Free Thoughts Blog

We value liberty at the expense of caring. That’s the takeaway about libertarians from Jonathan Haidt’s compelling new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The basic idea in The Righteous Mind is that humans have six “moral foundations.” We vary in how much importance we place on each—and that variety explains our political views. Libertarians give the “care/harm” foundation very little weight at all.

I think Haidt is wrong about libertarians—or at least not completely right. Of course libertarians value liberty. But a great many of us, myself included, value caring very highly too. In fact, the reason I shifted from being a progressive to a libertarian was not because my moral foundations changed but because I came to realize that genuine caring means making an effort to actually help people—and that government programs intended to help have a rather poor track record.

I am a libertarian because I want a better—more caring, more fair—society and I believe enhancing the private sphere at the expense of government power is the best way to achieve that. I also strongly believe that liberty, which is after all entirely about how we treat other people, is central to both caring and fairness. Expansive government not only makes things worse from the standpoint of economic consequences, but also creates a world that is less caring and less fair.

Of libertarians, Haidt writes,

We found that libertarians look more like liberals than like conservatives on most measures of personality (for example, both groups score higher than conservatives on openness to experience, and lower than conservatives on disgust sensitivity and conscientiousness). On the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, libertarians join liberals in scoring very low on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations. Where they diverge from liberals most sharply is on two measures: the Care foundation, where they score very low (even lower than conservatives), and on some new questions we added about economic liberty, where they score extremely high (a little higher than conservatives, a lot higher than liberals).

You can take Haidt’s tests online and see how you compare to his findings. (I encourage you to do so, as the tests are quite interesting and revealing.)

Here’s his explanation of how libertarians diverge from liberals on specific questions:

For example, do you agree that “the government should do more to advance the common good, even if that means limiting the freedom and choices of individuals”? If so, then you are probably a liberal. If not, then you could be either a libertarian or a conservative. The split between liberals (progressives) and libertarians (classical liberals) occurred over exactly this question more than a hundred years ago, and it shows up clearly in our data today. People with libertarian ideals have generally supported the Republican Party since the 1930s because libertarians and Republicans have a common enemy: the liberal welfare society that they believe is destroying America’s liberty (for libertarians) and moral fiber (for social conservatives).

Yes, libertarians believe the welfare state impinges liberty. But we also believe it harms those it’s intended to help. Thus, we want to reform welfare and entitlement programs in large part because we care about their recipients.¹ Social Security doesn’t just mean the government deciding what to do with your money. It also means making you poorer in your twilight years than you would’ve been had you invested that money in a private account.

Of course, libertarians might be wrong about what helps and what hurts. Maybe we’re mistaken in our policy prescriptions. But those mistakes, if they exist, aren’t because we “care” less than liberals, just as mistakes by liberals (should their policies in fact not work) aren’t the result of them caring less than libertarians.

Haidt writes,

This helps explain why libertarians have sided with the Republican Party in recent decades. Libertarians care about liberty almost to the exclusion of all other concerns, and their conception of liberty is the same as that of the Republicans: it is the right to be left alone, free from government interference.

Again, no. Liberty does not come at the exclusion of all other concerns. Rather, liberty is the best way to maximize all other concerns. Yes there are libertarians who want nothing more than “to be left alone.” But that feeling doesn’t carry with it Haidt’s implied “and screw all the rest of you.” Instead, “left alone” means freed from officious government so we can better go about making the world a happier, healthier, richer, and more caring place.

Sixty-seven million dollars. That’s the tax bill Eduardo Saverin’s avoiding by renouncing his U.S. citizenship just as he’s expected to earn billions from Facebook’s IPO.

By not paying that $67 million, Saverin’s being greedy, ungrateful–even traitorous. Or at least that seems to be the consensus view among the tech press and the political talking heads. And it’s a view I strongly rejected in a post here a couple days back.

Noah Kristula-Green over at the Daily Beast thought so little of that post, he labeled it “The Weakest Defense of Eduardo Saverin.” Kristula-Green argues that Saverin gained much–if not everything he has–from America’s system of laws. Thus he owes the state for much–if not all–of his riches, and so ought to pay up. (Or, rather, he ought to pay more than he already will, because he’s not escaping the U.S. tax free.)

“If you think that Saverin should be convinced to maintain his U.S. citizenship,” Kristula-Green writes, “this is an incredibly important argument to get right.”

That’s true. But Kristula-Green doesn’t succeed.

Let’s start with a major assumption being made–one that must be argued for, but isn’t. This is the question of whether paying taxes is the only (or even the best) way of discharging debts you have to America for benefits you received from being a citizen. I wrote a rebuttal of the “only taxes will do” position last year.

The short version is simply that my debt from benefits received is ultimately owed not to the state, which may have been the immediate supplier of the benefits, but to the citizens who sacrificed to pay for them. Because of this, the debtor can discharge his debt in any way that helps those citizens. That may mean paying taxes, but it needn’t mean that exclusively. Rather, if Saverin benefited from all of us, his obligation (if he has one) is to in turn benefit us back. I argue he’s done that enough by being partly responsible for Facebook. But even if that’s not enough, I don’t quite see why he must “benefit” us by way of a check to the IRS instead of, say, funding private scholarships or launching a new business to put even more Americans back to work.

Further, while it’s true that Saverin benefited from America’s judicial system, that would seem to imply only a duty to give back to the judicial system. It’s unclear why it means he’s morally obligated to pay into a pot from which the judicial system will get something, true, but which will also be used to bail out banks, drop bombs on people in Afghanistan, subsidize rich sugar growers, and outfit SWAT teams perpetuating the shockingly immoral war on drugs.

Kristula-Green goes on to ding me for “express[ing] skepticism with the idea of a state at all.” To support that claim, he links to a post of mine on fair play theory, part of a series I’m writing on the philosophy of political obligation.

The question of political obligation–even if it makes us skeptics–matters. It’s not an easy question, but it’s one we need to address if we’re to have meaningful discussions within political philosophy. It’s a exploration that may lead to anarchism, but it needn’t necessarily take us that far. As I wrote in an earlier post,

Recognizing just how hard the question of political obligation is does carry some normative weight outside anarchist circles. The modern state, with its high taxes, voluminous legislation, and robust regulatory regime, acts as if we have a significant number–a huge number–of obligations to it. The modern state exercises a great deal of authority over us.

But if justifying that authority and grounding those obligations proves morally difficult, then at the very least we ought to be more skeptical the next time the state adds another obligation to its list. And the state adds obligations all the time.

What’s more, none of this is particularly controversial among philosophers. In fact, most of the arguments I’ve discussed in my series, raising problems with fair play and gratitude and so on, also appear in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic, which itself pulls from A. John Simmons’s groundbreaking book, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, as well as the work of Simmons and others in the 30 years since its publication. Simmons’s position, what he calls “philosophical anarchism,” may actually be the dominant view among academic philosophers (surely not a reactionary, right-wing bunch) who’ve made a study of political obligation. And if it’s not dominant, it’s certainly the most influential.

In short, explaining why we have political obligations proves awfully hard. Assuming it’s easy won’t make the question go away.

What’s more, we all have a theory of political obligation and authority, even if we’ve never examined it. We all have a point at which we say what the state asks of us is too much. We can all imagine some situation where we’d feel the state has no right to spend our tax dollars on that.

In closing, do I, as Kristula-Green claims, “express skepticism with the idea of a state at all?” Yes and no. Throughout my series, I’ve generally avoided attacking premises such as “the state benefits us” or “we are better off with government than without” precisely because, even if those premises are true, it’s not clear that genuine political obligations of the kind expected of us by large, modern democracies necessarily follow. In fact, I believe they don’t. I believe that while it’s possible for political obligations to arise, they can only occur in very narrow circumstances (i.e., through some form of legitimate consent) and with very narrow scope. I also believe that no currently existing state meets those requirements. Thus none of us actually bear political obligations.

(Please note this is not the same thing as claiming we are without moral obligations and so are free to murder, steal, oppress, and so on. I explain the difference between moral and political obligations here.)

But denying political obligations doesn’t mean I therefore reject the idea of the state and embrace anarchism. Rather, while I think the state has no moral authority over us, we still have good reasons to want live within it and support (some of) its activities. Thus we should act as if political obligations do in fact exist, while recognizing that enforcing them may, because they are a fiction, be immoral. We may even have very good reasons for adopting this tactic. Perhaps having a state that enforces its (illegitimate) authority is just so much better in its consequences that we’re willing to put up with the moral violations it entails.

So this makes me skeptical of the state, yes, but not of the idea of the state at all.

There are many things Eduardo Saverin probably ought to feel morally bound to do with his $67 million. Paying what amounts to voluntary taxes, by choosing to stay in the United States, isn’t one of them.

Eduardo Saverin’s decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship, presumably to avoid a few billion dollars in taxes, has Internet moralizers gnashing their teeth.

Saverin, a co-founder of Facebook, could expect to send Uncle Sam an awfully large chunk of his Facebook IPO earnings–that is, if he’d decided to stick around. The result of his leaving, aside from less money for foreign wars, bank bailouts, and farm subsidies, is articles like this one on Pando Daily, headlined “What Eduardo Saverin Owes America (Hint: Nearly Everything).” Condemning Saverin’s decision, the author asks,

Is this fair? No. It’s worse than that, though. It’s ungrateful and it’s indecent. Saverin’s decision to decamp the U.S. suggests he’s got no idea how much America has helped him out.

The author goes on to “list all the ways Eduardo Saverin has benefitted from America,” including the safe life he lived in Miami compared to his native Brazil, the fact that he met Mark Zuckerberg in America, his education at Harvard, and “the American government’s creation of the Internet.”

It’s Elizabeth Warren’s “nobody in this country who got rich on his own” speech all over again. I’ve written several posts on her remarks. Here’s one on whether benefiting from the state creates obligations to repay those benefits. Here’s another on whether a duty to pay for those benefits necessarily means a duty to pay taxes.

In Saverin’s case, the same rejoinders apply: Why should “paying taxes” be the only or even best way to discharge any debt Saverin might have to America? And what about America’s debt to him?

Because it’s not like Saverin did nothing to earn his billions. They didn’t fall out of the sky onto his head, at which point he gathered them up, stuffed them in his pockets, and said, “Screw all of you.”

No, Saverin got rich by creating immeasurable value for Americans (and billions others around the globe). He co-founded an enormously successful company, one that in turn lead to the creation of many other enormously successful companies. All of those business employ thousands of Americans, who not only are more prosperous than they probably would’ve been without Facebook, but also pay taxes on all their earnings. So even without its cut of Saverin’s IPO windfall, Uncle Sam comes out ahead, as do all those American workers.

The rest of us gain, too, because we get to have Facebook. Which is cool enough that most of us spend far more time on it than we’d like to admit. Facebook made America (and the world) better.

Which means that instead of raging at Saverin for not wanting to give the bloated federal government in Washington more-more-more of his wealth, maybe we should just call it even.

Here’s my follow-up post expanding on these ideas and further making the case that a “debt to America” does not mean the same thing as a “duty to pay taxes.”

The fair play theory of political obligation goes as follows: We’re all in this together. Every one of us got where we are because of the sacrifices and tax dollars of those who came before. We benefit from the group endeavor that is government and so, when the time comes, it’s only right that we pay our fair share, both by cutting a check to the IRS and not mucking the whole thing up by disobeying laws.

Fair play’s probably the most common argument of the five I discuss in this series. It’s the sort of obligation-creating situation we’ve all encountered. The neighborhood collects money for a playground. If you enjoy it, you should pitch in. Your church group hosts a potlatch. If you plan to eat, you should bring something to share.

To put it more formally, if we benefit from a cooperative scheme, we need to abide by its rules or else we’re free-riding. Here’s H. L. A. Hart’s useful capsule version from his 1955 essay, “Are There Any Natural Rights?”:

When a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to those restrictions when required have a right to a similar submission from those who have benefited by their submission.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick sets out an example: Imagine that your neighbors have all agreed to use the town’s public address system as an entertainment outlet. Each day, a new person spends several hours broadcasting music, amusing stories, and community news. You don’t actively seek out these broadcasts, but because you live in the neighborhood and it’s summer, so you’re often outside or have your windows open, and you hear quite a lot of it. Most days, the programming’s pleasant enough and, in some case, you enjoy it greatly.

Then your day comes around. Clearly you’ve benefited in some way from this cooperative scheme, and those benefits came via sacrifices made by your neighbors (they gave up their time to run the system). So are you obligated to pick out old records, polish off your anecdotes, and spend the day entertaining your peers?

Whether you are will depend an awful lot on what choice you had in benefiting. If your neighbors, counter to your wishes, decide to form a mob and wander from house to house cleaning cars, and if they come in the middle of the night or when you’re out of town and clean your car, it’s difficult to see how this would obligate you to become part of the car-cleaning mob yourself.

For fair play to create obligations, the benefits must be accepted. They can’t merely be received. If you never had a choice about rejecting the benefit, how can you possibly be compelled to repay it? In the public address example above, it’s clear you as the listener received the broadcast entertainment, but not at all clear you accepted it. For if you hadn’t wanted to hear the broadcasts, how would you have avoided them? Closed all your windows? Never gone outside?

With this in mind, the issue for fair play and political obligations becomes one of whether state benefits are typically accepted or just received. Do we have a choice about accepting the services our tax dollars pay for? What would be involved in avoiding them if we decide we don’t want to contribute to this particular cooperative scheme?

Another problem has to do with the kind of obligations fair play creates. It may be true that benefiting from the sacrifices of my neighbors and fellow citizens means I’m obligated to sacrifice similarly on their behalf. But does this moral obligation rise to a political obligation? Do I owe it to the state–or just to my fellow citizens? Because we can readily imagine a situation where, while my peers benefited me by paying taxes, I’d benefit them more (and thus improve the whole cooperative scheme to a greater degree) if I do something other than pay taxes. I might offer my services as a carpenter. Or take the time now afforded me because of state programs to invent a cure for cancer.

In short, even if fair play suffices to create obligations, it remains an open question whether it creates political obligations and whether the obligations it creates must only be fulfilled by paying taxes and obeying the law. It remains an open question, in other words, whether fair play applies to the state.

That’s a question I’ll explore next time.

As editor of Cato Unbound, I don’t actively take sides. Here, though, I’m going to be a bit polemical. My thesis is simple: If you want to square libertarianism with social justice, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice is probably not a book you should reach for.

As the term is usually used, the advocates of “social justice” are not Rawlseans. You will not win them by quoting Rawls. You will not win them by thinking like Rawls. They know what they want, and Rawls isn’t it. Rawls is for the milquetoasts of the academy; social justice is radical stuff. Whatever their origins, the two have diverged, and there’s no sense denying it.

(This leaves aside Rawls’ effect on libertarianism proper, which Todd Seavey has aptly described as “attaching a washing machine to a soufflé.” The only way to improve would be to specify, more elegantly than I’m doing right now, that the free market is the washing machine, a durable good that benefits everyone; and Rawls is the soufflé, a fragile, delectable confection, enjoyed for half a minute by a well-stuffed class of elites.)

Now we may certainly debate the merits of Rawls’ system (I say it’s flawed) but we should recognize that Rawls is tangential to the debate about libertarianism and social justice.[1]

Rawls’ distinctive move in political theory was to recommend a shift in strategy. Those who are most concerned with the poor should reject both egalitarianism and utilitarianism, he argued. In their place he urged a maximin strategy, in which inequality of wealth would be tolerated, and even welcomed, on the condition that relative disparities in wealth always worked to the absolute benefit of the poor.

I’d like to ask the libertarians who are keen on Rawls: Have you ever tried pointing out the absolute wealth of the American poor? Have you ever mentioned this fact to a progressive? And did their hair not immediately catch fire?

A Rawlsean ought to love this report from the Heritage Foundation:

For decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in “poverty,” but the bureau’s definition of poverty differs widely from that held by most Americans. In fact, other government surveys show that most of the persons whom the government defines as “in poverty” are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term. The overwhelming majority of the poor have air conditioning, cable TV, and a host of other modern amenities. They are well housed, have an adequate and reasonably steady supply of food, and have met their other basic needs, including medical care. Some poor Americans do experience significant hardships, including temporary food shortages or inadequate housing, but these individuals are a minority within the overall poverty population. Poverty remains an issue of serious social concern, but accurate information about that problem is essential in crafting wise public policy. Exaggeration and misinformation about poverty obscure the nature, extent, and causes of real material deprivation, thereby hampering the development of well-targeted, effective programs to reduce the problem.

To a rounding error, this is what Rawls would demand. Note that the absolute wealth of our poor is virtually unprecedented in all of human history. It’s an accomplishment shared only by those countries that have adopted a significant measure of free market economics, or, at best, by a few others who piggybacked on the free market’s creative success while adding almost nothing of value themselves.

The overwhelming majority of the poor in the United States enjoy technological wonders that didn’t even exist a few decades ago. Outside the free market/liberal democratic synthesis, essentially no other social system has ever delivered as much — because almost none of them can produce a steady stream of new technological innovations in the first place, let alone distribute them to the poor.

It takes remarkable upper-lip musculature to sneer in such circumstances. But some do manage. “Let Them Eat Cake,” says one progressive commentator about the report — hardly an outlier.

Forgetting, then, that most American poor really do eat cake. Also forgetting that the very notion of the poor eating cake was unthinkably absurd for all of human history. That’s why it became a catchphrase — because it was absurd. And yet our poor eat cake while talking on a video phone and watching their choice of movies on a flat-screen TV.

This really ought to count for something, but somehow it never does. And if giving the poor a lifestyle that would have been the merest science fiction in the 1960s doesn’t count for anything — then what on earth would? 

In one sense, the poor are entitled to as much as possible. And I mean that sincerely. Were I able, I would give every American a salary of $200,000 a year — in real terms, not inflationary funny-money. I would put everyone in today’s much-hated one percent. And why stop there? Let’s have free clothes from Prada. Free meals from Le Bernardin. And biological immortality. And a fully functional U.S.S. Enterprise. Because hey, why not?

Where we could find all that wealth, God only knows. But the problems are technological, not philosophical. Nothing in justice forbids everyone from growing arbitrarily wealthy, provided they come by it peaceably and honestly.

But what is social justice, then? It’s the kind of justice demanded by socialism. We might want to say that market institutions can provide it. We might want to say a lot of things about markets. We think markets are good; naturally, we want to promote them. But we should not lose sight of what markets actually are. Or of who our real audience is. This stuff isn’t going to convince socialists, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think that it will.

The type of justice demanded by socialism is neither the type favored by libertarians — that of continuous, undirected, uncoerced economic activity — nor the type favored by Rawlseans — too complex to set off neatly with dashes. Social justice appears to mean (1) an ever-greater equality of outcome through forced wealth transfer and/or state-run economies; (2) a prediction — surely falsifiable — that forced transfers enhance the dignity and autonomy of the poor, (3) state-subsidized status enhancement for members of aggrieved groups, and (4) never mind about the absolute holdings of the poor, already.

That’s also why I will never be a socialist, and why I will always be skeptical of social justice.

The advocates of social justice do not like it that the poor have surprisingly large holdings in absolute terms. Point it out to them, and they grow resentful or condescending. (“Well… but… it’s not really very nice cake…”) All these consumer goods dull the sense of envy, and that sense needs to be sharpened if we’re going to force the equality of outcome.

But you never make more cake by slicing it up differently. When cake goes to the hungriest, you don’t encourage baking; you encourage whining about hunger. How do you make more cake? Even the baker can’t answer that question in any detail. It’s a product, so far as we can tell, only of the market process, of specialization and gains from trade, of local knowledge and market discipline.

That discipline now yields a productivity unheard of in all of human history. That’s something we and the Rawlseans both might learn from. But it’s not a thing beloved by the advocates of social justice.

[1] On that tangent: I find Rawls incompatible with libertarianism in part because Rawlsean thinking is too quick to bless the status quo. It is, as I suggest above, too conservative for libertarianism, which ought to be a radical political movement. Libertarianism should always begin at or near the question, “Why is there some government rather than no government?” Libertarians may be anarchists or minarchists, but they should never take government as either a matter of course or as one of indifference.

Libertarians are often accused of advocating for a merit-based society. The free market, the argument goes, produces a distribution that more-or-less corresponds to how meritorious the people are. If you’re poor, you likely deserve to be poor; if you’re rich, the same. To mess with the market is to mess with that moral order.

Even worse than those who pigeon-hole libertarians into that argument, however, are those libertarians who actually make this argument. Bad arguments for libertarianism not only harm the cause of liberty over all, they divert attention from the arguments that deserve the most consideration. Moreover, because we tend to better remember the bad arguments for ideas we oppose, bad arguments get recycled by our opponents more than the good ones.

Merit should have nothing to do with why libertarians advocate for free markets. At any given time-slice in a free market some people are up and some people are down. Why they are up or down is beyond the ken of both the market and those who support markets.

The first question to ask, of course, is what merit is. This question proves quite difficult, but it seems, at a minimum, that merit refers to the characteristics that make an activity praiseworthy rather than the characteristics make it valuable. The free market “determines” value through a freely flowing price system that quickly accounts for changes in supply and demand. Merit, however, looks beyond the market value to assess the quality of the individual action.

For example, someone may become incredibly good at a video game, and they may do so despite overwhelming odds (vision or tactile impairment, perhaps). Many would consider this a meritorious accomplishment, but it is one that has little value in the marketplace. Similarly, someone may become quite wealthy despite expending little effort or cleverness. This may be meritorious or not, but the market cares little.

A properly functioning free market does not reward people based on merit; it rewards people based on output. If someone produces goods or provides services that are valued by others, then she will be rewarded for it. Perhaps this comes easily to her, or perhaps it’s difficult. There are some born with innate talents while others struggle to learn viable skills. Still others are born into propitious circumstances that make success easier, while others begin life in situations that hinder their future success.

We are all bundles of hindrances and abilities. Some of these may be the product of nature, the product of our family life, or just a learned skill. It is because of these complex backgrounds and subjectivities that the market must rely on objective criteria such as output, rather than subjective criteria such as merit. By focusing on the objective criteria of output, we avoid subjective determinations of value. We also encourage productivity, which ultimately broadens the possibilities for success and makes wealth available to more people.

If merit comes from striving, effort, or overcoming adversity, then a free market works to diminish the amount of meritorious action in order to increase productivity. Efficiency is preferred over toil. If holes need to be dug, then they should be dug in the most efficient manner possible, not in the most meritorious manner. Digging a hole is hard work, and digging a hole with only one arm is even harder work, but it would be odd if we determined the value of hole-digging based on these considerations.

Still, some libertarians, particularly of the objectivist bent, may align market success with merit. Many characters in Rand’s novels, after all, are heroes whose successes in the marketplace are indications of their virtue and merit. If you wish to admire the character traits that lead someone to become a steel tycoon, that’s fine. But it does not follow that those who failed to become tycoons are less meritorious. The singer-songwriter who makes a decent living crafting excellent songs and playing small venues can also be praised as meritorious. Most importantly, we can point to the wealth produced by the free market as the primary reason why singer-songwriters can even make a living.  

Wealth is not a sign of merit, and poverty is not a sign of failure. As I’ve argued before, we should champion the free market as a system where productivity allows people to be artists, record store clerks, or even bums. We can personally praise or chastise anyone for their life-choices and values, but we should not argue that the market is there to do it for us.