Clearly, Cassidy is saying “I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords!”

Every Libertarian model presumes general democracy. But people who live dysfunctional lives are still allowed to vote.

Untrue. Libertarian anarchists do not presume democracy; they do not presume anyone should be allowed to vote.

I have not read Sunstein and Thaler’s book, but am of the opinion that the best corrective for the irrationality of human behavior is to let people enjoy the undiluted consequences of their actions. Many may think me cruel, but I counter that it is far kinder to have an environment where people learn as efficiently as possible from their mistakes and successes. Damping of the feedback mechanism simply perpetuates bad behavior. Any paternalistic state apparatus makes people serfs and deprives them of their dignity, not to mention liberty.

The Founders clearly understood Wilkinson’s point about government needing to be severely curtailed to protect the people. Most of the evil that has been visited upon people throughout history has been at the hands of their own governments.

To imagine a paternalistic government making people better is ludicrous on its face.

I’m taking from this that you don’t know many politicians and policymakers.

Some reasons come to mind:
- politicians have a hearty interest in getting re-elected. If people don’t act in their own best interests directly, then it seems entirely plausible that they won’t necessarily act in their own best interests in voting.
- politicians and other policy-makers don’t know the details of your own life as well as you do
- even under a limited government, politicians already have what are really too many problems to deal with for any one person (national defence, public health, environmental problems, the justice system, defining property rights, any one of these can be studied by one person for a whole life time, but the head of state has to make decisions across the whole range). The more responsibilities you add to politicans, the less well they will perform on any individual responsibility. There’s only 24 hours in a day. Division of labour doesn’t help as the decision-making process needs to include trade-offs, while there may be some win-win connections between say environmental problems and the justice system, at some point spending a dollar on one environmental problem means spending a dollar less on protecting elderly ladies from muggers or what not.

On an ancedotal level, it’s easy to think of examples of politicans and policymakers completely stuffing things up.

The idea that politicians and policymakers are better equipped to make decisions than the masses is doubtful. The more decisions we expect them to make, the more doubtful it is.

But I think it’s easy to see why Cassidy would argue that an objective government official might have a more dispassionate view what you need to save for retirement or what kind of mortgages are really feasible.

The first problem is finding an objective government official. The second is finding enough objective government officials to fill all the positions that government officials are needed for.

Until we have found this magical supply of government officials, let us try to design a government that can cope with non-objective government officials.

Nor do I see why dispassionate is good. What’s wrong with being passionate about my life? I find the passions is what makes my life worth living.

Further, the private sector is organized around individual interests, so it’s hard to see what kind of objective view it might be able to hold forth on how people make decisions.

The mind boggles at the thought of the private sector holding a view. Aren’t you taking reification a bit far? Would you say that the private sector holds an objective view on, say, The General Theory of Relativity? How would you aggregate the views of, say, a subsistence farmer who never learnt to read and has no idea who Einstein even is, a businessman who once read A Brief History of Time, and a highly-paid physicist working for a private research company to determine what objective view the private sector holds on the General Theory of Relativity?

And for that matter, how can the government sector hold an objective view on the General Theory of Relativity, or on how people make decisions? The government sector includes guys working in the depths of the military who have PhDs in physics, PhD economists at the Treasury, elected policiticians with no background in science at all, PR guys who come from a background in journalism, etc. How on earth would you aggregate all their views to figure out what view the government holds on the General Theory of Relativity, or how people make decisions? Let alone, how would you figure out if the view is objective?

Cassidy was reaching for why Libertianism (like Marxism) looks great on paper and founders in real life. He simply failed to get his fingers around it.

Every Libertarian model presumes general democracy. But people who live dysfunctional lives are still allowed to vote. People who live dysfunctional cause dysfunctionality among their family and neighbors. Eventually dysfunctional people will seek someone to rescue them. Their family and neighbors will much sooner seek someone to rescue them. There will always be a battalion of panders in government (that ultimate whorehouse) who will build a career promising that rescue.

So if we could have a revolution tomorrow that instituted pure Libertarianism, in 20 years the People will vote in an even more powerful nanny-state than was ever imagined before.

Of course the key to Cassidy’s approach is a move away from thinking about public policy as a matter of decisions and to consider it more as (ideally) a rational science. Cassidy is not all holding out that someone else should make decisions for you - classical paternalism - he’s saying we should organize our government around the science of human behavior (a science that wasn’t exhausted by Horatio Alger). You may want to call this a technocratic paternalism but, if so, you have to put your finger on what exactly is wrong with a technocracy. (Why is technocratic paternalism worse than irrational liberalism? Here I think the liberal answer is inevitably going to lean more towards religion than science.)

Of course whether or not it’s the government who should make these decisions is another matter. But I think it’s easy to see why Cassidy would argue that an objective government official might have a more dispassionate view what you need to save for retirement or what kind of mortgages are really feasible. Further, the private sector is organized around individual interests, so it’s hard to see what kind of objective view it might be able to hold forth on how people make decisions.