March 2005

My friend Stephen Hicks, a professor of philosophy at Rockford College, has written an outstanding book, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. Steve is an incredibly lucid writer, and has a rare talent for making fordbidding ideas accessible. Steve traces the dismal fortunes of reason from Kant’s Copernican Revolution, through subsequent German philosophy, down to contemporary postmodernism. I especially enjoyed the clear explanation of the famously obscure Heidegger. Steve notes that postmodernism isn’t just nihilist or anti-rationalist, but is uniformly leftist. (If nothing’s true, there is no fact of the matter about the quality of reasons to believe things, and belief is just a commitment backed by power, then it makes just as much sense to be a money-grubbing natural rights minarchist as a turtlenecked chainsmoking Trotskyite.) His account of the way the increasingly evident failures of communism in terms of reason and evidence are tracked by the increasingly extreme postmodern rejection of reason and evidence is utterly compelling, and has influenced my thinking since I Steve first gave a talk on the topic to a student group I ran at Northern Illinois way back in 1997. Anyway, it’s a lovely little book, and if you’ve never been able to make heads or tails of postmodernism, or would just like to get a particularly sharp and fresh take on it, pick up Steve’s book.

The New Republic and The National Review are hosting an “Opinion Duel” between Jonathan Chait and Jonah Goldberg. I’m quite pleased to see that Jonah has availed himself of my post criticizing Chait’s silly empiricism article, which, naturally, makes the first round a blowout in Jonah’s favor.

Now, if I can whip up an anti-Goldberg screed and get Chait to link to it, I would consider that a libertarian triumph.

In an utterly bizarre breakdown of narcissism, I failed to promote myself on my own blog.

Anyway, the oversight is that I failed to mention my piece in TCS the other day, “Insuring Against the Inevitable” on the “don’t think about rates of return; social security is insurance canard.

I don’t know how this happened, and it won’t happen again.

Great profile in the Boston Globe about Robert Trivers. I had the privelege of meeting Trivers at a little conference I helped Tyler Cowen & Robin Hanson organize on self-deception while I was at Mercatus. Trivers is undoubtedly one of the weirdest people I’ve ever met. He apparently has a penchant for stealing and hoarding pens. He is quite frank about it. So, reasoning that the principle of diminishing marginal utility might help save the pens of those around Trivers, a colleague and I rounded up a varied bunch of spare pens from around the office and left them at Trivers spot, along with a cheap watch from the lost and found, while everyone was having a coffee break. He was delighted. He instantly put the watch on and stashed all the pens in his bag. Big smile. Later, he complained about the flourescent lights bothering his eyes and wondered if we had a hat he could wear. Since we kept no hats around the office, I popped over to the GMU Law bookstore and bought him a Mason cap. Again, just thrilled! He wore it happily the rest of the conference. Later, I received what I consider the ultimate compliment from a man like Trivers: “Hey man, I like your phenotype.”

My impression was that he’s a very emotionally labile person who naturally gravitates to a fairly agressive form of tit-for-tat. If you do nice things for Trivers, he’s just incredibly warm and grateful. If you do things that Trivers doesn’t like to Trivers, he angrily retaliates with extreme prejudice.

And he is brilliant. I can’t wait for the book on self-deception.

I’ll be giving a talk on “Pluralism, Sympathy, and Lifestyle Entrepreneurship” or something along those lines, at the Boston University Libertarian Society’s imaginatively named Liberty Conference on Saturday April 9th. If you’ll be in Boston, or across the river among the dorks and snots, please come by. I aim to edify.

I just thought of something Boston-related that I think is funny to do. When you get in a conversation with somebody, and it gets to the “where’d you go to school phase”, and they say with excruciatingly mannered evasiveness “Oh, up in Boston,” reply, “Oh sure, Northeastern’s a really great school,” and walk away. Fun!

Virginia Postrel has a nice little piece on hotel rooms and the problem of setting up the CPI. I am quite sure that the CPI overestimates inflation, underestimates real wages, and that the gap between the methodologically “correct” CPI and the actually existing CPI is growing at an ever accelerating rate. Before coming to Washington, and getting all interested in policy. I had no idea what a profound impact a bunch of statisticians down at the BLS have on all our lives. These technical methodological matters mean more than most people know. Although she doesn’t come right out and say so (when she writes, “If . . . guests care as much about aesthetics as hoteliers believe they do, it would be irresponsible to treat the $15 as a true price increase,” I think I can hear the antecedent affirmed between the lines”), Virginia’s saying that the CPI just can’t get a grip on increases in value due to “intangibles,” and so overestimates the price of hotels rooms and underestimates the worth of the money in your pocket.

The concluding sentence is nice:

Measuring inflation, [BLS guy] acknowledges, “is more of an art than a science, unfortunately.”

Which is to say, value-laden and contestable.

Deep in the comments of this characteristically puzzling Elizabeth Anderson post, David Velleman strikes back at those who deny that the state is productive:

This is the fallacy that lies behind so much of the distrust of government in which Mr. Ridgely revels (irresponsibly, in my opinion). The fallacy is to think that because government doesn’t produce anything, it doesn’t contribute to economic productivity. Go look at the current economic productivity of Iraq, and ask yourself what’s most needed before it can be improved. What’s needed is government.

How productive would our country be without secure borders, without civil order, without a properly regulated currency and banking system, without a judicial system to enforce contracts and adjudicate disputes, without an interstate highway system, air traffic control, well functioning ports and waterways, orderly division of the electromagnetic spectrum, protection for intellectual property rights, guarantees of the safety of buildings, food, and drugs, a well-educated and healthy work-force … must I go on? All of these government functions make productivity possible. Without them, we would all be less productive and poorer.

I agree that the state can contribute to economic productivity by setting in place a system of sound basic institutions that help create the conditions for efficient market cooperation. But Velleman seems to dip his toes in the opposite fallacy. Markets are limited and feeble without effective political and legal institutions. Therefore assume effective political and legal institutions! And behold their glory! Government makes markets go ZOOM!

But but but wait. Market cooperation is limited in the absence of effective government because of, to make a very complicated story very uncomplicated, problems of assurance and trust. But problems of assurance and trust are exactly what prevents government from being effective, too. In order to fund a government sufficient to do anything worth having a government do, there has to be sufficient wealth, and thus markets that have already solved, to some extent at least, the problems that you need government to help markets solve.

The more effective, efficient, trustworthy, non-corrupt, credible, etc. a government is, the less you will need government. Whatever norms a society has deployed to partially solve the principle/agent & state autonomy & nepotism & predation problems that afflict political institutions everywhere and always, those are norms that will have also been deployed to solve problems of market cooperation.

So here’s my little superficially paradoxical rule of thumb, which I hereby dub Wilkinson’s Law, until I am told that it has already been dubbed: The more your markets need government, the less your government will be able to do for your markets. Or, equivalently, the more your government is able to do for your markets, the less it will need to do. Pithier still . . . Government: if you need it, it won’t be good, and if it’s good, you don’t need it.

Ceterus paribus, naturally.

This leads me to believe that Velleman’s list of the wonders of good government has too much stuff on it. Indeed, his entire list after “adjudicate disputes” is pretty questionable. If you’ve already got the kinds of markets that give rise to issues about interstate highways, air traffic control, spectrum allocation, food and drug safety, and whatnot, then you’ve likely already developed the wherewithal to solve market coordination problems using largely market means. And if the market can do it, then the government isn’t likely to do it any better. And the government doesn’t contribute to productivity if it’s crowding out something that could be do the same thing better by other means. And when the government does it, its coercive. And coercion is bad, on the face of it, and raises questions of moral legitimacy that do not arise under institutions of voluntary coordination. Because voluntary cooperation is good, which is why markets are.

Time is running out! If you’re a libertarian or libertarian-curious college student with some time on your hands over the summer, you’ve got to apply for one of the Institute for Humane Studies’ fantastical free summer summer seminars. You’ll make new friends! You’ll explore WILD new ideas! Face the ultimate contrarian challenge of alienating even those who agree with you!

Seriously, some of the best times in my young life were had at IHS seminars. If you miss the chance, you’ll regret it. There is no tired quite like the good tired after a week of friendly heated conversation, little sleep, and copious free beer.

From Louis Hartz’s bizarrely rambling and free-associative The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), for all you Austrians out there:

But Lippmann’s defense of liberalism, if it utilized the bogey of foreign totalitarianism, was for the most part devoid of American nationalism. It was theoretical, philosophic, relying, as we know, on the Austrian school of Von Mises and Hayek. And here is a most interesting set of relationships. The class-conscious Toryism of Europe could absorb only a bit, and even that incongruously, of the diehard John Brightism preached by the Austrians. Austria itself with its statist tradition found it for the most part irrelevant. But America, a liberal community, found it usable, so that Hayek after the Second World War scored himself a more vivid literary success here than Lippmann had during the New Deal. What they used to say about England, that it was the home of dead German philosophies, would have to be altered in this case to apply to America: it is the home of dead English philosophies retained by Austrian professors.

That is, in fact, a particularly coherent passage. After reading about ten pages, I thought I was inside a political theorist’s hallucination, where historical figures become grotesteque blabbering cartoons, and their “isms” become ruber balls that they juggle and throw, and which bounce around according to no sensibile physics. And even the isms have isms. Americanistic Hamiltonism is bouncing its repressed Algerist Whiggery off the skull of Herbert Spencer and Norman Thomas who have heads the size of watemelons and giant mouths yelling slogans and tiny bodies dressed in meticulous brown suits. Or, in other words, like reading a book-length Reihan Salam post, but without the rap. Harvard professors really used to write like this?

From this artilce in the NYT:

Mr. Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School suggested that it is proper for the government, or an employer, to set boundaries to choice to achieve desired social objectives, an approach they call “libertarian paternalism.”

Government, employer. Same thing.

Rumination:

This last clause of that sentence captures the deep tension between paternalist welfarism and democracy as the means of republican self-government. If it is known in advance which “social objectives” it is “desirable” to achieve, then the technocrats can “set boundaries to choice” to bias the process of social choice in the favor of these objectives. This is not, in itself, a bad thing. A constitutional convention, for example, is all about setting boundaries to achieve desired social objectives. But at the post-constitutional phase, the state’s “setting boundaries” in this way can amount to an illiberal and anti-democratic imposition of parochial values. Liberals who see the basis of state legitimacy in a kind of deliberative democratic procedure have to eschew technocratic framing or bounding of the choice set. But it’s easy to press too hard on this point. If you’re going to have an adminstrative bureaucracy, it’s going to issue regulations. And I sure want to say that some regulatory institutions (a market in pollution credits, for example) are better than others (say, demanding an across-the-board reduction). I think the distinction has to lie in they WAY boundaries to choice are set, and the KIND of constraints the boundary setting process imposes.

There’s a very entertaining discussion of consciousness and rights in this post of Julian’s that started out as an email conversation between us.

I’m sure Blackburn isn’t being altogether fair to Sam Kerstein (a friend and former professor) in this paper [.pdf], but I very much liked the overall gist of his argument. And I liked the conclusion, which puts me in mind of an ongoing conversation I’ve had with Julian over the last few years.

…the kinds of [rationalist] argument [against expressivism or sentimentalism] I have been discussing, are very deep-rooted. Partly, they represent a noble dream. They answer a wish that the knaves of the world can be not only confined and confounded, but refuted – refuted as well by standards that they have to acknowledge. Ideally, they will be shown to be in a state akin to self-contradiction. Kerstein acknowledges that Kant and neo-Kantians have not achieved anything like this result. But it is still, tantalizingly there as a goal or ideal, the Holy Grail of moral philosophy, and many suppose that all right-thinking people must join the pilgrimage to find it.

We sentimentalists do not like our good behaviour to be hostage to such a search. We don’t altogether approve of Holy Grails. We do not see the need for them. We are not quite on all fours with those who do. And we do not quite see why, even if by some secret alchemy a philosopher managed to glimpse one, it should ameliorate his behaviour, let alone that of other people. We think instead that human beings are ruled by passions, and the best we can do it to educate people so that the best passions are also the most forceful. We say of rationalistic moral philosophy what Hume says of abstract reasonings in general, that when we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning.

Lovely.

Patri Friedman has posted a commentary on a talk by Robert Shiller that is just plain delicious mind candy.

One of the mantras of social security reform obstructionists is: “Don’t think about rates of return. It’s social insurance stupid!”

That is, SS is a big risk pooling scheme, and it’s working just fine if you’re sufficiently insulated against risk. Expecting a high rate of return is just a category error. You would be glad if you pay money to GEICO, say, and never get a dime back. The point was that they were there to cover you if you ever did get in an accident. And if you never do, and never see a cent, well then lucky you.

Now, the parts of the system that aren’t up for reform are unemployment and disability benefits. The big controversy is over retirement. But getting old and retiring isn’t a risk. Not these days. It’s a near certainty. Thinking of retirement as a risk that one needs to be protected against is like thinking about sending one’s kids to college as a risk. Losing your arm in a combine, and thereby losing your livelihood, is an unpredictable low probability event. It could happen to you, but probably won’t. Paying your rent, sending your kids to college, or retiring are highly predictable, high probability events. You need to take responsibility and prepare for them, not be “insured” against the inevitability.

You can get a feel for the difference between the economic and demographic conditions in the early part of the 20th Century by thinking about this passage from Henry Rogers Seager’s Social Insurance, among the first systematic treatises on the topic, published way back in 1910:

If the need is one the wage earner clearly forsees as certain to arise, then I should be the last person to wish to relieve him of responsibility for meeting it. If, for example, we were discussing means of helping wage earners to pay their rent, I should say that the only safe means are measures designed to increase their energy, ambition, and efficiency. Only in extreme cases should a need of this sort be met by outside help. But the future needs we are considering are not of this sort. Many wage earners go through life without being the victims of industrial accidents, without serious illness, never lacking for work, and not living long enough to become superannuated. These are all risks to which wage earners are exposed, not certain needs which they can clearly foresee.

See, in 1910 one couldn’t expect to live long enough to face the problem of supporting oneself after one is no longer able to work. Nor could you in 1935. That’s why the age for benefit eligibilty was set right around the age of expected death. But the whole idea of a long period of retirement is a function of massively increased lifespans. It’s just no longer a “risk” that one will get old and stop working well before one dies. Retirement is now in the category of events that, as Seager puts it, “the wage earner clearly forsees as certain to arise.” And thus, the author of the ur-text of American social insurance is, “the last person to wish to relieve him of responsibility for meeting it.”

So, what? All those folks who insist on talking about retirement as a risk one needs to be insured againt are the ones committing a category error. That’s what.

There was a lot wrong with Max Sawicky’s part in his WSJ debate with Tyler. This bit in particular exemplifies a mode of thought that really bugs me, and ought to bug people who care about democracy:

. . . the mission of the public sector in my view goes well beyond aid to the poor. Even in those terms, I pity the poor who wind up isolated in a ghetto of means-tested programs. Programs for the poor isolate their beneficiaries politically and end up poorly supported.

Here we have a nice statement of the principle that it is politically necessary to delude a broad swathe of the electorate into thinking they’re getting something out of a “social insurance” scheme, when, in fact, they get less than nothing, so that they will support welfare payments to people who really need it. The problem with means-tested welfare benefits is: big benefits will not be democratically popular, so, insofar as it is possible, the issue must be taken out of the domain of democratic choice.

Last night at the AFF panel on social security, Dean Baker made some point about how popular Social Security-as-we-know-it is, and that we live in a democracy, so if you don’t like it, well, too bad. I thought this was an extremely disingenous argument. From what I could make of him, Baker is an ideologue like Sawicky, and if it turned out that the democratic public became persuaded to radically alter the historical treasure of social policy that is Social Security, Baker would not just shrug and say, “Oh well, that’s democracy. The General Will has spoken!”

I’ve been surprised by the weakness of the conservative grassroots push for social security reform. Here’s some illumination from The Note:

When the President first enunciated his Social Security principles, business groups, prodded by the White House, said they’d spend millions to influence public opinion. That was predicated on the Administration’s announcing its support for a precise proposal early.

“We haven’t done it because Bush doesn’t have a plan yet,” said the Free Enterprise Fund’s Steve Moore. “It’s hard for anyone to mobilize conservative activists and conservative money until we all know that it’s a plan that’s worth mobilizing for.”

But, as I understand it, Bush doesn’t have a precise plan because he needs the ability to negotiate with Democrats in order to get a bill through Congress. That’s why he keeps saying that “everything’s on the table.” I think this may have been a huge mistake. First, by not endorsing a specific plan, you allow the opposition to play the vagueness to their advantage and to impute an unattractive plan to the administration, around which they can rally resistance. Second, you leave yourself and your advocates unable to defend your plan against the opposition. All you can say is: “That’s not the plan I have in mind.” Third, your grassroots support has nothing to rally around, and so keeps the money in the bank, as the AARP, Big Labor, etc., run riot. The public’s attention span for the issue may be short. So it’s a big loss to lose out in the first few rounds of the PR battle.

All this has to weighed against the bargaining advantages of public open-endedness about policy. But if you lose the public opinion war too badly, in part because of the strategy of vagueness, then the bargaining advantages of vagueness start to dissipate.

I hope that the adminstration’s doing some kind of rope-a-dope, and letting the anti-reform forces start to feel complacently self-congratulatory before wheeling out the big guns, and mobilizing the massive grassroots PR assault. I mean, that could happen, right?

From Lindsay Beyerstein’s comments in her post about freezing in line to see Harry Frankfurt talk about his book On Bullshit on the Daily Show, here’s the segment.

I found it delightful to see a real philosopher on The Daily Show. And I was pleased to see that Stewart was smart enough to have genuine respect for a genuinely erudite and wise man like Frankfurt.

For those of you who didn’t have to read any Frankfurt essays in grad school, he is a philosopher of unusual sensitivity, creativity, subtlety, and depth. He is most well known for his work on free will, especially his famous thought experiment designed to show that the openness of alternative possibilities is not a necessary condition for freedom. Frankfurt’s work on the structure of the self, and the relation between higher and lower order aims and desires, is central to contemporary discussion of the nature of agency. And Frankfurt’s ideas about care and love as sources of normativity I find to be more satisfactory than almost all the alternatives.

If you’re one of those people who thinks that contemporary analytic philosophy is obscure, scholastic, and irrelevant to real human concerns, you need to read Harry Frankfurt.

Here’s an interview with Frankfurt on “the necessity of love.” [.pdf]

And here you can see video of Frankfurt in his natural habitat giving a lecture on “Some Mysteries of Love” at UC Riverside in 2000. [Realplayer]

Books at Amazon:

The Importance of What We Care About
Necessity, Volition, and Love
The Reasons of Love

The other night I was talking to my roommates about family, communes, thick normative concepts, and the nature of not-further-questionable reasons for action. Among our topics: Can “Because she’s your sister” be sufficient reason for doing something? Why “Why should I care that she’s my sister,” is both a necessary and unacceptable question.

This bit of Pinker’s excellent discussion of the Summers controversy reminded me of our conversation, which had absolutely nothing to do with women and math:

What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair–the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of a fascinating bit of human psychology.

The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo–the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them–is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense. In 2000, he reported asking university students their opinions of unpopular but defensible proposals, such as allowing people to buy and sell organs or auctioning adoption licenses to the highest-bidding parents. He found that most of his respondents did not even try to refute the proposals but expressed shock and outrage at having been asked to entertain them. They refused to consider positive arguments for the proposals and sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering for campaigns to oppose them. Sound familiar?

The psychology of taboo is not completely irrational. In maintaining our most precious relationships, it is not enough to say and do the right thing. We have to show that our heart is in the right place and that we don’t weigh the costs and benefits of selling out those who trust us. If someone offers to buy your child or your spouse or your vote, the appropriate response is not to think it over or to ask how much. The appropriate response is to refuse even to consider the possibility. Anything less emphatic would betray the awful truth that you don’t understand what it means to be a genuine parent or spouse or citizen. (The logic of taboo underlies the horrific fascination of plots whose protagonists are agonized by unthinkable thoughts, such as Indecent Proposal and Sophie’s Choice.) Sacred and tabooed beliefs also work as membership badges in coalitions. To believe something with a perfect faith, to be incapable of apostasy, is a sign of fidelity to the group and loyalty to the cause. Unfortunately, the psychology of taboo is incompatible with the ideal of scholarship, which is that any idea is worth thinking about, if only to determine whether it is wrong.

At some point in the history of the modern women’s movement, the belief that men and women are psychologically indistinguishable became sacred. The reasons are understandable: Women really had been held back by bogus claims of essential differences. Now anyone who so much as raises the question of innate sex differences is seen as “not getting it” when it comes to equality between the sexes. The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.

Pinker points toward the coordinative functions of taboo. Adherence to taboos signals unconditional cooperation or an unconditional disposition to punish (usually the latter), providing a clear structure for coordination. Because family solidarity is, in most cultural contexts, so important, defecting on a family member has the character of a taboo. The taboo authorizes extreme reprisals and often requires altruistic punishment that is “irrational” in the technical sense, but which creates a payoff structure that is not a prisoner’s dilemma, i.e., in which it is not rational to defect.

So if I say, “Because she’s your sister.” And you say, “Why should that matter?” it is not that you’re asking an essentially illegitimate question, but that you have signaled non-commitment to the taboo-laden game structure, and thus identified yourself as a potential defector who must be given some additional reason not to defect. There may be some additional reason that is readily available. But insofar as speech acts are moves in the game, the correct response may not be to provide the additional reason, but to begin altruistic punishment immediately in an attempt to reinstate the more reliably cooperative game structure. So, it would not be unexpected, nor necessarily strategically irrational for “Why should I care that she’s my sister?” to be answered with a hard slap to the face.

But a slap in the face is, as Pinker puts it, “incompatible with the ideal of scholarship,” or rational inquiry. If the game is inquiry, then we have to question the taboos. One might worry that the entire family solidarity taboo structure is unjustified, especially given the cultural evolution of family structure. Fair enough. But then it is crucial to make it abundantly plain what game is being played. And if you attempt to play the inquiry game with your family, they might fairly suspect that your motivation to introduce the inquiry game is really to change the structure of the family game, which they will likely resist. So you end up in a third game, where the inquiry game is resisted in order to prevent the introduction of uncertainty into the family game by the rational undermining of stable norms.

(Now that I think of it in these terms, I realize that I played this third kind of game constantly with my mother in Sunday school. I would ask what I took to be a penetrating theological question, and she would resist answering on the terms of the game I had introduced, lest she undermine the norms of faith to which she was attempting to commit her son.)

Good but dry Frank Rich column on The Aristocrats, Deadwood, and our stiflingly censorious political climate.

In honor of Matt’s safe return from the heart of darkness, and in lieu of an actual blog post, I thought I would display my geographical experience of America:

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

My fudge is that I say I lived in Virginia. I never had a residence there. But I worked in Virginia for three years, and spent as much time there as Maryland or DC during that time. Of course DC isn’t a state. But you knew that.

Regarding FEC Commissioner Brad Smith’s incendiary comments that McCain/Feingold could lead to a crackdown on blogs . . . I wonder if Smith, a sworn enemy of the speech restrictions he is supposed to impose in his capacity at the FEC (for which Smith gained the sworn enmity of McCain), is strategically baiting bloggers to help drum up a backlash against M/F.

Having seen Smith, who seemed to me a true blue libertarian, speak at an IHS seminar I ran a couple of years back, I think it’s pretty likely.

“I want to note that the growth of regulation generally, or more precisely, the growth of the administrative state, is itself smothering democracy in America, not only in its particulars, but in its general, ubiquitous presence.”

Bradley A. Smith, speech delivered at the Catholic University Law Review’s Election Law Symposium on September 23, 2000.

Let me just say, before it becomes illegal: Brad Smith for President!

Tim Sandefur writes:

Wilkinson’s argument seems to be that when Rand says that a morality of reason is necessary for man’s survival, that isn’t true, because you can see all around you that there are many people who live and who are not rational. Isn’t this rather like saying that alcoholism isn’t really bad because there are lots of alcoholics who aren’t dead—and even ones who accomplish big things?

No. Here’s the proper parallel. Someone tells you that any alcohol AT ALL imperil your life and happiness. Then you discover that that the happiest, longest-lived people you know regularly drink alcohol. So then you know that the claim about the dangers of alcohol just aren’t true. Rand’s claims about reason are like that. She claims that any bit of irrationality imperils life and happiness. But then you lift your weary eyes from the pages, stick your head out the window, and observe happy, successful people whose commitment to reason is notably partial.

And this:

A bureaucrat at HUD might be a happy person because he is a basically rational person who engages in the behaviors that Objectivism considers virtues—even though his life may include contradictions, and his happiness may be mixed.

This is a move that really bugs me. Start with your theory about the necessary conditions of life and happiness. Observe that someone lives and is not unhappy. Conclude that they must implement elements of your theory. No. No. No. This is backwards rationalism. Do this instead: Observe people who live and are happy. Draw generalizations about them. I think the correct answer, based on a good inductive approach, is something like: yes, a well-developed capacity for “common sense” or “folk rationality” is a necessary condition for life and happiness. But this is not incompatible with all sorts of astonishing forms of irrationality. Many of these forms of irrationality have no apparent effect on life and happiness, and other forms appear to have some positive effect. Of course, there are many forms of irrationality that are truly destructive, and I think we can all agree that these are to be avoided.

I’m reminded of the utilitarian’s favorite dodge. Offer an intuitive moral counter-example, such as “utilitarianism demands cutting up healthy people and distributing their organs to sick people,” or “utilitarianism demands televised to-the-death gladiatorial combat, since so many people really enjoy watching people kill each other,” and the utilitarian will offer an elaborate story about how utilitarianism, properly and subtly understood, actually forbids these things. But there is a point where this becomes ridiculously ad hoc, and it becomes obvious that an honest utilitarian is either going to have to bite some bullets (e.g., “We really should be carving healthy people up!”), reject the notion that intutions about cases like these have any authority and offer a different (non-question begging) standard for evaluating the adequacy of moral theories, or admit that the counterexamples are decisive.

If I keep showing you happy, deeply religious ninety year olds who devoted their lives to altruistic service and the mastery of astrology, and you keep telling me that they must embody Objectivist virtues of rationality because, after all, they’ve never once stepped in front of a car and have a solid record of not doing things that would make them miserable, then I am not going to be impressed.

One thing I meant to take up in the letter, but which I think I will take up in a separate letter, is Rand’s “survival barometer” view of happiness, which I think is quite implausible.

Last, Tim says “Parisitism as a personal psychology, is stable only as socialism . . .” No. A system in which everyone is parasitic is unstable, surely. But my point is that parasitism doesn’t require an especially parasitic psychology, and parasistism works pretty well as long as the host organism is exceedingly robust. Ever met a happy special-interest lobbyist truly proud of their latest success at rent-extraction? I have. Parasites don’t need to have a parasitic mentality. I’ve met any number of professional rent-seekers who see their work as necessary and noble, and who gain the usual psychic rewards from a job well done. These are people who, in fact, contribute next to nothing to the wealth of society, and are in fact part of a system of parasitism and predation. But they don’t see it that way. The system is too robust to suffer too much from institutionalized parasitism. Society continues to get wealthier. There is no serious social instability, or threat of downward spiral. (And so things are not, as Tim says, like the jumper who says “so far so good” halfway down.)These people are as insulated from the objective systemic effects of their work as much as any other more objectively productive member of society. And psychological well-being depends more on the way you conceive of what you’re doing than on the real worth of what you’re doing. Since you’re so insulated from the effects of the real results, which are muted and diffuse, there is little reason to suspect that your actions have a negative effect.

There is simply no non-table pounding reason to suspect that someone’s happiness is compromised simply in virtue of being objectively unproductive and subsisting off of the spoils of political predation. This can, in fact, be a quite nice kind of life and that is part of the political problem.

Good thoughts by Brooke Oberwetter (in her new digs) about how a genuine debate about Social Security is almost impossible to have given the systematically misleading way economists and journalists insist on using language.

One of the things that makes talking about Social Security so infuriating is the fact that conventional ways of talking about government spending have no basis in reality (though that hasn’t prevented members of the reality-based community from using them).

Read the whole thing.

[For an explanation of this series, go here.]

Dear Young Will,

I’m sorry; it’s been a while. You’ll be glad to know that I’ve been busy and happy. I hope you’ve been the same.

So, where were we? Oh, last time, I wrote to you about Objectivism’s inadequate conception of human sociality. This lack points to the general inadequacy of the Objectivist ethics.

Before I get going here, let me remind you that I don’t pretend to be offering you drop-dead arguments. I am simply letting you know how things look from here, on the other side of a decade’s education, formal and informal. I know you’re a tenacious debater, and I certainly encourage you to bare your teeth and dig in. It feels good. I know. I know. But follow me a little way, and try to see what I’m trying to show, if you have the patience. Anyway, no need to implore you. I know you’re intellectually curious. I know you’re listening, even when you’re pouncing — that it only sinks in, really, when you tumble off target and wonder why.

It’s easy to see why Ayn Rand’s ethics is attractive . . .
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