolies built and maintained with the express help of various world states, which is a somewhat different matter.
Economics is not a zero sum game. I doubt I’m going to find myself competing for a promotion with a Saudi prince. Rich people do not harm the poor with their wealth: they simply may not help (aside from, say, putting their money into banks and loaning it out to less wealthy people).
Knowledge is certainly not a zero sum game! Besides, if you genuinely want everyone to have an identical education, you can’t simply provide public education—you must also outlaw private schools, home schooling, and any sort of parental involvement in education: after all, why should the child of a college professor have an unfair advantage over the child of a ditch digger? That hardly seems fair.
My perspective here is colored because my public school experience was more or less entirely catastrophic, and I am predominately self-educated. If we were to force everyone to be educated at only modern public school levels, it would be an economic and cultural disaster of hard-to-register proportion.
Large charities also have the ‘legitimacy of public action.’ Also, if you think the government won’t use its propagandizing power to preserve the status quo that benefits it, you’ve never sat through the pledge of allegiance.
Significant status differences in a society are correlated with all kinds of adverse outcomes. One causal hypothesis (with quite a bit of compelling evidence backing it) is that a lot of this has to do with the neuroendocrinological stress response triggered by the perception that others are higher status than oneself.
I don’t know if I’d classify this as rich people harming poor people, but (if accurate) it is an example of entrenched social inequality harming poor (and other low-status) people.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 10
Change the “good” to “better” and it would be more accurate.
-- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk II, Chapter 10
We had those, the problem is that it turns out those stereotypes were in fact true.
So some of them might be. But it is curious that (to use one example), the degree of gender difference in math performance varies widely by country, and moreover is most extreme in Islamic countries(pdf). You can’t just say that because stereotypes are less strong now, or that they are less socially acceptable to vocalize, that they aren’t to a large extent due to self-fulfilling issues rather than any intrinsic difference.