Aaron Ross Powell | Free Thoughts Blog

George H. Smith takes up a new theme in this week’s Excursions​, beginning a series on the intellectual roots of state education. The first essay takes us quite far back, all the way to conflicting philosophies of Athens and Sparta.

As post-Renaissance intellectuals looked back on Sparta, many saw something other than brutal totalitarianism. They saw a planned, well-ordered society where individual goals were subordinated to the common good, a society where education was controlled by the state and where civic virtues were instilled in children at an early age. 

Plato and Aristotle, though by no means unqualified admirers of Sparta, endorsed the Spartan principle of state education, and their endorsements played major roles in elevating the Spartan model to a pride of place in the modern era. Plato’s blueprint of an authoritarian society called for a state system of centralized education supervised by a minister of education.  “In this conception,” wrote the Greek scholar Ernest Barker, “Plato was definitely and consciously departing from the practice of Athens, and setting his face towards Sparta.” Plato’s aim was “to combine the curriculum of Athens with the organization of Sparta.”

Plato’s view of the relationship between the child and the state reflects the Spartan influence, as we see in this passage from The Laws. “Education is, if possible, to be, as the phrase goes, compulsory for every mother’s son, on the ground that the child is even more the property of the state than of his parents.” 

Read the full essay here.

Married to the Sea is a great web comic. But every now and then the creator puts up one that offers, let us say, a “teaching moment.” Today’s is a good example, one that makes a joke out of rich people complaining about paying taxes by way of all-too-common of shibboleths. Of course, humor simplifies, so treating a single panel cartoon like it’s a 30 page article in Philosophy and Public Affairs isn’t necessarily fair. But the attitude the comic represents demands a response because we encounter it frequently.

With that preamble done, here’s the comic:

1) “Some.” Very few people argue the government shouldn’t get to take some of our money. A government that took no money either wouldn’t exist or would have to rely on voluntary contributions (and so wouldn’t fit any common definition of a state). The issue in the real world, of course, isn’t about “some” vs. “none,” but how much? As I’ve written before when addressing Elizabeth Warren’s thoughts on taxes and fairness, considering much of what the modern state does, it’s difficult to figure out why any of us are morally obligated to contribute more to it. If the state limited itself to defense and protecting our rights (and, depending on whom you ask, offering a basic social safety net), then it would be odd for anyone but an anarchist to refuse to pay taxes. But the state doesn’t limit itself to that—and there seems nothing unreasonable in saying, “I don’t want to pay more taxes if that money’s going to go to unnecessary wars and subsidies for rich sugar growers.”

2) “Maintain society for 200 years.” If we stick to talking only about the United States, in the last 200 years our government enabled and enforced slavery; slaughtered countless of its own citizens, either on its own soil or by sending them to die overseas; forced racial segregation upon blacks; created the TSA; put us all trillions of dollars in debt; and, with the help of Wall Street, tanked the U.S. economy. That counts as “maintenance?”

Further, the fact “society” existed long before this government and was functioning before this government got so big (and thus so expensive) means we can safely assume, if government didn’t get more of our money, society would persevere. Of course, some things government does are good and some of the changes it realized in the last 200 years have improved our lives, but that doesn’t give it the right to expect us to pay more today for a great many things that aren’t good.

The broader trouble with ideas of the Elizabeth Warrens, the Married to the Seas, and all other who mirror their views—of the idea government has done good and has helped, in some way, to make us wealthier, so why gripe about paying our fair share?—is that they’re ways to avoid the actual debate.

After all, the issue is not whether to pay taxes, it’s what should we pay taxes for? I feel rather certain that if Santorum gets elected and he decides to raise taxes to fund massive abstinence-only education programs, you won’t see a new comic poking fun at progressives who don’t want to pay for that.

The trouble with politics is that too many of us assume that we’re right, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that, crucially, we’re right in a way that’s obvious. Thus anyone who disagrees—who would rather see other policies enacted or who doesn’t think current policies work as well as we do—is not just mistaken. Indeed, he’s either stupid (he fails to see what’s painfully obvious) or evil (he does see it, but is so immoral he wants bad things to happen). This means rather than taking opposing views seriously (maybe “paying your fair share” is more complicated than we immediately realize), we can instead safely ignore them—because what’s the point of genuinely engaging the ideas of stupid or evil people?

This is sad, not just because it inhibits fruitful deliberation, but also because it means despising our fellow citizens for no good reason.

In my last post I clarified what I think is a rather straight forward argument. Put very simply, it goes like this:

1. The ways that SOPA was a bad piece of legislation— it would’ve been ineffective at its stated goal, it would’ve been costly and harmful, and whatever benefits it created would’ve flowed almost exclusively to a small interest group— weren’t unique to SOPA. In fact, they’re more the rule than the exception when it comes to lawmaking in Washington.
2. Given this, it’s prudent to be generally skeptical about future claims by lawmakers that their new pieces of legislation will do what they say, how they say, and at little or no cost.
3. The result of that skepticism will be less support (by some degree, perhaps by a rather large degree) for new laws and regulations.
4. Less support means fewer new laws and regulations, which means a government smaller and less meddlesome than it might otherwise have been.
5. A smaller, less meddlesome government is a more libertarian government, so those who embrace this skepticism are moving in a libertarian direction.

Basically, if we have good reasons to think government generally does a bad job at certain kinds of things, then we’re less likely to want government to do more of those things in the future.

But do we have good reasons? Further, do we have good reasons to think that non-government solutions will work better? Because what we don’t want to do is get caught comparing “real” government (i.e., government how it really works) to “ideal” markets (i.e., markets how they work in the perfectly structured environment of abstract theory). We need to make sure, instead, that we’re comparing real to real.

I believe the answer to both questions is yes. I could, of course, begin listing all sorts of other bad laws. But I don’t really have to. Anyone sufficiently interested can open the paper and see article after article about laws “bad” in precisely the way I claimed SOPA was. Just this week the cover story of the Washington Post was about lawmakers using their legislative power to funnel taxpayer dollars to local projects that will improve the land value of property those lawmakers own. Again, SOPA is how things happen in Washington.

Here are three reasons why.

1) The Knowledge Problem. In his 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” F. A. Hayek wrote that,

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

Massive legislation designed to create certain end states in the marketplace (no piracy, health insurance for everyone, no more recessions) assumes that a small group of people (lawmakers plus the bureaucrats tasked with carrying out their commands) know enough about the details of social and economic interactions, both now and as they change in the future, to be able to effectively guide them.

Hayek argues this simply isn’t possible. Too much of the crucial knowledge for such schemes to work (current and future uses for emerging technologies, the needs and wants of citizens when it comes to their health, the complex desires and actions of actors throughout the economy) is spread across the whole of society in a way impossible to aggregate. Because of this, regulators, especially when regulating on a very large scale, will suffer from too much ignorance to do their jobs well.

2) Public Choice. Public choice economics applies the insights of traditional economics to the actions of government agents. It also provides strong reasons for thinking that the very size and scope of our institutions may make it impossible for them to function in any way close to the full-throated public spiritedness we’d need for many regulatory schemes to actually work.

My colleague John Samples has begun a series of blog posts introducing public choice, so instead of getting into it here, I’ll point you to the first in his ongoing series.

3) The Role of Incentives. Government programs, once created, almost never go away—and, in fact, they often continue to grow, even after the purposes for their existence have disappeared. Programs created to accomplish X are rarely evaluated years later to see if they’re actually accomplishing X. And those few times they are evaluated, the evaluations are almost never acted upon.

This is in part because once a government program begins, it establishes its own constituency, from the workers it employs to the people who benefit from it. And that constituency has a strong incentive to see the program continue and grow. A much stronger incentive than the general public has in shutting down any given wasteful and inefficient agency or regulatory scheme. This is the problem of “concentrated benefits and diffuse costs” and it plagues our government at every level. Furthermore, for most Americans, once a law has been enacted and so they have the sense that the government has “done something,” there just isn’t much of a drive to go back later to see how it’s working. New problems have come along demanding new laws, so that’s where our attention ends up.

These three go a long way toward explaining why laws like SOPA, the recent health care changes, or even things like Medicare, can’t work as well as their proponents claim, won’t work as well as their proponents claim, and will, over time, become more expensive and less effective. These three reasons alone give us cause for skepticism about much of what gets proposed in Washington.

Markets, while not perfect, fare better. Hayek shows how prices in a free economy act to aggregate the knowledge central planners can’t. And, while market actors may have incentives to behave badly, the market also has mechanisms for punishing them if they do. Companies that make bad products or anger their customers tend to go out of business. That is, unless they get government to prop them up through subsidies, protectionism, special privileges, and bailouts.

We all have good reasons to be skeptical of much of what government wants to do. And that skepticism, even if it doesn’t lead us to outright libertarianism, at least ought to make us a little less willing to hand over more of our liberty and money to politicians and bureaucrats.

I’m pleased to announced that we’ve added the Cato Home Study Course, a series of audio lectures on foundational ideas and major thinkers, to Libertarianism.org. While the course has been around for some time, it’s finally available totally free as a set of MP3 downloads. Here’s a bit from the description.

The Cato Home Study Course immerses you in the thoughts and views of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Henry David Thoreau, Ayn Rand, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. You are stimulated and surrounded by their ground-breaking ideas on liberty, justice, property, constitutionalism, free trade, capitalism, toleration, and peace.

This is a self-paced, home study program, enabling you to spend time with brilliant minds wherever and whenever you have an opportunity to listen and think. Each program is presented by professional actors and broadcasters, and the content is lively, dynamic, and truly thought-provoking.

This is a really exciting addition to Libertarianism.org. The whole course runs roughly 30 hours and explores its subjects with remarkable depth and clarity. Plus, many of the modules were written by our very own George H. Smith.

The Home Study Course is perfect for your iPod, for commutes, or for just relaxing with on a weekend afternoon. It’s great stuff.

In a recent blog post, I argued that the tech community should have learned a libertarian lesson from their experience with SOPA. In short, given that SOPA happened to be a law they possessed the technical knowledge to evaluate and given that their evaluation exposed it as downright awful, they ought to become more skeptical about laws they don’t have the technical knowledge to evaluate in the same way.

Over at Rust Belt Philosophy, Eli Horowitz disagreed. His critique of my libertarian skepticism raised issues worth exploring at greater length here. He makes three general claims. First, that the skepticism I endorse leads not to libertarianism but to anarchism. Second, that merely pointing to the badness of SOPA does not establish that other laws are like SOPA. Third, that my skepticism is inconsistent because I don’t apply it equally to state-based and market-based solutions.

To keep this from running excessively long, I’ll deal with each in a separate post over the next few days. Today, I want to deal with Horowitz’s first objection, which seems to stem from a misunderstanding of what I’m talking about when I saying “skepticism.”

What I do not mean is something like philosophical skepticism, the view that we can never have knowledge of anything. When I say we should be skeptical about claims by legislators that their proposed legislation will fix significant problems and do so with benefits outweighing costs, I do not mean that we must reject all laws whose workings we cannot fully evaluate.

Instead, I mean only that we should be skeptical. We shouldn’t take claims at face value. If I am skeptical about your claim that you ran a five minute mile over the weekend, I’m not impossible to convince. Rather, I need convincing.

So we need not see libertarian skepticism as insurmountable and thus a straight line to anarchism. If a law is more narrowly tailored, if it is simpler, if it demands less interpretation by its enforcers, and so on, then the law may move closer to clearing the skepticism hurdle. I’ll expand this point more in my next post.

All of us are to some degree skeptical about proposed laws. We all have some point at which the claims of a bill’s proponents are so facially absurd to make us balk. All I argued is that many people should be more skeptical than they already are.

Nor is it the case, as Horowitz argues, that my skepticism, if it is truly libertarian, will leave me in the difficult position of counseling rejection of “good” laws, too. Horowitz writes that my “argument cannot really try to say that our skepticism should be based merely on a history of bad laws, because that same reasoning would recommend credulity given a history of good laws.” He believes that the only way I can avoid this problem is to “admit that we have the ability to rationally analyze laws even without being experts on the subjects of those laws.”

It’s important to recognize that “good” as Horowitz uses it here is rather different from what we typically mean when we speak of good laws. In common usage, a “good” law would be one that ought to exist. Here, however, “good” means only the opposite of what called “bad” laws, so a “good” law would be one that (1) actually accomplishes what it claims it will while (2) not having hugely greater costs than benefits and (3) not directing those benefits exclusively to some special interest group.

It’s true that the skepticism I described would present no barrier to “good” laws of that sort. But this doesn’t put me in much of a bind as a libertarian. For I have other reasons for rejecting some of even the “good” laws, ones drawing on moral philosophy, the limits of political obligation, and the basic rights of human beings. Libertarians are skeptics, but skepticism is not the whole of libertarianism.

I might also respond by pointing out that I never argued that we can’t “rationally analyze laws even without being experts on the subjects of those laws.” Instead, I claimed only that recognizing our ignorance “forces us to either accept at face value what our legislators tell us or to adopt a general attitude of skepticism.” And, as I explained above, an attitude of skepticism is not the same as a wholesale rejection of all new  proposals.

The simple fact is that any of us can get a lot closer to having the expertise to fully evaluate any given new law. We can read thorough analyses of it. We can carefully study the views of people who understand it. If we do enough of this, we may diminish our ignorance enough that we feel our skeptical demands have been met.

But it is also a simple fact that most of us don’t do this. We may lack the time for such an endeavor (quite a lot of laws get proposed every day, after all). Or we may just not be interested in studying policy. Regardless of their reasons, most people who advocate campaign finance reform have never bothered to read even a handful of articles from political science journals on the topic. Most people who eagerly applaud Dodd-Frank probably couldn’t say exactly what a derivative is.

Horowitz assumes too strong a claim on my part. I need not deny even the possibility of rational analysis of laws outside our expertise in order to maintain my call for skepticism.

In part two, I’ll turn to whether one data point makes a trend and why government solutions in particular ought to make us skeptical.

In this week’s Excursions​, George H. Smith gives us a glance at economic regulations from the past.

During the Renaissance, when King Louis XII asked an adviser what was needed for a successful conquest of Milan, he was told: “Most gracious king, three things are necessary: money, more money, and still more money.”

It was during the modern era of conquest and absolute monarchy that taxation became a permanent feature of the political landscape. But collecting taxes proved difficult for emerging nation-states, often meeting with violent resistance. Tax revolts were common in Europe throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, tax revolts were so frequent in France during the seventeenth century that they became, in the words of a distinguished French historian, “almost an institution.”

In France the tax on salt was so unpopular that its name, gabelle, was applied to any unjust or excessive tax. The role of salt in food preservation made it indispensable, but legal salt was available only through licensed retailers who sold small quantities at a time. This imposed severe hardships on those living in remote districts who had to make several long trips just to purchase their quota of salt.

Read the rest here.