Since the 2016 election, college campuses have erupted in violent protests, demands for safe spaces, and the silencing of views that activist groups find disagreeable. Robby Soave has gone in to the trenches to catalog these young radicals in order to better understand the climate at universities across America.

When did college campuses become sites of harsh public discourse? How has the culture around safety changed on college campuses? Is there a crisis on college campuses? Are we chilling our professors in order to not hurt students’ feelings? What is intersectionality? Why are students claiming that their professors are triggering their PTSD?

Further Reading:

Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, written by Robby Soave

Penn law professor faces backlash, petition to resign over ‘repugnant’ comments on race and immigration, written by Owen Daugherty

Do controversial figures have a right to speak at public universities?, written by Holly Epstein Ojalvo

Campus Rights, FIRE

Related Content:

The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff), Free Thoughts Podcast

Campus Freedom, Free Thoughts Podcast

Conformist Students Fear Disagreement, written by Natalie Dowzicky

The recent shootings in El Paso and Gilroy are a reminder of the power of the internet to build communities for niche interests, from vampire fan fiction aficionados to neo-Nazis. The El Paso shooter posted his manifesto to 8chan, a hub for dank memes and hateful content alike. Timothy McLaughlin joins the show to explain where 8chan came from and the personalities people behind its founding.

Then Paul, Matthew, and Will discuss the ways that online radicalization of the alt-Right is both similar to past waves of terrorist radicalization and dissimilar in that it is stochastic and requires less organizational structure. Finally, they caution against government overreaction to the legitimate problem of online radicalization, given that most of the proposed measures wouldn’t work, might even backfire, and would create significant, ill, and unintended consequences for positive online social movements.

What is 8chan? How is 8chan organized? Who created 8chan and what was its’ original purpose? How should forms of exchange be regulated in the wake of horrific events? Does the use of mass communication inspire people to commit terrible acts of terror? Why are criminal manifestos posted on 8chan? What is stochastic terrorism? How should government respond to the problem of online radicalization?

Further Reading:

The Weird Dark History of 8Chan, written by Timothy McLaughlin

Trump wants social media to detect mass shooters before they commit crimes, written by Rani Molla

‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says the Creator of 8chan, a Megaphone for Gunmen, written by Kevin Roose

Related Content:

Haters Gonna Hate Speech, Building Tomorrow Podcast

How the FOSTA Rules Create a “Bootleggers and Baptists” Scenario for the 21st Century, written by Paul Matzko

What Made the Internet Possible?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

The New York Times Magazine recently released its “1619 Project,” an initiative marking the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves arriving in North America. The project is ambitious, aiming to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.” A collection of pundits have framed this project as an attempt to “delegimitize” the United States. Such commentary provides an opportunity to consider the state of American race relations and the role of slavery in American history. 

Whether or not the foundation of the United States was legitimate is an interesting political, moral,  and historical question. You can spend a career considering questions about when political violence is justified, what fair representation in a democracy looks like, how to measure and secure the consent of the governed, and what political system best secures natural rights. But these aren’t the kinds of questions many 1619 Project critics have in mind when they accuse it of “delegimitizing” the United States. They’re concerned that highlighting America’s brutal history of slavery and its role in forming the United States undermines the American project; an experiment in self-government. 

The relationship between black people and the white institutions that oppressed them is one of the most consequential features of American history. The most prominent of America’s contradictions is that its Founding documents were written by white men who owned black human beings as farm equipment, yet they expressed a commitment to liberty. 

Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed that it was “self-evident” that all men are created equal owned slaves. James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” and author of many of The Federalist Papers, also owned slaves and was skeptical of free African Americans being a part of the American polity. After leaving the White House Madison served as the president of the American Colonization Society, which urged freed black people to move to Africa. 

During the Revolutionary War, the British frigate HMS Savage sailed up the Potomac River, its troops burning houses in Maryland in view of Mt. Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia estate. The Royal Governor of Virginia John Murray had earlier issued a proclamation, offering freedom to slaves who fought for Britain. A wartime necessity rather an endorsement of full-throated emancipation to be sure, but it’s nonetheless telling that seventeen of Washington’s slaves fled Mt. Vernon and boarded HMS Savage. To a Virginia slave, housing in a British warship was preferable to the slave quarters belonging to the man who would become the first president of the United States.  

Bewilderment at slave owners proclaiming a devotion to liberty is hardly reserved to 21st century. In a 1775 essay on the American colonies the English writer Samuel Johnson asked not unreasonably, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” The Founding Father John Adams never owned slaves and opposed slavery, though favored gradual erosion of the instution rather than outright and immediate abolition. His wife Abigail understood the contradiction of the American Founding:

I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Equally Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs. Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principal of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us… .

That the Founding generation included moral hypocrites is hardly surprising. Every collection of human beings has included flawed people. Anyone scouring history books in search of moral perfection will be left disappointed. 

It’s not clear that the moral hypocrisy of some of America’s founders delegitimizes the United States per se. At worst such hypocrisy makes the founding of the United States far from perfect. Even those who think that it’s a stretch to say that the United States was founded “on” racism can hardly deny that it was founded with racist institutions explicitly protected. The evils of slavery don’t in and of themselves negate the colonists’ complaints about a lack of representation in Parliament or the fact that British officials had subjected colonists to needless, intrusive searches and other abuses against their civil rights. But they shouldn’t be overlooked. 

What is clear is that the United States has yet to fully come to terms with its history of racial violence and oppression. In large part this is because we’re accustomed to measuring our race relations progress through the lenses of military, political, and legislative victories. 

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died in the wake of an illegitimate attempt at secession predicated on the preservation of slavery. The Civil War amendments to the Constitution certainly improved the document, but they hardly erased a culture of violence and racism that made them a necessity. 

The North won the Civil War, the South won Reconstruction. The explicit exemption of blacks from civil rights and political participation in the South as well as the emergence of a racist domestic terrorist organization are all evidence that wars and Constitutional amendments hardly erase cultures that took centuries to develop. A century after Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, racists were murdering civil rights activists in the Jim Crow South. Thousands of black people had been lynched during those hundred years. Others were subjected to medical experiments. Segregation, bans on interracial marriage, and many other indignities were imposed by white-majority legislatures. 

We can and should applaud the progress that the U.S. has made since its founding while accepting that there is much work to be done. Such work requires an honest look at history that treats the Founding Fathers and America’s founding documents as men and historical writings, not prophets and religious texts. 

Although decades have passed since the civil rights movement American institutions continue to reflect America’s racist history. Law enforcement and criminal justice are perhaps the most prominent and obvious examples, but we shouldn’t ignore the impact racism has had on housing policy, education, and economic regulations. This history of course doesn’t imply that everyone who works in law enforcement, housing, and education or advocates for minimum wage increases is a racist, but it should be considered when discussing the ongoing impact of race relations on American society.  

We should also consider modern moral hypocrisies and racial language. Today, many people who claim to support “liberty” protest the removal of statues of Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, a city worker in New Orleans wore body armor and a face covering while removing a statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. 

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), a member of the “Freedom Caucus,” won re-election despite saying that President Obama should be sent “back home to Kenya or wherever”(he has since disowned the comments). The whole Obama presidency is full of examples of thinly veiled racial language being used against the president and his family. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has used racist language and adorned his desk with a Confederate flag, which he displayed without any hint of irony alongside the American flag.

If initiatives like The 1619 Project can help Americans better understand their history and institutions then they should be applauded. I’ve yet to read the 1619 essay collection in full, and I’m sure that I’ll have some disagreements with some of its contributors. The essay on the link between slavery and the “brutality of American capitalism” looks ripe for educated criticism.

It’s important for an honest look at American institutions and history because the United States - unlike France and Greece - was founded on a set of principles. French and Greek identities have endured despite Greece and France being governed by a wide range of political regimes (republics, parliaments, monarchies, occupations, etc.). Yet there’s a sense in which American identity is tied to the political commitment outlined in the Declaration: a government tasked to securing rights endowed to all people. 

I am bound to that commitment. I took an oath to the Constitution when I became and American citizen ten years ago. I did so gladly, knowing that the document and the men who ratified it were imperfect. But such imperfections didn’t dent my budding patriotism. Anyone with a family and friends knows that you can love something that isn’t perfect. My relationship with my country is like my relationship with anyone: it improves with increased honesty, reflection, and candor. 

As social media platforms grow it is apparent that they will never be able to make decisions that will appease everyone. We should also recognize that calls for government-induced content moderation will make these platforms battlegrounds for a perpetual intensifying conflict over who gets to silence whom.

What is a moral panic? Why are people panicked over fake news? How addictive is social media? What is Section 230 and what implications does it have for social media companies? What is a social media platform?

Further Reading:

Challenging the Social Media Moral Panic: Preserving Free Expression under Hypertransparency, written by Milton Mueller

False Assumptions Behind the Current Drive to Regulate Social Media, written by John Samples

What Senator Hawley Gets Wrong about American Identity, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Related Content:

What Made the Internet Possible?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Free Speech Online: Unfriended, Building Tomorrow Podcast

The Problem with “Fake News”, written by Ryan Khurana

If you, as a private citizen, want to build a bridge across the river to shorten your commute, you run into a few problems. The incredible cost of the proposed bridge puts it beyond your limited resources, so you try and convince thousands of your neighbors to chip in donations. But you don’t want to contribute money unless you reach the total amount necessary to build the bridge; a half-built bridge is worse than no bridge at all.

One answer to this problem is to use the State to coerce contributions (taxes) from the community, but that comes with ethical problems and inefficiencies from bureaucracy and regulatory capture. Recently, new internet-based alternatives like Kickstarter have fueled the rise of private sector crowdfunding (properly known as assurance contracts), solving the fundraising problem by guaranteeing that contributors will only be debited if total contributions reach the required amount.

However, there is still a free rider problem given that people who want the bridge will be unwilling to contribute since there’s a chance that the bridge will be built regardless of whether they, personally, contribute. They can have a bridge without paying, thus the temptation to free ride. To mitigate that problem, Alex coined the idea of the dominant assurance contract, which gives potential free riders an additional incentive to contribute. And dominant assurance contracts could be combined with smart contracts on the blockchain to remove the need for as much trust in the good intentions of strangers.

What is a dominant assurance contract? What is a public good? How much of each public good do we want? How are assurance contracts just like crowdfunding? What is Kickstarter?

Further Reading:

Making Markets Work Better: Dominant Assurance Contracts and Some Other Helpful Ideas, written by Alex Tabarrok

Kickstarter and the NEA, written by Tyler Cowen

The private provision of public goods via dominant assurance contracts, written by Alex Tabarrok

Related Content:

What Theory Won’t Tell You About Public Goods, written by Jon Murphy

Prices Are Too Damn High, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Modern Liberalism and the Paternalism of Things, written by Jason Kuznicki

President Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) is oft quoted: “It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn’t.” To be frank, Mr. Van Buren has some explaining to do. Over Van Buren’s tenure as the nation’s chief executive, his administration did little correctly. Some of the major issues that plagued the Van Buren administration included: A global economic disaster in 1837, failing to act on the Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) and Texas questions, and continuing many of Andrew Jackson’s policies including Indian Removal. As a result of Van Buren’s mismanagement of the nation’s domestic affairs and foreign policy mishaps, the Whigs toppled the Democratic Party in 1840. Although Van Buren himself was an effective politician, his years as president prompted scholars to rank Van Buren’s presidency as average, grouped among some of the least-effective and forgettable presidents in U.S. history.^[1]

Martin (Maartin) Van Buren was born on December 5, 1782 in Kinderhook, New York. Of Dutch origin, he was the first president in U.S. history not born of British blood. He was qualified for the presidency because he: (a) was born during the American Revolution (1775-1783) – and under British law, he was technically a British citizen (despite being Dutch) and (b) he was born prior to the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783).^[2] Van Buren studied law and learned New York politics from William P. Van Ness (1778-1826) – an associate of Aaron Burr who served as his second in the famed Burr-Hamilton Duel in July 1804. Van Buren, a member of Jackson’s cabinet, served as Old Hickory’s Secretary of State from 1829-1831 and as his Vice President from 1833-1837. According to historian Sean Wilentz, Van Buren was an astute politician. He “moved up the ladder of the law and politics by dint of his diligence, charm, and ability to make useful connections.”^[3]  For Van Buren, opportunity was everywhere. Since he was a widower – Van Buren lost his wife in 1819 -  he had a great deal of free time.  Despite having a number of children, among other responsibilities, Van Buren served at Jackson’s will.^[4]

Van Buren easily won the election of 1836 and he did so with the intent of “following in Old Hickory’s footsteps.”^[5]  The “Red Fox of Kinderhook” ran against four Whigs – most notably future president William Henry Harrison (1773-1841), future Secretary of State Daniel Webster (1782-1852), Hugh White (1773-1840), and Willie Mangum (1792-1861). The Whigs’ strategy of running four candidates who represented different regions in the U.S. was a result of a lack of party unity. The idea followed the logic that although the Whig Party did not agree on everything, they all had one thing in common: they opposed the policies of Andrew Jackson. If the plan to deny Van Buren a majority of Electoral College votes worked, the job of choosing the president would have been that of the House of Representatives. Thanks to the Whig factions in the House, this would have more than likely resulted in the election of William Henry Harrison.^[6] This plan, however, failed. Harrison later occupied the presidency for a little over a month in 1841 and Daniel Webster became perhaps one of the most notable diplomats in U.S. history.

Endorsed by Old Hickory and the Democratic Party’s political machine, Van Buren entered office in 1837. Shortly thereafter, a Trans-Atlantic financial panic plagued the United States:  the Panic of 1837. In the years prior to the economic panic, the U.S., under many of Van Buren’s predecessors, flourished economically. However, a financial collapse beginning in 1836 crippled the United States. To make matters worse, English banks refused to infuse money into the American economy. In 1836, Andrew Jackson issued the specie circular which devalued paper money. As the economy worsened, banks overextended credit to customers which led to economic disaster and a five-year depression which loomed over the U.S. and throughout most of the Atlantic World.^[7]  

Van Buren’s response to the Panic of 1837 was timid (at best) – especially as his initial reaction was first to ponder “what, if anything, the federal government could do to provide relief.”^[8] Many Americans blamed Andrew Jackson’s specie circular for the financial collapse. Some bankers and politicians urged Van Buren to repeal the circular. Democrats including William C. Rives (1793-1868) and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge (1795-1864) warned Van Buren that if he retained Jackson’s specie circular that he would become so unpopular in the U.S. that he could potentially lose votes in the South and the West. Another Democrat, Andrew J. Donelson (1799-1871), hoped to convince Van Buren to modify the circular to allow “land buyers… to use paper money, but only in large bills.” Major newspapers echoed the sentiments of these major Democratic politicians and suggested to their readers that Van Buren would change the terms of the circular for the better.^[9]

Constant pressure from fellow Democrats and the nation’s newspapers may have convinced Van Buren to act on Jackson’s specie circular. However, Jackson and other aligned Jacksonian Democrats waged a letter writing campaign to keep the circular as law. Van Buren ultimately kept the circular despite “a majority in Congress had declared against [it].”^[10] Van Buren also attempted to shift the blame for the Panic of 1837 from Jackson, the Jackson-aligned Democrats, and the federal government to the banks. Van Buren proposed the Divorce Bill which would have established a sub-treasury system that allocated funds from banks at the state level to the federal level. The radical Locofoco faction of the Democratic party supported the bill while more conservative Democrats opposed it.^[11] There was also talk of reviving the Bank of the United States, but the bank’s president Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844) knew that the Democrats would not “betray Jackson by restoring the bank.”^[12]

Van Buren’s “Divorce Bill” proved unsuccessful. Newspapers heralded the fact the legislation remained in a state of limbo. This degree of uncertainty benefited the business community.^[13] By 1838, the U.S. and Atlantic economies recovered. As Van Buren’s Democratic colleagues warned, not acting on the Panic of 1837 lost Van Buren and the Democrats votes in the South. By 1839, Whig Governor of New York William Seward (1801-1872) declared the Divorce Bill dead and the nation slowly recovered. Meanwhile, “The angry passions which availed themselves of that disastrous time…to disseminate pernicious opinions, and to bring forward measures of rash, intemperate legislation, have subsided.”^[14]

Van Buren’s ideologically-driven response to the Panic of 1837 was an effort to save face with his Jacksonian counterparts rather than save the country from economic disaster. This disaster killed his public image. Cartoonists depicted Van Buren as an out-of-touch aristocrat. As the nation suffered, Van Buren’s opponents claimed “Martin Van Ruin” or “King Martin I” ate with gold spoons, walked on eloquent British carpets, and slept on luxurious French beds. This according to Van Buren biographer Caroline Lazo, was not true and according to the Washington Post, “a collection of lies.” However, this “collection of lies” surpassed any remaining historical truisms and the moniker of “Martin Van Ruin” among other nicknames cemented Van Buren’s place as Andrew Jackson’s lackey and defined much of the eighth president’s legacy in American history.^[15]

After the former Mexican province of Texas declared its independence, the influx of Anglo-Americans – many of whom were slave owners pressured the Jackson and then Van Buren administrations to allow it into the Union. Most Democrats favored admitting Texas into the Union, while the Whig Party opposed the measure.^[16] Politically, the nation was divided on the Texas question. Jackson did not act on the Texas question as he did not want to go to war with Mexico.^[17] Van Buren – a good Jackson acolyte - followed suit. Although he would defend the country’s national security if threatened, Van Buren did not want a war with Mexico.^[18] By leaving the figurative door open for annexation without war, Van Buren paved the way for the next Democratic president (James K. Polk) to seek annexation even if it meant war.

Meanwhile, in December 1837, a group of Upper Canadian rebels revolted against British colonial officials in York (Toronto).^[19]  One of the last major rebellions in the Atlantic World, the Canadian Rebellion of 1836-1837 and the subsequent Patriot War (1838-1841) threatened the domestic tranquility of the United States and British hegemony throughout the West. Early on, Van Buren declared the U.S. neutral in Canadian affairs. He did, however, dispatch Winfield Scott (1786-1866) to patrol the U.S.-Upper Canadian border to prevent any hostilities from spilling-over into the U.S., despite the strong support for Canadian republicanism within his own party. Meanwhile in the winter months of 1838-1839, a land dispute in the Northeast – known as the Aroostook War – threatened the U.S. and peace with Britain even further. Diplomats eventually resolved both issues with the British in the Canadas as part of the slaveholding Tyler administration’s pivot from acquiring northern territories to acquiring Texas. The peaceful resolution of these issues led to peace between the U.S. and the British Empire which radicals in the Democratic Party said was a result of Van Buren’s affinity for British power.

Van Buren “passed the buck” on the Texas question and the Canadian Rebellions. His inability to act on these issues on the U.S.’s northern and southern borders cost him a great deal of support from both slaveholders in the South and radical Democrats in the North. A future John Tyler (1790-1862) administration annexed Texas, while the diplomatic prowess of Daniel Webster and Winfield Scott resolved longstanding border issues with the Canadians and the British. Van Buren’s inaction allowed the rise of William Henry Harrison and then James K. Polk while also spelling the downfall of his own political career.^[20]

While in office, Van Buren continued Jackson’s Indian removal policies. Signed in 1830, Jackson’s Indian Removal Act led to the infamous and terrible Trail of Tears. In the decades following Jackson’s policy, the U.S. military forcibly removed Native Americans from their ancestral lands in the East and relocated them in the West past the Mississippi River. The bulk of the Indian removal efforts occurred during Van Buren’s presidency.  By the end of the 1830s, the Trail of Tears devastated Native American populations throughout the U.S. and was quite costly to the federal government. The total lives lost remains unknown, but for just the Cherokee Nation, numbers range between 500 to 2,000 on the low end and 800 to 4,000 on the extreme end.^[21] This policy remains a major stain on Van Buren’s historical record.

Finally, Van Buren, a native New Yorker, was not a defender of slavery, but neither was he a defender of abolitionism or abolitionists. Indeed, Van Buren believed that abolitionists would drive the nation toward civil war and he spent almost his entire career trying to maintain the “gentleman’s agreement” that neither section would agitate the slavery issue. He tried always to be a force for managing political conflict and assiduously avoided agitating it whenever possible. In 1839, a Spanish slave-ship from Cuba called The Amistad was overtaken by the slaves onboard. Survivors of the uprising attempted to navigate back to Africa, however, the Spanish navigators steered the ship north and it was intercepted by the USS Washington near Long Island.  The case went to court and a federal judge ruled that the slaves were to be set free. As a sop to the South, Van Buren successfully appealed the decision, leading to the famed Amistad Supreme Court ruling. The justices affirmed the lower court’s ruling that the African slaves must be set free.

Van Buren’s presidency was by no means the most effective in U.S. history. He did, however, accomplish many of his goals like strengthening the relationship between the U.S. and Britain and firmly establishing the new party system in American politics. Van Buren’s shortcomings, though, were tainted then and now with the blot of pragmatism and business as usual at nearly any moral cost. His constant political triangulation, his hand-wringing compromises, and his callous disregard of those who stood in the way of coalition-building marked him (and perhaps still do) as a sycophant to the British and southern slaveholders, tarnishing his image among radicals then and virtually everyone now.

Back in the twentieth century, there was room in American politics for bipartisanship, deliberation, negotiation, and compromise.  President Lyndon Johnson needed the support of Republicans to pass his landmark Civil Rights Act.  President Ronald Reagan spent his two terms coaxing legislation out of a Democratic Congress.

Today, the sort of cooperation that took place between Johnson and Everett Dirksen or between Reagan and Tip O’Neill would be impossible.  Our polarized constituencies would not allow it.  As twentieth-century comic-strip character Pogo quipped, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Political scientist Lilliana Mason has studied trends in opinion surveys and found that in recent decades  Democratic voters and Republican voters have become much more antagonistic toward one another, even though on issues their views have not hardened significantly.  In my observation, when it comes to politics, Americans no longer view those who disagree with them as decent individuals like themselves.  Instead, we see political disagreement as a threat, and we regard those on the other side as deliberately out to cause harm.

When progressives demonize their opponents as out to cause harm, they use language that implies that others are on the side of oppression.  Consider the example of African-American football players kneeling during the national anthem.  Progressives see these protests as calling attention to general mistreatment of African-Americans, and they see opponents of the protests as racists.

When conservatives demonize their opponents as out to cause harm, they use language that implies that others are on the side of barbarism.  They see the American flag and our national anthem as symbols of our highest virtues, and deliberate disrespect for those virtues is an attack on civilization itself.

Why do we demonize those with whom we disagree?  The basic reason is that it helps to protect us from having to question or doubt our own beliefs.  If we see others as decent human beings, then we have to consider how they arrived at a point of view that differs from our own, and even consider the possibility that they could be at least partly correct.  But instead, if we regard them as driven by evil motives, then we feel no need to give their actual arguments any sort of fair hearing.  Demonizing them saves us the hard work of listening and the emotional challenge of self-doubt.

Our polarization is reinforced by another psychological defense mechanism, called confirmation bias.  Researchers have undertaken experiments in which people with different positions on an issue were shown an identical set of facts on the issue, and each side reported that the facts strengthened its position! 

We instinctively elevate the significance of evidence that supports our point of view and dismiss contrary evidence.  A real-world example of this is the reaction to the Mueller report, which supporters of President Trump saw as exoneration while opponents saw it as making the case for impeachment.

It is likely that one cause of increased political antagonism in recent years is the media environment.  In the 1960s, national television news was on for half an hour in the evening, and the three main networks competed for a mass audience.  Today, cable television and the Internet are available 24/7, and the competition is for niche audiences.  The most successful tactic in this competition is to create melodrama, which means that progressive outlets emphasize the threat posed by conservatives, and conversely.

Consider that in 1977, there was a notorious event in which American neo-Nazis staged a march through the heavily Jewish suburb of Skokie Illinois.  After that event took place, those neo-Nazis were never heard from again. Free-speech advocates felt vindicated.

Now, with smart phones and the Internet, fringe hate groups never disappear completely from view.  Moreover, if we should forget about the “alt right” or “Antifa” or other extremists, our “friends” in social media and broadcast media are there to remind us that these evil demons are out there and pose a threat that we must attend to. 

If we are going to overcome dangerous polarization and return to a more constructive politics, we will have to stop rewarding media figures and politicians who amplify threats and demonize people on the other side.  We will have to get back to treating those with whom we disagree as decent human beings, and we will need to insist that other participants in political discussion do the same.

Arnold Kling updated his book, The Three Languages of Politics, to include the hyper political polarization we have witnessed in the last two years. The book is available now! 

I felt compelled to read Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, reproductive theorist Sophie A. Lewis’s new book, after seeing the online brouhaha about its controversial thesis.. 

Lewis, a communist, believes that “the path to freedom for humanity is a flight from market dependence, and one name for this path is ‘full surrogacy’ ” (33). Now, I’m definitely not a communist, but, deep worldview divisions notwithstanding, I found much of value in Full Surrogacy Now. Even if we (happily) never move towards communal reproduction under communism, there is much to be said about commercial surrogacy and gestation under capitalism. 

First and foremost, I agree with Lewis that pregnancy is work. Having just finished birthing 3 children in less than 4 years, I’m no stranger to the rigors of gestation. Sociocultural baggage around pregnancy, including muddled, uneven, and historically naive claims about maternal altruism, can obscure this truth at times. But, at the end of the day, work is work — though communists and libertarians have much different opinions on what place “work” holds in a just world. 

Whether you think paid labor has no place in a just world or that it should serve as a primary mediator of human interaction, it’d be bad news if pregnancy work were both widespread and miserable. Lewis claims that “pregnancy work is not so much disappearing or getting easier as crashing through various regulatory barriers onto an open market” (5). On the contrary, the volume of worldwide pregnancy work is both shrinking and, for many gestators, becoming easier as well.     

Industrialization, urbanization, and investment in human capital (i.e. education) have combined to drop the birth rate from a grueling and dangerous number of children per woman towards a more humane 1 or 2. In fact, global fertility may have dropped to an even lower number than is socially optimal; and there are women who want to have children but cannot given that access to healthcare remains uneven, childcare is devastatingly expensive, and that childbirth will never be totally risk-free. Still, thanks to advances in obstetrics, and public health more generally, pregnancy and delivery are leaps and bounds safer today than they used to be. 

On top of those demographic changes, brisk markets for consumer goods and services shower pregnant women in developed countries with things that really do make pregnancy easier, like maternity wear, compression undergarments, nausea products, and gear to make caring for and entertaining other children less burdensome. Though these creature comforts won’t seem like a good substitute for cradle communism to a comrade, they are greeted with open arms and wallets by many pregnant women across the rest of the political spectrum.

In other words, economic freedom (i.e. capitalism), and the prosperity that attends it, do seem to be alleviating this oldest of burdens. Meanwhile, countries that have socialized health care appear to deliver worse outcomes during pregnancy and delivery. If improving reproductive healthcare outcomes is the goal, then we have to chalk up another point for capitalism. 

To turn to the realm of ethics, libertarians believe that you should be able to do anything for money that you’re already legally permitted to do for free. This belies common complaints about the “commodification” of certain domains. The principle covers things individuals might choose to do with their bodies: putting things in (sex), taking things out (organs), and incubation (surrogate pregnancy). 

Moreover, libertarians can agree with Lewis that various forms of surrogacy as currently practiced are handled in a deeply unethical manner. The “feminationalism” Lewis decries — laws created to “protect” a “nation’s women [from] nefarious outsiders” — is also objectionably anti-individualist. Libertarianism’s concept of self-ownership strongly contradicts the proposition that a country’s national resources includes women’s uteri and are to be managed through the political process. 

The simple pursuit of profit motivates action from good people and scoundrels alike. But the libertarian vision of capitalism is based on individual freedom and active consent (often explicit and contractual) to commercial transactions. Those surrogates who have been recruited into the industry by dishonest middlewomen, working under “contracts” they literally cannot read, have been unquestionably wronged according to both communist and libertarian standards.

So if libertarians and communists like Lewis are, in some ways, on the same page about surrogacy, what about the radical call for full surrogacy? Well, the details here are sparse. As far as I can tell, Lewis views universal, fairly-paid surrogacy as an intermediate step towards the complete disintegration of the patriarchal, “biological” family. 

The new family will value “motherhood” not as an act of uterine work to produce children-cum-possessions, but as an ongoing practice of generous and kindhearted adults towards various young people with no biological connection necessary. In the meantime, surrogates can and should seize power over their gestational labor through organizational strategies. Although labor negotiations are sometimes a dry affair, surrogates occupy a unique position from which to seize power if they wish. Their strikes and protests might involve absconding from surrogates’ prescribed living quarters or going rogue with fetuses.. 

I am happy to accept a near future in which surrogacy is more widespread, so long as it is genuinely voluntary. But truly ‘full’ surrogacy would have to be the product of coercion. Even if today’s biological mothers are often alienated from their “natural” pregnancy labor and are brainwashed about what motherhood really means, it’s hard to imagine that nobody in a world of “full surrogacy” would want to do her own gestational work or keep the products thereof. 

Genetic relatedness might not be the most important thing morally connecting caregivers to the children they raise. Still, ordinary genetic parenthood stands as the de facto baseline for human affairs. Perhaps one day every last one of us will consent to a system of invitro-fertilizing our eggs using anonymized pools of sperm and incubating them in disembodied baggies of amniotic fluid (while sterilizing ourselves, lest we accidentally produce a baby the old-fashioned way) and then dispassionately watching them be raised by strangers, all done under the all-seeing, munificient hand of the State. 

But there is no reason to think a government can sort babies and parents effectively, even in the case that everyone wanted this (and they don’t). Coercion on a massive scale would be necessary. In any case, pursuing the Communist full surrogacy vision is already possible on a smaller scale; individuals who do actually want to distribute motherhood amongst themselves communally can already choose to do so. Communes might have a poor track record in general, but I’m happy to live in a society where eccentrics are free to choose to live, work, and raise children however they wish. 

Make no mistake: human reproduction has taken, and continues to take, many different forms. “Leave It To Beaver”-style nuclear families might turn out to have been a flash in the post-World War II pan, so we shouldn’t lean too heavily on that template for reproductive life. I can, with Lewis, at least begin to imagine material and sociocultural conditions under which voluntary surrogacy becomes a widespread norm. 

However, today’s parents seem to feel more strongly than ever that parenting is a value-laden, self-expressive undertaking. So I can’t imagine that full surrogacy would become a step along the path to a radically different future, rather than the product of a radically different future that had already mostly materialized.  How we produce babies would be the last piece of fully automated luxury communism to click into place, not the first. 

Steve knows the world has truly gotten better for human beings. Not enough people recognize or appreciate that. We hope that this episode inspires you to help a neighbor or call a friend.

How does gratitude compare to resentment? Do we have the mental space to be thinking about the welfare of everyone else? How different are you on social media compared to real life? Why do GoFundMe’s work? Is the demand curve for chemotherapy vertical?

Further Reading:

Suicide of the West, written by Jonah Goldberg

Related Content:

Teaching Economics (with Steve Horwitz), Free Thoughts Podcast

The Dismal Science, Liberty Chronicles Podcast

The Two Sides of Every Regulated Economic Exchange, written by Steve Horwitz

The Best Work/Family Arrangements Come from Families, Not Governments written by Steve Horwitz

One of the most remarkable aspects of the last few generations is that for the first time in human history, at least to this degree, stuff has been getting cheaper while human labor gets more valuable. It’s a technology-enabled humanist revolution! At the same time, labor-intensive sectors like healthcare and education have become more expensive relative to the declining price of goods. Economists call this the “Baumol effect,” though it’s sometimes referred to as the “cost disease.” But economist Alex Tabarrok joins the show to discuss how that curse might actually be a blessing in disguise and how the Baumol effect radically disrupts our preconceived notions about effective government policies.

Why are some prices getting higher while innovation causes the lowering of other prices? Why has the price of education gone up? What is the Baumol Effect? How can we substitute for skilled labor?

Further Reading:

Why Are the Prices So Damn High?, written by Eric Helland and Alexander Tabarrok

Marginal Revolution

Stubborn Attachments, written by Tyler Cowen

Related Content:

The Automation Revolution is Upon Us, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Will Artificial Intelligence Take Your Job?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

On Innovation: Don’t Ask for Permission, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Radical abolitionist, feminist, and libertarian forerunner Henry Clarke Wright was born on Tuesday, August 29, 1797, in Connecticut’s northwest corner, the descendant of New England puritans and the son of a house-joiner.¹ Arguably “the most notable of the champions of non-resistance”² and “the chief theoretician of nonresistance,”³ Wright influenced several of the radical movements of his time, perhaps most notably the abolitionist cause. As a young man, in 1814, Wright entered a hatmaking apprenticeship in his home state, but his time as a hatter did not last;⁴ powerfully influenced by the religious instruction and tenets of his parents, he was destined for the clergy and went in 1819 to study at the Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts. There he established for himself several strict rules, calculated to open his mind, to put it “into a posture of neutrality.”⁵ Among these, Wright resolved, “I would take nothing for granted as true or false, right or wrong, but would doubt on all subjects, without any regard to what others might think or say of me.”⁶ To this precept he seems to have held fast throughout his life, maintaining fierce independence of thought and never shying away from controversy.

Ordained in the summer of 1826, Wright found a congregation in West Newbury, Massachusetts, where he first encountered William Lloyd Garrison’s radical anti-slavery periodical The Liberator. His initial reaction to Garrison, thought he knew Garrison was right, was one of disapproval; he regarded Garrison’s denunciations of the church and the clergy as “rash, imprudent, and bitter in spirit.” Though it would be several years before the two would meet, Garrison words left their mark, as we shall see. Wright, though, was not yet finished with the ministry. Known for his love of children, Wright became both an agent of the Sunday School Union and a children’s minister; he had, by all accounts, a unique passion and aptitude for communicating with children, and he even wrote a children’s book, A Kiss for a Blow, composed of a series of morality tales teaching the principles of non-resistance.⁷

Wright urged strict adherence to the doctrine of non-resistance, thus counseling meek, “passive submission to enemies.” His non-resistance was based on a radical interpretation of Jesus calling on Christians to “resist not evil,” to abandon force even to defend themselves. Wright lived his convictions unyieldingly, adamant that one must meet evil by turning the other cheek. In a personal journal entry, dated March 1835, he recounts his being struck in a Philadelphia hotel, whereafter he invited his assailant to his home and assured him that he had no ill feelings toward him. The next morning, the man who had attacked him visited his room to ask for forgiveness.⁸

Wright’s non-resistance philosophy often very nearly approximates contemporary libertarianism in its principled renunciation of coercive force, its emphasis on the importance of the individual, and its defense of voluntary cooperation.⁹ On the question of slavery, these views led Wright to immediatism, which held that the peculiar institution must be abolished forthwith—no concessions or compromises. Wright was steadfast in the conviction that the Christian, as such, could abide no accommodation of any kind to slavery. Reacting to the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he wrote to Garrison objecting strongly to its apparent suggestion that Christianity’s effect on the slaveholder is “to make him kind, just, humane, as a slaveholder.” For Wright, “the first, and last, and only effect of the Christian spirit on such a character is, to cause him to cease, at once and forever, to be a slaveholder.” As a non-resistant, Wright sees all government as, in principle, a species of slavery, for all existing governments are predicated on the invalid, usurpative claim of “a right to control the will of a fellow being by physical force.” So radical were his opinions that the American Anti-Slavery Society discontinued his agency in 1837,¹⁰ citing the fact that he refused to “cease[] interweaving his ‘no government’ views with abolitionism.”¹¹ For Wright, the issues to which he devoted himself were all necessarily and inextricably connected to one another; he felt that he could not be true to himself or to these causes if he pledged, as was the Anti-Slavery Society’s request, “to confine himself to the discussion of abolitionism.”¹² Every issue must be on the table—the woman question, the slavery question, the peace question, etc.—for all were related to one another and to the non-resistants’ repudiation of violence.

Wright and other radicals in what came to be called the “ultra” camp, believed that to be a consistent advocate of peace meant not only opposing wars between nations, but condemning all acts and institutions of violence, even (or perhaps especially) one’s own government. Many in both the abolitionist and peace movements believed that by wedding these causes to other more radical views, perceived as unrelated, they would alienate potential allies and fracture existing support. “Wright was probably the most ultra of the peace ultraists,”¹³ extending his underlying philosophical commitment to non-resistance across the board and seeing the logical relationships between the pressing issues of his day. Historian Marc-William Palen has made important contributions in considering the connection between various liberal (and indeed proto-libertarian) currents of the Victorian era, including the opposition to war and heralding of world peace, the promotion of global free trade against protectionism, the advancement of women’s rights (particularly suffrage), and the support for the abolition of slavery.¹⁴ One of many Garrisonian abolitionists to become closely affiliated with Manchester school free-traders and members of the Anti-Corn Law League, Wright attended league meetings during an 1843 visit to England and “even addressed a large free-trade banquet in Manchester.”¹⁵ And throughout his life, Wright frequently used his platform to attack traditional gender roles.¹⁶ He was given occasion to voice his commitment to equality for women when, in 1840, a number of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s prominent members seceded to form a new organization after one Abby Kelley, a woman, was appointed to one of the Society’s committees. In his letter to The Liberator, Wright wondered how this new organization could carry on calling itself an anti-slavery society when the assertion underlying opposition to slavery is “the equality of human rights,” the recognition of “every human being, without regard to complexion, sex, or condition, as being the image and representative of God on earth.” In this exclusion of women Wright saw “the spirit of despotism,” which sequesters them and makes them a second class, “the uncomplaining, suffering slave[s] of man.” It was unclear to Wright why people who would relegate women in such a way would even maintain the pretense of principled anti-slavery sentiment.

Though he served as an agent of the American Peace Society for a brief period in 1836, philosophical differences predictably led Wright to part ways with the Society. The Society’s leadership had urged Wright to adopt a more measured approach, one adapted perhaps to the views and prejudices of his audiences, for whom his uncompromising pacifism, rejecting even defensive war, was simply too extreme, impeding a more ecumenical approach to the cause.¹⁷ Even in the characterization of his views, Wright had to challenge the orthodoxy of the movement’s leaders, preferring “anti-war” to “peace,” believing the former to be more “aggressive.”¹⁸ It is interesting to observe the similarities between the internal debates and divergences of the peace activists, abolitionists, and other nineteenth century social reformers and those that divide today’s libertarians, who frequently disagree on both tactics and first principles. Is electoral politics, for example, a vital and necessary medium for the communication of libertarian ideas and the most direct path to effecting practical change? Or does it require endorsing violence and man’s evil domination of man? Ever the firebrand, Wright was sure of his answer to that question, convinced that his approach was the right and true one, and was so fervently anti-political that he would not vote even “if his single ballot could abolish slavery.”¹⁹ “A bullet,” he said, “is in every ballot,” the practical political process leading inevitably to “the gallows or the battlefield,” with “no consistent or honest stopping place between them.”²⁰

Wright, Garrison, and other ultras at last resolved to inaugurate a new organization, committed to “the principle of the Inviolability of Human Life,” to “the anti-man-killing principle,”²¹ founding the New England Non-Resistance Society born in 1838. Wright’s picture of mankind as a single race and brotherhood, each individual a child of God, translated into principled and explicit cosmopolitan, anti-nationalistic views. Wright, in point of fact, condemned “nationalism” at a time when use of the term was itself quite rare.²² The masthead of The Liberator famously bears the words, “Our country is the world—our countrymen are all mankind,” and the Non-Resistance Society’s Declaration of Sentiments elaborated this message of universal, worldwide brotherhood, announcing:

Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us, than are those of the whole human race.

In an 1844 letter to Garrison, published in The Liberator, Wright relates the story of a conversation at the dinner table, at which Wright’s interlocutor remarked on Wright’s low patriotism and pressed him to acknowledge, at least, that he “like[d] America a little better than any other country.” Wright replied indignantly: “You know that I abjure the name American—that I never wish to be called an American—that I profess not to love America any better than England, or Austria, or any other land, and that, as a practical principle, I adopt the Brotherhood of our race.” In the letter, Wright argues that God holds people responsible not as nations, but as individuals, and moreover that the great object of governments “seems to have been to enable the few to rule and murder the many, systematically, respectably, and legally.” It is worth quoting Wright at length:

States and nations are to be regarded as we regard combinations of men to pick pockets, so steal sheep, to rob on the road, to steal men, to range over the sea as pirates—only on a larger and more imposing scale. When men steal, rob and murder as states and nations, it gives respectability to crime—the enormity of their crimes is lost sight of, amid the imposing number that commit them, and amid the glitter and pomp of equipage. The little band of thieves is scorned and hunted down as a felon; the great, or governmental band of thieves, is made respectable by numbers, and their crimes cease to be criminal and hateful in proportion to the number combined to do them.

Lewis Perry likens Wright to a radical contemporary, the mid-nineteenth century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, arguing that Wright plainly presented “a version of anarchism,” consistent with a three-part test Perry derives from Proudhon’s thought.²³ First is Wright’s hope for an end to all human government, regarded as an illegitimate usurpation of a power rightfully possessed only by God—the power to lord over mankind. Secondly, Perry contends that, like Proudhon, Wright did not only agitate for an end to government but presented a positive vision of “the creation of new and uncoercive social arrangements.”²⁴ Finally, as noted above, Wright finds justification for his radical libertarian message in sources exterior and, more importantly, antecedent to the authority of man-made law as actually set forth, viz., the government of God. For Wright, “Human government is just as necessary as sin—no more.”²⁵ In this view, and in the words of Wright’s friend Garrison, “human governments [are] the results of human disobedience to the requirements of heaven.” Wright did not refer to himself as an anarchist, yet neither did many of those adjudged anarchists from the standpoint of the present (Josiah Warren, among many other American examples). In his history of American anarchism, William O. Reichert writes, “No American more fully embraced the essential attitudes of the anarchist idea than did Henry Clarke Wright.”

As a matter of course, non-resistants such as Wright were also the prison abolitionists of their day, denouncing all punishment as at odds with God’s law, not to mention futile. They argued “that physical coercion is not adapted to moral regeneration,” and that only gentleness and love could defeat evil and sin. If, as Wright argued, the individual can never rightly seek retribution or recompense, then neither can any government, which is only a group of men. For non-resistants, the Old Testament formula that prescribes taking an eye for an eye is mere vengeance, impermissible to individuals, who are enjoined to forgive their enemies in all cases. In the words of another prominent non-resistant contemporary, Adin Ballou, “the reign of military and penal violence must ultimately give place to that of forbearance, forgiveness, and mercy.” Wright is careful to distinguish between government as such—that is, rules appropriate to protect the rights of the individual—and “government by force” (emphasis added). To those who insisted that his non-resistance philosophy, with its opposition to human law and government, represented anarchy (in the sense of lawless chaos), Wright turned their argument back on them: he maintained that in fact it is the reign of violence, embodied in every state, that results in anarchy. If violence is wrong for the individual, he argued, then so too is it wrong for the state.²⁶ He compares the label “no-government man” to the term “Quaker,” which also emerged as one of reproach, but was later adopted by Friends themselves.

Wright’s energies were at the heart of the Non-Resistance Society; when he went to tour Britain, it fell into a period of relative inactivity (at least as a formal entity), having found no one to take up his mantle, its other members being focused on activities in the furtherance of the antislavery cause.²⁷ Wright should be remembered as among the great American libertarians, a powerful and principled voice for freedom and equality of rights for all human beings, without distinction of race or gender. On so many important and enduring questions, he was more than a century ahead of his time—and frequently ahead even of our own time—pushing fellow abolitionists and champions of peace to be more principled and consistent.

1. Henry Clarke Wright, Human Life: Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (Bela Marsh 1849), page 19. ↩
2. Merle E. Curti, “Non-Resistance in New England,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1929). ↩
3. Richard O. Curry, “The Right to Self-Government: Anti-Institutionalism and Individualism in Abolitionist Thought” in Richard O. Curry and Lawrence B. Goodheart, eds., American Chameleon: Individualism in Trans-National Context (The Kent State University Press 1991), page 110. ↩
4. Wright, though he resolved to learn the hatmaking craft cheerfully, describes this time in terms that today are easily recognized as reflecting a deep depression. He recounts “a sinking of spirit,” loneliness, a “loathing of food” and “distaste for amusement,” and an incredible effort to appear happy on the outside. ↩
5. Henry Clarke Wright, Human Life: Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (Bela Marsh 1849), page 184. ↩
6. Ibid. at 185. ↩
7. Walter M. Merrill, ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, Volume III: No Union with the Slaveholders (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1973), page 126, note 8. 7↩
8. Ibid. ↩
9. Of course, in forswearing even defensive force, the non-resistance doctrine breaks from contemporary libertarianism as generally understood. Few libertarians today argue against an individual’s right to defend himself. ↩
10. John R. McKivigan, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers: 1842-1852 (Yale University Press 2009), page 65, note 5. ↩
11. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (Houghton, Mifflin and Company), page 159. ↩
12. Ibid. ↩
13. Larry Ceplair, ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimke: Selected Writings 1835-1839 (Columbia University Press 1989), page 137. ↩
14. See, for example, Marc-William Palen, “British Free Trade and the International Feminist Vision for Peace, c.1846-1946 in Imagining Britain’s Economic Future, c.1800-1975: Trade, Consumerism, and Global Markets, David Thackery, Andrew Thompson, and Richard Toye, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), and Marc-William Palen, “Free-Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism: A Historiography” in Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Volume 37, Issue 2 (The History of Economics Society 2015). ↩
15. W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists & Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press 2013). ↩
16. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century American (2nd. Edition) (Indiana University Press 2001), page 63. ↩
17. Perry at 60. ↩
18. Martin Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730-1854 (Oxford University Press 1996), page 323. ↩
19. Ibid. at 89. ↩
20. See Carl Watner, “Those ‘Impossible Citizens’: Civil Resistants in 19th Century New England” (1979). ↩
21. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (Houghton, Mifflin and Company), page 224. ↩
22. W. Caleb McDaniel notes the infrequent use of the term at this time generally, as well as the fact that “[n]o more than five or six articles prior to 1843 used nationalism in something like Wright’s sense of excessive patriotism.” The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists & Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press 2013). ↩
23. Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism page 22. ↩
24. Ibid. ↩
25. Daniel Ritchie, Isaac Nelson: Radical Abolitionist, Evangelical Presbyterian, and Irish Nationalist (Liverpool University Press 2018), page 57. ↩
26. Henry Clarke Wright, Six Months at Graefenberg with Conversations in the Saloon, on Nonresistance and Other Subjects (Charles Gilpin 1845), page 188. ↩
27. Walter M. Merrill, ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, Volume III: No Union with the Slaveholders (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1973), page 238. ↩

At the end of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek took a direct jab at the Beveridge report by writing, “It is doubtful whether at this stage a detailed blueprint of a desirable internal order of society would be of much use—or whether anyone is competent to furnish it.” The two economists certainly had different views of the welfare state. Beveridge thought that private competition was the cancer at the root of the voluntary insurance system; Hayek believed it to be the last bulwark against totalitarianism. Beveridge believed that the state could create social security without damaging individual incentive; Hayek thought it would stultify British innovation and entrepreneurship. The Beveridge report placed great trust in the capacity of impartial experts to administer welfare; Hayek labeled them power-hungry autocrats.^[i]

Beveridge’s and Hayek’s dispute over expert control of economic and social policy was a manifestation of a much deeper disagreement, something that Hayek called “the Knowledge Problem.” By this, Hayek meant that no single person, or even group of people, could possess the knowledge contained within an entire society. “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 knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” Socialists, according to Hayek, suffered from “the mistaken assumption that all knowledge can be collected in one mind.” Hayek had attacked the fundamental concept of central planning, the belief that an enlightened bureaucrat could gather all pertinent information, consult with experts, and make an informed decision.^[ii]

Beveridge, like all central planners, believed that he could rationalize and streamline the social insurance system by depending upon information provided by “impartial expert authorities.” He anticipated critics, like Hayek, who questioned his forecasts and he acknowledged the difficulties that the project faced. After all, it was “impossible today to forecast with assurance the level of prices after the war.” Even what constituted “reasonable human subsistence is to some extent a matter of judgment.” Beveridge’s calculations of how much households spent each month on food, clothing, and fuel became quite complicated and he was forced to make recommendations based on what the average household needed without making adjustments for regional and local variations in the cost of living.^[iii]

The greatest controversy between members of Beveridge’s committee arose over the thorny issue of rent. Beveridge noted that the cost of rent differed “markedly between London, the rest of England and Scotland, and between industrial and agricultural households.” According to the data given to Beveridge by Seebohm Rowntree, the average household in Scotland spent little more than half as much on rent as the average household in London (8.2 shillings against 15.7). Rowntree himself recommended giving claimants their actual rent, a suggestion heartily seconded by committee member Muriel Ritson who “complained that it would be grossly unfair to low-paid, low-rent areas like Scotland, and would mean that the contributions of poor highland crofters would subsidize the rents of affluent workers in the South-East.” Beveridge considered their recommendation at length in the report, but he ultimately discarded their advice because “any regional or occupational differentiation of benefits and contributions…would raise some difficulties in administration.” Instead, Beveridge went with a fixed-rate benefit of 10 shillings a week per household. Without elaborate administrative mechanisms, it was simply impracticable to control for regional variations in rent, let alone attempt to compensate every individual household for the exact cost.^[iv]

The rent controversy is emblematic of Beveridge’s encounters with the Knowledge Problem. In the end, he had to acknowledge the limits of centralized knowledge. Even the otherwise sympathetic Nicholas Timmins faults “the essential arbitrariness of the exercise” and notes Beveridge’s frequent use of phrases such as “It is reasonable…” or “It is suggested…”  There are hints that Beveridge himself recognized the Knowledge Problem. While discussing the transfer of the functions of local authorities to the new Ministry of Social Security, he wrote, “It is clear that the administration of the Ministry of Social Security must be decentralized so that its local officers are in intimate touch with the problems and circumstances in their localities.” Beveridge hoped that such would be possible “without making these officials servants of, and subject to the control of, the Local Authority.” His plan arranged for “local administration by local officials of a Central Department.” Yet immediately after asserting the desirability of decentralized or “intimate” knowledge, Beveridge concluded, “It is neither desirable for the strength of local democracy…nor compatible with a national minimum and a national Plan of Social Security that people should be given assistance according to a scale and conditions which vary from place to place.” Beveridge desired two contradictory things: local knowledge and central planning.^[v]

Yet the Knowledge Problem is a double-edged sword that cuts against Hayek as well. For although he opposed state-run central planning, Hayek also explicitly repudiated laissez-faire anti-statism. He wrote, “Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.” While Hayek valued competition and criticized central planning for limiting competition, he acknowledged a legitimate role for the state in creating “a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible.” Workplace regulations, road maintenance, and pollution all required “some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism.” Thus, Hayek defended the rule-making power of the state even while objecting to central planning. Yet the Knowledge Problem applies to both rule-making and central planning. According to the principle of the division of knowledge, there is no more reason to trust the ability of centralized government to set reasonable rules than there is to think it can effectively plan social security.^[vi]

Hayek leveled another accusation at central planners that applies to the Beveridge Report. Hayek believed that socialism and democracy were incompatible, that “the inability of democratic assemblies to carry out what seems to be a clear mandate of the people will inevitably cause dissatisfaction with democratic institutions.” Hayek quoted from the work of fellow LSE professor Harold Laski, who complained about the inability of Parliament to pass socialist legislation and openly asked, “Whether in a period of transition to Socialism, a Labour Government can risk the overthrow of its measures as a result of the next general election.” What Hayek really feared was that dissatisfaction with democratic institutions would lead to “the delegation of particular technical tasks to separate bodies.” Efficiency would require that planning “must be taken out of politics and placed in the hands of experts—permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies.” These independent experts would not be directly accountable to the people, nor, often, even to the assemblies that created them in the first place.^[vii]

Beveridge certainly relied heavily upon “impartial expert authorities” in his plan. Underlying Beveridge’s support for expert authorities was his dislike for sectional interests. Indeed, Beveridge wrote one of his most enduring lines—“A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.”— to explain why sectional interests should be bypassed. Of course, “sectional interests” was a phrase of 1940s jargon that comes close in meaning to the modern bogeyman “interest groups.” Beverdige believed that sectional interests undermined national unity and prevented effective central planning for social security. Beveridge’s biographer, Jose Harris, writes,

He was disturbed by what he believed was the growing trend for politicians to act, not as individual representatives, nor even as members of a party, but as docile instruments of a particular faction or class. This suspicion of popular politics was reinforced by his personal experience of working with distress committees in East London—by the ‘costly red tape…lucrative contracts to local tenderers and soft jobs to local workmen’, and by the ignorance and ineptitude which he perceived in the vast majority of local councilors and guardians.

In response, Beveridge “repeatedly advocated greater central control of local authorities [and] more power for non-elected ‘experts’.” He never explained precisely why national authorities would be less prone to corruption than local authorities would, but it can be surmised that he thought that national experts would be removed from the influence of sectional interests. Of course, sectional interests were often a result of sincerely held differences in political philosophy. Expert consensus would come at the expense of both open political discourse and democratic oversight.^[viii]

While Hayek’s criticism of Beveridge’s undemocratic beliefs carries some weight, Hayek himself was not a committed democrat. At the end of the chapter, “Planning and Democracy,” in which he attacks the undemocratic ways of central planners, Hayek wrote, “We have no intention, however, of making a fetish of democracy. It may well be that our generation talks and thinks too much of democracy and too little of the values which it serves.” Hayek believed that democracy was a means to an end, that of “safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom,” but even democracy could become tyrannical. “It is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority, democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.” Nevertheless, both Beveridge and Hayek shared a conditional commitment to democratic government.^[ix]

“The era of big government is over,” President Bill Clinton declared during the 1996 State of the Union. Clinton’s pronouncement has been oft repeated, but the second half of his statement is often forgotten. Clinton continued that although the era was over, “we cannot go back to a time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves. Instead we must go forward as one America, one nation working together to meet the challenges we face together. Self-reliance and teamwork are not opposing virtues; we must have both.”^[1] What Clinton imagined was a leaner, more efficient government that would help provide opportunity to its citizens, while not promising equal outcomes.^[2]

Clinton succeeded in being a new kind of Democrat as he and the moderate (sometimes labeled conservative) Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) promised he would be during the 1992 presidential campaign.^[3] When evaluating the Clinton presidency, it must be said that his administration’s economic achievements were impressive. By working with Speaker of the House (after 1994) Newt Gingrich, and the Republican Congress, Clinton was able to achieve much of the DLC’s agenda. These achievements included a balanced budget, impressive economic growth, welfare reform, and significant deregulation.

On social issues, however, Clinton’s shift to the center resulted in a crime bill that, perhaps unintentionally, disproportionately targeted minorities and contributed (although to what extent is unclear) to our current culture of mass incarceration.^[4] Likewise, Clinton’s attempts to appeal to voters’ more traditional values led him to sign legislation such as the Defense of Marriage Act and to encourage measures to limit individuals’ personal liberty.

Perhaps Clinton’s greatest failure, however, was his inability to redefine America’s foreign policy in the wake of the Cold War. Clinton was an internationalist and believed in an activist American presence abroad, but he was unable to create a comprehensive doctrine to guide the United States into the 21^st century. Indeed, when Clinton did act, his policies served as a foundation for the more interventionist (and disastrous) policies of the George W. Bush administration.^[5]

****

When Clinton took office in January of 1992, he promised to govern as a New Democrat. This meant that he would, as he had declared when he announced his candidacy in October the year before, “provide leadership that will restore the American Dream—that will fight for the forgotten middle class—that will provide more opportunity, insist on more responsibility, and create a greater sense of community.”^[6] Initially, Clinton promised the American people a middle class tax cut. Even before taking office, however, he spoke with the Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, who insisted that if significant deficit reduction could be achieved, the bond market would respond by lowering long term interest rates. The reduction in rates, in turn, would benefit the middle class and lead to economic growth.^[7] As such, deficit reduction became the means for the Clinton administration to bring about economic growth and opportunity – much to the chagrin of the more Keynesian members of the administration.

Although budget reductions had not been a major part of Clinton’s campaign, behind closed doors he lambasted both President Reagan and President Bush for their fiscal irresponsibility.^[8] Now in office, he had a chance to address annual deficits and the debt. Although Clinton’s first budget included a tax increase on the wealthiest Americans that generated a projected $240.6 billion (and thus gained him the image of a tax and spend liberal), it also reduced government spending by a projected $192.3 billion and along with the budget caps (put in place during President George H.W. Bush’s tenure) helped set the country on the path to fiscal responsibility.^[9] While Clinton’s first budget made some inroads, it was ultimately impressive economic growth (especially from 1996 to 2000) – along with the bipartisan Balanced Budget Act and Tax Relief Act of 1997 – that led to the federal government having a budget surplus for four straight years. To put the balanced budgets into perspective, it was the first time the U.S. government had balanced the budget for four consecutive years since the 1920s.^[10]

In addition to getting deficits under control, Clinton also pledged during the 1992 campaign to “end welfare as we know it.” Clinton made welfare reform one of his three major policy initiatives during his first two years in office. The other two were his crime and healthcare reforms. Unfortunately, for both welfare reform and Clinton’s presidency, he decided to push healthcare reform before pursuing welfare reform. If he had reversed the two, he might have built a moderate coalition around reforming welfare, passed the bill, and then used the relationships – and his bona fides as a New Democrat – to pursue healthcare reform.^[11]

Instead, the administration sent a healthcare bill to the Congress that fundamentally transformed the American health system and was so complex that its authors even had a hard time explaining it. Healthcare reform, led by the First Lady – Hillary Clinton – failed.^[12]

Perhaps more damaging than its failure, however, was the blow that the debate over healthcare had on Clinton’s image. Republicans easily framed Clinton as a tax and spend, big government liberal, and his claims of being a New Democrat fell on deaf ears. In 1994 the electorate punished Clinton for not governing as a new kind of Democrat, giving the Republicans a historic victory that handed the Speaker’s gavel to Congressman Newt Gingrich.^[13]  

Ironically, the Republican takeover of Congress helped Clinton. Sure, he was upset about the defeat, but in time he came to realize that he had been freed – at least in part – of the Old Democrats in Congress who had consistently pushed him to the left during his first two years.^[14] As a result, Clinton pursued a strategy of “triangulation.” Clinton’s political consultant Dick Morris insisted that Clinton: “Triangulate, create a third position, not just in between the old positions of the two parties but above them as well. Identify a new course that accommodates the needs the Republicans address but does it in a way that is uniquely yours.”^[15]

At first, triangulation was a reelection strategy, but it became both a political and policy strategy and Clinton found that many of his New Democrat ideas were perfectly designed to appeal to voters and break out of the left vs. right paradigm. This strategy led Clinton to promise, and eventually sign, legislation to balance the budget.

It also led Clinton to sign welfare reform legislation before the 1996 presidential election. Clinton had always believed that “welfare was a second chance, not a way of life” and he had promised the American people in 1992 that he would “change welfare as we knew it.”^[16] Signing welfare reform signaled to the electorate that Clinton was indeed a New Democrat. According to a postelection survey by the DLC, “the president’s most important accomplishment in the eyes of voters was moving 1 million people from welfare into jobs, and 71 percent approved of his position on crime.” Clinton’s plan to run as a New Democrat, who argued that federal government’s goal should be to “give people the tools and try to establish the conditions in which they can make the most of their lives,” resonated.^[17] Welfare reform, the balanced budget, and impressive economic growth defined Clinton’s presidency.

Clinton also had other fiscally conservative victories. For instance, he provided presidential leadership on the issue of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and was able to see the trade deal approved over opposition from the House Democratic leadership. In the same vein, he was able to normalize trade relations with China. Clinton also perused deregulation of the banking industry with the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. This legislation legalized branch banking and put an end to the Glass-Steagall separations between commercial and investment banking. By signing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Clinton also deregulated the telecommunications industry. Finally, Clinton pursued a Reinventing Government Initiative (RGI) to decrease the number of federal bureaucrats and make the government more efficient and more responsive to citizens.^[18] Although the RGI did not redefine the way the federal government worked, all of these initiatives must be described as fiscally conservative and each brought varied degrees of success.

As such, when Clinton’s economic record is attacked, it is usually assaulted from the left. Ten years after welfare reform, “welfare rolls shrunk from 12.2 million to 4.5 million, caseloads down by 54 percent, 60 percent of mothers who left welfare now gainfully employed.” Critics, however, argued that “the federal government had broken its commitment to protect the most vulnerable of American citizens.” These critics claimed to be vindicated after the 2008 downturn when they claimed that welfare reform “has failed to cushion the neediest through recessions.”^[19]

Clinton’s policies have also been attacked for not addressing income inequality. In fact, Clinton has even been condemned for failing “to exhibit the moral outrage that could have put inequality at the top of the nation’s agenda.”^[20] In addition to his failure to address income inequality, Clinton’s emphasis on deregulation has been cited as one of the reasons for the 2008 financial crisis.^[21]

Clinton’s greatest failure, however, was his inability to stay focused on governing. His administration was riddled with financial and sex scandals. In October of 1997, Clinton and Gingrich met in the Treaty Room of the White House to discuss the possibility to reform Social Security. Both men realized that if they wanted to put the United States on a path to long-term fiscal solvency, they would need to address entitlements. After discussing how they could carve out the political support for such reforms, “both men left [the meeting] feeling confident about the possibilities of success.”^[22] Any coalition they put together, however, would be fragile and they wanted to make sure that hot button issues would not emerge to destroy the opportunity. Unfortunately for Clinton, Gingrich, and the country, on January 21, 1998 – just six days before Clinton was set to announce his plans to reform entitlements in the State of the Union – the press reported the Clinton-Lewinsky Affair.^[23] Any hopes of reforming Social Security and Medicare vanished as the partisanship made any bipartisan coalition impossible. Clinton’s sexually exploitive behavior not only hurt his family and Monica Lewinsky, but also the future solvency of the country.

****

While triangulation worked well on economic issues, it also led Clinton to embrace socially conservative positions that infringed on Americans’ civil liberties. When Clinton took office, one of the first issues he addressed was the status of homosexuals in the military. Clinton was delivering on a campaign promise and a deeply held belief that “the equal treatment of gay Americans was a matter essential to national unity.” During his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, Clinton exclaimed that Americans needed to stop distrusting and fearing one another because of their differences.^[24]

This inclusiveness was an essential part of Clinton’s message; however, the struggle was determining how to be inclusive without alienating the independent voters that Clinton would need to win reelection. In 1992, Clinton failed to fully repeal the U.S. military’s ban on gay men and women openly serving. The public battle with the military hurt him politically, as did the compromise that emerged. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” asserted that military personnel could not be asked about their sexuality, however, they could also not openly discuss their sexual preference.

Throughout his administration, Clinton would lend his voice to the cause of gay rights, but he was unable to significantly improve the cultural climate for gay Americans.^[25] Indeed, Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage (DOMA) Act right before the election in 1996, which established the federal definition of marriage as between one man and one woman and allowed states to not recognize the marriage certificates of other states. According to historian Kevan Yenerall, Clinton’s decision to sign DOMA “stands as a significant inconsistency in an otherwise eloquent Clintonian narrative regarding equality under the law for all citizens, regardless of sexual orientation.”^[26] Perhaps Clinton’s acquiescence was designed to head off the even worse possibility of a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage. Or perhaps he simply did not have the political capital in an election year to stand up against a culture of homophobia. Regardless, DOMA was a significant blow to gay Americans.

Another aspect of Clinton’s social agenda was getting tough on crime. To do so, Clinton pushed a crime bill that would put 100,000 new police officers into American communities. An advocate of community policing, Clinton believed such a measure would reduce crime and enable police officers to make a positive difference where they lived. The bill established Clinton as a different type of Democrat by expanding the number of offenses that were eligible for a death penalty sentence. Likewise, the bill included a “three strikes” and you’re out policy (meaning a life sentence) for repeat offenders. Critics of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act insist that “the bill decimated communities of color and accelerated mass incarceration,” while proponents insist the bill reduced crime rates.^[27] Regardless, at the heart of the bill was the belief that more severe punishment was the answer to addressing crime rather than rehabilitation.

While Clinton endorsed harsher punishments, he also tried to reduce Americans’ access to certain types of firearms. The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act limited the production and purchase of some semi-automatic weapons and also banned “large capacity” clips. Clinton also signed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which instituted a five day wait period for the purchase of handguns.^[28] Many Second Amendment advocates viewed these measures as an assault on their Constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms.

Triangulation also led Clinton to embrace some culturally conservative positions. Looking back, Dick Morris argued that Clinton’s political resurrection was in large part due to his “unveiling of a ‘values’ agenda” in 1996.^[29] This agenda included a proposed ban on advertising tobacco products to teenagers and the implementation of a new rating system for music and other forms of media. Clinton also used the presidential bully pulpit to curb the amount of violence on TV, to inform parents, teachers, and administrators how religion could be present in public schools, and to encourage the production new technologies – like the V-chip – to give parents more control over what their children viewed on television.^[30]

Clinton also supported and signed the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which sought to ban pornography from the internet. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld a federal court decision that the ban violated the first amendment rights of American adults. All in all, Clinton’s embrace of triangulation meant attempts to infringe on civil liberties.

****

In the wake of the Cold War, Clinton had a real opportunity to redefine America’s foreign policy. In foreign affairs, Clinton attempted to change the public’s image of the Democratic Party being weak on national defense. Clinton was a committed internationalist who believed that the United States needed to play an active role in promoting democracy and market liberalism abroad, but he was also wary of putting American boots on the ground.[^31]

To an extent, Clinton did achieve his goal of establishing the United States as a good faith partner of the UN in encouraging democracy and liberalism across the world.^[32] In the process, however, Clinton set dangerous precedents that his successors would build on. Under Clinton’s leadership, NATO participated in combat for the first time – an action that worried Russia. George Kennan described Clinton’s use of NATO as “a tragic mistake” and added that it marked “the beginning of a new cold war.”^[33]

During the conflict in Kosovo, the House rejected giving Clinton permission to intervene. Under the War Powers Act, Clinton was required to go to Congress within sixty days of authorizing military action. Clinton never came to Congress and became the first president to disregard the War Powers Act. Although the act had been weakened before Clinton, his actions “helped legitimize the autonomous war-making power of the presidency.”^[34]

Clinton also set some dangerous precedents when it came to U.S. involvement in the Middle East. In Iraq, Clinton contemplated how to deal with Saddam Hussein blocking some potential production sites from inspections. In 1997, Clinton warned about the possibility of rogue actors using biological weapons against the United States. He warned about the potential damage that could be done by weapons of mass destruction and exclaimed that was “fundamentally what is at stake in the stand off we’re having in Iraq today.”^[35]

In 1998, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which asserted that it was “the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” The legislation empowered Clinton to provide Saddam’s opponents with almost $100 million of assistance. In short, Clinton began to make the argument that President George W. Bush would build upon: that the removal of Saddam Hussein was in the national interest of the United States.^[36]

Clinton also dramatically expanded the practice of extraordinary rendition. Extraordinary rendition, which the George W. Bush administration would use extensively to much criticism, “allowed US officials to bypass extraditions procedures by apprehending suspected terrorists on foreign soil and either bringing them to the United States for trial or sending them to other countries for interrogation and incarceration.” The practice is considered a violation of international law, something that the Clinton administration acknowledged. National Coordinator for Security, Richard Clarke, told Al Gore when the vice president asked about the legality: “Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.” Once apprehended by the Clinton administration, many of the detainees were tortured. Under Clinton, the procedure (which had only been used three times by previous administrations) became “routine.”^[37]

Finally, there are those who would criticize Clinton for not doing more to pursue Osama Bin Laden after the first attack on the World Trade Center and following the bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton came close on several occasions to approving a strike on Bin Laden. Each time, however, the potential cost of civilian lives stayed his hand. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, members of the CIA pointed the finger at Clinton. Some asserted that Clinton, and other members of his foreign policy team, had not “taken bin Laden seriously enough.” A CIA operative told the 9/11 commission that Bin Laden “should have been a dead man.” Ultimately, this criticism benefits from hindsight. It is not clear that the CIA ever had a clear opportunity to eliminate Bin Laden.^[38]

****

So, what was wrong with the Clinton administration? It must be said that Clinton had significant economic achievements and that criticisms of his economic record amount to little more than ankle biting. On social issues, however, Clinton was much more conservative than many might believe, and he passed significant amounts of legislation that curtailed Americans’ civil liberties. Likewise, Clinton laid the groundwork for the War on Terror by expanding the presidency’s war making powers and by setting some dangerous precedents in regard to extraordinary rendition. Clinton should not be blamed for the actions of President George W. Bush, but he cannot be given a free pass for establishing the tools that Bush would later abuse.

Kevin Currie-Knight joins our podcast to talk about the libertarian case for markets in education. His book, Education in the Marketplace, explores the variety of arguments that libertarians have made in the past as well as the impact that they each have had on the ever-evolving education system

What is the government’s role in education? How decentralized did our school system use to be? When did our K-12 education system get so structured? When did we first start seeing grade levels for schooling? Who was Albert Jay Nock?

Further Reading:

Our Enemy, the State, written by Albert Jay Nock

Education in the Marketplace: An Intellectual History of Pro-Market Libertarian Visions for Education in Twentieth Century America, written by Kevin Currie-Knight

The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, written by Bryan Caplan

Related Content:

The Case Against Education, Free Thoughts Podcast

Private Lives and Public Education, written by Jason Kuznicki

The State of State Education in America, Free Thoughts Podcast

As the threat of government regulation of the internet mounts from both the political Left and Right, Paul and Matthew sit down to talk about the foundational law that made the internet as we know it possible. Ironically, Section 230 was one of the few bits of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that wasn’t struck down by the courts as a violation of the First Amendment, giving the internet more legal protection than it would have if the moral scolds of the 1990s hadn’t passed the law in the first place. Then, Paul talks with Jennifer Huddleston from the Mercatus Center about her research into the common law origins of Section 230, which rebuts claims that the amendment was some kind of unprecedented “gift” to tech companies.

What was the primary purpose of the Communications Decency Act? What are the ramifications of Section 230? Without Section 230, what would the internet look like? Why is censorship important to the conservative movement?

Further Reading:

What Senator Hawley Gets Wrong about American Identity, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Section 230 Is the Internet’s First Amendment. Now Both Republicans and Democrats Want To Take It Away, written by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

What Republicans are getting wrong about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, written by Zachary Mack

Related Content:

Free Speech Online: Unfriended, Building Tomorrow Podcast

How the FOSTA Rules Create a “Bootleggers and Baptists” Scenario for the 21st Century, written by Paul Matzko

New Conspiracism and Modern Politics (with Russell Muirhead), Free Thoughts Podcast

In the course of researching the philosophical foundations of African history, I have come across some recurrent historiographical mistakes. At the top of that list is the subservient view of the role of women in African politics, which—as we will see again in this article—is incorrect, or at least not ubiquitous across the continent. (I have highlighted several instances in my other articles in this publication.) Contrary to the view of a highly patriarchal ancient and medieval Africa, there are some societies that gave almost completely equal rights to men and women, including the right to assume significant monarchical authority.

The Asante nation, located in what is modern-day Ghana, is one of these egalitarian societies. Prior to the 20th century, the Asante political structure was critically defined by the occupancy of royal stools (an equivalent of thrones).^[1] In Asante culture, there are conventional stools (sese dwa) occupied by chiefs or district rulers, and there is the Golden Stool (Asikadwa). The Golden Stool is the most sacred object in Asante culture. According to folklore, the stool harbors the sunsum (soul) of all Asante—living or deceased. It is also believed that the stool had descended from heaven in a cloud of white dust and bestowed to Osei Tutu—the pioneer Asantehene (King of Asante) around the late 1600s. The stool is so important to the Asante that the unity of the kingdom is believed to depend on the safety of the Golden Stool.

The stools are intimately connected with women, especially the Queen Mothers.^[2] The Queen Mothers are sometimes as influential as the King himself, who is usually the son or grandson of the Queen Mother. Some Queen Mothers helped their Kings craft public policy or even served as regent in the absence or minority of the King. Perhaps the most widely remembered Asante Queen Mother is Nana Yaa Asantewaa, rightly honored for her heroics during the late 19th century in defiance of British harassment of the Asante. Yaa Asantewaa’s contribution to the independence struggle of the Asante confederacy against the British was instrumental to the nationalist agitations of the early 20th century that led to the independence of Ghana in 1957, the first independent Sub-Saharan African country in the post-colonial era. It’s a story that deserves being told in some detail. How did the British get involved in the affairs of Asante in the first place and why would a Queen Mother play so vital a role in the resistance?

British Arrival on the Gold Coast

Since the Portuguese first set foot on the shores of West Africa in the 15th century, the relationship between the Europeans and the kingdoms of Africa revolved around trade. In the Gold Coast, which constitutes the country of modern-day Ghana, the coastal Fante people^[3] (different from the Asante but belonging to the same broader ethnic group) served as middlemen between the Portuguese and many inland tribes. They leased part of their land to the Portuguese since direct trading between them was on a relatively small scale. It was not until the latter part of the 16th century that other Europeans reached the Gold Coast. The Dutch came after the Portuguese and were treated the same way by the Fante. In the Gold Coast, the trade in ivory and gold were of special interest to the Europeans until the mid-17th century. But due to the demand for labor across European plantations in the Americas in the 18th-century, trade interests in places like the Gold Coast shifted from commodities like ivory and gold to include the booming demand for African slaves.

In the early 19th century, a British expedition arrived at the Gold Coast and they soon developed trade relations with the Fante. As was common in relationships between the Europeans and local African tribes, the European power provided firearms or soldiers to their African allies to aid in their fight against other rival tribes. The British provided the Fante with such military aid during the Asante-Fante War in 1806 and 1807.^[4] Although the Asante leadership had prior knowledge of British presence and influence in the south, it was British support for their enemies that solidified Asante antipathy towards the British Gold Coast government. Later, in 1823, the British Governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Charles MacCarthy, formed an alliance with the Fante in support of the Denkyira tribe (also belonging to the Akan ethnic group) against an Asante advance on the Cape Coast. Although McCarthy died in the war, the coalition defeated Asante in 1826 at the Battle of Dodowa,^[5] marking the end of Asante control of some states. 

Throughout the rest of the 19th century, the relationship between the British and the Asante was conflicted. For instance, to avoid more bloodshed due to territorial disputes, the two parties, along with several other coastal states, signed the Maclean Treaty in 1831. The peace treaty gave more autonomy to many southern states previously under Asante control and drastically changed the political landscape of the Gold Coast. It required that the Asantehene “renounced all right or title to any tribute homage from the kings of Dinkira, Assin and others, [who were] formerly his subject…”^[6] Yet in the succeeding years, the British were well aware that many Asante traders on the coast were being badly treated by the Fante in violation of the treaty’s terms. At some point, the Fante used their control of the coastal trade routes to block trade from the coast to Asante’s inland territories. And even after the abatement of Fante oppression, the British themselves assumed control of some of the key coastal forts in 1843, which was taken to be an unprecedented trespass by Asantehene Kwaku Gua I.

British Overreach and the Yaa Asantewaa War of 1900 (War of the Golden Stool)

Nana Yaa Asantewaa was born in the 1840s as Asona royalty from the Besease clan in central Ghana and was of the Edweso stool line. Her brother was Kwasi Afrane and their parents were from the village of Ampabame in Kumasi, the ancestral home of the Asante people. Growing up, Yaa Asantewaa was a dexterous woman who had keen interests in farming (especially in the town of Boankra) and local administration. Kwasi Afrane was enthroned as the ruler of Edweso while Yaa Asantewaa married Owusu Kwabena—one of the grandsons of Osei Yaw Akoto, the seventh King of Asante who reigned from 1824 till 1834. Yaa Asantewaa was later appointed the Queen Mother of Ejisu by his brother, Edwesohene (King of Edweso) Kwasi Afrane.

In the late 1880s, the Asante confederacy was still struggling to unite; meanwhile the British were expanding their authority from the coast (predominantly Fante territories) inland into Asante territory. The animosity between the British and Asante dragged on. In 1863, Asante soldiers invaded and razed more than two dozen coastal villages to the ground in an attempt to reinstate their authority over the south, sending a warning shot to the British. The Governor of the Gold Coast, Richard Pine, counterattacked against the Asante, though the effort failed. However, the Asante were equally unable to control the coastal territories, leaving the nations locked in a stalemate. 

In 1873, the Asantehene Kofi Karikari led an Asante advancement into the southern territories once again, but the Asante were defeated this time by formidable British resistance. The two belligerents signed the Treaty of Fomena in 1874 to end hostilities, which permitted the British to declare the creation of the British-controlled Gold Coast Colony.^[7] Later in 1888, Asante enstooled a new Asantehene,  Kwaku Dua III, also known as Agyeman Prempeh I, who was a thorn in the flesh of the Gold Coast puppet government. Among Agyeman Prempeh’s many goals was to rejuvenate the influence of Kumasi. But some of his policies did not settle well with the British and they attempted to bring the king under the control of the Gold Coast protectorate.

In 1894 the British sent a Resident Minister (who would have the power of indirect rule over the Asante) to Kumasi, but Prempeh rejected the overture. In defiance, he sent an Asante embassy to London to meet with the Queen of England, which implied equal standing between Asante and British royalty. The Gold Coast governor, Sir William Brandfrod Griffith, did everything possible to keep the Asante mission from reaching London. He delayed the Asante officials for four months at the coast while threatening their lives. It was eventually allowed to leave the Gold Coast in April 1895 and they reached Liverpool in May. While in London, the Asante mission gained sympathy from sections of the British media and from several Members of Parliament. The Colonial Office initially paid them no attention but instead demanded that the Asantehene paid indemnities owed to the British from the 1874 Fomena Treaty that ended one of the Anglo-Asante wars in 1873-1874. Ultimately, British colonial hardliners were furious at Prempeh’s audacity in sending the embassy and began considering ways to bring the Asantehene to his knees. 

While the Asante mission was involved in other endeavors in London, including looking for potential British investors in Asante, in 1896, the colonial government sent an official expedition to Kumasi to relay orders from Queen Victoria of England. Part of the expectations of the colonial government was for Agyeman Prempeh I to cover the cost of the British expedition, an insult given that he had not requested the expedition in the first place. As expected, the Asantehene refused to pay for the expedition and his refusal was seen as a grave dishonor to the Queen and a pretext to finally seize Kumasi and arrest Agyeman Prempeh I. The Asantehene was arrested in January 1896. Immediate relatives of Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh were also arrested including his mother (the Asantehemaa or Queen Mother), his father (the Apebiakyerehene), his brother (Adumhene), some chiefs, and kings of Offinsu, Ejisu (Kofi Tene)—who happens to be Nana Yaa Asantewaa’s grandson—and Mampong. It was almost a complete sweep of the Asante leadership. (Yaa Asantewaa’s brother Kwasi Afrane, or King of Edweso, had died in 1894 hence why he was not among those arrested.)

The Asante struggled to unite following the arrests, but Nana Yaa Asantewaa acted as regent of Ejisu Juaben. The British arranged for Prempeh and his court to be exiled to Sierra Leone and, later, to the Seychelles Island. In the aftermath of the British swoop of Asante leadership, the remaining chiefs were not united in challenging the British; some even supported them. But in 1898 a few Asante chiefs did unite and formally request that the Asantehene be released and returned to Kumasi. The request was turned down by the British citing the fact that not all Asante wanted their King back given that the petition for the release was only signed by a few and that some Asante chiefs supported the Asantehene’s destoolment.

While the Asantehene and other Kings remained on the Indian Ocean island of Seychelles, British Governor Sir Frederick Hodgson was still unable to bring the whole Asante nation under his control. Hodgson soon realized that the Asante confederates would only recognize the authority of someone sitting on the Golden Stool. In March 1900, Hodgson laid out a series of insulting demands on the Asante chiefs during a meeting at the Kumasi Fort, which Yaa Asantewaa attended on behalf of Edweso. Among his demands was that the sacred Golden Stool be brought to him as the Queen of England’s representative on the Gold Coast, arguing that the Queen, after the deposition of the Asantehene, was the rightful ruler of Asante.

The chiefs were dismayed and disgusted by the sheer audacity and disrespect of Hodgson’s claim, but they had no way to resist, especially as the Asante political structure was almost non-existent after the banishment of so many powerful Kings. They had also suffered huge losses to their army during their many confrontations with the British in the preceding decades and confronting superior British firepower once again seemed like certain suicide. Still, if Hodgson and the British were allowed to seize the Golden Stool, the future of the Asante nation would have been in the hands of their longstanding adversary.

In a secret meeting held to determine the course of action by the remaining local chiefs, at which Yaa Asantewaa was again present, the chiefs struggled to agree on a military solution. Instead, they suggested conceding to British rule. Yaa Asantewaa was left livid by the words of her fellow Asante. She was said to have responded in these words:

Now I have seen that some of you fear to go forward to fight for our king. If it were the brave days of Osei Tutu, Okomfo Anokye and Opoku Ware I,^[8] chiefs would not sit down to see their king taken without firing a shot. No white man could have dared to speak to the Chief of Asante in the way the governor spoke to you chiefs this morning. Is it true that the bravery of Asante is no more? I cannot believe it. It cannot be! I must say this: if you, the men of Asante, will not go forward, then we will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight till the last of us falls on the battlefield.^[9] 

Embarrassed to have been corrected but also energized by her words, the chiefs mobilized forces to protect the stool and to engage the British armed forces until the exiled Asante chiefs were allowed to return.

The news of Asante intentions reached Hodgson. He sent a party of Hausa soldiers^[10] to warn the Asante chiefs of British intolerance to any such rebellion. The Hausa soldiers never returned and were believed to have been killed by the Asante. When the Hausas did not return, Hodgson saw this as a declaration of war on the British by the Asante. Several Asante chiefs acting as administrators for the colonial government crossed over to the Asante side. Hodgson grew impatient and prepared for war.

In what was one of the finest moments of African resistance against colonialism and the last of the many Anglo-Asante wars, Nana Yaa Asantewaa gathered and commanded an army of over 5,000 Asante soldiers (sometimes estimated at around 20,000 soldiers). She made it clear that the reason the Asante attacked the British and besieged the Kumasi Fort was because of Governor William Edward Maxwell’s unlawful arrest and exile of Agyeman Prempeh I and other Asante chiefs as well as Hodgson’s demand for the Golden Stool itself. It was a fight for Asante freedom. The hostility led to the most brutal episode of the Anglo-Asante War (or War of the Golden Stool), which dragged on for months. The Asante, led by Nana Yaa Asantewaa, put up an inspiring fight against the superior firepower of the British and kept them from marching beyond the Kumasi Fort. Under siege at the Kumasi Fort for weeks, the British and their fighters gradually ran out of supplies and endured an outbreak of disease leading some to flee to the Asante side. Hodgson was forced to sue for a ceasefire.

Yaa Asantewaa and other Asante commanders weighed his proposal and responded that the Asante would only agree to end the war if the British released Agyeman Prempeh I and guaranteed that their southern allies would respect the rights of Asante traders. Hodgson accepted some of the demands but refused either to release Agyeman Prempeh I or cede significant British authority over trade in the southern coastal region. Talks failed and the Asante, realizing their advantageous position, decided not to attack the British, but instead kept the fort under siege until the enemy camp was forced to submit.

With some adroit maneuvering, however, Hodgson was able to escape the siege and alert Britain of the situation in Kumasi. London responded by mobilizing about 1,400 troops from other colonies in British West Africa, who reached Kumasi in less than twenty days. The Asante were finally outmanned and outgunned. The besiegers were now on the defensive. Many Asante commanders and chiefs, and later Nana Yaa Asantewaa herself, were captured. Like their compatriots in 1896, the captives were exiled to Seychelles as prisoners. Around 2,000 Asante and 1,007 fighters on the British side were reportedly killed in the war. However, even years after the war, the British were still unable to lay their hands on the Golden Stool, which had been the ultimate goal of the war. It is speculated that the Asante had hidden the Golden Stool in a remote forest to keep it further away from the British in case Kumasi was captured.

The Asikadwa remained lost in the forest until it was found in 1920 by a group of construction workers. Just a year after the resurfacing of the Golden Stool, its keeper, Yaa Asantewaa, died in her sleep in 1921 while still in prison in Seychelles. But the purpose of the war had been fulfilled; Hodgson never sat on the Golden Stool and the war convinced the British to release the Asantehene a few years later. Agyeman Prempeh I was released and returned to Kumasi in 1924. In 1928 he initiated efforts to exhume and return the remains of every Asante prisoner that had died in captivity. Later, in 1930, the remains of 29 Asante detainees, including those of Nana Yaa Asantewaa, were welcomed to Kumasi. Yaa Asantewaa’s remains were brought to her hometown of Edweso where she was properly interred as the Asante. The Gold Coast was inching closer to complete freedom from British rule.

The Legacy

The heroism and willing self-sacrifice of Nana Yaa Asantewa in the fight to preserve the freedom of Asante—regardless of who was victorious in the end—inspired subsequent nationalist^[11] movements among the Asante and along the rest of the Gold Coast. Asante eventually won freedom as part of the independent state of Ghana in 1957 and Ghana’s independence subsequently influenced nationalist struggles in the rest of the Sub-Saharan region with neighbors Nigeria, Dahomey (now Benin Republic) Côte d’Ivoire, and Cameroon all becoming independent of British and French rule by 1960.

Besides the political contribution of Yaa Asantewaa, contemporary African feminist movements have drawn inspirations from her outlook on the social aspect of life. She never stopped her normal farming routine despite her royal status. She was a mother to her children and a guardian to her third grandchild (the ruler of Ejisu) and younger chiefs, but never relinquished her interest in politics and administration. This is evident in her role in maintaining the stability of Edweso and Ejisu following the death of her brother (Kwasi Afrane) and the imprisonment of her grandchild (Kofi Tene). It is these qualities that make Nana Yaa Asantewaa one of the central figures of African matriarchy, feminism, and freedom.

Nationalism is making a comeback. Buoyed by the rise of rightwing and authoritarian parties and movements across the globe, our political moment is full of appeals to this revived and increasingly popular creed. A prominent advocate is the Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, via his book The Virtue of Nationalism.

While understanding nationalism is vital for comprehending our era, Hazony’s work does not perform this task and instead adds further confusion. Ultimately, he defends propositions that, if taken to their conclusion, imply denying that individuals have any kind of meaningful autonomy, excusing state violence, and legitimizing gross violations of human rights. Hazony encourages us to lean more heavily into our tribal and authoritarian instincts—instincts which have served to fuel centuries of violent conflict and sustain oppressive social orders. Finally, he radically oversimplifies Jewish tradition, misrepresenting a complex faith with competing values of both universalism and particularism.

Hazony’s Account

Hazony states that a nation is an extension of a tribe—an ethnically homogenous group which shares the same language, culture, and religion, and originates from the same area. Members may at different periods have joined together for common defense against external enemies. He contrasts nations with empires, which Hazony defines as being composed of many different tribes joined together through conquest by a dominant one. Hazony argues that we should favor nations and disfavor empires because the latter illegitimately impose themselves on the former.

Hazony claims that nations keep to themselves and to the territory by which they self-define. Their statehood, which respects the sovereignty of other peoples, is part of their interest in self-governance. In this regard, Hazony gives a defense of nationalism in quasi-libertarian terms: nationalism is apparently nothing but self-determination, free association, and independence. He argues that empires favor “universalism” over the coexistence of self-governing nations. All must submit to the imperialists’ values. For Hazony, nationalism is about defending the plurality of world cultures, imperialism about imposing homogeneity.  However, Hazony merely stipulates all this. He fails to demonstrate that this model is true. Rather, he gives us idiosyncratic definitions that serve to reclassify proffered counterexamples rather than engage challenges to his framework. Thus, for Hazony, Nazism was not nationalism, but imperialism, since the Nazis sought to impose themselves on other countries, even though Nazi ideology was precisely based on the ethnic conception of nationalism that Hazony defends.

Hazony’s dichotomy is significantly flawed and deeply ahistorical. His tribal account disregards the robust literature describing how most nation-states emerged from heterogenous groups which were conquered and ruled over by a larger, more powerful entity. These “stationary bandits” manipulate mass media and modern technology, construct systems of mandatory common association, such as the military, and broadcast propaganda so as to manufacture a mythical shared heritage—creating what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community.”

Nationalism is in large part an ideological product of modernity, coupled with European states’ desire for conquest, which built stories of common belonging and national difference to make social control and wars of expansion more feasible. Hazony claims that such cases are in fact empires. However, ignored in this account is that all these cases are of states built on narratives about common origins, language, and culture—exactly the criteria which Hazony sets for nationhood. Thus, Hazony has it backwards: Nations do not create states. Rather, states frequently create nations by forcing groups together.^[i]

There are a few examples which do fit Hazony’s model. Some nations and states are “primordial,” or more directly linked to a single ethnicity or tribe. Hazony’s primary illustration of this is the Jews, specifically the version rendered in the biblical narrative. The Kurds, Basques, and Catalans present more instances of ethnically-derived nations. Nevertheless, such examples are the exception, rather than the rule.

But these classification issues are ultimately secondary. Hazony’s view of moral obligations exacerbates the threat posed by nationalism. As I will discuss, his views about the role of individuals and the nature of ethics mean that nations of any type are permitted to wage unjust war and impose sweeping domestic oppression.

Hazony’s Mythical Collectivism

Hazony’s account is not merely factually inaccurate, but also morally problematic, as he sublimates individuals into collective monoliths. For Hazony, individuals are defined primarily by their belonging to a national group. Neglected in his account is that such group membership exists only as strongly as a given individual buys into it. Hazony does not consider that while I might be born in one place, family, and community, I may choose something else later in life. I can also be part of multiple groups and communities which perform different functions and command different loyalties. This ability is imperfect because group statuses (such as race) are often imposed from outside, but we nevertheless possess significant freedom to determine who we are.

In “Natural and Artifactual Man,” James M. Buchanan argued that our interests and preferences are not static, but emergent from our ongoing journey to define ourselves. Likewise, John Rawls and Robert Nozick each discussed how a core problem in doing political theory is adequately addressing the fact that each of us is a separate person with our own values and will. These key issues of individual autonomy and social diversity are wholly disregarded in Hazony’s discussion. In this regard, it is Hazony, not universalist liberals, who is running roughshod over pluralism.

Hazony has a point when he discusses how liberal thinkers have sometimes characterized individuals in a manner such that the people they talk about are so abstract as to seem somewhat unreal. All identities carry some roots, and this is not unimportant. Respect for others, as well as successful community building, often rests on appeals to individuals whose sense of self is connected to thickly-entrenched group membership. I have discussed in depth the ways that recognition of identity is an ongoing paradox which can reflect healthy moral and social impulses, as well as dangerous intolerance and bigotry.

However, Hazony’s answer is to affirm identity so robustly as to metaphysically imprison people into one group: the nation. Such a move imposes an identity regardless of whether people embrace it. The complex nuances of communal affiliation are thus discarded for a quasi-reimagining of the medieval Great Chain of Being. For Hazony, individuals are bound to their national roots in the manner of serfs to feudal estates; a person’s identity doesn’t really exist apart from the tribe. Hazony’s social anthropology mirrors that of Rousseau, for whom identities and value commitments are only meaningful within the context of a holistic body politic. The leaders of the nation-state serve as mythic avatars for the “general will” of all.

Hazony concedes that nations, like states, are abstractions which bear little if any authority to command allegiance. Most people in my nation are strangers, and I have no reason to see them as automatically constituting part of my identity or community. In this regard, it is impossible to aggregate all interests into a consensus. However, he claims that this gap is bridged by assumptions of mutual loyalty and commitment, such as one finds in families, qualities which he says are replicated in the national context.

Conceiving of the nation as a family is a fallacy discussed extensively by F.A Hayek in The Fatal Conceit. For Hayek, seeing nations and states as familial is a product of our minds’ insufficient adaptation to the size, complexity, and diversity of the modern world. We are still using instincts which evolved during humanity’s struggle to survive in prehistory. In that setting, group co-dependence was essential, and we knew only fellow members of our tribe or band. This is no longer the case. Continuing to rely on such instincts dangerously misapplies the logic of the “intimate order”—the family and the tribe—to the “extended order”—modern states and global market systems. It threatens the social cooperation and prosperity we have gained in the transition to modernity.

Why Nationalism Always Comes with a Sword

Hazony rejects moral universalism, as well as any account of human rights. He provides a version of an argument familiar to readers of Edmund Burke and other conservatives and communitarians, as well as the tradition of empiricism associated with David Hume. This says that moral relationships and duties are established through the communities of which we are a part, through the people with whom we interact and hold ongoing relationships. Universal claims are intellectual fictions and morality is only grounded in the norms of specific communities. This means that since each society has its own way of doing things, and that communities differ, we should give space for plurality. By contrast, a universal morality, such as that proposed by Locke, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and other liberal philosophers, is a motivation for imperialism, because universal norms and duties require universal enforcement.

There is some merit to this claim. Jacob Levy argues that liberalism carries tensions between what he calls “rationalism” and “pluralism.” For Levy, “rationalism” describes the tradition which sees liberalism as founded in abstract moral theories which view freedom and equality as best secured by a nonpartisan central authority. By contrast, “pluralism” is the tradition which locates freedom in diverse community associations that push back against state coercion. This tension is especially significant when communal practices may violate liberal notions of individual autonomy and human rights. Liberal debates about humanitarian interventions and foreign policy reflect ongoing wrestling over this question.

However, Hazony fails to recognize that liberalism is not uniform. He fails to distinguish between the liberalism which is skeptical of state power and the wisdom of using violent institutions to impose one’s will on others, and that which sees state power as nothing but a means for liberal ends. He also does not clearly distinguish between cooperative multilateral agreements, such as international courts and legal systems, which are voluntarily entered into by states, and actual global government. Furthermore, Hazony does not engage with the point that liberalism’s commitment to both universal rights and lifestyle diversity usually counsels against interfering with the lives of others and the plurality of communities.

By contrast, under Hazony’s framework there is no ethical constraint on whether and how we may impose ourselves on others. For Hazony, rights do not exist but by permission of the collective. This is an essential problem at the heart of his case. Nationalism functions as a justification for state oppression and violence, because it lacks any principle which could say harms to declared outgroups are unjust. The highest good is that of “The People.” Since most nations and states are not ethnically homogenous, but heterogeneous composites, defining “People”-hood often involves xenophobia. The quest to define who is part of the national body becomes an impetus for exclusion and prejudice.

Furthermore, because Hazony restricts nations to only being tribal and ethnic, rather than civic and ideational, bigotry becomes an inherent danger. On Hazony’s account, the only reason we have moral obligations towards anybody is because we relate to them as fellow group-members: “The People” constitute a category of moral value higher than any other. Entirely ignored are other meaningful moral intuitions we have—intuitions which recognize moral worth in others for their humanity and their sentience. Hazony’s theory does not require states to create legitimacy through respect for individual rights, since they function only as embodiments of a tribal destiny. It is therefore sadly unsurprising that the conservative pundit Candace Owens appropriated Hazony to make the absurd and horrifying claim that Nazism was only a problem because of its ambitions to conquer other countries.        

This is a point supported by the true history of nationalism, woefully missing in Hazony’s book. As Alex Nowrasteh writes (summarizing Douglas Porch) imperialism is the highest stage of nationalism. It is perhaps telling that Hazony’s model centers on an incomplete recitation of the biblical account of Jewish history wherein he wholly omits the ancient Israelite conquest and murder of the peoples of Canaan, in pursuit of what they saw as their birthright, and episodes like Saul’s genocide of the Amalekites.

There is no reason to believe, despite Hazony’s assurances, that nationalism means restraint from interference with other cultures. What is more probable is that a sense of national pride and entitlement makes it extremely difficult to cooperate with outgroups. Nationalism relies on a sense of pride in being a member of a certain group, as opposed to that of any other. Not because of the contributions that my group may make to humanity, but simply because I happen to be a member. Thus, nationalism encourages enmity between societies, almost by definition. Moreover, this sense of pride is fundamentally chauvinistic and anti-egalitarian, centering on a form of hierarchical pride, or the instinct that Francis Fukuyama terms “megalothymia.” This kind of recognition is not about giving “to each his due,” but about declaring one form of identity to be superior to the alternatives.

Furthermore, nothing prevents nations from engaging in imperial conquest when it is in the interest of the governing class and/or a desire on the part of the public. It is precisely these popular instincts which are exploited by elites to maintain their grip on power. Hazony ultimately commits us to a form of nationally-justified moral relativism, in which there are no values except what nations define as right and wrong.  Thus, it is easy to see why the history of nationalism is the history of imperial conquest. It is also why nationalist empires have rarely sought to be agents of pluralism as Hazony claims, but have been exploitative and oppressive, gathering tribute and subjugating populations to the rule of elites. It is only after thousands of years that the idea of constraining the state became a prominent aspect of politics, the result of the liberalism Hazony rejects.

Why Moral Obligations Need Not Be Tribal

Furthermore, as Kian Hudson points out, Hazony omits those aspects of the Hebrew Bible (and, I would say, the Jewish tradition broadly) that complicate his story. The idea that human beings are created in God’s image, what Jews call “tzelem elohim” (for Christians the “imago dei”) and that therefore our moral obligations extend to everyone, is the missing half of a core religious dialectic: It is important that the Hebrew Bible talks not only about Jews as God’s chosen people, but also of the Jewish obligation to welcome strangers and outsiders. While Judaism does not proselytize, Jews are also obligated to be an “or l’goyim”—a “light unto the nations.” Later texts—including the Talmud and the works of philosophers such as Maimonides—spend extensive time debating the appropriate range and degree of universalism vs. particularism. No accurate account of the Bible or of Judaism can be had without including both elements.

Hazony also fails to show why moral obligations must depend on their establishment in and by groups. He argues that “rationalist” moral theory is too dependent on abstract ideas without real world grounding—for Hazony, morality only exists in contexts. However, Hazony does not account for what is a significant is-ought problem. The fact that we first learn morality in specific places does not show we ought to see moral duties as only grounded by those environments.

Just because morality is learnt in a local setting does not mean the values of which it consists cannot be more broadly applied. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, our ability to extend our sympathy and empathize with one another is a central part of human moral psychology and serves as grounding for a wide range of obligations. We can and should recognize others for who they are, not simply for what group they originate from. Our moral intuitions are complex and capable of great sophistication in their application. Hazony erases this, encouraging us to restrict our moral vocabulary to an impoverished state.

It is precisely our ability to reason and apply principles in complex and abstract forms that allows moral ideas to be relevant considerations extending beyond tribal borders. Whether that takes the form of deontology, consequentialism, or some other theory is secondary. What is significant is that human intelligence and sentience allow us not only to have moral intuitions, but to reason about them, to deliberate about our values and consider areas of concern which we do not directly experience. I do not need to live beside people from another part of the world to recognize the kinds of interests they have, the problems they face, and the common humanity we share. I can apply my reason to my moral sense and extend the range of my ethical concern. In this way, I can abstract from my context and ground my understanding of what I owe to others. Indeed, the Bible itself makes this point, when God tells the Israelites in Exodus 23:9 (my emphasis): “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, as you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Crucially, as Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in “Cosmopolitanism:”

Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feeling or doing something. And it isn’t a ground for me, unless it’s a ground for you. If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn’t matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due.

Conclusion

Nationalism is a powerful force in the modern world, one which requires a serious reckoning. Work providing explanation and understanding of nationalism is thus sorely needed. Unfortunately, The Virtue of Nationalism is not that book. It is certainly true that humans are group-oriented, and that tribalism is part of our evolved normative language. However, insofar as these instincts constrain our ability to have widespread empathy, this is a reason to see nationalism in solely pragmatic terms, and to encourage a civic national identity, not an ethnic or tribal one. At their best, nations and the states which represent them are a way to expand our circle of inclusion and to supply a limited set of public goods. At worst, they are grave threats to peace, prosperity, and social cooperation. Nationalism is a vice, a dangerous instinct of our primordial cave-dwelling past, not a guide for our present.

Liberty. It’s a simple idea, but it’s also the linchpin of a complex system of values and practices: justice, prosperity, responsibility, toleration, cooperation, and peace. Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. They’re called libertarians.

Liberty made great progress over hundreds of years, but the first half of the 20th century saw it in retreat. It was a time of savage war, oppression, genocide, protectionism, socialism, fascism—a time when humanity experienced the awful power of the truly unlimited state.

But late in the century the tide started to turn again. Fascism had been militarily defeated. The Soviet Union collapsed. Apartheid was dismantled. More and more nations embraced constitutionally limited government, free markets, free trade, individual rights, and toleration. The promises of the Declaration of Independence were increasingly extended to women, racial and religious minorities, and gay people. The rising tide of prosperity in many nations—from South Korea and Taiwan to Chile and Mexico—led citizens to demand more open and democratic political systems. And libertarianism reemerged as a central political ideology of the modern age, with adherents promoting freedom in almost every country of the globe.

Yet libertarians have not been, and cannot afford to be, complacent about the future. Old threats to liberty remain and new ones have appeared. Fanatical terrorists have declared war on free societies, determined to impose religion by gun and car bomb and to force women to submit to the most degrading tyranny. In response, some in the freer societies have proposed restricting liberty, all in the name of defending our civilization and our heritage.

Yet those who would so lightly throw away freedom to defend civilization don’t understand the very heritage they claim to defend. That heritage is the culmination of a centuries-long struggle to free the individual and to limit the power of the state. At the dawn of the modern world such thinkers as John Locke and Adam Smith challenged the old regime of monarchy, mercantilism, and religious intolerance. A growing middle class, made possible by the growth of trade, demanded individual rights. In the colonies of north America, radicals such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson led a revolution and set up the world’s first political system based on the natural rights of man. Their philosophy of individual liberty became known as (classical) liberalism, and in the nineteenth century it swept through much of Europe and made inroads in other parts of the world.

In the twentieth century the old regime—in all its modern guises—staged a spectacular comeback. Statists of the left and of the right replaced liberty with power, toleration with murder and ethnic cleansing, free exchange with compulsion. But that movement reached its high-water mark with World War II. During and after that war a small band of thinkers—including Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and many other writers and scholars—began to revive the tradition of classical liberalism. In place of intolerance and war, they proposed toleration and trade. In America most classical liberals took the name of “libertarians.”

Libertarianism is the belief that each person has the right to live his life as he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property. In the libertarian view, voluntary agreement is the gold standard of human relationships. If there is no good reason to forbid something (a good reason being that it violates the rights of others), it should be allowed. Force should be reserved for prohibiting or punishing those who themselves use force, such as murderers, robbers, rapists, kidnappers, and defrauders (who practice a kind of theft). Most people live their own lives by that code of ethics. Libertarians believe that that code should be applied consistently, even to the actions of governments, which should be restricted to protecting people from violations of their rights. Governments should not use their powers to censor speech, conscript the young, prohibit voluntary exchanges, steal or “redistribute” property, or interfere in the lives of individuals who are otherwise minding their own business.

Libertarian ideas are becoming increasingly influential. Philosopher Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia helped to revitalize political theory and to focus attention on the proper limits of state power. Classical liberal economists and social scientists have pioneered the understanding of processes of social coordination and change, many of them earning Nobel Prizes in the process. And the broad global trend toward economic deregulation, freer trade, limits on taxes, toleration of minorities, and greater personal freedom shows the influence of libertarian ideas and libertarian thinkers and activists.

Libertarianism is one of the most exciting developments in modern thought. Libertarian scholars address hard problems and propose solutions that are both moral and realistic. Libertarian activists work to defend liberty from its many enemies and to advance liberty to those who have been excluded from its blessings. They seek to liberate individuals and bring about open, free, humane, and prosperous societies. The people of the world have waited long enough to be free.

Declaring War on Wall-Street

Late 2017 to early 2018 will go down in the history of cryptocurrency as the year of the ICO. ICO stands for “Initial Coin Offering” and describes a new type of crowdfunded currency created via the Internet. By issuing their own token, a group of people or company can quickly raise capital without having to rely on investment banks or venture capitalists. Investors, on the other hand, can buy initial shares in the new cryptocurrency in hopes of rapid appreciation or just to have a stake in a developing ecosystem.

ICOs mirror, in some ways, what are known in the traditional world of finance as initial public offerings (IPOs). The latter is done by companies when they are publicly listed on stock market exchanges. Therefore, it is quite tempting to regard an ICO as the digital counterpart to a classic IPO. However, this is not correct. Not everyone who buys a token through an ICO is automatically granted shares in the company. By contrast, voting rights are inherent to owning shares of stock and profit-sharing is common. While it is theoretically possible to grant both voting rights and dividends through tokens, they are not legally guaranteed.

Nevertheless, the American ICO market accounted for as much as 45 percent of the traditional IPO market in the second quarter of 2018. That was 31 percent of the total volume of the venture capital market. Expressed in U.S. dollars, this means that according to official figures, the total ICO volume was around 7.2 billion U.S. dollars, while the US IPO market had a turnover of 16 billion US dollars over the same period. The venture capital market’s turnover was 23 billion US dollars.

But during the summer months of 2018, ICO revenues began to dry up; by September, they stood at a virtual standstill with just over $31 million invested. The main reason for this decline were the fixed costs and other development expenses finally catching up with previous ICO projects. They had raised incredible amounts of capital during the ICO craze earlier in the year, but now they had to rapidly liquidate much of their early holdings. This led to immense downward pressure on prices and the market value of all crypto assets plummeted.

Initial investors in numerous ICOs found themselves underwater on their investments. Yet, what many people forget while bemoaning their losses is that the spate of ICOs in 2017-2018 proved that it was possible to raise a great deal of money in a fast, efficient, and fully digital process, one which also bypassed the established financial system.

An Act of Self-Liberation

During peak ICO hype, investors lost a lot of money and many also fell for fraudsters and charlatans. Of course, some investors were very careless and disregarded even obvious red flags. However, the fact that dubious ICOs were able to attract so many investors in such a short time frame is a clear indication of just how over-regulated capital markets are in the conventional world.

In fact, legal requirements make fundraising through traditional avenues — even for over-the-counter investments — a very complex procedure. Anyone seeking capital must not only submit a promising business plan, which seems self-evident, but must also comply with a number of publicity and accounting regulations. While that provides a sense of security (although perhaps only the semblance of it), the net effect of these requirements is to make the world of investing a mostly exclusive club for already wealthy, accredited investors.

This is one reason why the number of publicly listed companies has been falling for years. Even up-and-coming start-ups are going public later or sometimes don’t go to Wall Street at all because an IPO might be more bother and expense than it would be worth.

The consulting firm Partners Group estimated in a 2018 study that the board of directors of a listed company wastes a quarter of its time on complying with stock market regulations and bureaucracy. It is therefore not surprising that the Swiss entrepreneur, Nick Hayek Jr., has considered taking the Swatch Group, the largest watch company in the world, off the stock market, partly because of time-consuming accounting regulations. Although many of these measures are designed to protect investors and make markets more efficient, all too often they minimize an investor’s potential yields along with their risks.

Therefore, ICOs have been hailed as a way of breaking free from the shackles of Wall Street and avoiding the inflated transaction costs of the established world of finance. Money invested through an ICO arrives directly at the start-up; intermediaries such as stock exchanges, clearing houses or notaries are not needed. In addition, tokens are traded without delay. Therefore, legitimate ICOs are superior options both for companies seeking capital and for risk-taking investors.

Think of just how revolutionary ICO investing can be; never before has a 16-year-old from, say, Brazil, India, or Mongolia been able to invest the equivalent of a few U.S. dollars in a start-up company from Switzerland, Israel, or Singapore. And while revolutions are prone to exaggerations, exuberance, and excess, to ban ICOs completely, as China has tried to do, is the wrong approach. ICOs can be a valid alternative to traditional fundraising models.

To make a comparison, while Bitcoin offers an alternative to fiat money created by central banks, ICOs are an alternative to the centrally organized capital market. Investment banks have always acted as intermediaries between capital seekers and investors. Now there is a technical way to bypass these expensive financial intermediaries.

Of course, established players are not giving up their lucrative business models without a fight. In the world of finance, unregulated ICOs are going to be replaced with regulated Security Token Offerings (STOs). This is already happening. Surely, financial experts reason, risk-averse investors will prefer STOs to ICOs because the former is regulated.

And from the perspective of regulators, the establishment of STOs will diminish the demand for ICOs. That might be true. But what regulators don’t get about ICOs is that they were not so much an upgrade to conventional investment vehicles but rather an indication that conventional capital markets were being slowly suffocated by regulations. Which is why ICOs will not entirely disappear regardless of what happens with STOs.

Many Americans believe that foreign military intervention is central to protecting our domestic freedoms. But Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall urge engaged citizens to think again. Overseas, our government takes actions in the name of defense that would not be permissible within national borders. Emboldened by the relative weakness of governance abroad, the U.S. government is able to experiment with a broader range of social controls.

How do military contractors benefit greatly from U.S. militarism? What is “the boomerang effect”? What is the relationship between domestic citizens and political institutions in the time of increased militarization? What is the interventionist mindset? When did we develop our first SWAT team?

Further Reading:

Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, written by Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall

Ludwig von Mises on War and the Economy, written by Christopher Coyne and Anne Rathbone Bradley

“Tyranny Comes Home” Book Panel, Mercatus Center

Tyranny Surveillance State: When Tyranny Comes Home, Mercatus Original Video

Related Content:

The Birth of American Imperialism (with Stephen Kinzer), Free Thoughts Podcast

Henry Hazlitt, Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

Deconstructing the Surveillance State, Free Thoughts Podcast

The CIA Listens to Free Thoughts, Free Thoughts Podcast

Parenting is a wonderful, terrifying, joyful, horrible, lovely thing. And one of the more annoying aspects is the firehose-worth deluge of information about what you should and should not do with your children, the thousands of books, websites, and expert all clamoring with advice. Emily Oster, best-selling author of Cribsheet, offers a way to wade through the often contradictory advice without losing your mind. In short, she’ll teach you how to approach parenting like an economist and data scientist.

How do parents making parenting decisions based off of data? How important is data in parenting decisions? Is anyone an actual parenting expert? Why are infant mortality rates so much higher in the U.S. compared to other developed countries?

Further Reading:

Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool, written by Emily Oster

Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know, written by Emily Oster

Economist Emily Oster explains the science of parenting, written by Angela Chen

Related Content:

Overparenting & Bad Public Policy, Free Thoughts Podcast

Why Schools Haven’t Changed in Hundreds of Years, Free Thoughts Podcast

The Best Work/Family Arrangements Come from Families, Not Governments, written by Steven Horwitz

Introduction

In 1954, the great economist Paul Samuelson coined the phrase “public good” as a means of describing what he called a “collective consumption good.”  Samuelson’s distinction began an important trend in economics: the classification of goods into one of four major categories: private goods, public goods, club goods, and common-pool goods.  This classification depended on two characteristics of goods, specifically their rivalry (whether or not one’s consumption of the good reduces another person’s ability to consume the good) and their excludability (the ability of the owner of the good to prevent use of the good by another person).  A good that is both rival (meaning one person’s consumption prevents another person from consuming the good) and excludable (meaning the owner can prevent someone from using the good) is a private good.  For example, an apple is a private good.  If you eat the apple, then I cannot eat that same apple.  Likewise, if you possess the apple, you can prevent me from eating it.  Conversely, a good that is non-rival (meaning one person’s consumption does not diminish another person’s ability to consume) and non-excludable (the owner cannot easily prevent others from using the good) is a public good.  For example, over-the-air radio broadcasts tend to be considered public goods.  If I tune into a radio station in my car, that does not prevent you from tuning into the same station in your car.  Likewise, if you are sitting in my car with me, I cannot easily prevent you from listening to my radio’s broadcast.  Club goods and common pool goods are the other two combinations of rivalry-excludability.  However, the focus of this article is on public vs. private goods, so I will defer a discussion on club goods and common pool goods at this time, although the issues discussed here will apply equally to them.

Given the difficulties owners of public goods have in preventing free-riding (the use of the resource without payment), Samuelson shows that public goods will tend to be underproduced compared to a socially optimal level: if not everyone who uses a firm’s product pays for it, the firm will produce less of it.  Thus, a government can step in and either directly provide the public good and pay for it through taxation (thus solving the free-rider problem), or subsidize production of the good funded, again, via taxation.  In either case, a public good is often used as economic justification for a government intervention into an otherwise free market. 

Seems straightforward, right?  Just identify the public good and (if conditions warrant) subsidize it with tax money.  But how easy is it to identify a public good?  Do they exist or is it merely some theoretical “ideal” type?  Let’s attempt to answer this question by looking at the prototypical example used in textbooks: national defense.

National Defense as a Public Good

National defense is the quintessential public good.  In theory, it is non-excludable: if fighter jets are flying over my house protecting it from bombers, they are also protecting your house from bombers.  Further, it is non-rival: whether the fighter jet protects one person or one million, it costs the same.  Thus, in theory, if national defense were provided privately through competing firms, it would likely be underprovided.  We, then, have an economic justification for the role of government in providing a military for national defense.

But how much of a public good is national defense?  The answer depends, partly, on the scale at which we are looking.  If we only focus at a subnational level, national defense appears to be a public good: fighter jets just as easily protect Baltimore as they do Boston, and if Massachusetts is protected from invasion, for the most part Maryland is as well.  But if we expand the scope of our analysis beyond just the subnational unit, the classification becomes more difficult.  In a country the size of the United States, excludability comes into play.  If, for example, the entire US military was stationed on the East Coast, the West Coast would be very vulnerable to attack and the US government could choose to not defend it, thus excluding the West Coast from national security.  Given part of our criteria for a public good is non-excludability, this violates our classification rules.¹

We could also make a similar distinction when it comes to rivalry.  In war, there are different theaters.  For example: in World War II there was the European Theater (the armies in Western Europe), the African/Mediterranean Theater (the armies in Northern Africa and Italy) and the Eastern Theater (the armies in Russia and Eastern Europe).  If national security assets are tied up in one theater, they cannot effectively be used in another theater of war.  Thus, the goods are rival: if one part of the war is consuming them, another part cannot also consume them.

So, we see that expanding the scope of our analysis is sometimes enough to transform a public good into a private good.  The unit of analysis in economics often matters.  Our theory provides no guidance on what level of analysis to conduct—that is the job of the analyst.  But scope and scale are not the only problems we face when trying to classify economic goods.

TV and Technology

Radio and free television broadcasts are also often touted as being public goods (which subsequently justifies the funding of some public broadcasts like PBS and NPR).  And back when anyone with an antenna could pick up on the broadcasts, this might have been a legitimate classification.  But, starting in the 1950s and really taking off in the 1980s, broadcasters began scrambling certain broadcasts and, in order to unscramble them, people had to buy cable boxes and pay a fee to the company.  Thus, with the invention of cable TV, broadcasts went from being non-rival and non-excludable to non-rival and excludable.  TV went from being a public good to a club good.

Another example comes from concerts.  In 2009, Bruce Springsteen came to the Xfinity Center in Massachusetts, an open-air amphitheater.  That show was, to put it mildly, a public good.  Not only did the fine folks in the amphitheater enjoy The Boss, but the folks in the parking lot and surrounding neighborhood did as well.  It was non-rival and non-excludable.  But it was only non-excludable because of the technology the owners of the Xfinity Center were willing and able to build into their amphitheater.  They could have installed higher walls or soundproofing materials, thus preventing any spillover of music.  They could have invested more in excludability technology, aside from merely just the ticket-takers and turnstiles.  But they didn’t, so The Boss was a public good.  A classification of a good depends on the technology available and accessible to the producer.

Is a Good a Good?

One final point that deserves more discussion than can be devoted here is the meaning of the term “good” in “public good.”  An economic good is, by definition, something where more is preferable to less, all else held equal.  In other words, it provides utility to the person consuming it.  A “bad,” however, is something where less is preferred to more, where there is disutility from consuming it. 

The distinction between a good and a bad is not as clear cut.  Take, for example, the case of the concert.  Bruce Springsteen rocking out to “Thunder Road” may be great at noontime, but at midnight it might be less so.  As the music was non-excludable, some of the notes from the concert fell on neighboring houses.  If some of the households like rock, then they are free-riders, which is to say the concert is a good for them.  If, on the other hand, some of the households do not like rock but prefer a quiet, peaceful setting (or would rather hear rap) then the concert is a bad for them and they are suffering from a negative externality.  A negative externality means that the good is overprovided and incentives should be created to reduce the output.  And we find ourselves with a paradox: a public good is a good that tends to be underprovided, and thus incentives should be created to produce more of the good.  For certain households, the amount of the good on the market is too little, for others it is too much.  What a conundrum for policymakers!  Do they incentivize the production of rock concerts, treating it as a public good because it is non-rival and non-excludable, or do they tax the production of rock concerts because they generate externalities?  Theory provides no guidance on whether to classify the concerts as a public good or as a negative externality-generating enterprise.  Again, it all comes down to the analyst. 

For the analyst, any discussion of economic welfare and classification must ultimately come down to a discussion of aesthetics and morality, to paraphrase Frank Knight.  Analysts may simply impose their own value system onto the situation; they love rock and thus the outdoor concerts are public goods.  Of course, few analysts do this outright.  Rather, analysts may look to current conventions in a certain area; how do people currently and actually behave?  Do people treat the outdoor concerts as public goods or as public bads?  Do they hang out on their back decks listening to music (public good) or have they installed sound-proof windows in their homes (public bad)?  How people actually behave can tell the analyst how they treat economic behavior.²

There is a way to resolve the paradox of classification: let people bargain.  If the folks who value the peace and quiet value it more than those who value the concerts, the former can bargain with the latter to build a wall.  And vice versa.  Either way, we have a solution.  Ronald Coase pointed this solution out in his seminal 1960 piece “The Problem of Social Cost.”  This point, which would later be dubbed the Coase Theorem by George Stigler, demonstrates the power of markets to overcome seeming paradoxes and develop solutions better than policymakers. The paradox of classification can be solved through bargaining, but the important note here is economic theory provides no objective guidance to policymakers on what economic classification should be applied (and subsequently what policies could be undertaken) to a given situation.

Conclusion

Economic theory is often touted as a tool that can guide policymaking.  There was a great debate in economics in the middle parts of the century on the ability of theory to guide policy and vice versa (see Don Lavoie’s excellent 1985 book Rivalry and Central Planning for more on this debate).  However, as we see here, even if we take the necessary knowledge and information needed as given, we still face a classification issue for guiding policy.  It is not as precise and accurate as the textbook models often suggest.  Rather, economic theory and classification is loose, vague, and indeterminant and often relies on the morals and aesthetics of the analyst and observer.  Thus, we should avoid what I have come to call economic casuistry, or the laying down of rigid rules for given situations (rules such as “if a good is a public good, it ought to be provided by the government” or “if something produces an externality, it ought to be taxed”).  Trying to shoehorn these rigid rules into fluid situations that require the analyst’s judgment, sense of morality and values, and observation and interpretation of events are unlikely to produce anything but confusion.

1. National defense is also excludable internationally.  If a country were to invade Mexico, the US would likely not get involved.  Thus, the US is excluding Mexico from the benefits of national defense. ↩
2. Of interest to the reader might also be this 1999 paper by Don Boudreaux and Burt Folsom applying this idea to antitrust. ↩

A couple of months ago I wrote an article about how Buddhist ethical first principles commit Buddhists to probably political anarchism. The basic argument was simple: According to Buddhism, to even begin to practice, one must accept the Five Precepts. The first two are “to abstain from taking life” and “to abstain from taking what is not given.” But by definition, the state must violate these two in order to exist, because laws require force, and ultimately deadly force, for their enforcement, and any taxation that isn’t voluntarily simply is taking what is not given. Thus Buddhists, when they use the state to advance their political goals, are violating the very core of their professed ethics.

One objection people have made to my argument is that the Buddha, while speaking to various rulers during is life, didn’t tell them to abandon rule, and didn’t tell them that the very nature of government violates Buddhist ethics. Given that the Buddha understood Buddhism as well as anyone, this disconnect means I must be mistaken in my interpretation of his teachings.

I’m skeptical. I can think of at least three plausible reasons why the Buddha wouldn’t have publicly spoken to the disconnect between political action and personal ethics.

1. The Buddha taught to his audience.

First, in the vast body of writings known as the Pali Canon, which is accepted by Buddhists as the earliest extant record of the words of their philosophy’s founder, we see the Buddha teaching conflicting doctrines. The traditional explanation for this is that the Buddha was supremely practically minded. His goal was to help others achieve an end to their suffering, and so he taught to the individuals he happened to be speaking to at the particular time. He told each person what they needed to hear in order to progress toward enlightenment, and given that different people have different needs and are in different situations, his teachings varied.

Generally, kings don’t take well to being told their rule is illegitimate. If, upon sitting down with a king, the Buddha said, “If you want to follow the Dharma, you must cease enforcing your will through laws and you must cease taxing your subjects,” it’s rather unlikely the conversation would’ve gone any further, any opportunity to help this person achieve release from samsara precluded.

It is possible, then, that the Buddha decided to focus, in his talks with rulers, on matters he knew they’d be more receptive to, in keeping with his general pedagogical strategy.

2. The Buddha was dependent on rulers.

Mendicants in the Sangha begged for everything. A monk owned only his robe and his alms bowl. The Buddha had no lands, no source of income, no army for his defense. If a ruler grew angry and decided to snuff out his nascent movement, there was little the Buddha could’ve done to stop it. Thus keeping his mouth shut about the incompatibility of ethics and state rule was simply prudence. He could do more good in the world teaching the Dharma, even if it meant staying quiet about politics, than he could dying at the hands of an irritated monarch.

3. The Buddha never fully analyzed the nature of state power.

We know the Buddha was at least somewhat aware of the concerns I raised in my essay. In the sutta SN 4.20, while sitting in private retreat, he asked himself,

I wonder if it’s possible to rule legitimately, without killing or having someone kill for you; without conquering or having someone conquer for you; without sorrowing or causing sorrow?

Of course, the answer to his question, at least as it regards all governments then existing and all governments that have existed since, is “No.” It is impossible to have a state that makes and enforces laws without at least the threat of violence, including killing, of those who disobey the law. Otherwise laws are nothing more than suggestions.

But the Buddha lived far before philosophers had adequately mapped out the nature of state power or questioned its moral legitimacy. Then, and even now, the assumption was that state power is legitimate, and the only question worthy of analysis was how to properly use it. Attempts to offer an origin of this power existed, but it was only recently that philosophers began to seriously question its very legitimacy or to poke holes in the standard justifications.

I find it quite plausible that the reason the Buddha didn’t tell rulers that their very rule itself violated the first two precepts is simply because he hadn’t adequately examined the nature of that rule. Like everyone else of his time, he assumed its existence, and couldn’t imagine an alternative. (Except possibly in the mythical form of the Chakravarti, or Wheel Turning Monarch.)

That the earliest philosophers, of which the Buddha was one of the most important, didn’t have the benefit of the 2,500 years of philosophical development and progress we do shouldn’t be held against them. But we also shouldn’t fail to recognize that such progress exists. We simply have thought more deeply about these concepts over the last two thousand years, and so know more. Just as the Buddha held to primitive medical beliefs, he also held to primitive political ones, and part of that takes the form of not thinking through the political implications of his underlying ethics.

Fortunately, the rest of us can now do that for him.

I’m getting ready to travel to teach at a workshop in France, and at the last minute realized that I need a new European plug adapter. No problem—I go online, order an adapter from an array of choices, and it arrives on my doorstep the next day. Thirty years ago, I spent considerable time and more money finding one at a specialty travel store, or else I would have had to spend a small fortune on one at the airport.

This story illustrates how digital technology has transformed our world by increasing our connectedness through communication networks. What the capabilities of various digital technologies enable us to accomplish has been profound.

We can gain a lot of insights into the modern digital economy from the work of Adam Smith. This assertion seems unlikely—how can an 18th century political economist from Scotland give us a deeper understanding of our digital society? That’s the question I explore in this first of a series of three essays.

Smith’s main works are The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS, 1759), which he considered his best work, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN, 1776), for which he is best known among economists as the founding thinker in modern economics. Smith’s ideas in these two works resonate with much of what we are experiencing in the digital economy, with what we are reflecting on in ourselves as we engage with each other using new technologies, and with what we see happening socially as we adopt and adapt to new digital technologies.

The digital economy creates and employs lots of information. Low information costs make it easy for us to find vast amounts of information at our fingertips, much more than Smith could have accessed in all of Edinburgh’s libraries. Dramatically lower transaction costs make it easier and cheaper for us to exchange with each other, and to engage in trade with strangers, thereby generating larger possible value creation through broader gains from trade. The evolution of the internet as a platform for innovation has fostered economic growth, because within the legal constraints of common law and some bottom-up, emergent technical rules about interoperability, innovation around the edge of the internet is permissionless. We are capable of greater degrees of communication and contact with more people because the costs of digital communication are so low, but this communication with mostly strangers is of a particular form that can be either very similar to or very different from what we experience face-to-face.

Smith’s work generates ideas that can help us think about these features of the digital economy. One fundamental idea is how this greater connectedness promotes mutually beneficial exchange. In the very first chapter of Wealth of Nations, he starts right out of the gate with his argument that the nature and causes of the wealth of nations are grounded in the division of labor. The immediate implication of the division of labor is specialization, which means that we have to rely on each other to produce things other than what we ourselves produce, and that we can acquire those other goods, voluntarily and cooperatively, through exchange.

Smith describes humans as having an inherent “…propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (WN Book I Chapter II paragraph 1), and then famously explained that in satisfying this propensity, both parties are better off if they recognize the self-interest of others and take into consideration what the other party wants:

Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

(WN Book I Chapter II paragraph 3)

The online retailer that sold me a plug adapter had to go through this same mental calculation. They had to imagine the situation of potential buyers, and how best to interest them in buying what they had to offer. Having the empathy to imagine the situations of others enables people to come up with the value propositions that are mutually beneficial, and that’s as true with digitally-enabled commerce as it was in 1776 when the butcher, baker, and brewer were working to sell people their dinners. For Smith, this empathy is part of the sympathy that forms the foundation of our ability to live together peacefully in civil society, as he argued in TMS. This empathy connects the moral psychology of humans in TMS with our mutually beneficial exchanges in WN.

The economic principle of mutually-beneficial voluntary exchange is fundamental to all commerce, including online commerce. From Amazon to Zillow, from online retail to the “sharing” economy, all are animated by the principle underlying gains from trade.

Smith digs deeper into this principle by elaborating on how increased connectedness makes us better off by increasing productivity and exchange. In a chapter entitled “The Divison of Labor is Limited by the Extent of the Market,” Smith makes a beautiful argument about transportation networks and the extent to which transportation networks enable more commerce and more exchange, and thus facilitate deeper specialization and increased well-being arising from the division of labor. Enlarging the market brings more buyers and sellers in contact with each other, deepening the division of labor, which increases productivity, which increases wealth. And, Smith notes, this increase is an increase in shared “universal opulence,” which is a more widespread increase in wealth that is not concentrated in just a few people in society. In Smith’s time he observed that the productivity arising from commerce and the division of labor meant that factory workers in Britain could live as well as a tribal king. 

The digital economy is this same process, amplified. Making the analogy between the transportation networks of Smith’s time and the combination of transportation and digital communication networks today, we can understand the growth of online commerce and its valuable effects as consequences of increasing the extent of the market. Digital technologies increase the extent of the market, which is almost literally global, and make more products and services available to many more people.

How does growth of the network happen so quickly and pervasively in the digital economy? It’s all about reducing transaction costs, which is where Smith’s framework meets up with Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase’s institutional economics. Although humans may have inherent propensities to truck, barter, and exchange, engaging in transactions is costly—they take time, parties have to find each other and acquire information about the goods and services being offered and the terms of the offers, and trade among strangers can be stymied due to a lack of trust. Reducing those transaction costs leads to increased specialization and exchange, amplifying the market extension effects that Smith described. Digital technologies are first and foremost transaction cost reducers. As transaction costs fall, and as patterns of transaction costs change in a dynamic economy, more exchange takes place. More innovation also occurs, as new connections create new ideas, new products, and new services.

Ride sharing illustrates the power of digital technology to reduce transaction costs. Digital platforms like Lyft and Uber harness algorithms and automation to connect drivers with riders, and all three parties benefit—drivers earn money by offering riders safe and convenient rides, and the platform company earns a service fee by bringing them together with a well-designed piece of software and set of rules for interaction. In much the same way as with water transportation in Smith’s time, none of this value creation is possible without transaction-cost reducing innovation.

Economic freedom underpins this process of division of labor, specialization, exchange, and increasing the extent of the market. Economic freedom makes possible the permissionless innovation that has made the internet such a profound platform for creativity and productivity. It’s also essential for the freedom to experiment to discover ways to reduce transaction costs. Whether in Smith’s time or in the modern digital economy, freedom of voluntary exchange is a fundamental human right, and one that has had large and widespread beneficial consequences where it has been coupled with the rule of law. Adam Smith’s insights were profound enough to remain relevant today, even in a technological future he could neither have foreseen nor imagined.