Free Thoughts Blog

George H. Smith has another Excursions essay for us this week, continuing his look at critics of state education. With part three of the series, he explores more of the Voluntaryist objections.

Indoctrination is inherent in state education, according to Edward Baines. State education proceeds from the principle that “it is the duty of a Government to train the Mind of the People.” If one denies to government this right — as defenders of a free press and free religion must logically do — then one must also deny the right of government to meddle in education. It “is not the duty or province of the Government to train the mind of the people,” argued Baines, and this “principle of the highest moment” forbids state education.

Read it here.

Michael J. Sandel has an article in The Atlantic on the moral limits of markets. In it he expresses remarkably common views about the dangers of market forces but does so through remarkably sloppy analysis for such a major thinker.

The piece begins with a litany of horrors. Can you believe it’s possible to buy your way into a carpool lane, even if there’s only one person in your car?  Can you believe rich folks would hire Indian surrogate mothers when there are (more expensive) Americans available? And on and on goes the list of awful things both bought and sold.

After assuming that his readers are as shocked—shocked—by this as he is, Sandel writes, “Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.”

And here’s his first—of many—missteps. Because of course we did arrive at this condition through deliberate choice. Every item bought and every item sold in his preamble was bought and sold through deliberate choice on the part of those doing the buying and the selling. Sandel’s argument thus is not that there wasn’t any deliberate choice involved but that the deliberative chooser wasn’t who Sandel thinks it should’ve been—and the choices made weren’t what Sandel himself would’ve chosen.

In other words, it’s not that we haven’t chosen. Rather, we haven’t chosen the way Michael J. Sandel would have. (Sandel seems to believe that “deliberate choice” would lead to preferences matching his own. He never appears to consider that people like having the freedom to decide for themselves what they can buy and sell with consenting participants.) Michael J. Sandel decidedly would not choose markets in many instances where willing buyers and sellers obviously have. For one, Sandel thinks markets breed inequality. Those with money can buy more than those without. Second, “putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them.”

The most silly—and monstrous—claim Sandel makes regarding corruption is about how markets set value. “But not all goods are properly valued [by markets],” Sandel writes. “The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction.”

No. Slavery was not appalling because it allowed human beings to be sold as commodities in the market. It was appalling because it allowed human beings to be enslaved. A system where slaves weren’t bought and sold but were instead granted by a king or claimed by victorious warriors would be just as awful as one where they’re allocated by the market.

Relatedly, throughout the article, Sandel displays a lack of awareness of alternatives. He laments the use of markets “to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods.” And he might be right. Who knows? Maybe there are better ways to allocate those things. But allocated they must be, and Sandel never really bothers to acknowledge how they’d be allocated if not via markets—nor how they were allocated before markets.

After all, it’s not the case that, prior to markets in health, education, and recreation, everyone just had as much as they needed as often as they needed. Instead, allocation occurred along other lines, most of them worse than markets. Education was a matter of class privilege. It was denied to members of certain races. Social goods came at the whims of kings and priests. Markets may not be perfect, but they’re better than determining distribution through arbitrary features like the color of one’s skin or the social class of one’s parents. At least markets give everyone the possibility to participate. Caste systems do not. When Sandel argues that, “in a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means,” he ignores that, in a society where everything is distributed by and for whites, for example, meaningful life is practically impossible for non-whites. The same goes for women, for religious minorities, and for disfavored political groups. Something must do the distributing and markets are, in most cases and if nothing else, the least worst option.

Sandel’s solution to “the corrosive tendency of markets,” is, of course, more government. “[W]e need to do more than inveigh against greed,” he writes. We also “need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t.” He goes on, “A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong.”

While there are legal constraints on what can be bought and sold, the rest of Sandel’s statement—the “public good,” “we” deciding, “public debate”—raise more questions than they answer. Members of society decide all the time whether given items belong the in market. They do this through the rather mundane act of choosing whether to buy (or sell) them or not. If I don’t think it’s okay to pay children to read, I won’t pay my daughter to read. If you do think it is okay, you will pay your son to read. And so on.

What Sandel wants instead is for government to force us to comply with the wishes of others, particularly if we’re in the minority when “society” decides. He’d banish individual choice on the part of parents and make it simply illegal for me to pay my daughter to read. If the public debate is to extend to such questions, then the public debate will necessarily encompass everything in our lives. Because, as Sandel makes clear, everything in our lives is conceivably distributable through market processes.

Sandel assures his readers that having this debate—letting “society” decide—“would make for a healthier public life.” But it wouldn’t. It would make everything worse because it would extend the scope of politics and politics makes us worse.

Can you think of any sphere of life outside of politics (and, perhaps, religion) where differences of opinions make us hate each other? Political debate by most Americans is uninformed (because most Americans don’t have the time to learn the details of all the issues presented to them) and rancorous. We despise each other over tiny differences in tax bills. This does nothing to make us better people and it does nothing to improve society.

Now imagine extending the sphere of politics to everything. How can this in any way “make for a healthier public life?” It can’t. The only way to make public life healthier is to scale back the scope of what political debate covers. Then we will all have less reason to worry about what the guy down the street—or in that red or blue state—thinks about such-and-such. He can have his opinion and we can have ours. On the other hand, letting “society” decide makes those opinions matter because if society decides his way, you’ll be forced to comply.

Sandel’s article accomplishes nothing except expose just how dangerous it would be if people like Michael J. Sandel got their way.

George H. Smith has a new Excursions essay this morning, another in his series on the critics of state education.

One important Voluntaryist was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), a leading libertarian philosopher of his day. Although Spencer became an agnostic, he was home-schooled in Dissenting causes by his father and uncle. “Our family was essentially a dissenting family,” Spencer wrote in his Autobiography, “and dissent is an expression of antagonism to arbitrary control.” Much of Spencer’s first political article, written in his early twenties and published in The Nonconformist in 1842, was devoted to a critique of state education, and it possibly influenced the birth of the Voluntaryist movement in the following year.

Read it here.

In the New York Times Opinionator blog, Gary Gutting writes:

Conservatives tend to be elated by Murray’s cultural rather than economic understanding of inequality; liberals tend to be outraged at the suggestion that inequality is due to the moral faults of the working class. But Murray’s sociology of inequality is only a preliminary to the real point of his book, which is an impassioned defense of a libertarianism that he sees at the root of the “American project” as envisaged by the founders of our republic. I propose to look at the argument — far more philosophical than sociological — that Murray advances for his libertarianism…

As a philosopher my interest is in the argument he goes on to develop for a libertarian approach to making the lower 30 percent happier. Here he goes beyond sociological data and argues from something much closer to a philosophical thesis about human nature and happiness. The thesis is that happiness requires responsibility: “All of these good things [elements of happiness like self-respect, intimacy and self-actualization] require freedom to act in all areas of life with responsibility for the consequences of actions … . Knowing that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is a major part of what makes life worth living.” Call this the responsibility principle.

Murray invokes this principle to support his own version of libertarianism: that, except to prevent “starvation or death by exposure,” a government should not interfere at all in the lives of any citizens, including the lower 30 percent. His argument is that any government intervention to improve the lot of the lower 30 percent decreases the responsibility of the people helped and thereby decreases their happiness. Childcare is a paradigm example: “If you’re a low-income parent who finds it easier to let the apparatus of an advanced welfare state take over” the care of your children, then “the deep satisfactions that go with raising children” are “diminished accordingly.”

I don’t think this gets Murray’s argument right.  By my reading, he was not arguing that removing all social welfare programs will directly and rather mysteriously make poor people happy by forcing them to exercise responsibility.  Instead, Murray is arguing that social welfare crowds out civil society, and civil society is a key venue where people of all income levels can and should exercise responsibility.  That’s a thesis with deep roots in the classical liberal tradition going all the way back to Alexis de Tocqueville.  As with Tocqueville, if anyone has a particularly large share of obligation in Murray’s view, it’s the rich, the well-educated, and the well-connected.  At any rate, these are the only sort of people who are likely to pick up a data-heavy, not-especially-screamy book about what’s wrong with American society today.

It is, in short, a misreading to say that the message of the book is that poor people need to shape up.  Instead it’s a lot more nuanced: rich and poor people alike might do better, but right now the government works very hard to make sure that they can’t.

Gutting is very right about one thing however, and it would be interesting to ask Murray about it:

Murray’s assumption is also undermined by the large amount of assistance the top 20 percent receive from the government. He claims that they are far happier than the lower 30 percent because government seldom intervenes to improve their lives: “the things the government does to take the trouble out of things seldom intersect with the life of a successful attorney or executive.” This ignores, however, the many tax exemptions and government-financed projects like urban development, scientific research, museums and parks that make life much more pleasant for the upper 20 percent. This, of course, is in addition, to the enormous educational and financial benefits they receive from simply being children of their parents. Their situation makes it entirely clear that a very high level of happiness is consistent with receiving considerable benefits for which the individual is not responsible.

My earlier review of Coming Apart is here.

I’m excited to announce that we’ve just released the latest in our Exploring Liberty series of original lectures on the theory and history of libertarianism.

This new lecture features David D. Friedman, distinguished economist, political philosopher, and the author of many books including The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism. Friedman lays the groundwork for a society based exclusively on voluntary transactions and offers a few additional conclusions he has reached in the years after the first edition of The Machinery of Freedom was published in 1973.

An MP3 audio file of the lecture is available for those of you who’d like to listen on the go — and we also have an audio podcast of the entire Exploring Liberty series on iTunes. 

Recent momentous events at Cato have dredged up some age-old questions about libertarianism and politics: how should libertarians interact with politics and political candidates? Should libertarians compromise “full freedom” by promoting half-measures in the form of less-than-perfect candidates who are better than the alternatives on some matters but perhaps worse on others?

Many of the most long-standing divisions within libertarianism are partially a result of different answers to these questions. Some regard all interactions with politics and politicians as inherently corrupting and a tacit endorsement of governmental oppression. Others feel that a refusal to engage in politics is a one-way-ticket to irrelevancy that ultimately guarantees a less-free society. They claim that while utopian dreams of a political discourse built on ideas and bereft of partisanship are fine, political change happens through politics and politicians, and to deny this is to be obstinate.

I believe both methodologies are needed. In an age of increasing politicization it becomes more and more necessary to “win” libertarian goals through politics. It is crucial, however, that concessions to politics do not compromise the libertarian message that political choice must be limited in its reach. If we only focus on the next election, this message may be lost and politics will take over, perhaps forever.

“Liberty” is not the ideology of an interest group; it is the baseline of the human experience. But encroachments on liberty will inevitably manufacture interest groups that seek out compromises in order to preserve liberty in limited areas. Thus, a city considering licensing cab drivers creates an interest group that fights to maintain a free market in taxis. After licensing is instilled, the interest group lives on, fighting new regulations, passing their own regulations, and defending certain interests of cab drivers.  

As more and more areas of life are politicized, this type of politically oriented behavior becomes increasingly necessary. We move so far away from the baseline of liberty that political mobilization is required in nearly every area of our lives: to marry who we want to marry, to get the medical treatment that may save our life or relieve our constant pain, to choose a health-care plan that does not violate our conscience, or even to drink raw milk. In the process, the struggle to preserve the baseline of the human dignity—human liberty—are sub-divided into battles over the mundane—such as the freedom for children  to start a lemonade stand. This is how the fight for human dignity is trivialized and advocates for liberty are balkanized. This is how politics takes over the fight for liberty.

I do not blame anyone who fights for liberty through politics. In fact, I encourage it when it is needed. If your honest business is threatened with extinction due to a new prohibition or regulation, then any politicians pushing the rule should be opposed in the political arena.

But while such fights are perhaps the frontline of the fight for liberty, they are not the baseline. Those fighting for the baseline should constantly remind us that political squabbles over taxi licenses are second-best solutions to a problem that is far more pervasive than licensing: the increasing politicization of human life and the compromising of human dignity that results from that politicization. When there are no more zones where political control is forbidden—your mind, your body, your family, your property, etc.—then there will be no liberty. 

The fight for liberty has both a short and a long game and, just like football, both should be part of the strategy. But, unlike other political persuasions, focusing too much on the short game actually undermines some of our core principles: that there should be little or no political involvement in certain areas of life. Above all else, libertarians should have long memories that can point out how political concessions of the past paved the way for crises in the present, and we should also be able to show that we made this argument in the past, but no one listened to us. Otherwise, if our past is filled with political concessions, then our message will be substantially weakened, if not totally lost.