Because I realize that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t understand Iranian politics very deeply. I will now proceed to make some mistakes that prove this. For example, I did not know until this episode that Mousavi was Prime Minister of Iran for many years under Khomeni, which pretty much guarantees he’s no angel. I did not understand anything about the internal divisions within the Council of Guardians and the Assembly of Experts. Indeed, I still don’t completely grasp how these various bodies are related to each other. What I gather is that that Khameni and Ahmadinejad are aligned against former Prime Minister Mousavi and former President Rafsanjani (who is now the head of the Assemby of Experts, the body that chooses the Supreme Leader. Thank you Wikipedia). I don’t really grasp whether Mousavi and Rafsanjani are in it together, or are in a “the enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine” sort of thing, or what. As far as I can tell, the ruling axis got worried A’jad might lose the election, botched the vote-rigging, but validated the result anyway. I don’t know who would have won had the vote been counted (I think this remains quite unclear), but in any case, it seems clear enough that Ahmadinejad is staying in power despite a pretty transparent flouting of the rules of an already deeply anti-democratic constitution. This provided a great opportunity for the anti-Khameni/Ahmadinejad faction to encourage a popular uprising, which I am sure is fueled by real discontent with the current regime. And much of this discontent I am sure is surely rooted in an authentic desire for a more liberal and democratic Iran.

Is that what we get if the Mousavi-Rafsanjani axis comes to power? A more liberal and democratic Iran? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think many people do. I do know that these guys are deeply embedded in the larger status quo power structure, have had power before, and their records don’t look so good. They may well represent improvement, but I don’t honestly know that. As far as I know, the outpouring of desire for change that we see so clearly on YouTube is being exploited by one faction of the Iranian ruling class to depose another. I’d like to see the whole theocratic structure of Iran fall. I’d like to see the whole country radically liberalize, but I think that’s unlikely, largely because I doubt very much that that’s what most Iranians want. I want Iran to be free, and I want Iranians to want to be free. And I’m quite willing to cheer for freedom. Go freedom! But given my ignorance of exactly what and who I’d really be cheering on should I alter my Twitter avatar to reflect the campaign color of the former PM of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I think the intellectually and morally responsible course of action is to watch with colorless hope.

I am, however, quite confident that the powerful faction within American politics that argued for and got a war in Iraq has been arguing for a much harder line against Iran in order to set up a familiar dynamic of sanctions, UN Security Council demands, and so on. Just read the Weekly Standard blog.  Dick Cheney’s authorized biographer Stephen Hayes is certainly not trying to avoid a future conflict when he writes:

The reason to talk about consequences [i.e., what the U.S. will do if this or that happens in Iran] is, at least in part, because it offers an opportunity to influence how this is going to play out. It may be the case that there are few potential consequences from the international community that could affect regime behavior. But if that’s the case — and given the regime’s support for terror, its pursuit of a nuclear weapon, its theft of the election, and its violent suppression of the protests — doesn’t that make it more urgent for the international community to at least try to affect behavior and at least raise the possibility that there will come a time when the world refuses to recognize the current regime?

People are accusing other people of naïveté all over the place, so I’ll try not to. But let me say I think it is rather unwise to underestimate the strategic savvy of the opinonmakers at the Weekly Standard and Fox News. It is not “paranoid” to think they are in fact talented at shaping American popular opinion and then bringing it to bear to achieve their political aims. The correct description of the events in Iran continues to elude me. Perhaps I have been ideologically blinded to the obvious. All I can say is that given what little I know, it is not obvious. But it is quite clear to me that the story of a people yearning for freedom and rising up to demand their rights as citizens who are then crushed by an evil authoritarian regime that will do anything to achieve its evil ends… it’s clear to me that this story is useful to a certain faction in the ongoing debates about U.S. policy toward Iran. It may be that this story is the true story. But I don’t honestly know that it is, so I think it is prudent not to assume it is–especially given the fact that this narrative does play into the hands of the most dangerous people in American public life.

Things really are lining up rather nicely for the neocons, and I don’t think it’s crazy to be wary of helping them, especially when doing nothing but explaining why you’re doing nothing really can’t hurt. If Mousavi turns out to be the Iranian Gorbechev, I’ll be delighted. But then we’ll hear how the reverse domino theory has been vindicated, how George W. Bush is a world-historical champion of freedom, and how we should not in the future be so hesitant to knock down dominoes. If the protests are crushed, it proves how rotten and dangerous the regime is, making it all the more urgent that the “international community” intervene to make sure the evil mullahs don’t nuke Israel. If it turns out the new boss is same as the old boss, we’ll hear a lot about Iran’s instability, and the danger of nukes in that kind a tinderbox. Etc. So, yes. I am on my guard.

Anyway, I really did disparage people’s motives in my first post, and I don’t really think all Livestrong bracelets, pink ribbons, yellow ribbons, purple ribbons, blue ribbons, and green Twitter avatars are cheap, empty signaling. If you’re really sincerely just excited to do some small thing to stand with people risking life and limb for their freedom, I apologize. But I do ask you to reflect on what you do and don’t really know, and to consider what narrative benefits whom.

Meanwhile, IOZ interviews The Revolution.

Easterly says poverty isn’t a rights violation in his initial post, criticizing Amnesty for blurring the distinction between clear and questionable violations. Sameer Dossani’s UN-centric reply here. Easterly’s UN-skeptical response.

Here’s the core of Easterly’s argument:

The only useful definition of human rights is one where a human rights crusader could identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator. [...] Poverty does not fit this definition of rights. Who is depriving the poor of their right to an adequate income? There are many theories of poverty, but few of them lead to a clear identification of the Violator of this right. Moreover, human rights are a clear dichotomy — someone violates your rights or they do not. But the line between poor and not-poor is arbitrary — it is different in different countries, and on a global scale, many still argue what is the right dividing line that constitutes poverty. So calling poverty a “human rights violation” does not point to any concrete actions that the “violator” must stop in order to restore rights to the “violated.”

First, let’s restate the question, as Easterly does: Is there a right to a certain level of material welfare? Easterly says no for two reasons. First, a rights violation implies a violator, but it’s not clear who is to blame for widespread poverty. Second, the poverty line is not a bright line, and so it’s not clear when the right to live above the line has been violated or denied.

I don’t think I agree with Easterly’s pragmatic rule for determining what is and isn’t a human right.

There is a human right to property, I believe. But the definition of legitimate property rights and the criteria for identifying their violation are also vague. I don’t think that means we should not recognize property rights.

In many cases, it is clear who has violated a property right. Maybe it was a thief. Maybe it was the state. But what do we say when, for example, an otherwise well-functioning democratic state fails to recognize a property right because almost all of its citizens do not recognize it? Almost everyone supports certain kinds of eminent domain without truly just compensation, say. And so a bit of my back 40 is confiscated to build a road.  Who has violated my property right by refusing to recognize and enforce it? You can say it’s “the state,” but that’s already a corporate body and not a natural person. Who is that really? And in this make-believe case “the state” really is just acting as an agent of “the people”–of most of them, at least. My guess is that Easterly is uncomfortable with the idea that a rights violation can be so diffuse, that responsibility can be so broadly distributed, and that there is no easily identifiable perpetrator. But I think that’s the way it is. That’s one of the dangers of democracy: it makes the diffusion of criminal responsibility easy.

All rights have correlative obligations. If a person has a bona fide moral right, simply in virtue of being a person, who is it a right against? Who has an obligation not to violate the right? The answer is: everybody else does. So a right to a minimum level of material welfare implies that everybody else has an obligation to make a positive contribution, to chip in, to bring those below the line up to par.

What is interesting is that almost nobody really believes this, as I’ve just stated it. Most of those who argue for a positive right to a material minimum don’t think that everybody in the world already above the line is on the hook. They tend to say that fellow citizens of one’s own country already above the line are on the hook. My right not to be stabbed is a right against everybody in the world. Doesn’t matter who printed your passport. But a Freedonian’s right to a material minimum is a right against other Freedonians. That’s weird, and doesn’t have the structure of a bona fide moral right. So I suspect it isn’t one.

I’ve come to see most such “positive” rights as benefits of membership in one of the U.N.-recognized clubs. Positive rights so construed are then rights against the club and its dues-paying members. They are rights one has as a member of a state, not as a person. To say there is a right to healthcare is basically to say that this ought to be a benefit of membership in one’s national club. So it is an embarrassment to many left-leaning Americans that it is not yet an explicitly recognized benefit of official membership in the United States of America. Thus, to say that there is a right to a certain level of material welfare is to say that this is something one ought to get from one’s club, in virtue of being a member of it.

Now, if we accept the positive-rights-as-benefits-of-membership model, the identity of the violator of a right not to live in poverty is pretty clear. It is the club and its members. Who is violating certain Americans’ rights to healthcare? Other Americans are! A poor, sick kid in Milwaukee has a claim against middle class folks in Baton Rouge, but not against anyone in Berlin.

OK. But what about a poor sick kid in Benin? But suppose there isn’t enough money in the entire club to bring everyone up to par? What then?

This is where things get funny. The country-as-club model gets confusing here. There are a couple ways to go. One way to go is to say that benefits of membership are relative to what a club can afford. So Freedonians have a right to a material minimum only if Freedonia can afford it. But I think most Westerners want to say that Freedonians just do have this right in virtue of being persons. Yet they don’t want to say that everybody’s on the hook. I want to say that because Freedonia is on the hook, it ought to be able to afford it — it has some kind of obligation to be able to afford it. I think this helps us understand the implicit model behind talk of human rights in the context of “development.” The language of “development” implies that poor clubs need to grow up a bit, to the point where they can guarantee the full list of benefits to their members. That’s why development assistance money tends to go to the clubs, not directly to their members, who have no claim on benefits from Club Sweden or Club Japan. All those poor people in poor countries should be getting benefits from their clubs, not ours, and so beneficient wealthy countries, as good and beneficient global citizens, wheedle and cajole and bribe shoddy poor clubs to get up to snuff, so they can do their jobs. Of course, this doesn’t really seem to help.

Anyway, I take the larger implicit model of positive rights to look like this. There is a list of rights people have in virtue of being people. The livable surface of the globe is divided exhaustively into mutually exclusive territories governed by a single state. Each person is assigned (usually by birth) a membership in a state, which is a special kind of association or club. This task of these territorial clubs is to provide benefits to their members. Benefits implied by the list of rights are not optional. All states have a duty to protect the “negative” rights of everyone, regardless of their membership. And all states have a duty to secure the “positive” rights of their own members, but not of non-members elsewhere. So the idea is that, when it comes to positive rights, there is a kind of division of labor among states. But what happens when the some states don’t do their job? There is a presumption of state sovereignty. But if a state/club fails to provide its members decent benefits, the presumption of sovereignty relaxes somewhat, and international bodies governed by the governors of effective clubs intervene to help out failing clubs.

My problem isn’t at all with the idea that people have a right to a material minimum. My problem is with this way of thinking about it.

There are many ways to justify a scheme of rights. For contractualists like me, a scheme of rights is justified just in case it does better than the alternatives to enable people to live good lives, by their own lights. Those rights are human rights. One thing a justified scheme of human rights will do is to create the conditions under which everyone is very likely to achieve a material minimum, since that’s instrumental to almost any kind of life. That’s why property rights are rights: it’s impossible to get and keep people over the minimum without them. If a whole population is persistently beneath the minimum, that’s a clear sign that a number of their fundamental rights are systematically violated or denied them. But there’s a difference between saying that people have a right to a material minimum and saying that they have a kind of higher-order right to a system of rights that tends to produce the conditions under which everyone meets or exceeds the material minimum. So (we’re getting there) poverty is not itself a violation of human rights, but widespread and longstanding poverty is a pretty sure sign of the violation of human rights.

One way to reject the positive-rights-as-benefits-of-membership model is to reject as unjustified the status quo system of dividing the globe into states. The overall global scheme is itself subject to justification. Just as a system of property rights needs to more or less benefit everyone within it in order to be justified, the global system of states needs to more or less benefit everyone in order to be justified. But it doesn’t come close. The globe may be a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking but non-overlapping sovereign territories. But it ought to be patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions, each jurisdiction standing before the tribunal of justice both for its treatment of those within its bounds and for the global effects of the rules that govern the movement of goods and people over those bounds.

Moreover, rights are rights are rights. If people are living in poverty in Benin, it seems that the proximate cause is the government of Benin. But many of the people of Benin would not be so poor if they had the option of traveling to jurisdictions where the conditions for general prosperity have been established. And badly governed jurisdictions would not be so badly governed if the targets of state predation could more easily move beyond the state’s reach. Those of us in rich, well-functioning jurisdictions are on the hook. But we do not do our duty to the world’s poor populations simply by offering a smidge of “devopment assistance” to the dysfunctional governments that persistently fail them (or by global redistribution based on a Tobin tax or taxes levied on wealth gained from exploiting natural resources on the seabed.) We do our duty, we act to protect the human rights of the world’s poor, by establishing policies of maximum openness and inclusion. We would thereby bring multitudes of abused people under the protection of decent schemes of rights, create robust and enriching ties of trade, and create stronger incentives for poor jurisdictions to respect and maintain the conditions for prosperity and flourishing.

The idea that there is something natural and inevitable, and therefore nothing objectionable, about the status quo global system of exclusive states is I think one of the ultimate barriers to the spread of legitimate human rights and the prosperity that entails. I think current debates over economic development and global justice seem so fruitless because they take for granted a set of illegitimate assumptions of which we have attained only a flicker of awareness.

I’m actually with Will Wilkinson when he talks up “liberaltarianism” and I support a reasonable social safety net. I’m one of those people that thinks rising GDP indicates increasing interdependence, that that is a good thing and that self-sufficiency is the road to poverty. Today Wilkinson suggests a reason why liberaltarianism might be a non-starter:

[I]t’s easiest to get people to face up to tax increases if they don’t have the sense that they’re paying more just so the special interests of the winning coalition can get more.

Isn’t the conditional phrase an empirical fact about governments?

This reminds me of my dad and the Church. Even after all us kids grew up and he stopped going to church, he gave money to them every week. The Church does a lot of good things for people — disaster relief, poor assistance, etc — but a couple years ago my dad stopped giving. His primary reason: he thought his money was primary going to paying off molested children; it wasn’t going to help poor people. He didn’t want to subsidize corruption.

I don’t want to subsidize corruption either.

I think Will is just agreeing with me. I take it that the empirical fact about governments is this: when taxes go up, transfers to the special interests of the winning coalition go up. I think that’s probably a decent empirical generalization. But I don’t think most voters do. Now, if the increase in transfers is generally equal to the increase in revenues, then budgets balance only when revenues are underestimated. I’m not so sure that’s true. And pretty sure most voters assume it isn’t.

What I was trying to say is precisely what Will is getting at: that willingness to contribute reflects a sense that the contribution is going to something worthwhile. Tax increases coupled with large spending cuts creates the sense that there is a good faith effort to balance the budget, which the tax increase is one part of.

As a matter of fact, I think the various bailouts have created a large problem for Democrats in generating public support for tax increases. Ideologues on the left enjoyed depicting the various Tea Parties as a ridiculous efflorescence of dimwitted rightwing ideology, and it was partly that. But it was also partly a real reaction to transparent distributive injustice. You can say that some of the bailouts were necessary to keep the whole system going. That may be true, but that doesn’t make it fair. (Maybe it was the best thing for the church to pay off molested children, but that doesn’t mean Will’s dad wants to pay for it.) That sense of unfairness, which is by no means limited to Limbaugh-loving Tea Partiers, together with the sting of the recession (even after it’s over), together with the typical American aversion to taxes increases that Obama has constantly catered to, is going to make tax increases on the middle class an incredibly hard sell even if there are also large cuts in spending, which there won’t be.

But even these metro-libertarians tend to be more concerned about economics than social or foreign policy. The Cato Institute publishes an annual survey of economic freedom throughout the world, but produces no surveys of what countries have the most political or social freedom or those that have the most libertarian foreign policy.

Furthermore, economic freedom tends to be determined primarily by those measures for which quantifiable data are available. Since it is very easy to look up the top marginal income tax rate or taxes as a share of GDP, these measures tend to have overwhelming influence on the ratings. As a result, countries like Denmark, which are very free every way except in terms of taxes, end up being penalized. Conversely, authoritarian states like Singapore don’t suffer for it because they have low taxes.

I’d very much like us to try to measure freedom more broadly. The fact that it is an “essentially contested” concept needn’t cause too much worry. What we should try to do is compile a number of different indices that reflect a variety of widely accepted conceptions of freedom. My hypothesis is that we would find most of them highly correlated with another, and with a wide variety of social indicators. The ones that correlate poorly with the others and/or correlate poorly with various indicators of well-being and human development can probably be just thrown out.

More from Bartlett:

At the liberaltarian dinner, many of the liberals persuasively argued that the pool of freedom isn’t fixed such that if government takes more, then there is necessarily less for the people. Many government interventions expand freedom. A good example would be the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was opposed by libertarians like Barry Goldwater as an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights. Yet it was obvious that African Americans were suffering tremendously at the hands of state and local governments. If the federal government didn’t step in to redress these crimes, who else would?

Since passage of the civil rights act, African Americans have achieved a level of freedom equal to that of most whites. Yet I have never heard a single libertarian hold up the civil rights act as an example of a libertarian success.

One could also argue that the women’s movement led to a tremendous increase in freedom. Libertarians may concede the point, but conservatives almost universally view the women’s movement with deep hostility. They think women are freest when fulfilling their roles as wife and mother. Anything that conflicts with those responsibilities is bad as far as most conservatives are concerned.

I think part of the problem is that if you hold up the Civil Rights Act as an example of libertarian success, most libertarians will deny that you are one. I think both the Civil Rights Act and the women’s movement did in fact lead to tremendous net increases in liberty. I think Bruce makes an excellent point. Federal intervention, while certainly limiting freedom of association and trumping more local jurisdictions, resulted IMO in an overall increase in freedom. That many traditional libertarian conservatives, such as Goldwater, seem to have been willing to sacrifice a great gain in overall freedom in order to maintain status quo levels local self-rule seems to me to betray a commitment to ancient ideals of liberty as community self-government in conflict with the modern idea of liberty as freedom from coercion.

I think one could buy into all of this and safely maintain libertarian bona fides. But I think that in order to endorse the freedom-enhancing nature of the influence of the women’s movement, you need to accept that cultural norms and social expectations can restrict liberty without the backing of state coercion (though state coercion very often does reflect and reinforce liberty-limiting cultural norms and social expectations). I accept that you don’t need state coercion to threaten liberty. That’s where some libertarians draw the line. But, please note, if one thinks that culture and convention can limit liberty, it does not follow that one must also think that it is permissible for the state to intervene in order to change convention. One can believe that the state may legitimately act only to protect liberty. But that does not imply that the state must do anything in its power that might protect or enhance liberty.