Fatal Conceit

The ramblings of Zachary Woodman. Unapologetic Rortian Pragmatist, Unterrified Hayekian, failed academic, radical liberal. UMich Alumn in Economics and Philosophy, 2018. \This blog is currently inactive, but is kept up for archival purposes. My more recent public writings can be found at https://notesonliberty.com/ My interests include classical liberal political theory, anarchist political theory, macroeconomic theory, behavioral economics, Austrian economics, constitutional political economy, anarchism, public policy, queer theory, political theory, interpretive sociology, and neo-pragmatism. Intellectual influences include Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Huemer, Judith Butler, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Bernstein. Contributing editor for http://notesonliberty.com.

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Moving to Substack

Hello everyone, It has been 6 years since I last posted here. A lot as happened for me and the world. Graduation from undergrad, grad school, a pandemic, and so, so much more. At any rate, I would like to start blogging more again. However, I do not think tumblr is the place to do it. Most folks seem to be over at Substack these days so I am jumping ship over there. This feed will be kept up for archival purposes, but you can now follow me at https://fatalconceit.substack.com/. I have not decided what to do with my old personal tumblr feed. That might be active again soon, or it might not. Best: Zak

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What is Wrong with Income Inequality? Five Reasons to be Concerned

It has been several months since I posted anything here as I’ve been busy, but at any rate I have a new blog post over at Notes on Liberty on why libertarians should be concerned about income inequality. While I concede normal libertarian and classical liberal arguments against distributive justice I argue there are five main empirical reasons for libertarians to still be skeptical of rising inequality. They are: 1) economic inequality is often the result of unjust government policies and institutions, such as rent-seeking 2) economic inequality can often empower the wealthiest to use rent-seeking to exploit those without politcial or economic power, 3) economic inequality can harm economic growth, which can have bad effects on the quality of life for everyone especially the poor, 4) economic inequality can lead to unstable political institutions, or populist support for illiberal policies which harm the freedom of everyone in society, 5) economic inequality can harm social mobility, which insofar as libertarians and classical liberals have meritocratic leanings is problematic. A slice:

The main point I’m getting at is nothing new: one need not be a radical leftist social egalitarian who thinks equal economic outcomes are necessarily the only moral outcomes to be concerned on some level with inequality. How one responds to inequality is empirically dependent on the causes of the problems, and we have some good reasons to think that more limited government is a good solution to unequal outcomes.

This is not to say inequality poses no problem for libertarian’s ideal political order, if it is the case that markets inherently begets problematic levels of inequality, as for example Thomas Piketty claims, then we might need to re-evaluate how we integrate markets. However, there is good reason to be skeptical of such claims (Thomas Piketty’s in particular are suspect). Even if we grant that markets by themselves do lead to levels of inequality that cause problems 3-5, we must not commit the Nirvana fallacy. We need to compare government’s aptitude at managing income distribution, which for well-worn public choice reasons outlined in problems one and two as well as a mammoth epistemic problem inherent in figuring out how much inequality is likely to lead to those problems, and compare it to the extent to which markets do generate those problems. It is possible (very likely, even) that even if markets are not perfect in the sense of ensuring distribution that does not have problematic political economic outcomes, the state attempting to correct these outcomes would only make things worse.

It’s also worth mentioning that I did have a post at NOL in November I neglected to share about political correctness, identity politics, and Trump. I plan on having a follow up sometime soon, but at any rate check it out.

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Against Democracy: A Review

Over at Students for Liberty’s blog, I have a review of Jason Brennan’s excellent new book Against Democracy. A slice:

It is in responding to some of the objections to these proposals that there is some weakness in Brennan’s arguments. For example, he responds to the point that most politically knowledgeable are disproportionately white, wealthy, middle-aged men. Epistocratic policies will exclude poorer minorities, such as black women, from having proportional representation in the electorate. Brennan’s response to this objection, for the most part, seems right. First, it is not clear that giving ignorant minorities the right to vote helps them in any way because they are ignorant of what policies are needed to help them. Second, most voters do not vote their self-interest in the first place. Third, those imbalances in political knowledge reflect deeper injustices in mistreatment of those minorities, many of which are continued by allowing the politically ignorant to rule. Having a more knowledgeable electorate may be able to fix those injustices in the first place.

Though the first two responses seem perfectly right to me, the third one could use some qualification. Part of what an electorate does (or, at least, should do) in a democracy is not only vote for candidates who advocate their preferred solutions to problems, but also candidates who recognize the problems they face are problems in the first place and take those issues to be a high priority, prolonging these injustices. Though a better-informed electorate might be better able to recognize when something is a problem based off the facts, they still might give issues that do not affect them a very low priority simply due to the availability bias in their communities.

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Most Arguments Against Open Borders Lead to Extremely Un-Libertarian Positions

In my latest at NOL I consider a couple of objections to open borders commonly given by libertarians and show how these arguments, if applied consistently, can lead to some pretty absurd anti-libertarian positions. A Slice:

For example, many libertarians claim that because immigrants will increase deficits by using the welfare state, the government is justified in restricting immigration. Of course, this isn’t actually true, but even if it were true this in no way justifies immigration restrictions.

...So libertarians who make this argument are substantially saying that if it can be shown to reduce deficits, using government force to restrict someone’s freedoms is justified. If anti-open borders libertarians treated any other issue like they do immigration, it would lead to some pretty absurd, anti-libertarian policy positions. For an example, as long as we have government-provided Medicare programs, allowing people to eat unhealthy foods or smoke will increase the cost of those welfare programs; following the logic of the argument above, the government would be justified in implementing paternalist policies that restrict people’s right to consume what they want to reduce the burden of the welfare state. People with lower incomes are more likely to use welfare programs as well, so the government is justified in reducing their population size by restricting their right to reproduce through forced sterilization.

Obviously, both these positions are absurd from a libertarian perspective. Someone’s freedom from government force in areas of reproduction and what food they consume is more important than the fiscal costs. What makes the freedom of movement any different? Replace “people with lower incomes” with “immigrants” and “sterilization programs” with “immigration restrictions” in the sentence above, and the argument is the same. If the government cannot restrict freedoms in other areas in the name of deficit reduction, what makes freedom of movement in immigration restrictions any different?

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No, Trump, Immigrants aren’t a Drain on Healthcare Entitlements

After a month of sparring with multiple computer issues, I’m hopefully back to blogging more regularly. My latest at NOL is a short fact-check of Trump’s claims that immigrants are a fiscal cost for healthcare programs. A slice:

Meanwhile in reality, undocumented immigrants actually contribute more to Medicare than they withdraw. It is unclear where Trump is getting his $11 billion figure, but he is ignoring the increased payroll taxes undocumented immigrants pay into these programs. A 2015 study found that, in fact, between 2010 and 2011 immigrants paid up to $3.8 billion more into Medicare than they took out.

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Would a Universal Basic Income Increase Poverty?

Over at NOL I have a longer, wonkish post analyzing a recent piece published by the Center for Budget Policies and Priorities (or, as my think tank buddies call it, the “Center for Bigger Budgets) which claimed that a Universal Basic Income (or Basic Income Guarantee) would increase poverty. I find the argument completely unconvincing and show why our current welfare state is increasing poverty, but a BIG might not. A slice:

But more importantly, Goldstein’s assertion that replacing the welfare state with a UBI would increase poverty is fully unwarranted. He seems to take a ridiculously unsophisticated idea that “more means-tested programs immediately reduce welfare.” His assertion that the programs in question “lift tens of millions of people, including millions of children, out of poverty each year and make tens of millions more less poor” is, at best, completely erroneous. For three reasons: first, individuals know better what they need to lift themselves out of the than the government, and these programs assume the opposite. Second, the structure of status quo means-tested programs often creates a “poverty trap” which incentivizes households to remain below the poverty line. Finally, thanks to these first two theoretical reasons, the empirical evidence on the success of the status-quo programs in terms of reducing the poverty rate is, at best, mixed.

The way our current welfare state is structured is it allocates how much money can go to what basic necessities for welfare recipients. So if a household gets $10,000 in welfare a year, the government mandates that, say, $3,000 goes to food, $3,000 goes to healthcare, $3,000 goes to education, and $1,000 goes to retirement.[21] This essentially assumes that all individuals and households have the same needs; but this is simply not the case, elderly people may need more money for healthcare and less for education, younger people may need the exact opposite, and poorer families with children may need more for food and education than other needs. It’s almost as if our current welfare system assumes interpersonal utility function comparisons are possible, or utility functions of poorer people are fairly homogenous but they’re not. It also ignores the opportunity cost of the funding for helping individuals and households out of funding; a dollar spent on healthcare may be more effectively spent on food for a particular individual or household.

In sum, there’s a knowledge problem involved in our current welfare policy to combat poverty: the government cannot know the needs of impoverished individuals, and such knowledge is largely dispersed, tacit, and possessed by the individuals themselves. The chief merit of a UBI is, rather than telling poor people what they can spend their welfare on, it just gives them the money and lets them spend it as they need.

I would also like to highlight this chart featured in the piece showing how our welfare state, at least in Pennsylvania, actually incentivizes people to stay in poverty:

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Where did Homo Economicus come from?

Over at NOL, I seek to answer this question:

It could be argued, in a sense, that the protestant Christian aim to complete moral purity and the Enlightenment aim to make man perfect in knowledge in morality (as embodied in Franklin’s virtue ethics) helped give rise to a culture that would be primed for such a model. Within economics, historically it comes from Bentham’s utilitarianism and Jevon’s mathematical extrapolations from Bentham’s psychology. However, I’d say this comes from a deeper “Cartesian anxiety” in Bernstein’s use of the term to make economic a big-T True, capital-C Certain, capital-S Science just like physics (which Jevon’s himself stated was an aim of his work, and has preoccupied economists since the days of JS Mill). If economic science cannot be said to be completely positive and “scientific” like the natural sciences with absolutely falsifiable propositions and an algorithmic means of theory-choice, it is feared, it must be written off as a pseudo-scientific waste of time or else ideology to justify capitalism. If economics cannot make certain claims to knowledge, it must be solipsist and relativist and, again, be another form of pseudo-science or ideology. If economic models cannot reach definitive mathematical results, then they must be relativistic and a waste of time. This is just another example of the extreme Cartesian/Katian/Platonic (in Rorty’s use of the term) either/or: objectivity OR relativism, science OR nonscience, determinate mathematical solutions OR ideological emotional bickering. Homo economicus was erected as a means to be an epistemic foundation to solve all these anxieties and either/ors.

Of course, as any good Deweyan, I think all these either/ors are nonsense. Their understanding of science, as revealed through the so-called “growth of knowledge” literature in postempiricist philosophy of science (ie., the work of Thomas Kuhn, Lakotos, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, Michael Polanyi, Richard Bernstein, Richard Rorty, etc.) has shown that this positivist conception of science, that is science consists of algorithmic theory choice selected based off correspondence with theory-free, brute “facts” of the “external world,” is woefully inaccurate. Dialogical Aristotelian practical reasoning in the community of scientists plays just as much of a role in formulating a scientific consensus as empirical verification. This does not undermine science’s claims to objectivity or rationality, in fact it puts such claims in more epistemically tenable terms.

Further, the desire to make the social sciences just another extension of the natural science, as Hayek shows in the Counterrevolution of Science, and as even positivists like Milton Freidman argue, is a completely misleading urge that has led to some of the worst follies in modern social theory. Obviously, I cheer the fact that “homo economicus is dead, and we have killed him,” but now that we’ve “out-rationalized the rationalizer of all rationalizers,” we must try to re-evaluate our economic theories and methods to, as Bernstein or Dewey would put it, “reconstruct” our economic science.

I’ve been working on a paper for over a year now beginning a project of such a “reconstruction.” I’ve also discussed such questions in the past here on Fatal Conceit.

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The Cruel, Conceited Follies of Trump’s Colonialist Foreign Policy

My latest over at NOL is an overview and critique of Trump’s foreign policy. First I argue, contra Hillary, that Trump does have a bit undergirding coherence to his often prima facie contradictory statements about foreign policy in public. This coherence can be characterized as a Jacksonian colonialism which takes the worst elements of interventionism and isolationism which seeks to use coercive foreign intervention to aggressively advance American interests. A slice:

Trump essentially views other countries in one of two ways, the way he seems to view people: either as enemies to be defeated economically (eg. China and Mexico) and militarily (eg. Lybia and Syria) or assets to be exploited for American interests via colonial conquest (eg. Iraq). Indeed, he combines the worse elements of neoconservative interventionism with the worst elements of isolationism that my fellow note writer Brandon Christensen points out. Like isolationists, he opposes international organizations like NATO and the UN, is generally skeptical of alliances, and fiercely opposes trade agreements; but he also supports costly, unnecessary, and unjust foreign wars and efforts to intervene in other countries’ affairs like neoconservatives. He manages to be both an isolationist, thinking the American government should only protect its own interests at the expense of the citizens of other people, and an interventionist, thinking the government should wage unjust wars to that end, at the same time. 

Next, I argue that Trump’s foreign policy goals are remote from the goals of liberalism of peace and individual liberty and that they will likely lead to cruel violations of human rights. I also claim that the policy mechanisms Trump seems to favor are ill-suited even for his sadistic ends. Another slice:

The knowledge problem also applies on another level to Trump’s brand of interventionism. Trump assumes that he, in all his wisdom as president, can know what the “national interest” of the American people actually is, just like socialist central planners assume they know the underlying value scales or utility functions of consumers in society. We have little reason to assume this is the case.

Let’s take a more concrete example: Trump seems to think one example of intervention in the name of national interest is to take the resource of another country that our country needs, most commonly oil. However, how is he supposed to know which resources need to be pillaged for the national interest? There’s a fundamental calculation problem here. A government acting without a profit signal cannot know the answer to such a problem and lacks the incentive to properly answer it in the first place as the consequences failure falls upon the taxpayers, not the policy makers. Even if Trump and his advisors could figure out that the US needs a resource, like oil, and successfully loots it from another country, like Libya, there is always the possibility that this artificial influx of resources, this crony capitalist welfare for one resource at the expense of others, is crowding out potentially more efficient substitutes.

For an example, if the government through foreign policy expands the supply of oil, this may stifle entrepreneurial innovations for potentially more efficient resources in certain applications, such as natural gas, solar, wind, or nuclear in energy, for the same reasons artificially subsidizing these industries domestically stifle innovation. They artificially reduce the relative scarcity of the favored resource, reducing the incentive for entrepreneurs to find innovative means of using other resources or more efficient production methods. At the very least, Trump and his advisors would have little clue how to judge the opportunity cost of pillaging various resources and so would not know how much oil to steal from Libya. Even ignoring all those problems, it’s very probable that it would be cheaper and morally superior to simply peaceably trade with another country for oil (or any other resource) rather than waging a costly, violent, inhumane war in the first place.

Finally, I compare Trump’s foreign policy ideas to Hillary Clinton’s:

...I’d still argue Clinton’s foreign policy is at least marginally preferable to Trump’s. With Trump we risk not only a fairly high probability of atrocious policies—quite possibly worse than Clinton’s—based off of his comments, we also risk the added problem of regime uncertainty in foreign policy. Also, some of the concrete policies Trump has called for—like torture and the murdering of families—are a cause for serious concern. Further, Clinton is likely to be far more diplomatic and will be less likely to offend other leaders and alienate the US from the world. Her point that Trump is “temperamentally unfit to lead” is very well taken, and was only confirmed by Trump’s response to her speech which in which he largely stuck to the non-substantive screaming of insults in his typical childish fashion

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Libertarians and Pragmatists on Democracy Part 4: Why Market Anarchism is more Democratic than Democracy

The last part of my series on democracy is up over at NOL, in which I argue that market anarchism is more likely to achieve the goals set out for democracy by ardent democrats themselves than democratic institutions. Here’s a slice:

Deliberation about legal policy is far more likely to be more reasoned in market anarchy than in democracy. First, because market anarchism is more radically experimental than political democracy. Freedom of speech and of thought in democracy is often likened to a metaphorical “marketplace of ideas,” but in market anarchy it is a literal marketplace in which the ideas are not chosen just by speculation and public deliberation, but actually experimented with and acted upon in practice. Democracy is only “experimental” in a priori public deliberation about policies, but market anarchy is “experimental” in actually applying those policies and assessing their results a posteriori. Under democracy, once a policy is chosen it becomes difficult to assess counterfactually if another potential policy could have yielded better results, thus it is difficult to ascertain which was the superior policy. It is as if scientists in a lab simply talked about the hypothetical results of various hypothetical experiments and chose theories based on their discussions rather than actually testing the theories by actually running the experiments. Because of the polycentric nature of law under market anarchy, multiple policies are taken on at the same time, making it easier to tell which is more desirable in practice rather than simple theoretical deliberation.

Another reason why political deliberation is more likely to be reasoned in market anarchy than democracy is because of the institutional mechanisms for choosing policy. The main way law is “made” in democracy is through legislation voted on by representatives, who are ultimately accountable to the public through general elections. Often, debate on the floor of legislative bodies is anything but reasoned and deliberative, and clearly discussion about elections quickly devolves into mindless partisan bickering, sensationalist “scandals,” and populist rhetorical flair rather than reasoned discussion about policies. In market anarchy, however, law is “discovered” by private arbitrators and judges who are ultimately accountable to the defense firm’s consumers in the marketplace. It is pretty clear that real-world courtrooms tend to have a more elevated level of dialogue than legislative bodies, to say less of public elections, and I fail to see why this would not be the case under market anarchism.Further, there wouldn’t be a need for partisan bickering and debates that bring down the level of public discourse in market anarchy, for similar reasons why there isn’t nearly as nasty debates about preferences for consumer goods as there are about politics. To use an analogy, in democracy, if we’re voting on what soda to consume, whoever wins the vote gets a monopoly on their preferred soda; so my preference for Coke could possibly eliminate your ability to enjoy Pepsi; but in a market, if I prefer Coke you still can drink Pepsi, meaning we don’t need to bicker about our consumer preferences. It is similar (though clearly not identical because when we’re talking about law it’s quite a bit more consequential) with legal policies: in democracy, if I prefer one set of legal rules to another which you prefer, we must fight over how to vote because the two are mutually exclusive; but in market anarchy, because law is polycentric and not monolithic, they are not mutually exclusive so we don’t need to fight nearly as hard for it. There’s a good reason why debates among consumers for products they prefer (Coke v. Pepsi, Apple v. Windows, Android v. iPhone) rarely get as nasty as debates in democratic politics, because there is room for disagreement at the end of the day in a market that there is not in politics.

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Don Lavoie on the Central Insight of Hermeneutics

Don Lavoie in the introduction to a collection of papers edited by him entitled Economics and Hermeneutics provides one of the best short introductory summaries to hermeneutics out there

The central point of hermeneutics might be summed up by clarifying the approach to understanding that it challenges, which might be called the 'copy' view. According to this view, when you read these words you are trying to reproduce as accurately as possible the original meaning I intended when I wrote them, you are trying to get an exact copy of my meaning. Human communication is implicitly treated as fundamentally similar to telecommunications. But if that was what actually happened when human beings tried to communicate with one another, then whenever there was a communication failure, our only recourse would be to send another copy, or otherwise build in some redundancy, as in computer communications. Instead, when we are misunderstood, we say it differently the next time, we explicate hidden assumptions, anticipate possible objections, deploy different examples. Our communicative process is not that of a fax machine sending a stream of bits in one direction only. Communicative partners engage with one another to discover a common understanding of a subject matter through a bidirectional, give-and-take process.

Against the copy approach, hermeneutics discusses the 'dialogical' process, through which a meaning is developed out of a text by the reader's interaction with it. Especially in the version that has been developed by Hans-George Gadamer, it takes the process of spontaneous interplay which occurs in a good conversation to exemplify successful interpretation. The reader of a text reads it well when he both permits the author to speak and permits himself to listen. He allows the text to speak, in the sense that he does not merely subject it to his own examination but strives to be genuinely open to the challenges it may raise against him. He also actively listens, in the sense that he does not passively receive the text's message but needs to appropriate it for himself, relate it to what he already knows, see what it means to him.

Contrary to many misreadings of philosophical hermeneutics, particularly from Rothbardian Austrians, hermeneutics does not imply any sort of relativism or radical subjectivism, it instead moves beyond such concepts and emphasizes the intersubjective dimension of human communication and interpretation. It rejects the extreme Cartesian either/or of classifying everything as simply objective or subjective, and analyses intersubjectivity.

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Libertarians and Pragmatists on Democracy Part 3: Pragmatists on Democracy as a Way of Life

Over at NOL, I have part three of my series on democracy up. In this part, I analyze and critique John Dewey and Sidney Hook’s conception of democracy as a way of life, what I dub philosophical democracy. I argue that, although the philosophical aspirations of democracy as a way of life are admirable, political democracy fails to meet these goals. A slice:

The pragmatist conception of philosophical democracy is certainly admirable from a classical liberal standpoint. Its emphasis on dispersed knowledge, its call for liberal tolerance of diversity, its humanistic respect for the dignity of every individual, and its use of a broadly scientific (though not scientistic) approach to social issues are all well in line with classical liberalism’s goals. However, clearly the incorporation of political democracy as the political ideal by the pragmatists would irk many classical liberals and especially modern libertarians. In fact, I would argue that political democracy in practice is somewhat antithetical to the philosophical aspirations of the pragmatists.

There are four ways in which political democracy undermines the aspirations of philosophical democracy. First, in no meaningful sense could it be said that political democracy has the consent of the governed. Second, political democracy in practice is in no meaningful sense actually an application of intelligence and the scientific method to political issues in practice. Third, the centralization of political authority and planning in democracies undermines Dewey’s point that intelligence is distributed throughout society (particularly in his extremely interventionist views on economics). Finally, the democratic process undermines the mutual respect of individual human dignity philosophical democracy exalts.

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Richard Bernstein and Habermas on Neo-Aristotelianism

The fact is that many of those who have appealed to Aristotle's ethics and politics have endorsed some form of neo-Aristotelianism in the contemporary world have done so to buttress a dubious neo-conservatism--to give it intellectual respectability. This conjunction of neo-Aristotelianism and bourgeois conservative thought has been more evident in German thought than in other varieties of conservatism, but it arouses a legitimate suspicion about the use of Aristotle to justify an ideological position. More generally, neo-Aristoteleans tend to use Aristotle as a weapon in the battle against the legacy of the Enlightenment. ....Habermas is well aware of the dark side of the “dialectic of the Enlightenment” and the dark side of the Enlightenment legacy. He knows aout the rise of positivism, scientism, the disenchantment of the world, relativism, emotivism, and the triumph on instrumental reason all have their origins in the systematic ambiguities of the Enlightenment tradition.  But at the same time he realizes that we need to preserve the truth in this tradition and reconstruct its emancipatory potential. What is needed is a genuine dialectical synthesis of the ancients and the moderns, not turning one's back on modernity as many neo-Aristotelians are tempted to do.

The above quote is from Richard Bernstein’s excellent Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (189) in which he summarizes Habermas’s criticisms of neo-Aristotelianism. This pretty much sums up my skepticism towards thinkers like Leo Strauss (though he’s not necessarily a neo-Aristotelean, his attacks on modernity fall prety to this criticism), most west coast Straussians (Harry Jaffa and his students), MacIntyre, and radically traditionalist conservatives like Patrick Deneen. Elsewhere, Bernstein notes how many neo-Aristoteleans try to divorce his Politics and Ethics from his “metaphysical biology;” the Straussians fall prey to this criticism as well (though certainly not MacIntyre in his later years and Deneen).

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On the Liberal Commodification of Minorities: Why Frozen’s Elsa Shouldn’t be a Lesbian

Recently, there have been a ton of calls from the left for Disney to make their princess Elsa from Frozen a lesbian in the upcoming sequel. As may be predicted, bigots on the religious right are freaking out over this prospect and are opposed to it. True to my contrarian nature, as a leftist classical liberal gay male who is passionately in favor of gay rights, I agree with the right that Elsa shouldn’t be made into a lesbian, albeit for very different reasons.

The reason for my opposition lies in the fact that treating minorities as some sort of spectacle can be as problematic as outright right-wing homophobia. This isn’t just the case for the recent push for “more representation” of homosexuals in the media, but this is also the case for people of color, transgender persons, or any other minority. Though it could conceivably be done well, making Elsa a lesbian has almost nothing to do with the plot, is somewhat contradictory to what was done in the first movie, and if done the way these things are typically done in the Western animation (see my comparison of western treatments of LGBT issues to Japanese anime), will detract from the (already lackluster) plot of the film.

In truth, making Elsa a lesbian (or if Disney were to randomly throw in people of color into a movie based in a setting where there were no people of color for no good reason as people wanted them to do) would be nothing more than a thinly veiled, contrived money-grab using homosexuals as commodities. It would just be treating gay people as a token for Disney to prove how “progressive” they are and get liberals from Gay Rights, Inc. to buy their products. I’m not typically a fan of Marxian arguments from commodity fetishism, but if treating gay people in this way isn’t over-commodification of people that leads to alienation, capitalistic exploitation, and dehumanization, I don’t know what is.  

It isn’t necessarily that I have a problem with Disney making money off of media involving gay people, or even including gay characters for the sole reason of making money without any regard for the social activism; as Adam Smith said, we don’t get our dinner from the benevolence of the butcher and baker and we need not get our cinema from the benevolence of the producer and director. Further, I recognize the need for more representation and would greatly value media, particularly for kids, that takes LGBT issues seriously and incorporates LGBT characters well for the sake of what Richard Rorty called “sentimental education.” However, in all this discussion about “more representation” it’s easily forgotten that gays (at least for men) are only around five to ten percent of the population and trans people are less than one percent. This isn’t to say that gays aren’t underrepresented in film or that more representation isn’t a good thing, over I would submit the fact that Americans overestimate the amount of homosexual people as evidence that we’re close.

Nonetheless, a balance needs to be struck between accurate representation of minorities that actually achieves sentimental education and crass commodification of minorities. Occasionally, this balance is well struck in children’s media: Heather has two Mommies, And Tango Makes Three, Legend of Korra (to a lesser extent), and, though aimed less at children, Hourou Musuko all accomplish this very well. However, my expectations for Disney to do this are very low and the way the public discourse has gone on this issue in general goes way too far on the side of commodification.

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Libertarians and Pragmatists on Democracy Part 2: Classical Liberal and Libertarian Criticisms of Democratic Institutions

Over at NOL, I have the second part of my series on democracy up. In it, I mostly analyze and critique the various approaches classical liberals have taken to the issue. Thinkers analyzed include John Locke, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, the Virginia School of Political Economy (Tulloch, Wagner, Buchanan), Hans Herman Hoppe, Michael Huemer, and Jason Brennan.  I conclude by saying the following:

Clearly, the classical liberals—from de Tocqueville to Jason Brennan—have very good reason to be skeptical of democracy, and perhaps even to feverishly oppose democracy. I still do not take the conclusions to the extremes of Hoppe and (at least from my limited knowledge of his writing on this topic) Brennan. I would agree with Hayek and Mises that constitutional representative democracy is the nth best alternative to other systems such as feudalism, absolutist monarchy, and any form of authoritarianism. (Although my general opposition to nation-states for both anarchist and communitarian reasons makes me more critical of democracy than most moderate classical liberals.)

However, it is clear that democracy is far from the best of all possible governmental arrangements. At the very least, the truth that Aristotle emphasized in his Politics that it matters not so much the make-up of the government (rule of the many, few, or one) but the quality of government, whether it is tyrannical or not. There is very good reason to believe, due to most of the arguments by the great thinkers discussed above, that democracy is, unfortunately, more likely than not to lead to tyranny—even if it is less likely to do so than the existing alternatives.

Having said that, perhaps not all is lost for the spirit of democracy. In the next post, I will analyze the pragmatist conception of democracy perhaps most popular among American twentieth-century liberals and progressives. This conception of democracy is far more than a form of political decision making discussed by the classical liberals, but a broader social epistemology and philosophy as mentioned in the introduction. I hope it will be clear by the end of the next post in this series that it is possible to affirm some of the philosophical commitments of democracy extolled by thinkers such as John Dewey, Sidney Hook, and Richard Rorty without necessarily embracing democracy as a political decision-making progress or, as Hayek would argue, democracy as it presently exists.

Keep a look out for part three, which I should have up by next week.

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A Critique of Dennis Prager’s Straw Man on how “The Left Loathes Western Civilization”

Everyone’s (least) favorite pseudo-intellectual neo-conservative junk columnist, Dennis Prager, is at it again. This time, apparently, his completely academically rigorous, 2deep4me, and definitely logical insight is that “the left” (whoever that is) “loathes western civilization.” First, Prager points to recent events at Stanford University as evidence that these horrible leftists hate the west:

This month, Stanford University students voted on a campus resolution that would have their college require a course on Western civilization, as it did until the 1980s.

Stanford students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A columnist at the Stanford Daily explained why: Teaching Western civilization means "upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations."

As one Reddit user pointed out, Prager’s account of what happened at Stanford is, at best, over-simplistic and, at worst, misleading. They did not reject teaching the Western civilization at Stanford, they simply gave students options on classes to fulfill that requirement. Here’s what the actual description of the core says:

The Core’s four tiers each consist of a class or series of classes that addresses a certain aspect of the humanities. According to the proposal, the first tier, “Foundations,” will focus on the ancient origins of world civilizations. The second tier, “Traditions,” will study the history and traditions of various cultures through a three-course sequence. As of now, there are four planned tracks within “Traditions:” students may study works from East Asian, Middle Eastern, African/African-American or European traditions. The third tier is called “Disciplines” and is comprised of introductory courses for various disciplines in the humanities, including (but not limited to) philosophy, classics and art history. The fourth tier is a series of advanced seminars in the humanities.

…The Humanities Core comes at a time when humanities requirements at Stanford have been the subject of broad campus discourse. With regards to the “Traditions” tier, the Core places a large emphasis on diversity in cultures, and states that “no single cultural tradition can be required of all students.” This seems to contrast with the Western Civilization requirement proposed earlier this year, which proposed a standardized humanities curriculum based in the Western canon.

So students can still study western civilization, not only in the “traditions” segment, but also the “foundations” (there are western civilizations that are ancient), and the “disciplines” (philosophy, classics, and art history all have western topics); they just gave the option of students to study other cultures in addition to the western civilization, not instead of.

But of course, Prager has more misleading mind vomit to regurgitate. In the rest of the article, he ridicules “the left” for hating western civilization because they “hate standards.” For being posted on a website called "Real Clear Politics," Prager is surprisingly unclear with what it even means by "the left." He tries to add a pseudo-intellectual facade of nuance by separating "liberalism" from what it calls "the left," and then destroys that by calling people who are pretty much liberals by any standard (eg., Obama) "the left." Basically, "the left" becomes an obscure, faceless enemy in the dark for all things bad in the way the likes of truly academic intellectual giants like Rush Limbaugh use the term, similar to "the state" for some cartoon libertarians or “neoliberals” for today’s socialists and far leftists.

Next, Prager builds a straw man directed at nobody in particular (probably whoever "the left" is supposed to be) thinly veiled under the guise of a pseudo-intellectual argument. First of all, I’m pretty sure very few self-identified leftists, except a few people who misuse anti-colonialist critical theory on Tumblr, truly "loathe" western civilization. Look at the intellectual heroes of the variety of ideologies on the modern "left:" Rawls, Zizek, Marx, Dworkin, or Dewey. If you seriously think, in all their serious engagements with western philosophy and at times almost ethnocentric (in the Rortian use of the term) focus on the west, they "loathe western civilization" you are probably a neck-bearded conservative ignoramus in the first place. If you think they "hate standards" when pretty much their entire projects are to create a theory of standards--moral, aesthetic, social, and otherwise--you're not only an ignoramus, but you're willfully trying to be an ignoramus.

Then Prager says that leftists think “Michelangelo is no better than any contemporary artist, and Rembrandt is no greater than any non-Western artist,” and implies that “the left” doesn’t believe in any aesthetic standards. I suspect the only people who dislike people like Michaelangelo or think there are no aesthetic standards are probably the same imaginary evil homosexuals seeking to persecute homophobic Christians.

No attack on “the left” is incomplete without a little Islamophobia as well, as Prager continues:

That is why the left is so protective of Islam. America's left-wing president, Barack Obama, will not use, and does not seem to allow the government to use, the words "Islamic terrorism." And, criticism of Islam is labeled "Islamophobic," thereby morally equating any such criticism with racism. It is not that the left is sympathetic to Islam, for it has contempt for all religions. It is that many Muslims loathe the West, and the enemies of my enemy (the West) must be protected.

I'm pretty sure the reason modern leftists are critical of Islamophobia is probably thanks to arguments they actually make (eg. Rawls's application of self-respect under the veil of ignorance) than that they're some relativist nihilist monsters who hate all "western moral standards" (whatever those are). And if there are appreciations of eastern over western values, they're probably not because of a hatred of standards (as if standards are only a western phenomenon), but probably for some variety of reasons such as those given by Nietzsche in regards to Buddhism.

The article then ends like your typical bad sermon given by an evangelical megachurch brought sponsored by Jesus, Inc. about how leftists hate God's judgment:

And finally, we come to the left's loathing of the religions of Western civilization -- the Judeo-Christian religions, which have clear standards of right and wrong.

Bible-based religions affirm a morally judging God. For the left, that is anathema. For the left, the only judging allowed is leftists' judging of others. No one judges the left -- neither man nor God.

Ironically, this comes just after Prager talks about how leftists are defensive of Islam which has perhaps the most judgmental concept of God out there.

This little bit of pseudo-intellectual, straw-manned drivel truly proves, though, that Prager is the Kidz Bop of right wing, quasi-evangelical nonsense.

[fatal-conceit]

UChicago’s Diedra McCloskey, one of the greatest economic minds of our time, joins Don Boudreaux of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center to discuss her new book Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. McCloskey’s book, the third of a series, argues that the classical liberal values of the bourgeoisie was the catalyst of what she calls the “great enrichment:” the fact that most of humanity, particularly the west, has had improvements in wealth and quality of life by dozens of orders of magnitude in the last couple centuries. Boudreaux also interviews McCloskey about her thoughts on the economics profession, hermeneutics and rhetoric, income inequality, Piketty, and Marx. Highly recommended listening. 

[fatal-conceit]

Study: The Cost of the US Regulatory Burden is Larger than the GDP of Almost Every Country in the World

If there is one area of economic policy that we should focus on systemically reforming the most, it is not what is typically talked about in modern political discourse. Most conservatives tend to focus exclusively on welfare programs and fiscal policy, most liberals focus almost exclusively on fiscal policy and immigration, and most libertarians will focus on fiscal policy, drug policy, welfare, or monetary policy. Though all of those areas are important and desperately need reform, the conversation almost wholly ignores perhaps the most damaging economic policy out there: regulatory policy.

Of course, there are tons of public choice and political economy points that could be acknowledged to back up my assertion that regulatory policy should be the primary focus of reform. Problems of the logic of collective action, regulatory capture, the revolving door between regulators and their industries, administrative/ bureaucratic bloat, unconstitutional executive actions, and so on plague the way our current regulatory policy is made and enforced. However, there are two points that are often ignored when discussing regulation: first, that it is perhaps more politically possible than any of the other opportunities for economic reform and, second, the sheer size and scope of the problem.

In the first place, I think it is one of the more possible areas systemic reform that can be accomplished. The fact that monetary policy reforms are pretty much politically impossible is readily apparent. First, any systemic reform (such as the abolition of the Fed or even adopting a new policy rule) will be met with strong opposition both from the elite academics affiliated with the Fed and investors who are struggling with issues of regime uncertainty. Second, monetary policy simply isn’t on the radar of most of the American electorate as most voters are rationally ignorant of monetary policy (I doubt most typical voters even know what the term means) so forming a popular movement on it outside of niche circles like Ron Paul supporters is very difficult. Third, it is out of the influence of most of the political process so little can be done about it by political activists or elected representatives save a few small, meaningless actions like auditing the fed (which, for a variety of reasons, I’m opposed to any way). This means that the only people who can meaningfully do something about it are academics who can work with employees of the Fed like Scott Sumner or Larry White (who do a great job at this), but it’ll be a long, hard fight before anything meaningful is done in the realm of monetary policy.

The same could be said for fiscal policy. First, political winds are simply far against cutting spending significantly. Political gridlock in Washington has stopped a budget from being past even over small issues like Planned Parenthood funding, so major cuts to spending are out of the question. Even if we could get a conversation started among legislators about spending, all of them have their sacred cows that will not be touched—liberals have their social welfare programs and pork projects for their districts, conservatives have their military spending and pork projects for their district. The same for comprehensive tax reform for the same exact reasons, in addition to the fact that tax I would argue that welfare reform is also off the table; voters are all going to be opposed to cuts and such austerity measures will cause a similar backlash to what has happened in countries like Greece or Spain. Though immigration reform seemed possible two years ago, the rise of Donald Trump and ISIS has fed nativist populism—on both the right and the left (think Sanders and blue-collar, union-loving democrats)—and has rendered meaningful immigration reform pretty difficult to accomplish.

This is not to say anybody should give up on any of those issues, surely we should continue to advocate for real, meaningful reforms currently outside of the Overton Window in hopes that one day they’ll be politically possible. But if we’re asking what should libertarian policy wonks, think tanks, and political activists in the political realm focus on primarily in terms of getting systemic reform across, I don’t think that should be the central focus. There are opportunity costs to their efforts, and it would be more fruitful to focus with laser intensity on what is possible. I think the answer to this question is regulatory reform.

Though anyone schooled in public choice theory will immediately be skeptical of my view for very good reasons, I think systemic regulatory reform is more politically possible than people realize. First, the infrastructure in terms of activism is there on both the right and the left; Ralph Nader’s network has been working very hard with right-wing think tanks on some of these issues. Second, the political winds are in the right direction right now; both Bernie Sanders’ populism on income inequality and the right-wing skepticism towards big government can work together. There is little doubt that regulations notoriously exacerbate inequality and reduce social mobility, this is why even the Obama administration has called for reform in regards to occupational licensing laws. Third, since most regulations are done bureaucratically in the executive branch rather than legislatively, it is easier to lobby regulators for better policies with the political infrastructure built by the Kochs and the Naders of this world.

There are some caveats; obviously, the public choice opposition to sound reform in many areas by special interests will be a huge barrier to overcome. And in some areas of regulatory reform, like financial regulation and environmental regulation, the ideological difference between the right and left is simply too large to form an alliance and in others, such as telecommunications and internet, the political winds are simply blowing in the wrong direction. However, I’m more optimistic in serious systemic reform for issues like occupational licensing and interstate commerce than tax reform or immigration reform. I think libertarians would be better served primarily focusing their policy reforms and activist attention on issues like those.

Image courtesy of the Mercatus Center.

Second, it is extremely underappreciated how simply huge the economic burden of our regulatory regime is. When big numbers are thrown around in politics, typically it’s in regards to our national debt or welfare spending. Yet a new study by the Mercatus Center has pointed out that these numbers are as relevant to regulations as they are to fiscal policy. The study, authored by Patrick McLaughlin, Bentley Coffrey, and Pietro Parreto, applies endogenous growth theory to build an econometric model of how large the regulatory burden has been in the United States since 1980. The result? Regulatory accumulation has killed GDP growth by .8% annually in the last thirty-five years. Though that may not sound like much, that’s $4 trillion in lost economic growth—larger than the annual federal budget, and about $13,000 per American. If the United States’ regulatory burden were a country, it would have the fourth largest economy in the world.

Image courtesy of Patrick McLaughlin of the Mercatus Center.

If that’s not a policy area in need of systemic reform, I don’t know what is. Further, it is possible to address now--perhaps more so than other areas of systemic reform. However, it is mysteriously absent from the minds of many libertarians—activists and wonks alike—and entirely absent from popular political discourse this election. That needs to change.