Free Thoughts Blog

When I arrived in D.C. five years ago, I was struck by the number of libertarians who defended the Confederacy and, specifically, the South’s “right” to secession. The proponents aren’t a majority of libertarians, but neither is it an insignificant number espousing the belief. Given the history of the Confederacy and its legacy Jim Crow, I think it is important to really flesh out what support for the Confederacy means and why it is wholly inconsistent with individual rights and, thus, liberty.

To that end, I have written an essay that examines the ‘libertarian’ defenses of the Confederacy why any continued support runs contrary to the cause of freedom.

George H. Smith continues his look at the intellectual roots of state education. This week he shows how history’s first great philosopher wasn’t a fan of educational freedom.

Plato’s argument that average people are not competent judges of educational quality was closely linked to his dislike of Athenian democracy, which he regarded as little more than mob rule. Plato harbored a deep distrust of the common man in politics and in every activity that requires special training.  Derogatory references abound in the Platonic dialogues to the “nondescript mob,” the “ignorant multitude,” “the great beast,” and so forth.

This is the major reason why Plato attacked the sophists and Athenian free-market education. Educational entrepreneurs give the public what it wants and so cater to ignorance and vulgar desires.  As Plato says the Republic: “Each of these private teachers who work for pay, whom the politicians call Sophists, inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled, and calls this knowledge wisdom.”

Read the rest here.

I am delighted that J.C. Lester is blogging at Libertarianism.org. I have long thought that libertarians should pay more attention to Karl Popper. Lester makes the case for my intuition in his book, Escape from Leviathan.

In this post, I want to pursue two paths, one that follows Lester’s earlier work and one that explores some thoughts suggested by his work.

Lester argues that the conjecture that liberty is compatible with welfare (or other cardinal values) has not been falsified. He defends the thesis against common efforts to falsify it. If the “compatibility thesis” has not been falsified, he argues, we should not prefer coercion over liberty.

Like a good Popperian, Lester invites everyone to falsify his central conjecture.  He will not lack attempts. A whole subfield of economics—general welfare economics—seeks to show that economic liberty leads to suboptimal outcomes for welfare. I pursue here one case that strikes me as difficult.

Consider the usual case of pollution. Free exchange between two parties leads to negative effects on a third party, effects that are not captured in the prices present in the original exchange. Ronald Coase found a libertarian way out of this problem: if the parties are willing to bargain, assign the rights as you wish, and the parties can still achieve the overall welfare (although the rights assignment matters a lot to the post-bargaining distribution of wealth). But once there are many, many third parties affected by exchanges, the transaction costs of bargaining may preclude Coasean deals. We are back to a world of negative externalities that are not properly priced. We end up with distorted markets and a suboptimal state of welfare.

This line of argument, if it withstands criticism, would cast doubt on the compatibility thesis. But the argument might be extended. In the case outlined above, many imagine that the state could actually get prices correct by imposing taxes on the polluter thereby using force in service to welfare.

At this point, the burden of proof has shifted: the advocate of the state has made a conjecture subject to falsification. If the conjecture is falsified (by robust evidence of government failure, for example), the compatibility theory may be restored. Surely this is a common result: the case against the compatibility of liberty and welfare will often involve asserting that government can improve outcomes in fact as well as in theory.

In this way, Lester points us toward an important implication of critical rationalism. Policymaking by governments is always a conjecture subject to falsification. In more prosaic terms, we ought to take the evaluation of programs more seriously. It is true that Congress often funds evaluation of policies, but I think these studies are often done poorly or ignored. A proper evaluation of program evaluations would itself be welcome; we simply do not know much here. We surely should not accept the conjecture that the professed goals of a government program are in fact what the program accomplishes.

I am inclined to think that a policy or program that fails to reach its goals should be viewed as a conjecture that has been falsified. Does that conclusion follow? After all, a proponent of a failed program/conjecture could simply say we did not spend enough, the program will work with small changes, or we did not wait long enough for its effects. None of these responses violate critical rationalism. Indeed, they suggest additional testing. Still, at some point, a program will exhaust its alternatives and become falsified (and publicly seen as a failure). Perhaps something like this happened with Aid to Families with Dependent Children in the United States from 1936 to 1996.

Lester is right to join philosophy and social science. But I believe his defense of the compatibility thesis implies that government actions are an ongoing series of conjectures subject to falsification. Such testing, if taken seriously, would offer a another path to a more limited government. 

Hello, I am Jan Clifford Lester (usually published as “J. C. Lester”). I am a philosopher specializing in libertarianism. Apart from articles and book chapters, I am the author of Escape from Leviathan (hardback 2000, paperback due out soon), Arguments for Liberty (2011), The Dictionary of Anti-Politics (forthcoming), and two philosophical dialogues: The Philosophical Genie, and The Naked Politician (both forthcoming in book form but also available online now).

Here are what I consider to be the three main differences between my approach to libertarianism and that of other libertarian philosophers:

1) I am a critical-rationalist libertarian. Following Karl Popper, I think it is epistemologically impossible to justify theories. One can only admit that libertarianism is a conjecture and deal with criticisms of it.

2) I have a pre-propertarian theory (including pre-self-ownership) of interpersonal liberty as the absence of proactively imposts costs. I attempt to deduce libertarian solutions to problems using this.

3) I advocate a (refined, extreme, and value-free) version of what I call the classical-liberal compatibility thesis: there are no systematic theoretical or practical clashes among the most relevant and plausible conceptions of economic rationality, interpersonal liberty, human welfare, and private-property anarchy. The most significant consequence of this is that we do not need to strike a balance between interpersonal liberty and human welfare.

I’d like to begin by discussing critical rationalism. A summary of my position, taken from my upcoming book, is now available as an essay on Libertarianism.org. It begins,

Put simply and starkly, critical rationalism is the view that absolutely all alleged knowledge is ultimately only fallible theory: mere guesses that we can test but which never become more probable by passing those tests. No truth is ever established to any degree at all. What follows can only outline an explanation of this counterintuitive view.

I encourage you to read the rest of the essay and then come back here to discuss it. I’m happy to take any criticisms, comments, questions, etc., based on the above, and let one topic lead to another (with me posting some short writings where it seems relevant).

We can continue until the discussion is judged by the moderator to have reached a suitable stopping point.

Today we have released the fourth lecture in our Exploring Liberty series. Richard Epstein, the author of Simple Rules for a Complex World, gives a quick outline of the six conditions that he says provide the groundwork for the emergence of a civilized society: individual autonomy, first possession/private property, contracts, tort, taxation, and eminent domain. This lecture is a great primer on how legal orders have emerged to form the complex and intricate web of relationships we know today as modern civilization.

Today’s new video is a particularly exciting one. Filmed in 1999 at an International Society for Individual Liberty conference in Costa Rica, economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman delivers a lecture about the tides of economic and political ideas throughout the modern era, beginning with the lassiez-faire influence of the Adam Smith in the 1700s, progressing through Fabian big government authoritarianism during the greater portion of the 20th century, and concluding with Hayek and the resurgence of classical liberal ideas following the collapse of some of the world’s largest and most restrictive authoritarian states.