A few commenters looked at the post below and said, “Where’s the Rawls?” I was just making what I took to be a number of largely conceptual points about the economic patterns that emerge from social interaction — points mostly from Hayek and Nozick. That point is that the principles of social interaction are the primary subject of moral evaluation, not the patterns themselves.

This is Rawls’ view, too. Nozick’s criticisms notwithstanding, Rawls really isn’t concerned with patterns either. He’s worried about the principles of interaction, the terms of association. A just society is a scheme of cooperative mutuality. The basic rules of the game should benefit everyone. A good way to ensure a set of governing principles does benefit everyone is to pay special attention to how the least well-off fare under them. Rawls says: when choosing a set of principles, we should pick ones that leave the least advantaged class as well off as possible. I agree with this. This takes a comparative property of a pattern (the poor do better in this pattern than in alternative patterns) as a constraint on acceptable principles, but says nothing whatsoever about inequality. Indeed, Rawls offers what amounts to a powerful argument against fixating on inequality. Rawls says: fixate on the welfare of the least well off.

It’s also worth emphasizing that Rawls isn’t talking about the income distribution. He’s talking about primary goods. (”Distribution” in his sense is opposed to “allocation” and “distribution” is not about income.) Given a solid Hayekian understanding of the function of sound market institutions over time, it becomes easy to see that rising income inequality can and does often accompany innovation that leads to increasing equality in primary goods. But, again, Rawls isn’t even much concerned with equality in primary goods. He’s interested in maximizing the minimum.

It’s true that the difference principle is stated in terms of “conditions” social and economic inequalities must meet. I think this was a big, terribly confusing mistake, since it does no actual work. You could just ask: Are the poor doing better in this scheme than in alternatives? Now, this won’t satisfy pious Rawls purists, but Rawlsekianism does not try to hide the fact that it is a mongrel creed. For me, the main Rawlsian takeaway is that the mutuality at the heart of justice should lead us to put the welfare of the least-advantaged at the forefront of our deliberation over basic principles of association.

I’ve recently become a big fan of the eminent political theorist George Kateb (I’m actually pretty baffled about how it could be that I didn’t know of him until late last year), so I’m pretty thrilled he agreed to write the lead essay for this month’s Cato Unbound on the value of patriotism. A thoroughgoing individualist, he doesn’t find much value in it. Here is an especially fine passage:

The brute fact of patriotism is made brute by the inveterate inclination in men to associate virility with the exertion involved in killing and risking death. No theory can ever defeat or discredit this inclination, which helps to engender the fantasy that the competition of political units is the highest kind of team sports. Men love teams, love to live in a world where they are called on to back or play for their team against other teams, even though the sport of war is soaked in blood. Socratic notions of gratitude or Jamesian notions of infinite indebtedness are not necessary for this love. In the sport, where aristocrats used to play their games, elites now mobilize groups or masses to slaughter each other. Men can become peace-loving for a while, but not forever. The women who love them encourage their inclination to see team sports as the essence of their masculinity, and to call patriotic this inclination when it is projected into politics. The pity is that men lend their energies to a state that sooner or later embarks on an inherently unjust imperialist career and thus gets constantly engaged in policies that are deliberated in secrecy, and sustained by secrecy and propaganda, and removed from meaningful public deliberation. Patriotism is indispensable for sustaining this career of anti-democracy.

Now, I know a lot of folks think there is a kind of benign patriotism that is centered on the celebration of the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and the culture that values them. Maybe. But go to GOPAC and tell me that the patriotism of liberal principles, and not the vulgar “highest kind of team sports” eagles and bunting and wiretaps version, is the most salient incarnation of patriotism in America.

If you’re looking for reasons to not be a Rawlsian, please read my colleague Tom Palmer’s terrific new paper “No Exit: Framing the Problem of Justice” [pdf] for a profoundly illuminating discussion of why Rawls’s theory justice makes sense only within his illiberal and fantastically unrealistic zero-mobility assumption.

There are a lot of good libertarian criticisms of Rawls, but I think Tom’s may be the most damning I have ever read, probably because there is nothing really especially libertarian about it, unless challenging deeply question-begging assumptions about the nation-state as the inevitable and inescapable framework of justice is essentially libertarian. If I were to make the argument in one sentence it would be this: Rawls provides accounts of liberalism and justice that are essentially nationalist/anti-cosmopolitan, but since nationalism and anti-cosmopolitanism are pretty obviously illiberal and unjust he fails at a very fundamental level.

Here’s a taste:

The sleight-of-hand involved [in establishing "justice as fairness"] is remarkably similar to that typically involved in specification of the choice situation governing the provision of public goods. Once a decision has been made to produce a good on a non-exclusive basis, it is then asserted that the good cannot be produced through voluntary, uncoerced cooperation. Or the demonstration begins by assuming the existence of a good from which consumers cannot be excluded (or can only be excluded at some cost), when the problem is to produce such goods in the first place. Assuming that the good exists is hardly a solution to the problem of how to produce it. Similarly, by excluding exit or choice among options as an option, the problem of distribution of rights and obligations is converted into a pure bargaining game, which sets the stage for Rawls’s voluminous writings and the many jots and tittles added by his followers. By eliminating such options, Rawls does not solve a problem of justice or fair division; he creates it.

Tom’s paper is limited to speaking to rights of emigration or exit from a polity, but it points to a rather more general lesson. That it is impossible to discuss questions about the (in)justice of limiting the right to travel across state borders, or to discuss questions of the justice of the distribution of national citizenships within a pure Rawlsian framework goes to show how useless is that framework for thinking about questions of equality and distribution in an increasingly globally interdependent world. It also goes to show just how captive is Rawlsian political theory to what I think are a set mistaken, distinctively 19th and 20th-century background assumptions about the nation-state as more or less co-extensive with society.

Added: Tom’s essay may be found in Ordered Anarchy: Jasay and His Surroundings, ed. by Hartmut Kliemt and Hardy Bouillon (London: Ashgate, 2008)

One thing I wish decent liberals would get a handle on is this: the idea of the state as a benevolent scientific administrator of all aspects of the lives of its citizens is not a liberal idea. There is nothing about this conception of state power that tends, in principle, to promote liberal values. The values it will promote will be the values of the people who control it. Moreover, science isn’t partisan. Once we have created a infrastructure of technocratic control, if the science happens to say the economy will do marginally better if, say, more women spend more time in the kitchen, pregnant, rather than competing for social esteem on an equal footing with men, then the state is ready with its managerial tools to reshape our incentives, our lives, and our social structure. We need only wait for a faction to come to power that finds that this or that bit of science (or “science”) conveniently reinforces their prior impulses, and then those tools will be deployed.

These are the thoughts I had reading David Brooks’ play at writing John McCain’s domestic policy in his latest column. I don’t have time to pick through the trainwreck, but let me just note that Brooks is in favor of mandatory national service, no doubt to help shape young people’s conception of who they really belong to, and what their lives are really for. And he wants to send government agents into “chaotic” homes, so that the children there “have some authority in their lives.” Brooks is very keen to ensure that we all have a great deal of authority in our lives, it seems, and I’m afraid that John McCain is too.

So far I have found this month’s Cato Unbound extremely stimulating. It sure helps when you get to invite the discussants, but the problem of how exactly limited-government types think government can realistically be limited really is of the first importance.

I think Anthony de Jasay is right that incentive-compatibility problems plague attempts to keep government lean and limited. That said, I think a certain kind of anarchist, like de Jasay, tend to somewhat oversell the impossibility of limited government. As Gordon Tullock likes to emphasize, given the vast amount that could be extracted by political predation, the puzzle for the political scientist is to explain why so little is invested in rent-seeking. Part of the answer lies in the structural constraints de Jasay mentions in his essay. The prospect that financial and human capital may flee a grabbing hand, or the fear that the electorate will rise up in anger and panic when the thicket of opportunistic regulation has begun to strangle prosperity, may rein in government. But these are constraints implicit in the nature of things, not ones imposed by law as limits on lawmakers. So it is interesting that he also mentions the campaign-finance rule as a constraint on the size of government, since that seems open to choice, to design, in a way that the other constraints are not. This seems like an admission that certain rules can successfully bind.

I think I’m almost entirely in agreement with the main thrust of Jerry Gaus’s reply. The problem isn’t so much the weakness of formal, paper constraints, but the weakness of formal constraints that are not reinforced by our moral sentiments. If a formal rule is seen as merely conventional, and therefore revisable by the relevant authority, and not as moral, there may be little resistance to overriding it in order to meet the demands of weightier moral rules. I found this passage especially illuminating:

[I]f the basic normative commitments of classical liberals were widely conceived of as moral rules, then there would be much deeper resistance to government-made rules that seek to cancel or override them. The problem is that the opposite seems nearer the truth: for many citizens, their understanding of the moral norms related to fairness endorses government-made rules overriding the conventional rules of property. The welfare state reigns supreme not because the state and it allies have tricked the rest of us in a power grab; it reigns supreme because in the eyes of most citizens it conforms to the egalitarian fairness norms that have evolved with humans (Fong, Bowles, and Gintis, 2005). Classical liberals who convince themselves that the New Deal is best explained as a power grab by Roosevelt and his allies are manifestly deluded: it was (and still is) very widely seen as demanded by our sense of fairness.

I think this is on the right track. But I think it’s worth emphasizing that the power grab explanation is not at all inconsistent with the “mandate of fairness” explanation. Power-seeking politicians can create the perception that their role and their power is legitimate by appealing to deep-seated moral sentiments. Second, I’m not so sure that our egalitarian sentiments are all that close to a pure expression of egalitarian sharing norms. First, there is the artificiality of nationalism, and the modern welfare state is nothing if not an expression of economic and moral nationalism. To see co-nationals in a vast pluralistic territory as part of a common tribe in which even an attenuated form of ancient sharing norms apply requires an incredible, imaginative, “unnatural” expansion of the circle of affinity.

But I think the general point stands. Moral rules are processed differently than conventional rules. If limited government is going to have a chance, it must be in sync with our moral sentiments and dispositions to moral judgments. I don’t think this is impossible. I’m pretty well sold on something like Jonathan Haidt’s multidimensional conception of the moral sense. And there may be something like a classical liberal calibration of the moral sentiments, such that certain rules limiting the domain of political power and collective choice may come to be experienced as distinctively moral, and therefore non-optional.

Now, I don’t know that there is such a thing, but there might be. I do think there is a broadly liberal calibration of the moral sense, I think that it is prevalent in liberal societies, and that is what makes them stably liberal. That means, in no small part, that the government is effectively limited in what it may do to people. Limited government is evidently possible because it is actual.

The idea that the there are various dimensions of the moral sense each with its own parameters implies that morality is a fill-in-the-blanks slate. The moral sense then isn’t an exogenous variable acting as a hard constraint on feasible social coordination. Nor is it infinitely malleable. There are only so many combinatorial possibilities, and the feasible cultural/developmental paths from one combination of settings to another may be quite limited.

But this kind of view does I think put ideas about pluralism and liberal neutrality that both Jerry and I are very fond of in a tight spot. The multidimensional moral sense view makes it pretty clear that liberal society requires that a certain kind of moral personality become common in the population. A specifically classical liberal society, in which the certain further limits on the scope of politics are felt strongly to be moral, may require an even more tightly-focused and even more-broadly shared, fine-tuning of the moral sense. But I’m not certain I’d even want that.

Hey, political theory geeks! This month’s Cato Unbound should be pretty sweet. Here’s the editorial summary of Anthony de Jasay’s lead essay, “Government, Bound or Unbound?“:

Reprising the topic of his 1989 essay, “Is Limited Government Possible?” political theorist Anthony de Jasay continues to express limited skepticism. According to de Jasay, the incentive of political actors is to gain power by putting together winning coalitions, and to stay in power by rewarding their supporters at the expense of their opponents. If constitutional limits stand in their way, they will eventually be reinterpreted, undermined, or otherwise worked around. Governments are more delayed than limited by constitutional rules, like a lady with the key to her own chastity belt. If governments are effectively limited, de Jasay argues, then it is by means of the structure of campaign finance, the practical limits on tax rates, and public panic at the prospect of economic ruin. De Jasay admits conventional cultural and moral norms may limit government, but doubts these are strong enough to fully check the interests that drive politics.

It’s long, but very worthwhile. Stay tuned for University of Arizona political philosopher Gerald Gaus, author of On Philosophy, Politics and Economics; Michael Munger, chair of the Duke University political science department; and Randy Barnett, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of Restoring the Lost Constitution.

I’m more than a bit baffled by this idea:

Despite the fact that Ron Paul, through his profitable, base-building newsletters, has actively spread and reinforced racist ideas, the really important thing here is that an end to the war on drugs would do more good for African American men than anything else. And since Ron Paul would, if elected president of the United States, end the drug war, anyone concerned for the welfare of African American men really ought to be in his corner, whether or not he has cultivated financial and political support through racist agitprop.

One obvious difficulty with this line of reasoning is that Ron Paul will never be elected President of the United States, and has about as much chance of ending the drug war as I do. He is little more than a symbol for a set of ideas—ideas his complicity with racism has tainted in many people’s minds, whose prospects he may have damaged. I want to end the war on drugs, therefore I’d rather people not associate that idea with Ron Paul.

One of the embarrassments of the American libertarian movement is its failure to sufficiently acknowledge how collective bias against blacks, women, gays, immigrants etc. deprives blacks, women, gays, immigrants, etc. of their freedom. To my mind, serious forms of structural discrimination are much worse for liberty than certain kinds of coercion. Libertarians make themselves look ridiculous when they claim that everyone is fully and equally free as long as no one is coercing anyone. Now, this isn’t obvious. At least it wasn’t to me. It took me a good while to come around to this view—to see just how much structural bias does deprive people of their freedom or of the value of their freedom. But I am embarrassed that it took me as long as it did.

Here’s where I’m coming from philosophically. I am no Rothbardian or Randian. I do not understand the argument that concludes in the categorical prohibition of all coercion, but which permits some other things far more harmful to the pursuit of happiness than most ticky-tack government regulation. I agree with some aspects of the 19th century criticism of classical liberal freedom as “merely formal.” I believe that the liberty most worth caring about is positive liberty—the ability effectively to enact one’s plans, to achieve ones ends. In my judgment, a regime of strong negative rights is the best guarantee of positive liberty. Government attempts to guarantee the worth of our liberties by recognizing positive rights to a minimum income or certain services like health care often (but not always) undermine the framework of market and civil institutions most likely to enhance liberty over the long run, and should be limited. But this is really an empirical question about what really does maximize individuals’ chances of formulating and realizing meaningful projects and lives.

Within this framework, racism, sexism, etc., which strongly limit the useful exercise of liberty are clear evils. Now, I am ambivalent about whether the state ought to step in and do anything about it. Maybe I’ll get into the complexities of that question some other time. What I am not ambivalent about is that racism and sexism, etc. deprive many millions of Americans of the full value of their freedom. Insofar as Ron Paul’s racist newsletters propped up and encouraged racist norms, he has actually helped cultivate a cultural climate hostile to the prospects of “the blacks”, whether or not he would end the drug war in the miraculous event of his presidency.

In my opinion, it is the responsibility of decent people concerned with liberty to at least denounce, if not actively work to tear down, the racist beliefs and norms that enable liberty-killing structural discrimination. If you don’t think ending discrimination is the government’s job–that this is the sort of thing that should be done by persuasion, not force—then you should take this responsibility extra seriously. It’s your job to persuade. If you think the government should do nothing but stay out of the way, but you are indifferent to racism and people who publish racist newsletters for financial and political gain, then it is not unreasonable to conclude either that you don’t really care about other people’s liberty, or think racism has nothing to do with it. In either case, you would be wrong.

It now seems quite clear to me that Ron Paul has for years used racism, among other vicious sentiments, to build financial and political support.

I’ve been pretty negative about Paul from the start, attracted only to his antiwar stance, since I find his old right brand of nationalist, populist anti-statism pretty repellent and at odds with the cause of human liberty. I didn’t know about the newsletters, but I’m not that surprised by them. I knew that he was close to Lew Rockwell, who many people speculate wrote many of Paul’s most shameful newsletters, and I knew Rockwell’s reputation as a racist and homophobe. And the syndrome of positions Paul has staked on immigration, sovereignty, and constitution idolatry is in my experience often correlated with racist sentiments of exactly the kind on display in the newsletters.

To my mind, the people who are trying to salvage something of Paul’s reputation are just making themselves look bad. No matter how much money, time, and devotion you’ve given to someone, sometimes the only right thing to do is spit on the ground and walk away, hurting. If it wasn’t before, it is now clear that this just isn’t a man who deserves decent people’s support.

I had hoped Paul would do more good than harm for libertarianism, inspiring lots of college kids to get interested in the ideas of liberty. But now I’m pretty certain that he’s done a lot of harm, causing many people to associate libertarianism with racist cranks. I think it’s pretty important then to publicize the fact that there are genuinely liberal versions of libertarianism out there. The young people who got interested in libertarian ideas through Paul need to be able to find Cato, Reason, the IHS, and other places where one can learn about classical liberalism, which isn’t about keeping the Mexicans out, deploring the abolition of slavery, or hoarding gold.

If I can find time over the next few weeks, I’m going to write a series of posts explaining why key elements of Ron Paul’s popular appeal, such as an antipathy to the freedom of movement, a fixation on national sovereignty, and constitutional fetishism, are inconsistent with a real concern for human freedom. More generally, I want to say something about why flag-waving “libertarianism in one country” types are ultimately no friends of liberty.

In the newish Public Reason blog, Robert Talisse writes:

I’ve been working on Berlin-style value pluralism lately. I’m particularly concerned with the attempt (made by Galston and Crowder, among others) to derive liberal political commitments from value pluralism. My sense is that value pluralism has no entailments regarding politics. But that’s a topic for another day.

Nope. It’s a topic for today! My sense is that every value theory has no entailments regarding politics. Whatever value it is you’re after, it’s an empirical question what institutional arrangement will produce it. Which is why political philosophers are useless in that Kantian “concepts without experience are empty” sort of way without a bit of social science. Liberal neutrality is a practical way of dealing with the fact of moral disagreement — with the fact of pluralism in moral conceptions. You don’t need the deeper truth of value pluralism to generate the fact of pluralism. But actual value pluralism, if true, would help explain why observed pluralism is deep — people are out there responding to all these different actual values and prioritizing them in different ways — which would tend to reinforce the need to accommodate diversity in moral conceptions, which would tend to support liberal toleration and liberal state neutrality. That’s not an entailment. One does not derive it. But given the historical fact that liberalism has been a fairly practically successful way of dealing with the fact of religious and moral diversity, its pretty easy to understand how metaethical value pluralism might be thought to point toward liberalism. Right?

Independence Day generally involves an outpouring of emotion usually described as “patriotism.” In the U.S., this generally involves a characteristic confusion between love of country and love of the principles the country is supposed to embody. I’ve just read George Kateb’s brilliant essay, “Is Patriotism a Mistake?,” from his collection of essays Patriotism and Other Mistakes (the lead essay alone is worth the price of the whole book.) What better time to cast aspersion on unthinking patriotism?

A country is not a discernible collection of discernible individuals like a team or a faculty or a local chapter of a voluntary association. Of course a country is a delimited territory. It is also a place, a setting, a geography; it has a landscape, cityscapes, perhaps seascapes; it has old buildings as well as new ones; it has historical sights; it has a light, an air, an atmosphere; it has a special look. But it is also constructed out of transmitted memories true and false; a history usually mostly falsely sanitized or falsely heroized; a sense of kinship of a largely invented purity; and social ties that are largely invisible or impersonal, indeed, abstract, yet by an act of insistent or of dream-like imagination made visible and personal. 

What, then, is patriotism really? It is a readiness to die and to kill for an abstraction: nothing you can see all of, or feel as you feel the presence of another person, or comprehend. Patriotism, then, is a readiness to die and to kill for what is largely a figment of the imagination. For this figment, one commits oneself to a militarized and continuously politicized conception of life, a conception that is entirely masculinist.

[...]

I ask us to notice that an abstraction of the sort I say patriotism is, is not the same thing as a principle. There is a very sharp contrast between a readiness to die and kill for an abstraction and a readiness to do the same for a principle. A principle must be universal, but an abstraction can have any scope. To embrace a principle, which is of course abstract in some sense, is to pledge oneself to a rule to guide one’s perception of the world and, if one has sufficient integrity, to guide one’s conduct in it. A moral principle … governs one’s conduct toward others, and the expectations one had to the conduct of others. A moral principle must be conceived as universalist, and asks for consistent application; and it aims at respect for persons or individuals, not abstract entities of imagination. There is also a sharp contrast between an abstraction like patriotism and a tangible interest like being protected or preserved in one’s rights of life, liberty, and property, for which purpose it may also sometimes be thought necessary to risk death and to kill.

[...]

The highest moral principles teach restraint of self-preference, whether the self is oneself or a group-self; while, on the other hand, a person’s basic rights and tangible self-interest, in a tolerable society, are supposed to be practiced or achieved without morally cognizable harm to the same rights and interests of others. In contrast, patriotism is self-idealization; it is group narcissism without any self-restraint except for a frequently unreliable prudence, and carried to death-dealing lengths. Patriotism is one of the more radical forms of group-thinking, or group identity and affiliation. Being armed is what makes it radical.

We all are touched with what Yi-Fu Tuan calls “topophilia,” a sentimental connection to place, and cannot avoid indulging in it. But we can avoid making an overriding ideal of it. Indepedence Day ought not be a celebration of this place, America, its imaginary history, and the imaginary solidarity of its people. It ought to be a celebration of the universal ideal of a society in which all are equally without right to rule one another and equally invested with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — a celebration of the ideals of the Declaration. Yes, you will enjoy your potato salad, your apple pie. Perhaps you’ll enjoy fireworks and tiny American flags. You may even catch yourself enjoying Lee Greenwood. But be sure to take a minute to enjoy the abundant happiness you have caught and the liberty that made it possible. And do consider how wonderful it would be if everyone, American and not, had it so good.  

Since I asked for it, I intend to reply to Reihan’s long immigration post. I’m totally not stalling! It’s just so long. In the mean time, let me ask a question about Reihan’s ideas on the “Fourth Way.”

I do actually have broader thoughts on the Fourth Way, but I need time to organize them. Let me just say that the Fourth Way won’t be just a phenomenon of the center-right. It is a reaction to the Third Way that will take Soho and Easterhouse forms, liberal and dirigiste forms. Broadly speaking, it will emphasize authority and security over cultural laissez-faire. It will be market-friendly, but in the sense that the market is strenuous, serious, and growth-enhancing, not emancipatory. It will be an awkward and problematic mix, but effective. 

Naturally, I think this sounds lousy—even slightly fascist. The obvious question: Effective for what? Who wants this?

And what’s this?

… merely declaring this or that violation of economic or even civic freedom unconstitutional can’t stop a determined democratic majority — our shared conception of political legitimacy, for better or for worse, is rooted in this majoritarian understanding. Movement towards juristocracy hasn’t altered this fundamental dynamic. This represents a serious problem for the partisans of limited government — they must keep most of the public with them most of the time to achieve their objectives.

This is smudging the line between a fact and a seemingely related non-fact. True: there’s no stopping the mob when it gets up a head of steam. False: our shared conception of political legitimacy is not majoritarian, as far as I can see. All but a few Americans just shrug and accept it when courts overturn popular laws as unconstitutional. And there is a firm sense that certain ideals—especially those embodied in the Constitution—rightly trump majoritarian will. So I don’t buy this description of the broadly shared American sense of political legitimacy. Moreover, just about every American is a partisan of limited government; we just differ on what we’d like limited. Liberals don’t need majorities hyped on the whole package of limitations on political threats to liberty. We need some group of people or other to be very jealous of each form of liberty, and the rest of the population to be not very strongly motivated to undermine them.

When I try to figure out what’s going on with Reihan, my first guess is that he thinks he’s doing a kind of non-ideal theory that takes the constraints of status quo public opinion seriously. He’s trying to formulate an ideological position that can bring together standing constituencies in American politics to effect real political change to best approximate his (obscure to me) set of ideals. But then his comments on democratic legitimacy and the alleged related problems for defenders of liberty make me think this isn’t exactly what he’s doing. Maybe I don’t grasp what it is that Reihan really wants politically — what he thinks a “fourth way” would be effective for — just because he changes his mind a lot. But I sort of suspect that his first-best ideal theory is obscure not because he doesn’t really have one, but because it wouldn’t actually be very attractive to Americans if described plainly, and what he’s doing is looking for marketing angles to get the package of policies (each one of which may indeed be attractive to some group of Americans or other) that together are supposed to roughly add up to his ideal  to 51 percent. At which point, I guess, we just have to accept it, even it turns out to be a gross violation of core American ideals of substantive liberty, since our shared sense of political legitimacy is allegedly majoritarian?

Maybe that’s not right. Let’s see… I guess I keep getting stuck on this: Does Reihan really think that an awkward and problematic politics of authority, security and cultural control aligned with strenuous, serious, growth-enhancing but not liberating markets (I swear that’s what I just read!) is actually in high in demand among real American voters? Because if he does, then that’s just plain weird. Or does Reihan think that given the right leader with the right rhetoric behind the right policies, it would be possible to get Americans behind that kind of politics? That might be true, but if so, it’s sort of terrifying. Which raises the question: Why would you want to do this? Which leads to the deeper question: what reasons do we have to favor the values such a politics would serve. But I’m not clear on what those values are, much less the reasons we might have to favor them.   

No doubt I’m getting Reihan’s intentions and opinions all wrong here, and I welcome his correction and illumination. But I do puzzle over why it’s so hard to get a good bead on what he really thinks about what a good society looks like. Maybe it’s all in the book!

Also, the new, less editorially coherent American Scene looks great and is a lot of fun to read. Congrats!

Grinding his Christian universalism under his nationalist heel, Ross Douthat breezily sets forth a multiply fallacious argument on the premise that there is no intellectual or moral difference between confiscatory redistribution and voluntary exchange when citizens of other countries are involved:

A slightly better way of putting what Matt is driving at, I think, is this: Large-scale immigration from Mexico to the United States is a form of de facto humanitarianism, and since Americans are generally leery of humanitarian spending (primarily because we overestimate the size of our existing foreign aid budget), liberal humanitarians have a vested interest in preserving the existing immigration system. It’s a rare issue where business interests line up on the side of raising the living standards of Third World peasants, and why mess with a good thing? Better, as Matt suggests, to go after the global elite in other arenas – like tax policy, say – where the business class’s preferred policies don’t have humanitarian externalities.

To which one might respond that there’s something slightly perverse about pursuing humanitarian ends through policies that lower the incomes of your poorest citizens and raise the incomes of your richest citizens. If I proposed a new AIDS-in-Africa initiative and advocated funding it through a regressive tax that included a tax credit for families making over $75,000, I doubt that many liberals would line up behind the proposal.

I’ll muster some charity and assume that Ross is simply confused here. But he really is badly confused.

It’s a rather profound error to characterize voluntary trade between American employers and Mexicans workers as equivalent to ”humanitarian spending,” as if money tax revenue had been withdrawn from the Treasury and sent to Mexicans. There is indeed a pecuniary externality of Mexican workers in the American labor market – downward price pressure from competition — and this can indeed have an effect on the pattern of American incomes. But it is a pretty basic and embarrassing mistake to confuse (1) coercive state confiscation and reallocation of income with (2) changing patterns of income from voluntary exchange.

Perhaps Ross really does think that the U.S. government has taken money from the pockets of the producers of Oceans 13 by refusing to ban Pirates of the Carribean, but I think he’s smarter than that. Government tax policy requires justification. Distribution of tax revenue require justification. Exercising our rights doesn’t.

That Ross is liable see the issue in this weird, mistaken way does indicate that he thinks some sort of nationalism is the legitimate moral baseline. The liberal (in the broad sense) presumption of freedom, on the other hand, has it that unrestricted voluntary cooperation between human beings is the moral baseline. Deviations from this require special justification. Given the liberal baseline, labor market restrictions (that’s what we’re talking about here – whether to further restrict American labor markets), besides standing as a violation of the rights of both Americans and Mexicans to freely associate and trade with one another, amount to a transfer of income from Mexican workers and American consumers to some low-skilled American workers. In addition to the basic violation of liberty, this is a monstrously regressive transfer, harming Mexican workers much more than it helps low-skilled American workers.

But Ross seems to understand the situation in a way that, as far as I can tell, completely discounts the welfare gain to Mexicans, and conceives of the effects of millions of people exercising their human rights as requiring some kind of special justification. This makes sense only relative to a nationalist worldview where ”humanitarian spending” is something benighted “liberal humanitarians” want to do and the actual welfare effects of this “spending” on foreigners is simply irrelevant to the moral calculus; all that matters is the effect of the policy on persons with valid U.S. passports. If the policy turns out to (on average) reduce the incomes of low-skilled U.S. workers and raise the incomes of  higher-skilled U.S. workers, then it’s evidently “perverse.” So if we have to placate uppity U.S. humanitarian liberals by throwing money at poor people somewhere, surely this isn’t the way we want to do it.

But what about Mexican workers and their families? Who cares! Wrong passport! What about the lost liberty of Americans to trade with Mexican workers on the labor market? Well, I guess we decide what liberties Americans have based on some undermotivated nation-level idea of just distribution. Why? Who knows!? (And who cares if it keeps Mexicans out?!) I don’t think Ross denies the fact that Mexican immigration on average makes Americans better off. So a merely utilitarian nationalism would have us accept even more immigrants. You could try to dress Ross’s view up as Rawlsian nationalism, demanding that a policy improve the lot of the least well-off Americans. But I think Ross’s argument really amounts to populist nationalism, appealing to populist class sentiments to help achieve a goal he wants anyway: a less Mexican America.  

Well, I understand that a certain kind of nationalism may well be the default baseline for a broad swathe of American public opinion, but that makes it no less repugnant from the perspective of both human liberty and human welfare. Democrats and then Republicans in the American South long succeeded in winning elections by drumming up racist majorities. (Integrating blacks fully into the labor market no doubt put downward pressure on low-skilled white wages, and I don’t doubt successful politicians brought this up.) But I don’t think this speaks well of our democracy.

This whole issue really turns on what we take to be the relevant moral baseline. I would very much like to see Ross defend what I see as his form of nationalism. From where I sit, there’s something more than “slightly perverse” about denying our human rights to freely cooperate and locking very poor people out of our labor markets so that relatively wealthy people whose grandparents got here first don’t have to take a paycut.

Paul Krugman has published an interesting article on trade and inequality at VoxEu that nicely illustrates the morally puzzling nationalist assumptions of standard welfare economics.

After economists looked hard at the numbers, however, the consensus was that the effect of trade on inequality was probably modest. Recently, Ben Bernanke cited these results – but he recognised a problem: “Unfortunately, much of the available empirical research on the influence of trade on earnings inequality dates from the 1980s and 1990s and thus does not address later developments. Whether studies of the more recent period will reveal effects of trade on the distribution of earnings that differ from those observed earlier is to some degree an open question.”

But the question isn’t really that open. It’s clear that applying the same models to current data that, for example, led William Cline of the Peterson Institute to conclude in 1997 that trade was responsible for a 6% widening in the college-high school gap would lead to a much larger estimate today. Furthermore, some of the considerations that once seemed to set limits on the possible inequality-promoting effects of trade now seem much less constraining.

There are really two key points here: the rise of

China, and the growing fragmentation of production.

Conclusion:

What all this comes down to is that it’s no longer safe to assert, as we could a dozen years ago, that the effects of trade on income distribution in wealthy countries are fairly minor. There’s now a good case that they are quite big, and getting bigger.

This doesn’t mean that I’m endorsing protectionism. It does mean that free-traders need better answers to the anxieties of those who are likely to end up on the losing side from globalisation.

I’m just going to assume that Krugman is right about everything. Maybe he is. If a large part of Krugman’s argument is that we increasingly buy stuff from China (and other such countries), since they can produce it more cheaply, then it is a large part of Krugman’s argument that ”the economy” in which Americans participate is increasingly one in which parties to complex forms of exchange work and reside in different nation-states. Krugman, as far as I can tell, thinks the increasingly globalized network of exchange creates a larger overall surplus than would exist in a more highly protectionist world, and Americans on average are better off for it. But, the argument seems to be, the share of that larger surplus going specifically to low-skilled American workers is smaller than it would be in a more heavily protected economy. These folks are on ”the losing side.” The policy upshot, I’m sure, is that “winners” might need to compensate “losers.”

I think there are lots of conceptual problems here that flow from knee-jerk economic nationalism. Let’s imagine just U.S. - Chinese trade, to make things simpler.

First, it is not clear why the scenario of a continued, less-globalized status quo ante, in which low-skilled American workers earn higher wages, counts as the relevant baseline. That is a world in which, I guess, we are supposed to imagine that the Chinese economy has not been liberalized, and so there is less competition from Chinese workers. Implicit in this idea is that unreformed Chinese communism — which keeps its workers off the world labor market – is a subsidy to low-skilled American workers. But now the subsidy has been withdrawn, making low-skilled workers “losers.” There is clearly a kind of perspective relativity going on here. We could just as well say that the prior generation of low-skilled workers were winners, receiving a bonus from Chinese economic illiberalism. I think the normative baseline should be competitive world labor markets — a world in which individuals’ passports have no effect on their freedom to trade with one another. And so the opening of Chinese labor markets is a reversion toward the baseline, and a withdrawal (from other low-skilled workers) of a positive externality of injustice.

Second, it seems to me that American low-skilled workers are suffering from a classic pecuniary externality (that is, the withdrawal of a positive pecuniary externality). If you and I are both in the hot dog biz, and I sell my hot dogs for a lower price, a reduction in your profits may be (to you) a negative external effect of my offering a lower price. But this is not the kind of thing you can claim as a “harm” or a basis for compensation. Pecuniary externalities are essential to competitive markets: we want them. Nobody is doing anything to low-skilled domestic laborers. It is simply that their segment of the labor market has become more competitive, bidding down wages. It’s just as if you had to cut the price of your hot dogs to stay in business, resulting in lower profits. Now imagine that our friend Larry is now buying hot dogs from me rather than you, since my hot dogs are cheaper. There are gains from our trade, which he and I divide. Larry comes to me not you, because he gets a relatively bigger bit of the surplus than he did with you. At the end of the year, Larry has more cash in his pocket than he would have had if he had been trading with you. And you have less in your pocket than you would have had if he had been trading with you. So the inequality between you and Larry has increased, all because I’ve been offering a cheaper hot dog. But I had next to nothing before I was selling cheap hot dogs. So the inequality between me and Larry has decreased.       

That’s what it’s like, isn’t it? Many Americans get a boost in real wages from the relative decline in prices due to cheaper stuff made in China. But that boost isn’t enough to fully compensate workers who would have been doing the work the Chinese are doing (if the ChiComs hadn’t opened their markets.) Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Chinese edge ever slightly closer to American wages. Which change in inequality matters morally? It simply isn’t obvious that it’s the gap among fellow Americans.    

Now, it may be the case that if the class of citizens who suffer a pecuniary externality is large enough, they may drum up effective political demand for restrictions on trade (for reinstating their previous subsidy, by other means), which would make most other citizens worse off in the short term, and everyone worse off in the long term. So we might want to enact direct wage subsidies, or an increase in the EITC, retraining programs, or whatever, to get those on the ”losing side” of globalization from trying to use the political process to make themselves “winners” again. But, if that’s the real argument, we should be clear that the point of this is not to ameliorate the injustice of increasing national income inequality caused by global trade, because there is probably no such injustice. Increasing national inequality may be a side-effect of a straightforward improvement in justice globally.

It may also be that Krugman is not right about everything. 

Following in my illustrious footsteps as an Economist.com guest blogger, Brookings senior fellow Jason Furman writes thusly of rising income inequality: 

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s income inequality data, the top 1 percent of households have seen their incomes go up by 7 percent and the bottom 80 percent have seen their income shares go down by 7 percent.  In total that is a $664 billion increase in inequality, representing $7,000 for each household in the bottom 80 percent and nearly $600,000 for each household in the top 1 percent.

That number motivates a Hamilton Project tax strategy paper co-authored by Larry Summers, Jason Bordoff and myself that is being released today.

It is far from obvious what has caused the change; in just the last month alone the National Bureau of Economic Research has released three working papers with divergent explanations:  a reduction in the bargaining power of workers, an increased reward for skills and worker productivity, and the destruction of good jobs by trade.

Regardless of the cause of rising inequality, lefties, utilitarians, Rawlsians and anyone with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system should all be concerned.  As Alan Greenspan memorably stated, “income inequality is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable.  You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.”

Well, I consider myself a sort of Rawlsian (a Rawlsekian!) with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system. Should I be concerned? I agree with the sainted Greenspan that capitalism cannot survive a widespread conviction that it is unjust. And I agree that income inequality is one of those things that some thinkers like wheel out to try to convince us that capitalism is unjust, at least around the edges, in order to build popular support for such things as more steeply “progressive taxes combined with expanded benefits like health insurance,” like Furman wants. But I’m not so worried by rising income inequality as I am by Furman’s facile slide from income inequality numbers, which are meaningless by themselves, to the possibility of a crisis of legitimacy.

It is worth repeatedly and forcefully emphasizing that income inequality may or may not be symptomatic of injustice. The three hypotheses for rising inequality Furman mentions are perfectly consistent with advances in justice. And if they are generating income inequality, then it may vindicate capitalism. For example, the loss of jobs, a decrease in wages, or a decrease in bargaining power for some workers may be a consequence of lifting coercive restrictions on voluntary exchange across borders — restrictions that are themselves a form of injustice. Furman himself notes that protectionist policies could decrease inequality, though he advises against them, and rightly so, since they are unjust. But if protectionist policies are lifted, and inequality increases, that uptick in inequality is a side-effect of justice, not a symptom of injustice.

Inequality may reflect real injustice in our culture and institutions, and some portion of it probably does. But then our focus ought to be on rooting out those injustices, not papering them over with confiscatory redistribution which, in the absence of a reason to do it other than arbitrarily reducing measured inequality, is straightforwardly immoral.

Let’s set aside the matter of the intelligibility of “shares” of “national income” as a subject of justice for another time.

[Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty.]  

I like Richard Chappell’s way of putting the point I was trying to make about the allocation of citizenships:

… it’s not as though citizenship is some positive entity that we’re simply omitting to provide. A non-citizen is not lacking in any intrinsic capacity. What citizenship provides is permission — it simply serves to remove the obstructions we would otherwise place in their way. In other words, social resources are liberties, and arguably should be considered the natural ‘default’ or baseline position. Citizenship isn’t something we grant; it’s something we cease to deny.

However, I’m not sure the last claim can be right. I can’t see how citizenship can be a natural default. There are no states in nature.

Suppose there is a naturally occurring orchard that is no one’s property. If someone put a fence around the orchard, or divided it into multiple fenced parcels,  and sought to exclude others from the fruit, they would need a good justification. I think there can be a good justification, which is provided by David Schmidtz in his paper “The Institution of Property.” I think it can be tempting to see the world as a big commons, like the orchard, and the boundaries of nation states as parcels that fence in the commons. Actually, I think that’s exactly the way to think about it. Then, one might try to justify the system of nation states on analogy with the justification of property. But the justification of parceling off the commons is that often this is a necessary condition for leaving enough and as good  for others–otherwise, the fruit may just disappear forever. Unless we can assign certain rights to exclude, we get all consumption and no production. Soon enough, there is nothing left to consume, and people die or suffer from deprivation. There is more to consume if there is more produced, and since exclusion is a condition of production, people need a certain system of exclusion: property rights. Are states like that?

Mostly, no. Now, a certain system of norms and institutions can be may be extremely beneficial to the people living under them. If the integrity of that system requires exclusion, than it might be justified. I take it that this is what some conservatives have in mind when they argue that if the U.S. lets in too many Mexicans, the norms that undergird broadly beneficial American institutions will weaken to the general detriminent. So, the preservation of the conditions for mutually beneficial order within a certain geographical region may be a justification for exclusion — if only as a means of keeping the in-flow of persons well-regulated. There may be no justification for keeping someone out, period, but there may be justification for making them wait in line. How fast the line should move will be an empirical matter of the robustness of the mutually beneficial institutions inside the fence to new entrants with different characteristics.

But that kind of thinking doesn’t get us anywhere near the justification of the system of states. Why do we think we can justify the nation state, but must justify the system of property? Many, perhaps most, people are made worse off by the fact that they are both fenced inside the state where they were born, and fenced out of other states. If it doesn’t make most people better off, the system of states is hardly justified. In light of the fact that most people don’t benefit from the system of internal entrapment and external exclusion that characterizes the global system of states — a rather obvious fact when you think about it for a second — don’t we have to reconsider the previous argument for exclusion? 

If there is an ongoing positive-sum game inside the fence, which billions outside the fence would like to come inside and play, then what should we say to them? If additional players to the positive sum game reduces the payoffs to the incumbent players, then the incumbent players will not want to let anyone through the fence. But if the benefit to new players is greater than the loss to incumbent players, shouldn’t we take that into account? I grasp and agree with the idea that in-flow needs to be well-regulated to avoid the erosion of the institutions that make a place attractive in the first place. Yet the idea that we discount the potentional welfare gains to people outside the fence by bringing them inside simply because they are not already inside the fence strikes me as monstrously, stupefyingly immoral.

Take any plausible liberal theory of the moral legitimacy of the nation-state. It will turn out that all but a handful of  states fail even a fairly generous test of legitimacy. How, then, can successfully liberal states justify their complicity in an overall system that literally traps billions of people in poverty and injustice? I can’t see how the system of states can possibly be justified without some kind of mutual assurance of mobility and the kind of jurisdictional competition that creates. 

Anyway, back to the point about the allocation of citizenship… Citizenship is conceptually tied to the idea of a state. A state is like a club and your citizenship is like a membership. The problem is that the system of clubs has no justfication. The few morally decent clubs have no moral basis for not making more many more memberships available, and, insofar as they wield influence on  indecent clubs, are morally obliged to not  assist them in fencing their immiserated and oppressed people in, and may be obliged to assist citizens of illegitimate states (indecent clubs) in gaining membership to some decent club or other. 

Some embryonic thoughts on justice, citizenship, and the distribution of passports…

Political philosophers sometimes completely confuse justice for something else, like some kind of disposition of stuff among people. It’s confusing and confused when they talk about “distribution” because it evokes the idea that all this stuff is just out there and that the fundamental institutions and rules of game (the “basic structure”) somehow distribute the preexisting stuff in this way or that. If the distribution isn’t fair, then someone can just redistribute it until it is fair.

This is, of course, massively confused. The deep objection to this way of thinking is that different basic structures don’t so much determine how stuff is distributed, but determine whether or not there is stuff at all, and how much. You don’t need to justify to anyone why they have less than someone else; you have to justify to them why they have less than their counterpart in some feasible, alternative set of institutions. Because wealth is created and not just moved around, and more wealth is created under certain institutional schemes than others, the question isn’t so much one of distribution as production or creation. The question of whether people live under institutions in which they can realize their capacities and reliably acquire the necessary means to successfully enact their life-plans is mainly a question of what might be called productive justice.  One of the things a morally legitimate government ensures are the institutions of production that make the achievement of good lives possible and even probable. People are owed such institutions — they have ‘em coming — in virtue of being people.

Maddeningly, most people on Earth don’t have these institutions — the institutions of liberal capitalism. This isn’t primarily the fault of the rich people who do have them; it is a pathetically common form of intellectual deformation to think other people are poor because we are rich. It is primarily the fault of political elites who control poor countries for failing to set up and secure the institutions of productive justice. One thing the citizens of rich countries owe the world’s poor people is to not give money to the corrupt elites that rule them.

Anyway, corrupt rulers aside, what the world’s less fortunate most need isn’t a chunk of our wealth, but the capacity to produce their own. There are two ways to achieve this. First, install liberal capitalism where the people are. Second, let the people come to where liberal capitalism is.

Strangely, there appears to be next to nothing in the mainstream political philosophy literature (though maybe I’m missing something), that drives home the arbitrary distribution of citizenship. It’s funny, because citizenship, unlike wealth, can be created out of thin air, and is distributed according to a few largely arbitrary principles.

So here’s my idea. Individuals and families in countries below a certain threshold of average wealth can register at the Embassies of, say, OECD countries to take part in a citizenship lottery. Each of the participating countries pledges to create a certain number of new citizenships (say 1/2 percent of their current population per year — in the U.S. that would be 1.5 million). The lottery randomly picks individual/families and randomly assigns them to passports. You don’t have to move anywhere. You’re now just a family of Zimbabweans who are also Dutch citizens. Now, I don’t think this is politically feasible, but it makes more sense than Pogge’s “global resources dividend,” which completely misunderstands the nature of the problem.

Another possibility: coalitions of successful liberal capitalist countries simply buy huge chunks of territory from illiberal leaders, and start new countries in each major geographic region. Current residents get double citizenship, and all property claims are formalized. Set up liberal institutions through a kind of multilateral colonial rule.  Start handing out a regulated flow of passports to people from around the region, which can ramp up in numbers as the economic institutions are entrenched, and democratic institutions are developed. The idea is to both secure rights and justice for people who wouldn’t otherwise enjoy them, while at the same time creating regional population drain in a way that stimulates jurisdictional competition, increasing the probability that nearby nations will finally get around to implementing the institutions of justice.

Less dramatically, we should plump for ever-broadening common regional labor markets that allow people to cross borders to work in nations with better institutions and opportunities than they have in their home countries.

Why isn’t there more discussion and development of ideas like these? Could be that they’re idiotic ideas. But my guess is that if you’re obsessed with the idea that justice primarily concerns the disposition of material holdings among everyone who happens to have a passport issued by the same jurisdictional public goods provider (Basic Income Grants now!), then you’re not going to welcome the added complexity that comes from justifying not giving passports to people who would benefit massively from them. Or something like that…

Anyway, the general question: If handing out new passports doesn’t cost those of us who already have them anything (on average), then shouldn’t we, as a matter of justice, give out as many as we can until it does cost us? Shouldn’t we think a lot harder about where that limit is?

I found Robert Wright’s NYT op-ed in praise of the Army both chilling and revelatory. Here’s the core sentiment of the article:

[T]he whole, larger stereotype — that the military is a right-wing institution, best viewed with skepticism if not cynicism by the left — is way off. Growing up in, or at least amid, the Army helped make me a liberal — not because I reacted against my environment, but because I absorbed its values. If all of America were more like the Army, it would be a better country.

Bob goes on to praise the way the military mixes race and class, creates a channel of social and economic mobility, provides good medical care to Privates and Generals alike, and is pervaded by a sense of solidarity and shared purpose. I think these are in fact admirable features of the armed forces, and they’re worth cultivating — in the armed forces. These are probably necessary features of an effective voluntary government institution devoted to the defense of a free society. But a free society is not a fighting force — it is not organized around war. If all of America were more like Sparta, we would no doubt be a more egalitarian society. But Sparta was not a “better country.”

I know that Bob, the author of a truly fascinating book on the logic of social coordination and cooperation, has to understand that free social orders are not, unlike the military, based on a single social goal pursued in common by all its members. Once you understand the logic of non-zero-sum games, as Bob most surely does, you begin to see societies as networks of mutually beneficial cooperation, in which individuals coordinate to help one another by on the way to helping themselves. There need be no shared purpose, no shared feeling, in order for us to be “in it together.” Yet, though he should understand better than just about anyone, Bob seems to me to fall victim to what Dan Klein, in a deeply insightful paper, has called “The People’s Romance” — the “yearning for encompassing coordination of sentiment” around a common social purpose. Dan’s analysis and critique of The People’s Romance is a must-read. Let me just quote him regarding the analogy of society to an army:

[The People's Romance] captures what William James sought in the “moral equivalent of war”—namely, “a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted” to dig coal, make tunnels, wash clothes, and catch fish. “[We should be] conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly.” In Great Britain at the Labour Party Conference of 1945, Sir Stafford Cripps said, “We have got to engender in the people the same spirit of determination to see this programme through that they have displayed in winning victory in the war.”

Whatever kind of vision of society this is, it is not a liberal one. Society is not an organism, not a family, not a firm, not an army. America would be a better country if people stopped wishing it was.

I pile on David Leonhardt’s nonsensical review of Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism over at Cato@Liberty.

McMegan writes:

I’m sorry if my nom de blog fooled you, but I’m not that sort of libertarian. Children are a perennial problem for libertarians, but what it boils down to is this: children (and to my mind, the severely disabled), have positive rights. They have a right to be fed, educated, clothed, sheltered, and given medical care on someone else’s dime. And if their parents abdicate this responsibility, then it passes onto the community, including the state, even if none of us asked said parent to reproduce. So arguing that educating poor children is immoral . . . well, I hardly know what to say, except remind me not to get into a lifeboat with you.

I’m not that sort of libertarian either. But this is a problem. Children don’t sprout from cabbage patches, as you may be aware. Here is the sequence of events, glossed over in Megan’s argument, that must occur before a child becomes vested with a right to the property of other people.

(1) Coitus.
(2) Conception.
(3) The decision to carry the proto-child to term.
(4) Not putting the child up for adoption.
(5a) Abdication of parental responsibility.
(5b) Inability (for whatever reason) to meet parental responsibility.
(6) General positive right to be fed, educated, clothed, sheltered, and given medical care.

Does Megan propose the state confiscate children whose parents violate their special relationship-relative positive rights? If not, and such kids are simply subsidized, then doesn’t this create an incentive for parents to violate their childrens rights so as to transfer the responsibility and cost to the state? If not sufficiently feeding, educating, etc. is a rights violation, shouldn’t bad parents be fined, jailed or otherwise punished? If bad parenting imposes a cost on taxpayers, shouldn’t bad parenting itself be taxed. But bad parents often have a negative tax burden anyway. What to do?

As an old Contemporary Moral Issues 101 fave puts it, if you have to obtain a license to drive legally, shouldn’t you have to obtain a license to legally retain custody of a child after birth? What to do with the kids of parents unable to meet the requirements for a license. Shall we scatter them among wealthier homes like so much spice? Good idea! With an overburdened pension system, or scarcity of good labor generally, kids are a positive externality–but only if those kids are net taxpayers, not net tax consumers. So let’s sterilize poor people, just to be careful, place kids of non-poor negligent parents in government programs/homes that will cultivate their potential for high levels of economic production (so our entitlement programs remain demographically stable), and give huge lump sum payouts for each child of couples with IQs two standard deviations above the mean.

I don’t suppose that’s Megan’s kind of libertarianism either. Sam’s Club Republicanism, maybe.

But seriously… having a kid and not taking care of it automatically entitles the kid to be raised by the taxpayers? Hmm. What happened to the intermediary institutions of civil society? Do we skip them? The state COULD give parents vouchers for food, etc. In fact, it does! (But not schools… God no! Not for schools!) But if these are in fact positive rights violating parents, do we really want to give them the vouchers? What kind of libertarian are you? I want answers, Megan. Answers!

One of the best discussions I know of on the difference between positive and negative conceptions of freedom is David Kelley’s in A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State. This was the final word for me on positive and negative freedom for some time. Looking again at Kelley’s argument, I find I am not as convinced as I once was.

Let’s look at a few passages:

Freedom always involves the capacity to choose among a range of alternative actions. In that sense, freedom is a positive concept. But it is also a negative concept: the freedom to choose existss as long as no one interferes with the choice coercively, using force to prevent the person from selecting one of the alternatives. … A diner at Joe’s Cafe has a more limited menu to choose from than does a diner at the Four Seasons, but both people are equally free to choose among the entrees available. The fact that Joe’s does not serve oysters on the half shell is not an issue of freedom.

OK. The question that arises for me, then, is why is the guy at Joe’s instead of the Four Seasons? If he (let’s call him Frank) just likes Joe’s, cool. But if it’s because he cannot afford the Four Seasons, or a place with an equivalently broad and high-quality menu, then the question is, Why not? The answer to that question is important. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Frank, and every other person at his approximate level on the economic ladder, would have the means to choose from bigger menus if only his society’s rate of economic growth had been just fractionally greater each year for the past two decades. Relative to faster growth, slower growth takes things off the menu. But is this an issue of freedom from coercion? Maybe, maybe not.

Suppose that people in Frank’s society just like relaxing more than working, and so aren’t extremely productive, leading to unimpressive rates of growth. Now, Frank is a highly motivated, hard-working, and would like to order off a Four Seasons menu, but simply can’t because his entire society is too poor. The point of this is to emphasize the interdependence of opportunities. Things can be off your menu, not because you’re lazy, or being coerced, but because of the (non-coercive) patterns in which other people are coordinating their behavior.

This brings us to Kelley’s next paragraph:

To be sure, there is not always a hard and fast distinction between the number of alternatives one has and the degree of one’s freedom to choose among them. Theoretically, any obstacle, restraint, or limitation may be looked at in either of two ways: we may view it (1) as something that eliminates one or more alternatives a person would otherwise have available or (2) something that prevents the person from choosing one or more alternatives. The difference lies in whether we consider the limitation as affecting the range of alternatives he has or the process of choosing among them. Advocates of positive freedom have exploited this fact, insisting that lack of a certain opportunity because of poverty, illness, or disability deprives a person of the freedom to choose that opportunity. Conversely, we could in principle view overt coercion, physical force, or violence, not as something that prevents a person from choosing an alternative but as something that removes alternatives he would otherwise have.

OK! Then Frank’s case is confusing, right? It looks like a case of (1). He doesn’t already have the menu, so his inability to choose from it is a moot question—not an issue of freedom. But suppose we get the exact same result—a low rate of growth—not from the indolence of the population, but from a few bad government policies that, say, restrict international trade. It turns out that Frank trades only with locals, so the trade restrictions don’t coercively prevent him from trading with anyone he wants to. But by coercively limiting others’ trade opportunities, others have less means, and thus less with which to buy Frank’s services, which ends up badly limiting his trade opportunities. And that’s why he doesn’t already have the menu he’d like. Still a case of (1)?

Here’s how Kelley asks us to tell the difference:

There are real differences between (1) and (2). One difference is whether the obstacle or limitation is imposed by reality or by other people. When some fact of reality affects the range of alternatives we face, it is wishful thinking to regard it as an obstacle to what we would otherwise be free to do. Facts are facts. The world operates a certain way, according to causal laws, and the constraints imposed by nature are the foundation for human choice, not a barrier to it.

I now find this remarkably unhelpful. Are other people’s preferences and patterns of behavior, which create huge limitations on the alternatives open to me, “imposed by reality” or “by other people”?

Here’s an illustrative example Kelly offers:

If I cannot run a five-minute mile, my incapacity does not abridge my freedom to do so; it is simply a fact about my nature. But if I can run that fast, and somebody forces me to wear lead weights as a handicap, he is restricting my freedom.

Now, imagine the following possibilities:

(a) a network of completely voluntary choices leads to air pollution as a side-effect; I could have run a five-minute mile had the air been cleaner.

(b) the anti-technology norms of my society, transmitted through education and social opproprium (no coercion!), have ensured that new physical performance technologies that, but for those norms, would have been invented, and would have made me able to run a five minute mile.

(c) bad government policy that does not directly prevent me from doing anything at any particular time, decreases the rate of growth, decreasing the amount of capital available for R&D, ensuring that new physical performance technologies that would have been invented aren’t.

(d) If super-steroids were available, I could run a