My primary problem with libertarianism is that it does not go far enough.
I am suspicious of governments exercising power over people, sure. But I am also and equally suspicious of corporations, non-governmental organizations, unions, and other people exercising power over people. My suspicion is not of governments; it’s of power. I believe that humans should have the absolute maximum freedom possible, given resource constraints and other practical problems, without interfering with the ability of other people to exercise that freedom.
(Note: some people will say “then why aren’t you an anarchist?” Because observably whenever one gets rid of a government one does not get rid of power relations; one just makes it so that the most powerful person in the area is whoever has the most weaponry and willingness to kill, and without the safeguards a government offers about use of force. This, needless to say, does not maximize freedom.)
A lot of people tend to justify limiting freedom by pointing out that it’s for the people’s own good. People are, in general, fairly dumb. We get tricked by pseudoscience and date people who are bad for us and refuse to exercise and say “yes, the last five years I didn’t do my New Year’s Resolution but this year will be different!” By any measure, humans are really bad at decision-making. Surely it makes sense to have someone smart constrain people’s choices so they have to do what makes them happy?
The problem lies in “someone smart.” As of yet, we have not invented any hyperintelligent computers; therefore, anyone who exercises power is going to be a person, and therefore dumb. Our ability to identify non-dumb is fairly low: fifty percent of Harvard students cannot correctly answer the question “if a bat and a ball cost $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?” (Try that question at home!) In fact, I discover as I read that article I just Googled as a citation for the Harvard thing, more cognitively sophisticated people may be more prone to cognitive biases, which is an absolutely terrifying result that gives me nightmares.
(Of course, there are a lot of cognitive biases and forms of self-delusion that people are less susceptible to in other people’s cases than they are in their own– for instance, you’re more likely to correctly guess how long it’ll take someone else to do something than how long it’ll take you. My intuition is that this is not a major factor a lot of the time, but I could be wrong, in which case I’d have to change about half of the things I believe. Anyway, “people are consistently dumb about this and we can nudge them into making correct decisions” is a sufficient justification for constraining people’s choices on a case-by-case basis. Thus, opt-out of organ donation, not opt-in.)
Given that humans are dumb, the average person is much better at seeking their own happiness than they are anyone else’s. If you’re trying to seek someone else’s happiness, you have divided loyalties: the other person’s happiness and your own. If you’re an elected official, then you want what’s best for your country but also you want to get re-elected and make lots of money; naturally, these will sometimes conflict. If, however, your primary job is seeking your own happiness, then divided loyalties are not an issue.
If you limit people’s freedom, you end up treating different people the same way. (No duh.) An individual can choose to work midnight to eight am if that’s when they do their best work, but a business has to make everyone work from nine to five.* A social norm has to say “everyone is only allowed to have one partner,” but an individual can choose to honestly and openly date multiple people. Given that people are diverse, a “people freely choose things” plan allows more scope for different people being happy in different ways than a “people follow these rules” plan.
In short: I think you should not constrain people’s choices without a Damn Good Reason. “It interferes with other people’s freedom”? Good reason. “It hurts other people in ways they would not like”? Good reason. “We can’t actually afford to pay everyone an infinite amount of money without the economy falling apart”? Good reason. “…because?” Not a good reason. If you do limit people’s freedom, limit it as little as possible– don’t pass a law when a social norm will do, don’t force people into organ donation when defaulting to organ donation will do.
Tomorrow: how this all relates to social justice!
*Obviously, there are sometimes good reasons for the “everyone works nine to five” rule, such as people having to communicate with each other.
I’ll go a step further and say it wouldn’t matter even if the person with absolute power really was smart. First because smart isn’t all it’s cut out to be either (Ted Bundy was very, very smart.) Second because, just to give the libertarians the single nod they deserve, really smart people may be even less inclined to altruism than regular ones.
But really, mostly, yes thank you yes for saying in nine words something it sometimes takes me paragraphs to say: “My suspicion is not of governments; it’s of power.”
To take two egregiously prominent libertarians examples, from a single family no less, both Ron Paul and Rand Paul are admired as libertarian icons. Yet for all their squalling about federal abuses of power, the father has said he’s perfectly, even cheerfully fine with jack-booted thuggery from state patrol officers. Just not federal ones.
Going further, the son is evidently not just fine with his personal security guards literally curb stomping citizens, he’s righteous and indignant that anyone would object to such behavior.
And dear sweet mother of pearl, even the precious ACLU has argued, in court no less, on behalf of speech limits and censorship by private corporations. On the offensively questionable grounds that suppression of such rights is a problem only when the government does it.
Screw them!
This doesn’t mean, incidentally, that I object to power. Power’s great and besides, just try and get human beings to stop using it, let alone abusing it. So instead I only object to unchecked power.
Call checks and balances the way to crowd source power. Heck, give a hat tip to James Surowiecki and call it “Wisdom of the Crowds,” where in the long run aggregate decisions tend to be less stupid (not necessarily smart, just less stupid) than the abilities of any individual in that aggregate.
The other problem with Libertarianism, of course, is that you’ll pretty much never meet one with less than a 125 IQ. Nor, at least so far, have I ever met one who understands that not everyone has a 125 IQ. And consequently clever little ideas like theirs don’t work for a really basic reason.
Ozy, while I wouldn’t want to give you absolute power I think you’re not just top-shelf intelligent, you’re wise way beyond your years. Or mine.
figleaf
Curious question: What do you count as “restricting choices”? I’d say, for instance, that having expensive semester fees in universities restrict the choices of working class people who can’t pay that kind of money for their education. On the other hand, some people would say that if you fund universities with tax payers’ money and thereby provide university opportunities for all, you’re restricting the tax payers’ freedom to do what they like with their money.
Sounds like you want to “thicken” libertarian commitments along the lines of Charles Johnson or Roderick Long.
I’m suspicious of the bat and ball question and the rest of the CRT. I’ve tried multiple times to replicate it, and undergrads usually get it right. I had students read the question and write down their answer, which might account for the difference since both were spoken in the original Fredericks and Kahneman study. Much less punchy conclusion about how dumb we all are though if the effect disappears when administered on paper.
“Note: some people will say “then why aren’t you an anarchist?” Because observably whenever one gets rid of a government one does not get rid of power relations; one just makes it so that the most powerful person in the area is whoever has the most weaponry and willingness to kill, and without the safeguards a government offers about use of force. This, needless to say, does not maximize freedom.”
Have you ever read any Kropotkin?
Dvar: Both are! Given that you have to limit *someone’s* freedom, you then have to figure out which one is less limiting. (I’d argue that taxes are less of a constraint upon choices, particularly if progressive, then college being completely out of reach for the working class is.)
Hugh: Nope, but if he’s like most anarchists then his solution to that problem is an overoptimistic belief about human nature, something that looks an *awful* lot like a government, or both.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is that where the possibility exists for choice, the possibility exists for coercion to choose in a particular way – either direct or indirect. This means that you sometimes want to make it impossible for people to choose certain options.
Minimum wage is a nice example where you’re restricting peoples’ choices but everyone is better off as a result – on the one hand it may be tempting to think “Well if people are willing to work for less than minimum wage then they should be permitted to do so”, but if you give people the option to do so then it’s easy for people to be forced into doing so out of desperation and everyone loses (except the companies who get to pay people an unfair wage. Yay for them I guess?). For similar reasons you don’t want it to be legal to sign over your human rights – you can’t sell yourself into slavery and this is a good thing.
Obviously this isn’t a general argument that choice is bad, but it’s something to consider when talking about how choice and
Oops. “to consider when talking about how choice and power interact”
In fact, I discover as I read that article I just Googled as a citation for the Harvard thing, more cognitively sophisticated people may be more prone to cognitive biases, which is an absolutely terrifying result that gives me nightmares.
Terrifying example: the “letters to the editor” section of any issue of Mensa Magazine. The vitriol that spewed forth after they featured a member with full-sleeve tattoos on one 2005 cover was a big part of my decision to stop paying dues.
You’re kidding me. Mensa? Ugh….
I kind of differ on this sort of thing, am nowhere near as libertarian (and in fact sometimes feel threatened) but do support a high agency society.
Some things occur to me:
- Possibly an anarchy can exist as a client state of an arbitrarily more restrictive society which exerts the minimum level of oversight to prevent violence, emergent governments, or plotting against the greater government. (seem to remember a sci-fi story about this, where things went Lord Of The Flies really quick after some idiot decided it would be cool to hack *all of the violence-preventing patrol drones at the same time*.)
- Don’t forget the stupid, often hypocritical libertarians.
David: I don’t even think having a certain minimum wage means restricting choices in the interest of increasing happiness – it just changes the choices, but doesn’t really restrict them. At least if you look at it from the employées’ rather than the employers’ POW.
Suppose there’s a certain town in a certain country with certain apartment and food prices and so on, which means that most people are barely able to survive if they’re paid five dollars an hour for doing a certain unskilled job. If there’s no minimum wage, unskilled workers will have the choice of doing that job for five dollars an hour or being unemployed. That’s what the choice is gonna look like in praxis. On the other hand, if there’s a minimum wage of ten dollars an hour, unskilled workers have the choice of doing that same job for ten dollars or being unemployed. So, just as much choice in either case. Just because, in the former case, there’s no RULE against working for MORE money than five dollars, it doesn’t mean you’ll have the opportunity to do so.
Btw, a bit related to this, I remember I read a newspaper article some years ago about liberal vs social-democratic ideas about freedom; liberals tend to stress freedom from the state, and social-democrats freedom from family ties. When you’re young and haven’t got a job yet, while you’re still in university, if you fall ill long-term, is seriously disabled or just really old, you’re GONNA be dependent on SOMEONE, there’s no getting around that. The question just is whether it’s gonna be the state or your family.
Dvärghundspossen: I think pretty much by definition any legal prohibition of something is a restriction of choice (it’s saying “Here are things you’re not allowed to do”).
In this particular case although you’re merely changing the exact nature of the choice for people who get minimum wage jobs, you’re restricting the choices of those who remain unemployed. They’re not given the option of trying to undercut the people who are earning minimum wage. They’re not given the option of going door to door and saying “Hey, I’ll clean your flat for £5/hour”, etc. I think this is an acceptable trade off, but it’s still a restriction of choice.
Yes, I think that minimum wage is a restriction of choice, but it’s one that ultimately is for the greater good (which is what I think drmaciver was getting at towards the end of their post).
Because, as Ozy pointed out, it’s not about governmental power – it’s about power, period.
In many industries, particularly ones that rely on unskilled labor (and in an economy where there are more people wanting to do unskilled jobs than there are unskilled positions, which describes much if the world) the employer has MAJOR power over the employee, because that job is much more valuable to the employee than the employee is the employer.
So the employer can pay the employee sub-living wage, and the employee will accept it because just having a job is valuable. Minimum wage tries to correct this by saying, fine, employer, you have all of this power over your employee, we’re going to make sure they at least get this much money for their hours. So yeah, it’s restricting choices, but it is doing so to help correct a power imbalance. In an economy where every industry had more jobs than it had qualified workers, a minimum wage would probably be unnecessary.
@drmaciver: My point was that the “option” of trying to undercut other people by going around to employers offering your services more cheaply is pretty theoretical. Or rather, that option may exist for a very short period of time, if there first exists a minimum wage and then it’s removed, but very soon you’re gonna have a situation where it’s not possible to undercut, since everyone working with this unskilled job will already be so low-paid that it’s entirely pointless to offer to do the job for even less than they do, because you’ll be far better off begging in street corners or turning to a life of crime or whatever. And therefore, employèes in praxis don’t have additional choices in countries/areas with no minimum wage.
Although I’m not gonna fight you big time over this since we don’t really disagree on anything important; we agree that minimum wages are a good thing.
Adding… supposing that Drmcaiver is right here and minimum wages do count as a restriction of choices, it’s still a bit complicated.
I remember years back when I worked in the home service and our labour union went on strike for higher minimum wages – and eventually succeeded. Now, first you have a bunch of employées who freely chose to join the union. And then we freely chose to go on strike. And eventually our employer, that is, the city, freely chose to sign a contract rather than having a continued strike on their hands. So in order to avoid minimum wages, one would have had to restrict one or more of the choices that led up to it.
And that’s probably often the case with choice restrictions; free choices led up to these restrictions, so you’d have to have restrictions in place to start with if you wanted to avoid these further restrictions.
There is a whole bunch of problems with the assumption that “smart” is one solid, consistent thing. It’s something I need to look into more, but it does feel like a lot of metrics of intelligence could equally be surrogate markers for access to intelligence / lack of structural marginalisation. It’s possible that Figleaf’s observation on the IQ of most libertarians is as much a reflection of the fact that they are in positions of relative economic privilege and just don’t get why things like welfare and minimum wages are important. Think the most important thing to be “intelligent” is to be able to criticise your own cognitive biases. And evaluate external criticism of them.
And yeah it’s not about having some kind of mythical philosopher-king in charge. Accountable power seems like the ideal to aspire towards. Libertarians seem to want to take power away from the state (semi-accountable in a so called “liberal democracy”) to unregulated businesses (essentially small dictatorships).
Overoptimistic based on what? I mean, the big problem with having faith in anarchism working is that it’s never really been successfully tried in conditions that could be replicated in the modern world, but that’s just as much a mark against assuming it wouldn’t work (says the self-identified anarchist who lurves him some Kropotkin).
I get not wanting to risk it all going belly-up if it turns out that, whoops, people are unable to live together without the threat of violent force, but what’s your basis for assuming that to be true?
Gametime, you answered your paragraph 2 question in paragraph 1.
“but that’s just as much a mark against assuming it wouldn’t work” is an incorrect statement.
(1)”Anarchism has not worked in the past” is an argument for anarchism being a bad idea.
(2)”Those past conditions are totally unlike the modern world” weakens (1), but what it does not do is provide evidence for/strengthen argument (3)”Anarchy is a good idea in the modern world.”
To strengthen (3) you would need additional evidence supporting the idea that whatever made anarchism bad in the past is no longer a factor in the present.
*Access to education rather than intelligence.. oops
It’s also not a statement I’d agree to, though, because it’s literally true but misleading. (Part of this might be my fault, because my first post was ambiguously worded.) Anarchism has not worked in the past in conditions applicable to large modern countries*, but anarchism also hasn’t really been tried, certainly not on a large scale. Again, if “we’re not sure if this political system is feasible, but it sure sounds appealing” isn’t convincing enough for you, I get that, but you can’t act as though you’re acting on strong evidence that anarchism is a bad idea.
* This is all apart from the fact that, for certain definitions of “work,” you could argue either that anarchism has worked or that capitalist democratic republicanism hasn’t.
I honestly don’t know enough about anarchism in history to take a stand one way or another on the argument “Anarchism is a bad idea because it has not worked in the past.” That was not my point. My point was just that the argument you wrote was a bad argument, from a logical standpoint. It did not do the things you (seemed to) want it to do.
Totally agree with you about the relativity of success/failure, a better way to state it would be “Anarachism would be/wouldn’t be better than the status quo because [reasons]“.
Dvärghundspossen: Hmm. On further thought, I think you might be right. I’ll have to go away and think about it. Either way though, as you say we agree that minimum wage is a good thing, it’s really just a question of categorisation.
Another example I’ve thought about for this sort of thing is why you can’t sign away various fundamental rights – in principle maybe you should be able to choose to do so. In practice the world is a better place when people can’t.