Libertarian Provincialism
Let me speak in broad over-generalizations.
Libertarians who live in America look around them and see cops shooting unarmed pedestrians, people getting arrested for growing pot or selling (delicious) raw milk, taxes and government spending and debt going ever higher. In short, disaster. And all of these things are bad and it is very good that we have libertarians railing against them.
But where it leads them astray is that they are often taken to make the following sorta-syllogism: “America has terrible policies. Most of the people around me are either for them or just not up in arms about them as I am. The combination of most people being dumb and democracy produces terrible policies.”
Thus the venerable Ilya Somin in this month’s issue of Cato Unbound. (And of course Bryan Caplan wrote a whole book about this.)
The only problem with that is that if you take a little bit of a broader perspective (both geographically and historically) you realize that democracies are actually really awesome and that they kick the sh** out of all other forms of government. I mean, it’s not even close! On every front: protecting civil liberties, developing markets, etc.
Almost all the countries that have the best policies are democracies. It’s really quite lopsided. The only exceptions are either short-lived affairs (Chile) or exceptions that prove the rule (Singapore).
Libertarians who bash democracy are really sawing off the branch that they’re sitting on because to criticize democracy for those reasons is really to undermine markets. The idea that voters have to be experts to make good choices is like the idea that consumers have to be experts to make good buying decisions. Consumers are stupid, but markets nonetheless work for a bunch of complicated reasons, but at bottom because markets are a decentralized trial-and-error process and that in a highly complex world decentralized trial-and-error produces more robust outcomes. This is why Ayn Rand is so dumb: markets work not because of supermen, but because of millions of idiots making mistakes. If only people with an economics degree were allowed to participate in markets, all the markets would break down (except the market for economists). Over the long run, millions of lemmings make spontaneous order.
Because the feedback mechanisms of pulling the lever on the wrong guy are more diffuse than the feedback mechanism of making the wrong decision in the marketplace, it takes longer for the benefits to emerge, but if you look at the broad sweep of history and the planet today, it’s just no contest. Democracy works because it fires people who produce bad outcomes. And over the past centuries, democracy has led to more libertarianism than ever. Median-voter-pandering presidents and prime ministers have legalized trade and gay marriage and cut taxes and abolished Prohibition and and and and. The march of liberty goes on at an excruciatingly slow pace, but it does go on. Because your neighbors are dumb. Not you, of course. No. You’re the smart one.
Raw milk kills people, and the thing about food poisoning is that in between the time you’re exposed and the time you notice you’re sick, you’ve eaten another 6-9 meals. Which one made you sick? Tough to tell, so there’s no “free market signal” against selling contaminated food products.
Only if they can be fired. Unfortunately for the US, a country where Americans can vote against House Republicans by 1.5 million more votes and still leave House Republicans a majority in the House may not be a democracy anymore.
— Chet · Oct 18, 06:03 PM · #
Brad.
There is a great difference between the rhetorical capacity of our thought leadership and our rank and file, just as there is an equally great difference on the left between its thought leadership and its rank and file. I would expect that while we know the lefts thought leadership, the left does not know ours. We know the lefts critique, but the left does not know ours. We demonize the left’s leadership and forgive it’s ranks, and the left demonizes our ranks, and ignores our thought leadership. Just why each tribe does so is fairly obvious. And I feel your post is one of the obvious.
The libertarian criticism of the institutions of government consists of fairly unassailable positions:
(a) MONOPOLY bureaucracy rather than the privatization of services through competing organizations,
(b) MONOPOLY of houses – the absence of houses that represent class interests and regional interests. If we must have a bureaucratic state,
© MONOPOLY of decision making via unnecessary MAJORITY rule rather than a government of brokered exchanges between groups.
(d) MONOPOLY culture, which requires we all live under the same conditions, norms and laws – and is the source of our political conflict, as the conservatives want to preserve the nuclear family and the high trust society, and the progressives want to resort to individualism, which, outside of the nuclear family, ….
(e) ELECTED representational government, rather than LOTTOCRATIC representational government, which generates special interests, and corruption.
(f) POOLING and LAUNDERING of taxes, so that the source and destination of revenue are disconnected. This is money laundering.
(g) MONOPOLY membership : while we can move between states to control government, we cannot secede from the federal government, and place constraints on that government.
(f) The failure of the majority of the planned social changes, in that they have destroyed the family, the civil society, the intertemporal system of cooperation between the generations, and subject us to extraordinary risk on the assumption of constant growth.
These positions are not criticisms of left policy. They are statements about the use of government to enforce the will of some on others regardless of bias. They are criticisms of tyranny corruption and malincentive – left or right. And the refusal to adopt such changes, falsifies all statements of ‘the utility of democratic government’ as ‘good’. It may be better than other systems, or not. But it need not be as bad as it is. Those are two different positions.
So, it is logically inconsistent to make the false argument that because something appears to be good, that it is in fact the cause of that good, just as it is inconsistent to make the false argument that because the rank and file propagandize, that the thought leadership lacks practical solutions, just as it is inconsistent to make the false argument that majority rule is either necessary or good, when by any logical argument it is in fact, a means of either constraint or conquest, and nothing more.
While I think all of us agree that demand generates growth, the fact that it was not possible to broker a compromise between left and right so that the left could spend in exchange for the right to seceded from the system of eduction and indoctrination. Some of us, libertarian and right, worked hard to ensure that our side would accept such a compromise. But the left would not. Your side wanted both to spend, to spend favorably to its constituents, without providing equal return to the right’s constituents.
People vote morally not rationally, and both despite the free riding and rent seeking of the other. Until that perception is fixed there will be conflict.
(BTW: This font is abusively small for comment entry. lol)
“democracy evidence is good” – this is not demonstrably so….
— Curt Doolittle · Oct 19, 08:36 PM · #
I’m going to go ahead and post the cynical response:
Libertarian distaste for democracy may be an indication that “true” libertarian priorities (among those libertarians who have such a distaste, at least, which is widespread) and stated libertarian priorities are not, in fact, the same thing.
I would argue that the degree to which a libertarian disdains democracy reveals roughly the degree to which their libertarianism is an post-hac rationalization of their plutocracy, ie, the degree to which they sympathize with libertarianism because it is an intellectually and socially acceptable vector to express their loathing for taxation and public spending on those of lower socio-economic status than themselves.
I would find that some of this kind of thinking is most virulent among libertarians who actually come from low SES backgrounds; and I would analogize it to the Byzantine Empress Euphemia, a former prostitute who successfully prevented her husband Justin I from changing the law to allow his nephew and heir Justinian I from marrying his love Theodora, also a former prostitute. A lot of people who make it up the ladder want to pull it up behind them, or at least lack all sympathy and empathy for those who didn’t make the same climb. They may also want to distance themselves from the lower rungs.
— Squarely Rooted · Oct 24, 02:33 AM · #
I agree with this one “Democracy works because it fires people who produce bad outcomes”. At fireflightuas.com we are not just thinking about UAV and Public Safety, we are deploying them. This blog post is doing a great service to the industry and we applaud you.
— Wendy Shear · Oct 29, 04:00 AM · #