Libertopia, with asterisks

Of course. The key issue that shows that most supporters of modern-day (right-wing) libertarianism in fact despise liberty—are, in fact, crypto-feudalists—is shown by their take on the land question. To wit, most of them think that it’s all fine and dandy if landowners collect rent even though the land was already there anyway.

I don’t know why you allude to Marx, though—Marx completely screwed up with his “workers vs the capitalists”. The right person to reference is of course Henry George.

An interesting question to me is why so few opponents of right-wing libertarianism are willing to grant legitimacy to the Georgist line of attack. Brains addled by Marx, I’d say.

Brains addled by Marx

Haters gonna hate. :-)

It’s funny, tho, isn’t it, how Marxists just happened to get mentioned in a post about how relations to the means of production shape a society’s political structure. I know John says this connection “hasn’t received much attention,” but it does make you wonder if the old guy might have written about it somewhere.

The best approximation of libertopia is the internet. And its pretty damn good. Buy what you want, speak to whom you want, etc.

John, the Lockean proviso isn’t an assumption but a condition upon legitimate appropriation. The assumption is that the condition could be met in the 17th-19th-century North America.

Your claim is that this is false because someone else already owned the land, so there wasn’t enough and as good.

I think this needs a bit of tweaking. First, because it is _true_ that nobody owned the land _on a Lockean conception of ownership_ . To this you might say “well so much the worse for a Lockean conception of ownership” – and you’d be right. Avery Kolers’s idea of ethno-cultural geographies is relevant here: the Lockean conception projects as the the default and natural normative relationship to the land something that’s culturally specific and which many indigenous peoples don’t share. Locke’s insistence on labour-mixing in the acquisition process is key here because it marks a break with earlier writers who employed the looser criterion of first occupancy (a criterion that the native inhabitants obviously met).

But, second, that assumes that white would-be settlers were ideological Lockeans who denied the prior ownership claims of the native inhabitants. That looks to be false as a historical claim since in North America white settlers (and the US government) took the trouble to disposess by fraudulent purchase or treaty – which presupposes recognition of the prior claims of the indigenous peoples. What you say actually fits Australia better, because there the land was declared _terra nullius_ .

I didn’t have time to read all the Zombie Economics threads, but surely this is at the heart of many of the Zombie ideas (and some others that are a bit broken too) in Economics?

Substitution sooner or later relies at least on their being fresh land to move to… and indeed, the notion that “there’s no such thing as involuntary unemployment” surely derives from a world where an unemployed person could make their way to the wild frontier and build a new life exploiting the natural resources there…

Marx did talk about this – the concluding chapter of Capital volume 1 is dedicated to it (he thought it was pretty important). It’s too long to excerpt neatly in a comment, but here he is on E G Wakefield:

‘Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. [4 Marx’s fn: “A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, it is no more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar…. Capital is a social relation of production. It is a historical relation of production.” (Karl Marx, “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,” N. Rh. Z., No.266, April 7, 1849.)] Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” [5] Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River! ‘

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm

Marx’s argument is that when American workers can easily take new land it is hard to get capital accumulation. He sees the turning point in the US as the civil war which ‘brought in its train a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c., in brief, the most rapid centralization of capital.’

What strikes me about at least Mark Twain’s accounts of mid 19c America is its embrace of modernity, forty-niners gambling with stock certificates. They knew the future was already here, and in that region it was; in short order parts of the Sierra were brutally terraformed by hydrological mining. Fans of Deadwood will recall how suddenly everything changed when Hearst arrived upon the scene, and in reality he arrived nearly immediately.

It’s hardly less pointless to wax sentimental over the dustbowl sodbusters who went broke than to lament their penniless predecessors whom we herded into reservations. If you’re looking for self-reliance, now that we’ve gotten rid of our local hunters and gatherers, how can we not look south of the border? Libertarians ought to celebrate the narcotraficantes for their flamboyant disregard of laws and norms and borders.

sg writes:

_in my experience, the response of real actual libertarians to this point about the US or Australia is always to use the example Chris gave, that “they didn’t have a concept of ownership of land” so it’s okay._

Indeed. On which cf Kant’s remarks (Metaphysics of Morals 6.266)

bq. Lastly, it can still be asked whether, when neither nature nor chance but just our own will brings us into the neighborhood of a people that holds out no prospect of a civil union with it, we should not be authorized to found colonies, by force if need be, in order to establish a civil union with them and bring these human beings (savages) into a rightful condition (as with the American Indians, the Hottentots and the inhabitants of New Holland); or (which is not much better), to found colonies by fraudulent purchase of their land, and so become owners of their land, making use of our superiority without regard for their first possession. Should we not be authorized to do this, especially since nature itself (which abhors a vacuum) seems to demand it, and great expanses of land in other parts of the world, which are now splendidly populated, would have otherwise remained uninhabited by civilized people or, indeed, would have to remain forever uninhabited, so that the end of creation would have been frustrated? But it is easy to see through this veil of injustice (Jesuitism), which would sanction any means to good ends. Such a way of acquiring land is therefore to be repudiated.

I know the point of the asterisking is really just to say “Notwithstanding all the other problems with Libertopia, here’s the problem *I* want to talk about now”, I want to de-asterisk the point about women.

As noted on CT in April, Bryan Caplan famously gave the game away by noting that “Women are more than half the population. If they’re freer today than they were in the Gilded Age, we can truly say that most people in America are freer today than they were before the rise of the welfare state”, and then, having committed himself to this fairly intuitive notion, engaged in increasingly tortured reasons why people with few legal rights but enormous social constraints were, _mirabile dictu_, nevertheless freer in C19 than today.

I bring this up here not just because any asterisk that eliminates more than half the relevant cases is an asterisk too far, but because the logic of appropriating the women’s value, and especially their care work (to use Folbre’s term) is similar to the logic of appropriating the Native American’s land.

Put another way, I don’t think that Manifest Destiny was an illustrative special case, I think it is an example of the way Libertopia is supposed to work, which is to say that positive externalities from other people to me are the way God and Galt intended things to be; positive externalities from me to others are proof that the system is working; negative externalities from me to other people are merely figments of whining losers; and negative externalities from others to me are not just evil, but trivially separable and fixable, if we only lived in Libertopia.

I want to convince you to de-concede “the possibility that the legal rights of women and men could have been equalized (at least in formal terms) without upsetting the C19 applecart”, because the C19 applecart (in its Libertopian flavor) had a deeper logic in its regard of benefit than treating Native Americans as one case and women as another, different case suggests. Put another way, running out of land to appropriate was the ending of one kind of frontier, but running out of women who couldn’t own property or vote was the ending of another kind, and your analysis could be broadened to cover that general logic.

The libertarian approach to indigenous dispossession – literally, that it couldn’t have happened in any meaningful sense

Personally, in common with most libertarians I’ve ever met, I think that the case for saying that the settlement of the US constituted an injustice is overwhelming. In fact it seems to me that only libertarianism (or, at least, property-based theories of justice) can adequately account for our intuitions that an injustice was done. I mean, for most people, it’s pretty obvious that one of the main problems with the way in which the native Americans were treated is that people stole their land. But if you’re the kind of sophisticated leftist that hangs out on Crooked Timber, you probably subscribe to a theory of justice that (among other things) denies the existence of any non-conventional property rights. But this makes it somewhat more difficult to diagnose the reason why an injustice took place. Maybe it is possible to come up with, say, a Rawlsian explanation. When I hear about the treatment of the native Americans by the settlers, though, my immediate problem with their actions is not that it engendered an environment in which social and economic inequalities were not being arranged to the benefit of the least advantaged; rather, my problem is that a bunch of people were violently dispossessed of their land.

At any rate, the genuinely interesting question is: given that the native Americans were treated unjustly, what follows? And it’s a really, really difficult question. One answer that I don’t find particularly convincing is that it means we should have eternal socialism as a punishment for our sins.

I’d agree that the existence of a frontier was critical. I’d simply point out that the key aspect of the frontier is exploitable resources outside the (current) reach of the government, but not of a motivated citizenry, NOT the existence of a native population to be subjugated. The frontier would have been as useful, or more so, if there had been no Indians to displace.

In fact, there’s a line of thought among libertarians that the creation of a ‘libertopia’ will become feasible only when space is opened up to colonization, creating a frontier again.

Dan, the Oxlib guy wrote:

_I mean, for most people, it’s pretty obvious that one of the main problems with the way in which the native Americans were treated is that people stole their land. But if you’re the kind of sophisticated leftist that hangs out on Crooked Timber, you probably subscribe to a theory of justice that (among other things) denies the existence of any non-conventional property rights. But this makes it somewhat more difficult to diagnose the reason why an injustice took place._

There are a lot of issues to unpack there (and see the quote from Kant, whom I guess you would class as a conventionalist, above). But I guess many “conventionalists” would want to say something like this: that whilst the ownership relation that individuals have to land (and other objects) is (at least in part) constituted by the state, the relationship that a people (and their state) have to a territory is different in kind (and includes the right to establish property relations and systems of various kinds). Indigenous peoples enjoy (morally speaking) that jurisdictional right which they exercise in ways that often actually deny individual members anything like Lockean property rights. To dispossess a people of that jurisdictional right is an injustice, and claiming that it is an injustice does not presuppose that any person owned anything in a Lockean sense.

I’d want to quibble with that picture in various ways, but you’re quite wrong to think that your opponents can’t explain the injustice.

The philosophical “foundation” for taking the land of natives goes back a bit further than Locke to Grotius, who was probably more widely influential on the early explorers, in the U.S. and elsewhere. He argued not only that they land wasn’t owned properly by pastoral or “nomadic” people, but that if they would not agree to allow agricultural people to use the land, they were actively harming the agricultural people and had therefore committed an act of war that justified conquest. It’s a bit more subtle than that, but not much. Kant had many good reasons for not liking Grotius, this being one of them.

‘The frontier would have been as useful, or more so, if there had been no Indians to displace.’

And fortunately for the usefulness of the frontier there soon weren’t.

Even conceding the status of women, African-Americans, and tossing out the Native American problem, there are still big problems with seeing 19th C USA as a libertarian state. In the first half of the 19th century, state and local governments were often interventionist, subsidizing and controlling canals and railroads, for example. In 1865, the USA had the highest tariff rates in the world. The would fall greatly by the end of the century, but they were quite high for decades after the Civil War. Tariff rates weren’t exactly low before the Civil War either. There is a nice graph showing this in Williamson’s Globalization and the Poor Periphery. Some aspects of American law in this period were modified in distinctly non-libertarian ways. Eminent domain proceedings were often run to the benefit of railroad companies and by any reasonable standard, infringed on the rights of property owners.
19th century American history is shot full of state interventions, protectionism, and use of government power to favor special interests. Sound familiar?

Medieval Iceland libertarian? Quite possibly. A utopia? Only if this state of affairs can be considered a utopia:

“Úlfarr does not enjoy for long the use of Örlygr’s property, for old Thórólfr Lamefoot is still plotting. While returning home with gifts from Arnkell’s autumn feast, Úlfarr is ambushed and killed by a man sent by Thórólfr. By chance Arnkell is standing outside his house and sees the killer running across a field. Now, though his protection has proved ineffectual in keeping Úlfarr alive, he acts quickly in his own interest. Sending some of his followers to kill the runner, he immediately rides to Úlfarr’s farmstead where he claims that as Úlfarr’s protector he should inherit the property.”

Dan are you deliberately trying to be a caricature of a libertard troll? The comment about “a certain type of sophisticated leftist” is so many shades of pure evil, and so many colours of pure bullshit, that I can only conclude you’re being a comedian.

So many straw Indians for the rhetorical cowboy to shoot down…

The problem with “exit” from society is that it presupposes entry into another, which no society can guarantee off its own bat*. Otherwise, what is the exit option from Libertopia? Start another one? Exit from society is like exit from a space station – not much use.

By the way, this:

The reality of course is that it’s not a libertarian space – it’s a corporate illusion of a libertarian space – very few people have a direct connection to the Internet proper, serve their own web pages or run their own email server.

is actually a point about libertarianism, rather than a point about the Internet. It’s not, in fact, particularly difficult or expensive to do any of these things in-house, not least because you can import stuff from the post-scarcity sector (particularly software, but also the universal interconnection model and the government-like services provided by IETF, your local RIR, etc). Not that many people do them – because, Coasianly, it’s easier to join a community that shares them or buy them as a product from a company that produces them.

This, though, is dependent on the existence of certain governmentlike institutions. Imagine getting IP address space from LibertopiaNIC; you wouldn’t be able to, because Verizon or KDDI or Libertopian Telecom would have been able to buy them all on day one.

*and let’s all raise a glass to the UN Convention on Refugees

The dispossession of hunter-gatherers, with hazy collective property rights over a territory, by farmers who may have individual exclusive property in happened in Europe 10,000 years ago. You can have the Grotius-Locke-Kant-Nozich argument about that. But what of the earlier dispossession of Neanderthals and other hominids by the fisrst wave of homo sapiens, about 100,000 years ago? It was complete and genocidal; we wiped out, worldwide, all human-like competitors more advanced than chimpanzees. The difficulty here is that the Neanderthals etc were very probably distinctly lesser in mental capacity than the invaders (us), so the cognitive error behind racism was then correct. But is it really OK to dispossess, wipe out or enslave cognitively inferior relatives?

Which is worse: having your land stolen or being killed? The worst injustice done to the indigenous inhabitants was not the theft of land, though that was indeed bad, but that they were slaughtered (i.e., the “genocidal wrongs” referred to by Jacob Levy @32).

While everything pales next to genocide, the dispossession of tens of millions of people and the theft of three continents is a pretty catastrophic additional moral wrong, not a minor squabble. It’s not as though either genocide or mass dispossession somehow needs to be minimized in order to take the other one seriously.

I don’t think you all really grasp libertarianism. There are certainly libertarian separatist dreamers, but that impulse derives more from a sense of frustration than inherent isolationism. Libertarians hate the idea of autarky. I, Pencil (one of the most influential libertarian texts) is in complete opposition to autarky–as are libertarian calls for free trade and more open borders. Libertarians are all about the benefits that come from voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange, and they hate rent-seekers who use the coercive power of government to get a undeserved, unearned cut of everything (think of state-mandated liquor distributors who buy political influence to amass fortunes that derive completely from regulatory capture rather than providing a valuable service — and yes, feel free to insert a photo John McCain’s father-in-law in that slot). But from the perspective of the mutual benefits of specialized trade, the concept of an isolated ‘libertarian utopia’ is inherently contradictory.

For libertarians, the ideal would be to live in a highly interconnected, integrated society where the limited government handled the essential services (common defense, the rule of law, social safety net) very effectively and stayed the hell out of everything else. Where there was no opportunity for rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and ‘baptists and bootlegger’ shenanigans because there would be precious few regulators to capture.

For libertarians, the ideal would be to live in a highly interconnected, integrated society where the limited government handled the essential services (common defense, the rule of law, social safety net) very effectively and stayed the hell out of everything else.

How does that differ from classic liberal ideals? The definition of what are “essential services”, is that all?

“How does that differ from classic liberal ideals?”

It doesn’t, really. “Libertarian” is just a way of saying “classical liberal”. Hopefully with less chance of being confused with “liberals”, who have essentially nothing to do with classical liberalism.

Property is theft

I tend to feel that the utopian/absolutist strain of libertarianism tends to encourage rather doctrinaire styles of reasoning among self-identified libertarians, even those who aren’t themselves utopian (cf the impact of Marxism on the left).

Phew. I was worried we might get through a whole post and comment thread attacking libertarians without an equal and opposite swipe being made at Marxists, for being just as bad, in their own way. I’m relieved to see the harmony of the cosmic order has been preserved. It is still alarming to hear about the devastating impact Marxism has had on the Australian left, though.

Each time this comes up I think of a ‘shorter crooked timber’ in which these arguments are neatly compressed into ‘Libertarians are blind ideologues and therefore idiots, Republicans are bigots for peddling their latest hate plank, Israel is turning into an Apartheid state and every member of the Library of Living philosophers has snuffed it.’

Did I miss anything out?

Of course the problem with Libertopia is the asterisks. Watch any decently accurate movie or documentary about the West and the lack of law and order was clearly not considered a good thing. You can even read these things called books and get the same information. People did not just sit down and respect the property rights of others, there were constant ranch wars and the weaker members of society were constantly having their property appropriated by force.

People actually living in this Libertopia demanded law and order because without it they could not be free of the gun slingers and thugs. That is why they pushed for statehood.

Of course it is easy to solve any problem if you can apply magical thinking and ignore the hard part. Wouldn’t dictatorship work just great if you could find the right person to be dictator?

Doctor Science,

That’s an important point, well-made.

And yet the curious thing — perhaps you were aware — is that Laura’s daughter Rose, who evidently did most of the actual writing, was a self-identified libertarian. In fact, she may be the person who coined the term in its modern political sense. Whether she simply couldn’t see the political implications of her own books, whether she was unconsciously subverting her politics with her story (or vice versa), whether this is the working-out of some mother-daughter conflict, or whether it’s just the ur-example of libertarian un-self-awareness, I couldn’t say. But it is interesting that the lessons you and I see clear as day in the books, the person who wrote them, did not.

“Looking at the US case, it seems fair to say that . . . the 19th century setup was a fair approximation to the libertarian ideal.”

Well, the individualist anarchists argued that it was not libertarian (in the true, left-wing libertarian, sense of the word) and spent a great deal of time trying to reform it into a non-exploitative and non-oppressive system.

For example, it did not have “occupancy and use” in terms of land. Somewhat ironically, for Murray Rothbard, the nineteenth century saw “the establishment in North America of a truly libertarian land system.” [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 73] In contrast, the Individualist Anarchists attacked that land system as the “land monopoly” and looked forward to a time when “the libertarian principle to the tenure of land” was actually applied [Tucker, Liberty, no. 350, p. 5] Clearly, Tucker and Rothbard were using the term “libertarian” in different ways.

Also, the individualist anarchists were quite away that the state was imposing capitalism onto America during the 19th century, echoing Marx’s analysis in chapter 33 of Capital (“The Modern Theory of Colonization”). Also, given that Rothbard suggested that 19th century was close to his utopia, it was not very stable (massive booms and slumps) and not to mention the company thugs who were hired to smash unions.

As for Medieval Iceland, that was a actually a very communal society. There was common land, communal bodies which worked like a mini-welfare state (and were compulsory), community assemblies, and a host of other institutions which would simply not exist in “anarcho”-capitalism. In short, the Icelandic Commonwealth was a pre-capitalist communal society whose political institutions finally collapsed due to increasing wealth concentrations (probably the only capitalistic thing about it).

Could there be a propertarian utopia? Perhaps, but I doubt it would be a nice place to life. Massive inequalities of wealth, regular economic crisis, private cops enforcing the property owners’ rule on wage-slaves and tenants, and so on. Yes, perhaps 19th century America was pretty close… which explains why so many reform and revolutionary movements developed!

the creation of a ‘libertopia’ will become feasible only when space is opened up to colonization

It’s a shame that heavy-handed laws are barring people from space, but I’m sure that the legislators mean well.

“Libertarians seem to worship “good” strong men like Bush”

That is about as counter-factual, I might even say delusional, a claim as I’ve ever seen. Bush was utterly LOATHED by libertarians. Can’t you even try to make plausible arguments?

61: many self-described libertarians in fact supported Bush very strongly.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.

After 4 days of continuous discussions, CT has reached an infinite loop consisting of the following two statements.

a) Not only does one have inviolate rights, one has non-negotiable duties as well.
b) No True Scotsman.

I appreciate that “Move to Somalia” is a standard insult to American libertarians, but doesn’t Somalia present an interesting test case for 21st century libertarianism? There’s no recognized central government, and in return the country is regularly invaded and piracy has become a key economic activity. According to the newspapers, people who actually live there rely heavily on their family and clan to survive.

So, if some central government is needed to provide essential services (like defense), I’m curious how libertarians plan on keeping the exercise of that government’s powers to a minimum. Adopt a constitution of expressly limited powers? Give substantial authority to a judiciary to invalidate legislative actions in excess of those powers? Require that judges be sociopaths?

Doctor Science @54: “The Wilders, though, say they didn’t do it for money, and they won’t take money from the mouths of the starving.”

Thereby, in Ayn Rand’s system of (shall we call it) morality, making them fully deserving of dying horribly in a train wreck.

They only survive the winter because of collective action. Laura’s future husband Almanzo and his brother are fronted money by the general store owner to make a perilous journey to buy wheat for everybody in town. They bring it back at great risk, and the storeman wants to sell it at a monopoly price—giving the Wilder boys a fee for their efforts, of course. The Wilders, though, say they didn’t do it for money, and they won’t take money from the mouths of the starving. Laura’s father tells the storeman that of course he’s a free man who can do whatever he wants with his property—but the townspeople will also be perfectly free to ignore him socially and economically after winter is over. It’s libertarian rhetoric as a veneer over communitarian actions.

No — libertarians love that kind of private, voluntary cooperation. What they hate is government coerced collective action. Libertarianism i>isn’t about isolated people going it alone.

I am slightly perturbed by how much gratuitous libertarian-bashing there is going on here. I mean, yes, among our bunch (I suppose my being a classical liberal makes me a libertarian in today’s books), there is a great deal of magical thinking. But there is just as much magical thinking, if not more, in social democracy and democratic socialism, or in any sort of traditional conservatism.

The point isn’t to grab onto some libertarian’s silly horns and start using it as a start point to demonstrate how the entire ideology is hopelessly tainted; one could do this easily with any ideology. This isn’t so much a discussion as a fairly antagonistic lemon session. You can’t discredit liberalism/social democracy by pointing at Michael Moore, and one similarly shouldn’t bother trying to make it into some general point about libertarianism by pointing at some of the more ridiculous and risible ideas coming from libertarians.

You can’t discredit liberalism/social democracy by pointing at Michael Moore

That’s correct. Because Moore’s work, while a bit erratic, is generally very good.

Just out of curiosity, Myles, what specific argument of Moore’s do you find so discreditable?

I think there are three very different phenomena that are often discussed under the rubric of “libertarianism”:

(1) The idea that certain social problems are better handled by market mechanisms than by command-and-control mechanisms. In some cases (cap-and-trade for carbon emissions) the argument for the market approach looks pretty strong. In others (privatizing Social Security), not so much. But you can accept the argument for a market-based solution for some particular social problem without buying into any broader political philosophy.

(2) The 21st-century Republican Party’s fealty to tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts. Phrases like “small government” are often invoked as slogans to support this ideology, but there is no serious attempt to combine the tax cuts with anything recognizable as a principled “small government” program—continuation of the so-called war on drugs, expansion of military spending, bank bailouts, etc., are enacted right along with the tax cuts.

(3) The philosophy that all government activity outside of a certain tightly limited range (or, for some, all government activity, period) that interferes with private property and contract relations is simply immoral. (Alternatively: that such activity inevitably leads to a bad end, even if it doesn’t seem to be hurting us right now.) Compared with the other two phenomena above, this philosophy is coherent enough that it can be argued about, and God knows people do argue about it all over the Internet. But as a political program, it will never be enacted into law, which makes me wonder why lefties feel so compelled to invest (ahem) their time in arguing against it.

In the context of carbon emissions, when I think “command-and-control” I think of regulations specifying exactly what has to be attached to each smokestack in order to reduce the pollution from it.

“Libertarians may support the Republican Party for economic reasons”…
buhhh… huh? THIS is supposed to count in your favor?

But US government spending as a percent of GDP has risen steadily since the Nixon Administration

No, it really hasn’t grown steadily — between 1962 and 2001, spending as a percentage of GDP hovered around 20%:

http://www.cbo.gov/docimages/35xx/doc3521/352101.gif
http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=3521&type=0

@56

The mantra is that “of course I will be charitable, just as soon as government stops making me be charitable in ways I find objectionable”. But there is zero evidence of this, and I tend to think a healthy part of the libertarian fantasy is that *everyone else* will become more charitable, absolving the fantasist from having to do so.

Myles.

1) Free trade (this is textbook economics: comp. adv.)

No. It is a meaningless buzzword that can, and has, been interpreted in different ways.

2) Free movement of capital and persons

Yep, brain drain and tax shelters are the midwives of of a better humanity…

3) Environmental protection through market mechanism (which has essentially achieved consensus status)

Nah, you just pay a fine ande put out some propaganda pamphlets and
suddenly you’re a “green” company.

4) Drugs legalization

I’d go along with this one, if only because nothing else has worked,
and that it is an enormous waste. Put the money into prevention and rehabilitation instead.

5) Freedom of firearms ownership

Sure.
But only for the people who actually need them.
Backup weapons for cops, shotguns/rifles for farmers and so on…
But no easy to convert-to-full-auto at your corner hunting store.

And as for your positions on Healthcare, you’re a nut.
Here in Denmark, OH NO SOCIALIST EUROPE!, we used to have unemployment and healthcare provided by the government, and while it was hardly perfect, it was better than what we have now: Our right wing (a little to the left of the U.S. democrats), started privatizing both. The end result: big subsidies to private companies while the quality of service declines. Why? because the private sector isn’t as accountable as the public one. You can vote for or against politicians. CEOs? Not so much.

1) Free trade (this is textbook economics: comp. adv.) 2) Free movement of capital and persons 3) Environmental protection through market mechanism (which has essentially achieved consensus status) 4) Drugs legalization 5) Freedom of firearms ownership

Well, Myles took me up on it, so I feel obligated to take him up on it. Briefly, I lack the training to address no. 1 or no. 2 usefully. With regard to no. 3, certainly market mechanisms have been shown to be an effective mechanism for environmental protection (though I doubt they are sufficient to achieve desirable outcomes in all cases.) But the ones of which I am aware were all imposed by government fiat, and if the legislation which set them up were repealed tomorrow, they would vanish instantly.

No. 5: No. But this is an argument which the Sensible Party in the US has lost beyond any prospect of immediate recovery, so I don’t propose to waste time talking about it.

Which leaves drug legalization. I think you will find few people here who would not agree that intensive criminal enforcement has spectacularly failed, over a long period of time, to solve the drug problem, and all the War-on-Drugs machinery ought to m be melted down. I also agree that marijuana prohibition should be lifted immediately, full stop, because it has been shown to be essentially harmless to its users.

Where I part company with at least some libertarians, however — and I tried to have this argument with Brett Bellmore on the other thread — is where they assert that what substances an individual puts in his body are no business of anyone else’s. I think it is beyond argument that if we adopted a wholly laissez-faire policy toward the use of heroin, for example, considerable numbers of people would die, quickly or slowly, as a result.

I think society has an obligation to that appropriate steps discourage even its dumbest members from doing things that are obviously harmful to them. We insist that cars have safety glass not plate glass windshields, and we put high fences around high voltage substations. The strain of libertarianism to which I object seems to me to be based on the calculation that “I am sensible and am not going to do foolish things; the more opportunity for other people to do foolish things, the more my competitive advantage over them.” In other words, Social Darwinism.

drat, copied the first part in. My kingdom for an edit function ….

But the ones of which I am aware were all imposed by government fiat, and if the legislation which set them up were repealed tomorrow, they would vanish instantly.

The government’s power to regulate in this case, given the present of negative externalities, is probably the same as its power of police. Which is to say, I don’t think there is necessarily an ideological problem with government fiat in integrating the positive and negative externalities of something together for the sole purpose of achieving a more perfect market.

The strain of libertarianism to which I object seems to me to be based on the calculation that “I am sensible and am not going to do foolish things; the more opportunity for other people to do foolish things, the more my competitive advantage over them.” In other words, Social Darwinism.

Perhaps some libertarians are thusly spirited, but my personal view (which is classical liberal) is that people, when freed from coercion and tyranny that imposes upon them choices against their natural inclination, find in their freedom the ability and inclination for good rather than bad. Which is to say, I believe that the coercion corrupts people, and the natural human inclination absent it is toward good.

Hey, Miles,
“I didn’t say I opposed healthcare as proposed by U.S. Democrats; I said that Michael Moore’s tactics to advance his single-payer agenda were dishonest, deceitful, disingenuous, and farcical. One could do the reverse and take some poor sap who had been beaten up by Castro’s thugs and put him in Mayo Clinic and use it as some sort of illustrative example of the grandeur of the American healthcare system, and frankly it wouldn’t have been any more dishonest than what Michael Moore did.”

I agree, but only to, ahem, a certain degree.
And I DID initially “oppose healthcare as proposed by U.S. Democrats”, but from the left.

Oh wait. Without the threat of brain drain, there would not be the necessary pressures for an out-of-shape and obsolete system to shape up. If your professionals and scientists are leaving your country in droves, it means there’s something wrong with your country, not something wrong with the people leaving. Keeping people within a territory by force or coercion is the definition of tyranny.

“I honestly didn’t imagine that you would root against “free movement of persons,” given that you know, it’s like one of the founding principles of the United Nations. That definitely counts for my morning shock. Good lord: even at Crooked Timber, the totalitarian impulse rears its ugly head.”

Uhhh, I don’t. But my solution would be for the state system to adjust certain benefits and budgets, instead of just letting the ephemeral, never-proven-to-exist, super free market god-hand determine our destinies.

Dr Science, is The Long Winter the last book of the series? I seem to remember not finishing it because it was much more boring than the earlier books, but I was 10 or 11 and maybe my taste just wasn’t very good at that age.

roac: I think it is beyond argument that if we adopted a wholly laissez-faire policy toward the use of heroin, for example, considerable numbers of people would die, quickly or slowly, as a result.

More than considerable numbers of people are having their lives destroyed and being killed by our insane war on drugs. When you read stories about people being gunned down in Mexico in the wars between rival cartels and between the cartels and government, you are seeing people being killed by prohibition. And despite the drug-war carnage, access to heroin is not all that difficult. In fact, in rural counties north of where I live, there have been a number of heroin overdose deaths in recent months and years–apparently because safer drugs (like oxycontin) were harder to get and more expensive than heroin. In the the 19th century, opiates were legal, and there certainly were addiction problems, but it’s not clear at all that they were worse than now and without prohibition there wasn’t the drug violence, the gross civil-liberties violations, and the insane levels of incarceration (and lives destroyed by criminal records).

Dr Science: My point is that the cooperation in The Long Winter is not truly private nor voluntary. The wealthy storeman doesn’t cooperate voluntarily, but because he is threatened by the public acting together. They are the government of the isolated town, and Mr. Wilder later was an elected official.

But of course it was both private and voluntary — none of the people involved were acting as state agents or at the behest of state agents. And nor, in your telling, did the townsfolk, say, pass a local ordinance fixing the price of grain–they merely pointed out that they (his customers) would remember how they were treated later and he should take that into consideration. The store keeper considered his alternatives (a quick profit vs alienating his customers) and made his choice.

You seem unable to grasp the difference between citizens threatening to take their business elsewhere in the future if they are mistreated and state coercion which is backed up by police, guns, courts and prisons. If you don’t understand that difference, you can’t understand libertarianism.

Perhaps some libertarians are thusly spirited, but my personal view (which is classical liberal) is that people, when freed from coercion and tyranny that imposes upon them choices against their natural inclination, find in their freedom the ability and inclination for good rather than bad. Which is to say, I believe that the coercion corrupts people, and the natural human inclination absent it is toward good.

Except the free market perverts peoples inclinations towards good, if being good means you are being outbid by someone without so much scruple. With small integrated societies these things can work through peer pressure and the high amount of information people have about the other people participating in the market (in fact almost any system can work in a small enough community, from communism to anarchism, to completely free markets with unbacked fiat currencies, or whatever).

As the amount of people in the market increases, the distance between the seller and buyer tends to grow rapidly, and as competition increases the pressure to cut corners to avoid being shut out of the market. A good example I know relatively well is food adulteration – so before any specific legislation things really start to kick off in the Victorian age alongside industrialisation – starting with adding sawdust and floor sweepings to bread becoming a standard practise, then even further with Bakers being caught cutting their flour with alum (I think, it ending up poisioning people on a regular basis until the government intervened anyway), “raspberry” jam with no raspberries (of course) but pips hand carved out of wood which was cheaper than using the real fruit, etc.

It is not as if the government has stamped it out, although the worst excesses have been stopped, and at least all the weird stuff they try on generally has to go on the label. So you still get up to 40% of the weight of a chicken breast being added water (and sometimes dried beef/pork protein used to stop the water coming back out, which some religious types aren’t keen on), or extra connective tissue being added to meat products up to the maximum limit the government allows without it being mentioned as an ingredient.

Taken to the extreme, where companies have continually pushed the boundaries on food production, you end up with the FDA specifying the exact ingredients and cooking methods to be allowed to call a product an “apple pie” or whatever, because absolutely any latitude that is given to companies is abused as some cheap replacement is found that can be cut with the real ingredients, or injected to bulk things up, etc.

To think of another random industry to prove food isn’t a special case, how about mining, showing that if workers are that worried about their jobs, they are happy to breath in poison air (even when the effects are so obvious that sufferers are referred to as “leaded”), let their children (and sooner or later all the towns/cities downstream of them) drink poisoned water, and still they fight the government trying to sort it out.

The method actually used by States to prevent famine, going back at least to the 41st chapter of the Book of Genesis, has been to impose a tax and use the proceeds to store grain in advance of need, which was distributed to the population at a nominal price when a harvest failed.

That assumes a well-established government with a steady resource base. However, it is possible to adapt the method to the frontier. Suppose the Wilders’ town had a government. Suppose it responded to the emergency by imposing a special assessment on property owners, and used the proceeds to pay Almanzo to trek through the snow.

I recognize that these strategies depend on state coercion backed up by guns. But they can be relied on to work, which is an advantage if your goal is to minimize starvation rather than to maximize freedom.

Seriously, I am actually kind of bugged by this. “Virtually without exception” doesn’t sound right; it doesn’t sound even close to being right. If I didn’t know better I would accuse you of smearing libertarianism.

For example, this is the link for the “Pigou Club”, founded by Greg Mankiw:
http://www.pigouclub.com/members
Carbon tax is a Pigovian tax (Pigovian taxes are taxes which are levied on activities producing negative externalities) and thus people who support Pigovian taxes tend to have no problem ideologically with government regulation of negative externalities, such as pollutants.

By the way, here’s Greg Mankiw expressing support for a higher gasoline tax (functionally speaking, a form of carbon tax):
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/pigou-club-manifesto.html

Virtually without exception, libertarians have embraced delusional conspiracy theories about the science of global warming rather than accept proposals for a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme.

Too bad our supposedly “delusional” take on global warming (we’re not into conspiracy theories quiggin – that’s your turf) turns out to be correct:

Some of us have been saying all along that climate scientists chronically underestimate uncertainty. For that we’ve been lined up with Holocaust deniers by the left. Well, eat your crow quiggin (it’s ok, I know you won’t – like most on the left you are incapable of ever admitting you were wrong; one reason why you need to be kept as far from the levers of power as possible).

Reading the thread backwards, mw said it best.

I find it interesting that lefties like quiggin so desperately need to caricaturize libertarians. As with most things, self-interest provides the most probable explanation. The vast majority of his ilk are living proof of the inefficiency of large government, and hence are most threatened by a philosophy of minimal government.

As the amount of people in the market increases, the distance between the seller and buyer tends to grow rapidly, and as competition increases the pressure to cut corners to avoid being shut out of the market.

Actually, the opposite appears to be true — that is, there’s empirical evidence that the more people engage in market economies, the more fair and ethical they are in their treatment of strangers:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5972/1480

Umm Red @108 – I quoted quiggin @98. Read my link @105. Or is Annals of Statistics too shabby a journal for you to bother with?

roac @ 99:

As you point out, the frontier towns had no properly functioning government so they started from the bottom up and created ad hoc forms of organization. I think it would have been normal in, for example, Europe, for most of the past several centuries, for the government to act as you describe, to prevent famine and outlaw hording.

A certain kind of conservative might celebrate these native forms of organization to the extent they still survive.

Another type of conservative might question the legitimacy of bottom-up organization arising in the way described in The Long Winter, and argue that this wouldn’t have happened if the British Crown had still been in charge: in other words, if the colonists had not rebelled (ignoring the arguable incompetence of Parliament in implementing top-down administration).

Or is Annals of Statistics too shabby a journal for you to bother with?

I’d read that paper closely if I were you. Or maybe I wouldn’t read that paper closely if I were you.

I mean, I would love to live in a world in which no one steals from one another or drives recklessly. But since I don’t, I have to put up with prisons and speeding tickets. If Libertarianism can’t even solve these kinds of petty issues. If Libertarianism can’t even solve these kinds of petty issues, it will never be able to solve larger issues like ACME dumping toxic sludge in the nearest barrio, or even making sure crack babies get a proper education.

Huh? Theft is a criminal matter–no libertarians are not against criminal justice systems. So the solution for dealing with thieves is the same. As for reckless driving and toxic dumping, criminal law and tort (which libertarians would prefer) are better solutions than detailed regulations — especially for the latter given the inevitability and ubiquity of regulatory capture. Far better to require that drivers and businesses involved in potentially hazardous activities carry sufficient insurance to cover potential damage. That provides powerful incentives to both the drivers and business (to keep rates low) and the insurance company (to keep payouts low) to minimize the risks.

A real life example is private fire insurance / fire fighting in California. The insurance company is strongly motivated to provide expert advice in making homes and landscaping fire-resistant and also in providing timely fire fighting services. It’s all a much more effective combination (in terms of likelihood of a house going up in flames) than government-provided fire fighting.

Educating crack babies? Hell, how about just educating normal babies? Or are you really arguing that statist approaches to K-12 schooling have that whole education problem solved?!? Is that a ‘mission accomplished’ situation?

I don’t think of Greg Mankiw as a libertarian. He is, however, a fool and a liar. Almost everything in intro textbooks in economics is wrong.

… you only have to look at “libertarian”, faithfully spouting the latest delusionist talking point on climate change, and implicitly conceding that the reality of climate science would render her version of libertarianism untenable.

Well, and then we have John, faithfully spouting the latest true believer line on climate change, implicitly conceding that its falsification would render his version of socialism anti-capitalism untenable. So it goes.

But, as he says, for anyone still interested, here’s a link to a series that looks at why, regardless of the how the true climate science shakes out, the latest proposals re: carbon reduction at the present time are likely a mistake.

I was waiting for “enough and as good” (OK I was hoping to introduce it in comments although I should have known better). I will defend Jefferson relative to Locke. Locke’s enough and as good was a fantasy when and where he wrote it. Jefferson knew very well that his Republic was very very bad news for Native Americans. I think he clearly recognised the moral unnacceptability of forcible expansion (as he undoubtably recognised the moral unnacceptability of slavery). Of course he accepted both, but, at least he knew he was betraying his principles.

The rest of us are talking about the reality: ideological bootboys for the rich.

But that’s a bit curious. In case you haven’t noticed, “green”/environmental movements and demands tend to benefit people who are already privileged: the educated, culturally upper-middle-class, broadly liberal person.

No MylesSG, I hadn’t noticed actually. Are you suggesting that the average Bangladeshi will benefit less from AGW remediation (they retain their home and farmland) than the average rich westerner, for whom life proceeds roughly the same?

If you restrict your definition of environmental demands to a few western clean air cases, then yes, you’re right. But the big modern problems – recycling and resource reuse, global warming, desertification, habitat loss – are much more an issue in poor nations. You don’t often see British people losing their homes and children to catastrophic mudslides, or Japanese exposed to toxic residue from discarded PCs.

This is another example of attacking a negative caricature of a movement (greenies) while simultaneously defending an unrealistically positive caricature of a movement (libertarians).

Seth, I’m quite familiar with that Stross essay, and it may surprise you, (Though it shouldn’t, given all I’ve said here.) that I find nothing in it to disagree with. Stross is quite right that, under current circumstances, space can not function as a frontier. He also identifies the sort of technological advances which would be necessary for it to so function.

I fully expect they’ll be achieved someday. Regrettably, I expect I’ll be long dead by then. In case you somehow failed to notice, I’m not claiming that you could, today, found a ‘libertopia’ in space. In fact, I thought I’d been clear that I don’t think you could found one anywhere.

That’s why most libertarians see an incremental approach in an existing state as the only way to go. It IS the only way to go, right now.

See you’re still at it! Characterizing obvious shilling as “ambivalence and silliness.”

Whether or not environmentally-friendly legislation hurts the rich, the libertarian bovverboys certainly think it does, and their strident arguments against it – which largely consist of sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming “lalalala” – make pretty clear evidence of their real ideological mission, which is to defend the privileges of their rich masters.

I’ve yet to see defenders of libertarian ideals come up with a single convincing argument (or, mostly, any argument) in defense of libertarian truculence over AGW, and their obvious complicity with (and involvement from the start in) Big Tobacco’s attacks on epidemiologists, climate scientists, etc. Until someone can find a way to defend the public morals of this, I think the rest of us are entitled to characterise libertarians as a bunch of reckless shills.

Uncertainty about the median projection of global warming increases the expected net benefits of action.

John you might appreciate this bit from Keynes, which I came across the other day while looking for something else. It’s from a 1942 letter to Harry Hopkins, discussing whether the goal of postwar currency arrangements should be basically a patched-up version of the prewar status quo, or a radical departure.

“You make me feel again what I have felt so often in the last twenty-five years: how fearfully and dangerously rash you cautious people are! Time after time during my active years the authorities have gone bald-headed straight into plainly evident perils, because (so they argued) it would have been incautious to adopt constructive measures or to do anything worth mentioning until after we knew for certain what we were in for. Time after time what I wanted to see done has happened in the end, but only after great misfortunes. Must this always be so?”

and their obvious complicity with (and involvement from the start in) Big Tobacco’s attacks on epidemiologists

I should say this is one hundred per cent justified, as the anti-smoking campaign has long ceased to be a health mission, and instead turned into a disgusting cesspool for Puritanical moralists to expel their excess zealotry and energies. Anti-smoking has long crossed the border from nanny state to tyranny state.

I am personally disgusted in the extreme by militant nonsmokers. They are probably no better, and probably more vile, than Prohibitionists.

and so it goes… see how little we have to scratch the surface to discover that libertarians and their defenders are ideological bovverboys?

You think it’s okay for a company selling a toxic product to pay people secretly to smear those who say its cancerous, to attack other political movements (e.g. AGW) to poison the well, again secretly, to attack the WHO and other international health bodies (again, using money given to them in secret) and to create a complex international propaganda smokescreen over a variety of public health issues (e.g. malaria control), all funded and coordinated secretly, just to protect its profits?

It’s okay for libertarians to shill on these companies’ behalf, using money they don’t declare, in the press? And to lobby for governments to undermine the WHO’s mission so that those companies can sell their products unfettered in the third world?

And it’s the tobacco control lobby who are the “disgusting cesspool”?

if Hitler were a puppy

ah the many segmented beast of international socialism.

For anyone who’s still following, this is yet another round in the long-running dispute over the trivial side issue of how sure we are that temperatures around 1300 were lower than they are today. The authors of the current paper accuse climate scientists of over-confidence on this, but conclude that the data supports a probability of around 80 per cent. But, even if we didn’t have any data at all on this, the evidence of global warming over the past century would be unquestionable.

Ah no. This supposedly “trivial” side issue was a front-page scare graph on IPCC reports and press-releases everywhere for years. The latest Mannian pile of garbage is referenced in the first highlighted box in the recent Australian Academy of Science alarmist report. Those who pointed out the problems (eg Steve McIntyre) were vilified by the professional climate science community and their cheersquad (eg quiggin). Well, McIntyre was right. Quiggin and cohorts were 100% wrong.

Are you now taking 80% as your level of statistical significance quiggin? If that’s the standard in economics it would explain a lot. Besides, you might want to read the paper more carefully: the authors point out the proxy records are incapable of capturing large derivatives in the temperature series, so even that 80% is an overestimate.

The climate science community closed ranks behind the hockeystick authors. These are the same guys who came up with “hide the decline” which is another way of saying “hide the fact that the proxies don’t capture large derivatives”. These guys do not know how to estimate uncertainty. They have similar problems with their climate models. At least some honest and competent scientists are now in the process of unraveling all the unsupported claims, so we can get to the bottom of what we actually know, versus what has been grossly distorted by those pushing a specific policy agenda.

libertarianism in America is the actual concretisation of ‘classical liberalism’

Exactly Ollie. There are also dogmatic ideological libertarians, but they are a fringe. Modern-day American liberals bear almost no resemblance to the classical counterparts, fueled as they are by snark, entitlement mentality, and a fundamental belief that anyone who works hard and improves their lot in life must have done so at the expense of someone else. To all those liberals who see life as a zero-sum game, I ask you one thing: how come were all still not scratching around in caves?

Barry @150: read the paper. Mann was wrong. Of course we already knew that, but now it’s been published in Annals of Statistics, the alarmists have to change tack (note quiggin now wants it to be a “trivial” side issue. Whatever – reminds me of the way my 4yo behaves when caught out, only he’s cute with it). The Annals of Statistics paper references several publications of McIntyre, who has been continuously denigrated by quiggin. So quiggin was also wrong on McIntyre. Time to wake up.

A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?

libertarian,

I apologise.

That sentence should have read; “I very much believe that what’s called liberalism in America is the actual concretisation of ‘classical liberalism”.

Oh well, then I thoroughly disagree with you Ollie. There’s very little that’s “liberal” anymore about American liberals. Yeah, they’re for gay marriage and legalized pot. But when it comes to liberty that actually affects people, like not having 60% of your marginal income confiscated at gunpoint by the state, they’re the biggest authoritarians of all.

157: your somewhat restrictive definition of “people” is duly noted.

Nozickian libertarianism does differ from Locke’s earlier form, slightly. The hypocrite Locke justified the imperialist seizure of native lands. Under Nozicktopia, it’s more like the benevolent capitalist obtains the land from the natives for a few cartloads of baubles and beads, and then rents out parcels to them.

I don’t think you guys understand how just irritating it is for people who smoke to have all that moralistic antismoking bullshit shoved in their face. I honestly have had no end of people telling me somehow I am morally decrepit for smoking, and I am honestly sick of it.

Frankly, given how idiotic and Puritanical the antismoking lobby is (scratch the surface and they are the exact same type that agitated for Prohibition and Temperance and working-women’s-hostels and all that bullshit), I am inclined to just punch them in the face.

In Canada, cigarettes can’t even be displayed in the store counter. Taxes on cigarettes are seventy percent. A pack of the premiums I smoke cost $11.

It’s honestly tyrannical. Of course, not Hitler-tyrannical, but tyrannical in the oppressing-minority-who-are-smokers sense.

Myles, you really do have all the perspective on life of a 13-year-old who’s just been grounded, don’t you?

My little nephew is tyrannical too, of course not in the Hitler-tyrannical sense but in the doesn’t-like-to-eat-lettuce sense.

libertarian, just a little FYI: the paper has been submitted to the Annals of Applied Statistics. It might help you to get the details of its publication status and journal correct.

It has been accepted sg. Go to the journal home page and click on “next issues”. The lasso is nonparametric – it doesn’t matter whether the variables are “correlated” vs “collinear”. But in a sense you are right – this changes nothing. Everyone outside the closed circle-jerk of climate science already knew the hockeystick claims were bogus. However, now with publication in a serious statistical journal, those inside the circle must finally pay attention, or risk even further degradation of their professional credibility (if that is even possible at this point).

I think that by smoking around you, Myles is initiating force. So go right ahead.

(Alternatively, you can sue him.)

“…antismoking killjoys…”

Yeah, like those impaired driving killjoys or industrial pollution killjoys. There’s nothing like the joy of imposing negative externalities.

Where are the negative externalities of smoking yeliabmit? I doubt Myles puffs in your face. And if he does succeed in killing himself young it is a cheap death that saves the state a lot of money in old-age healthcare.

McShane and Wyner explicitly acknowledge that paleoclimate reconstructions are only one of the branches of evidence for AGW. Even if they are correct, something that I’m not qualified to evaluate, there are many independent roads to AGW that are not tied to paleoclimate reconstructions.

there are many independent roads to AGW that are not tied to paleoclimate reconstructions.

True, but those roads are paved by the same kind of people responsible for the paleoclimate debacle. They all grossly underestimate uncertainty. Next to fall will be the climate modelers.

Just to be clear: AGW is real. What is not real is the case for alarm. It all comes down to climate sensitivity, and at present the evidence is very much against a high sensitivity.

MylesSG’s reactions to anti-smoking, and especially Libertarian @174 serve as beautiful demonstrations of Clay’s claim @ 17.

Even when you scratch a superficially reasonable libertarian like Myles, it’s very common to suddenly find that:

“negative externalities from me to other people are merely figments of whining losers”

The reality is that smoking was formerly seen as a private act, but is increasingly seen as a public one. You can lament this fact, but to base your argument on the idea that smoking is inherently private is begging the question (in the old sense). The main reason shift is presumably the movement of questions of health generally into the public sphere; in the case of smoking in particular, improved air quality, especially indoors, must play a role too: When you aren’t breathing lots of particulates anyway, the costs of smoking are going to be greater, and more noticeable.

As an empirical matter, it was never the case that your smoking only affected you. People’s decisions to start or stop smoking are powerfully affected by whether other people smoke. (Grown-ups know this.) We used to consider smoking private in the sense that, for purposes of law and morality, it wasn’t part of causal chains extending beyond the person. But that was always a social-political convention, not a fact about the world.

True, but those roads are paved by the same kind of people responsible for the paleoclimate debacle. They all grossly underestimate uncertainty. Next to fall will be the climate modelers.

I don’t see how one gets this from the article. If you read it carefully (which is hard and takes a long time because it’s a technical article of 40+ pages) they’re very careful about what kinds of conclusions they draw from this work. Nor do I see how you get the supposed demise of climate models from this either.

Seth Gordon-

You may not be aware the that New York City anti-smoking ordinance had a very similar provision: smoking continued to be allowed in bars and restaurants, provided it was limited to a separately-ventilated space that employees did not enter.

This turned out to be a dead letter, since the city law was quickly superseded by a state law with no such exception. (To the chagrin of bar and restaurant owners who’d already invested in separate ventilation systems for their smoking areas.) Incidentally, it’s always struck me as funny that Mayor Bloomberg is so strongly associated in the public mind with the New York smoking ban, when then-governor Pataki, who was instrumental in passing the even stricter state law, never has been.

Even when you scratch a superficially reasonable libertarian like Myles, it’s very common to suddenly find that:

“negative externalities from me to other people are merely figments of whining losers”

Look. High tobacco taxes to pay for health externalities in terms of additional healthcare costs. I get it (although it’s highly dubious, as smokers die earlier and thus in net save the health system money). But honestly, you couldn’t display packs of cigarettes in a bloody convenience store in Canada. They have to be hidden. This is ridiculous in part because it’s obviously impracticable for me to query the clerk whether they have this or that brand of cigarettes, every single time (especially if you are making multiple queries, and the are people queuing up behind you).

I mean, forcing stores to hide their cigarettes is an act of pure and vile moralistic zealotry. It’s no different from Temperance or sheer, disgusting Puritanism. Again, I have no patience for militant antismokers, and wish them the utmost enjoyment of second-hand smoke as a sort of cosmic desert for their vile Puritanism. I am sure Dante has make space in his circles of hell for militant antismokers.

I mean, forcing stores to hide their cigarettes is an act of pure and vile moralistic zealotry.

No it’s not, it’s a matter of “choice architecture,” or whatever new name the Nudge types have come up with.

Again, I have no patience for militant antismokers, and wish them the utmost enjoyment of second-hand smoke as a sort of cosmic desert for their vile Puritanism.

Lighten up, Francis.

Doctor Science @ 175:

The political aspects of the incident are definitely interesting, but so are the way Pa Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder are shown to be paragons among men. The “libertarian character” that’s been mentioned in this thread. Even though Laura Ingalls Wilder doesn’t mention the city, many readers likely read the book as claiming greater moral virtue for the farms and small towns of the American West, and corresponding moral depravity for people who live on the coasts (especially the East Coast) and in cities (especially northeastern cities)–similar to the way midwesterners now sometimes pretend they are widely viewed as good only to be “flown over.”

I really don’t get the ignorance about smoking, and these stupid questions about negative externalities.

Here’s your negative externality: when I go to a bar full of smokers, my eyes hurt, my clothes stink, I cough and splutter, if I have a cold it is worsened and becomes horrible, and I am exposed to a carcinogen. It doesn’t matter whether you blow it in my face or in the air. I don’t care about all the economic negative externalities – I’m talking about a minority of people in the bar ruining my experience of a night out so they can do something completely voluntary.

The libertarian view of this seems to consist entirely of : fuck off. What am I meant to do, walk up to every single person in the bar and ask them to stop smoking?

The hilarious thing is that if I walked into a bar, wandered up to the nearest smoker, and put something in his eyes, it would be seen as violence. But that same person can sit there doing it to everyone else in the room and it’s okay.

Smoking is not a private activity, it is not a private choice unless you do it on your own, so don’t whine when, after invading other peoples’ space with your publicly offensive behaviour, people start passing laws to stop you.

I’m talking about a minority of people in the bar ruining my experience of a night out so they can do something completely voluntary.

Isn’t your going to the bar — that bar in particular — completely voluntary? Why not just not go, or not go to that one if you don’t like it?

Smoking is not a private activity….

What is? We’re affected by everything people do. What if I’m offended by your choice of clothes — they make my eyes hurt, they give me nightmares, they affect my own fashion sense, etc. Can I pass laws that impose my style on you?

But you’re not “the majority”, are you? And how do you get to decide what hurts my eyes? Can I decide what stinks?

Of course there is that famous “band from overseas, here once a year, one performance” problem — what if we just ask them to do two performances, one for most people, and one for those with extra-sensitive noses?

Libertarian #188: “The alarmist claims are invariably borne out of a gross underestimation of uncertainty.”

–This is upside-down. Given the irrefutable certainties of radiation physics, the great uncertainty in the possible consequences is what is MOST alarming.

Also alarming are the denialists’ lack of systemic thinking and their certitude that mitigation measures will be unduly costly. Well, in the cost-benefits, make sure you include the following:

There was an epochal drought in the 12th century AD western half of the United States — when it may have been only 1 degree C. warmer (the so-called “Medieval Warming Period”, perhaps only a northern hemispheric event). From Six Degrees, by Mark Lynas:

“…between A.D. 1000 and 1300…[when] the old trees in Walker River and Mono Lake were growing. Wildfires had raged in both national parks twice as frequently as before… The area we now call California had in medieval times been hit by a megadrought, lasting at different periods for several decades… …how geographically widespread was this event? Evidence from another lake, far away on the Great Plains of North Dakota… …scientists have now reconstructed long-term records…from old lake sediments. …before A.D. 1200, a series of epic droughts had swept the Great Plains…” (pp. 26-27)

“…the evidence is now overwhelming that what the western United States suffered during this [Medieval] period was not a short-term rainfall deficit but a full-scale mega-drought lasting many decades at least. …the [Colorado] river lost 15 percent of its water during a major drought during the mid-1100s. For 60 years at a time, the river saw nothing but low flows… …the remarkable coincidence of dates with evidence from New Mexico suggests that this was the very same drought that finished off the Chaco Canyon Indians.” (pp.28-29)

“…an immense system of sand dunes that spread across thousands of miles of the Great Plains, from Texas and Oklahoma in the south, right through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, to as far north as the Canadian prairie states of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. These sand dune systems are currently “stabilized”: by a protective layer of vegtetation, so not even the strongest winds can shift them. But during the Medieval Warm Period…these deserts came alive… People who remember the 1930’s Dust Bowl think they have seen the worst drought nature can offer… In a world that is less than a degree warmer overall, the western United States could once again be plagued by perennial droughts… Although heavier irrigation might stave off the worst for a while, many of the largest aquifers of fossil water are already overexploited…” (pp.29-30)

References:

Stine, S. (1994) “Extreme and Persistent Drought in California and Patagonia during Medieval Time,” NATURE 369: 546-9.

Swetnam, T. (1993) “Fire History and Climate Change in Giant Sequoia Groves,” SCIENCE 262: 885-9.

Laird, K. et.al. (1996) “Greater Drought Frequency and Intensity Before A.D. 1200 in the Northern Great Plains, U.S.A.,” NATURE 384: 552-4.

Meko, D. et al. (2007) “Medieval Drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin,” GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS 34: L10705.

Wolfe, S. et al. (2006) “Holocene Dune Activity and Environmental Change in the Prairie Parkland and Boreal Forest, Central Saskatchewan, Canada,” THE HOLOCENE 16.1: 17-29.

Mangan, J. et al. (2004) “Response of Nebraska Sand Hills Natural Vegetation to Drought, Fire, Grazing, and Functional Type Shifts as Simulated by the Century Model,” CLIMATIC CHANGE 63: 49-90

A possible difference between classical liberals and libertarians is that libertarians think the state can be smaller. If classical liberals such as Locke and Smith were alive today, I doubt they would make that mistake.

This debate about smoking is just silly. I have smoked for decades and for some subset of those decades worked in a bar. I stand foursquare behind laws limiting smoking in bars and enclosed public spaces more generally.

I don’t think it’s silly. I’ve never smoked and I stand just as “foursquare” behind the freedom of bar owners or owners of other enclosed public spaces to decide for themselves whether they’ll permit smoking or not. That one bar owner you know, for example, would obviously find it to his advantage to ban smoking on his own, which is fine. In the same way, it’s fine that you’ve decided to go outside to smoke, a decision that you shouldn’t and didn’t need the state to make for you.

lemuel: The major externality from smoking is that it encourages other people to smoke.

Sort of like the major externality from eating hot dogs is that it encourages others to do the same.

MM:
I would argue that your are mistaken about not needing the state to create the context within which my going outside to smoke is necessary and reasonable, instead of a manifestation of “vile puritanism.” If, let’s say, the state allowed the on the one hand smoking and second hand smoke cause cancer and on the other a bunch of tobacco industry shills say it doesn’t therefore we won’t insist on warning citizens that smoking and secondary smoke causes cancer, my going outside would be like the little sister’s dad in Chandler’s “Little Sister” smoking an empty pipe, i.e., “vile puritianism.” Once the state acknowledges the scientifically proven fact that smoking and secondary smoking cause cancer the debate moves from “vile puritanism ate my freedom” to reasoned accommodation, smoking sheds, which allow smoker and non to enjoy their (perhaps) god-given, but definitely state-enforced, right to congregate and enjoy the refreshing beverage of their choice.

It’s not like the state insists that, for example, no one wear paisley because it offends the state’s aesthetic sensibility but rather no one is free to endanger another in public which leads, ideally, to reasonable individuals agreeing not to endanger others in private. However, should individuals remain resistant to private endangerment the state acting in the interests of all ought ban private endangerment. That’s right the state can tell you not to smoke in your own home because it endangers the health of others just like the state can ban, via criminalization, child or, for that matter dog, abuse.

PS: the excerpt from the paper extends to the end of the comment (208) — markup got mangled somehow.

And, of course, Metamorf and Myles SG have indepedently reached the same policy conclusions.

Mhm? Just a couple years ago I still thought climate change wasn’t happening; and when it occurred to me that it does seem to be happening, then I came around to carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. If carbon taxes and cap-and-trade don’t work, I would support “direct regulation.” As long as climate change exists we will have to solve it, and the realm of libertarian choice only exists within the realm of workable and realistic solutions. If the realm of workable and realistic solutions are somewhat more statist, we would have to operate within that somewhat more statist realm.

That was a completely logical process. It’s not like I came up with the priors of market-based approaches first and only then applied them to climate change. If there was no climate change and no environmental externalities I would prefer the government not meddle in this.

metamorf’s response and Myles SG’s characterisation of anyone who doesn’t like smoking as “vile puritanism” are both clear examples of how selfish and unworkable libertarianism is, and how completely out of step with basic social values.

I am only going to note that your logic actually does justify Puritanism, and unless you are willing to justify Puritanism, then a bit more toleration in your logic would be advisable.

Our social values are pluralistic. Your conception of social values are not.

Smoking is not a private activity, it is not a private choice unless you do it on your own, so don’t whine when, after invading other peoples’ space with your publicly offensive behaviour, people start passing laws to stop you.

Drinking or driving is not a private activity either and the externalities are much more serious – get back to me when these activities will be restricted in the same way smoking is now.

How about Lot? If we can find one good man in Libertopia, we will promise not to smite it with awesome state power? We know little about the political system of Sodom and Gomorra, but they were at the very least libertine in morals. Although I doubt they went as far as having gay marriage.

@ novakant: Driving is not really a good example, is it? We could propose to have smoker’s licenses with tests and a strict age limit, and a detailed set of smoking rules with a special smoking police to uphold it, and obligatory smoking liability insurance. By then smoking would be about as restricted as driving.

Myles: As long as climate change exists we will have to solve it, and the realm of libertarian choice only exists within the realm of workable and realistic solutions.

Well, or adapt to it — otherwise, this is reasonable. For an example of a possible solution that doesn’t involve carbon taxes (or cap and trade), see this. It’s the kind of thing the Believers abhor, precisely because it makes no requirement that we repent of what they consider our wicked ways.

Oh, and speaking of our “wicked ways”, see the smoking kerfuffle. tom bach @207 finally raised the one real objection to smoking in the vicinity of others, which is the possible carcinogenic effect on those with long, repeated exposures. This is a little different from simply being offended by it (e.g., the increasingly apoplectic sg). I’ll just note that the offense takers are aggressively trying to ban smoking in open air spaces, as well, or even private spaces involving lone occupants, which tells you something about what’s actually going on with all this, and the real motivations behind it. As others have observed, puritanical bans arise not because of the harm they do, but because of the pleasure they give.

Where have I shown I don’t understand statistical significance in that thread? You might want to read this before replying.

On metamorf’s Yoo-like logic, it’s presumably OK for non-smokers to beat up smokers and take their cigarettes away, as long as they cause no permanent organ damage.

Maybe john should be encouraged to take a rest — this doesn’t even approach making sense. I mean, we can already see his sad devolution continuing on into a kind of, oh, let’s not call it “liberal fascism”, but some sort of schadenfreudian puritanism here:

… as the proportion of smokers declines, their weight in making decisions of this kind falls relative to those among the majority who are particularly sensitive. And there’s no longer any political need to make concessions. So, insults from smokers that would once have been passed over as trivial can now be prohibited.

Now that is an interesting logic, don’t you think? Works just as well if you substitute any other minority in the place of “smokers” — religion, politics, clothing styles, …

UK extra tax on beer is 17 pound per liter alcohol, or about 50p per pint. Cigarettes are 14p per cigarette plus 24% of retail price.

Some as-yet-unmentioned negative externalities of smoking.

Speaking for myself, I was keenly interested in the issue when I was regularly forced to inhale smoke. Now that hardly ever happens, and I’m more interested in making sure that tobacco packaging accurately reflects the product being sold. I’m perfectly happy for airports, bars etc to provide closed areas for smokers and actually gain some mild schadenfreude from passing by the glassed-in examples.

But of course, as the proportion of smokers declines, their weight in making decisions of this kind falls relative to those among the majority who are particularly sensitive. And there’s no longer any political need to make concessions. So, insults from smokers that would once have been passed over as trivial can now be prohibited.

I don’t think you can quite understand how cranky I am if I have very bad cravings on a long trip with no direct flight; I can be extremely unpleasant, and this generally makes life less pleasant for my fellow passengers, not more. Also, this is somewhat fallacious:

“their weight in making decisions of this kind falls relative to those among the majority who are particularly sensitive.”

Shouldn’t you say, among the minority who are particularly sensitive? The majority of people tend to be rather more tolerant of smokers.

By the way, I don’t particularly mind the silly government demands that cigarette packs show the dangers of smoking, or even the ridiculous taxes. It’s the sick impulse behind cigarettes-cannot-be-displayed-in-any-store-counter-but-must-be-hidden-in-a-cabinet-that-looks-not-like-a-cabinet-but-a-part-of-the-wall foolishness that pisses me off.

And smoking rooms in airports are pretty much a necessity. You can exit the bar to smoke (few people complain about this except in winter), whereas airport security makes it near-impossible to access cigarettes in transit.

In any case, militant nonsmokers are much louder than the majority. The majority of nonsmokers I know generally do not tend to be unreasonable about this and not absolutely paranoid about second-hand smoke.

Libertarian #218: “then you have a warming of approximately 1C for a doubling of CO2. …you need water-vapor feedbacks, which are far less understood.”

–Which is one of the contributors to the definition of “uncertainty”: that which is not understood. So then, we look at what happened the LAST time it was possibly 1 degree warmer. I reproduced a description of that from research in the western half of the northern hemisphere. In other areas of the world, there may have been massive flooding. Have you factored into your cost-benefits a slew of Pakistani floods?

Here is what you might address: In climate change, statistical uncertainty is NOT YOUR FRIEND.

This, I think, gets us back to the reason why libertarianism will never work: People would have to know much more than they do. And, even if people were much smarter, it is very likely that we simply don’t have enough time to learn everything necessary to be responsible, less-government citizens. For complex systems science all we have are experts, and an ongoing refinement. My theory is that Hayek confused the libertarians, by making them believe that the market price mechanism can provide all the remaining information that is required. It doesn’t — prices transmit information only about scarcity and desire. And prices may not always transmit them fast enough in time.

The majority of people tend to be rather more tolerant of smokers.

The majority of people know that if they bug somebody who is a smoker about their smoking they have a good chance of running into a real dick.

I guess the smoking discussion of smoking is reaching the end of its useful life. But I do want to emphasize one more time that the externalities described by John Q. and sg, while certainly real, are *not* the main motivation for the spread of anti-smoking laws.

Here — to take one of many possible examples — is the Mayor’s Management Report for the New York City Department of Health. The department’s top critical objective? “Reduce smoking and the illness and death caused by tobacco use.” No mention of illness among non-smokers. The focus is on the harms to smokers themselves. One of the department’s key indicators is the number of proportion of smokers in the city. There is no distinction in the reporting of this indicator how much of the smoking took place in the presence of non-smokers. The goal is less smoking, period.

While I obviously don’t share Myles SG’s view of anti-smoking legislation as”vile puritanism” (an old coworker, and friend, died just last week of lung cancer, in his mid-50s; if the vile puritans had gotten started a bit earlier he might have had a another good 20 years) there’s a certain analytic level on which he understands this legislation better than most of its defenders here do.

The idea is not that smoking is an individual choice that people should be free to make as long as it doesn’t impinge on others. It’s that smoking is a ferocious addiction that people cannot free themselves from without collective help. Which, as an ex-smoker, was certainly my experience.

The idea is not that smoking is an individual choice that people should be free to make as long as it doesn’t impinge on others. It’s that smoking is a ferocious addiction that people cannot free themselves from without collective help. Which, as an ex-smoker, was certainly my experience.

I know this must be an extremely anticlimatic addendum, but as a personal matter, I need nicotine to function properly. I wasn’t so much “hooked” by nicotine as I simply never really functioned properly before I had nicotine or caffeine. I suspect I have ADHD. Used to have extremely subpar grades, truancy, that sort of thing.

The idea is not that smoking is an individual choice that people should be free to make as long as it doesn’t impinge on others. It’s that smoking is a ferocious addiction that people cannot free themselves from without collective help.

Same thing with junk food, too much TV, shopping, inactivity, and we haven’t even started on sex….

While the public drinking behaviour in the UK might indeed be a bit on the more extreme scale (doesn’t make it any better though) the deaths and injuries from drunk driving, rape, assault, domestic violence, child abuse etc. are definitely not a problem restricted to the UK, but exist in every country where people have more or less unrestricted access to alcohol.

But hey, it’s all good as long as nobody is “blowing smoke in your face”.

So then, we look at what happened the LAST time it was possibly 1 degree warmer. I reproduced a description of that from research in the western half of the northern hemisphere. In other areas of the world, there may have been massive flooding. Have you factored into your cost-benefits a slew of Pakistani floods?

You’ve presented a bunch of anecdotes, but it is pretty clear that a warmer world will, overall, be far better for the human race. Plenty more people die of cold than the opposite.

As for uncertainty: there’s uncertainty in everything we do. Were we to apply the precautionary principle to everything for which we have scant evidence, we’d still be scratching our bums in caves. The firestarters and wheelmakers would have been driven out by the liberal fascists.

As for government being better placed to make decisions: you’re joking right? Central planning worked brilliantly for the Soviets – that’s why they’re still the world’s leading superpower.

The worst part is that I have no particular desire to give people second-hand smoke. I stay away from children and the young at all times if I need to use tobacco. I try to aim my smoke away from the general direction of another person and stay a reasonable distance away from other persons if possible. I do not encourage others to smoke and take the appropriate measures to remove tobacco smells from me and my orifices when engaging in contact or conversation with others.

However, if some Puritan killjoy persistently bugs me about it and wishes to make me miserable, I don’t feel the duty to be nearly so considerate. If you are a Puritan killjoy, you deserve what you get.

Metamorf #242 — No, the list of possible problems caused by climate change is bad, but the list of economic problems caused by carbon taxes is short and mitigatable.

In fact, long-term economics is NOT so perilously unpredictive, not so fraught with tipping-points. We have thoroughly entered the scientific era and U.S. GDP per capita has gone STEADILY straight upward at about 2% per year since the late 1800’s. The Great Depression is a tiny blip on that graph. The same is becoming true of all other advanced economies.

There appears to be nothing that can stop economic growth except a global disaster. Things that would qualify are nuclear war, a sudden fatal pandemic, getting hit by a big meteor, or a rapid move into a climate regime of accelerated desertification, monsoonal flooding, and continental forest fires. One mega-forest fire might darken the skies enough to stop agriculture world-wide for a year or two — life would still go on, but without most humans, and the fire itself probably wouldn’t even show up in the fossil record. If primary green plant production was shut down for a year or two in previous eras, what would we know about it?

Changing incentives, such as by Pigouvian (carbon) taxes, by cap and trade, or by ending the massive subsidies to oil coal and gas doesn’t evacuate money from the economy like the Great Depression, leaving people bereft and without a way to turn — it just makes other technologies a little more cost competitive, and gets R&D investment into those sectors a little faster. The idea that this would incur a “tipping point” is frankly ludicrous. The proposal is not simply to reduce CO2 by less usage of carbon fuels, although it would have those minor effects; it is instead to spur the technological change to supplant these fuels. Without this incentive, it will happen slower.

This is basic economics — part of the reason that we are so far involved with carbon fuels is because they receive subsidies.

We have thoroughly entered the scientific era….

Ah, yes. Spoken like a character in a Jules Verne novel.

Myles, if your need is nicotine, will some other method of delivery satisfy work?

I am gradually weaning off cigarettes, and am trying out other delivery vehicles.

But I do uphold a smoker’s right to smoke with minimum of infringement.

To expand once more on Myles 248, it seems that you are advocating a code of “political correctness” towards smokers: don’t be moralistic, don’t judge, don’t be impolite, etc. If racism and homophobia are perfectly acceptable (say libertarians), why should it be wrong to hate smokers?

“So unless you are willing to get the State to get out of the anti-tobacco moralism business, you should stop excusing the moralism of the militant antismokers.”

Again, thinking as a libertarian, there is nothing to excuse – they are perfectly in their right to be moralistic. I have to insist here because this is such as beautiful example of the inconsistency that never fails to appear in any discussion with libertarians.

And no, you are wrong about a majority not caring about smoking laws. As the latest example, Bavarians voted on July 4 (non-smoker’s independence day) by a 61% majority to ban smoking in all restaurants and bars, no exception. And contrary to Lemuel’s contention, the law was written and campaigned for on behalf of nonsmokers’ protection, nothing else. And US-style smoking bans have in Germany caught on only very recently. In fact, the Bavarian referendum was a reaction to a law passed in 2007 and weakened in 2009 that allowed too many exceptions.

“Again, thinking as a libertarian, there is nothing to excuse – they are perfectly in their right to be moralistic.”

This is ridiculous. Does the State put out relentless propaganda advocating propaganda? Does the State put out relentless propaganda advocating racism? Does the State tell schoolchildren every single school year that homosexuality is decrepit and bad?

Private individuals have their right to be moralistic, and smokers have the right to blow smoke in the face of such moralistic individuals, but the State has long tilted the field toward anti-smoking propaganda.

If the State teaches in schools that homosexuality is evil, would you be saying that latent anti-homosexual discrimination is you know, somehow normal as well?

You have quite a weak mind for grasping reasoning.

You have a right to be a racist in private, non-commercial relations (if you don’t want to be friends with people of a particular ethnicity, etc). You do not have such rights in commercial relations (renting, etc).

Plenty more people die of cold than the opposite.

And plenty more people die of floods than of cold.

Metamorf (262). Please look up “Nash Equilibrium”, “Prisoners’ Dilemma”, and “Braess’s Paradox”. It is demonstrably not always the case that the equilibrium state of a social system is socially optimal.

Don’t they have every right to be puritanical zealots, just as you have the right to be libertarian?

Sure, hence my live and let live conclusion (262). They’re still puritanical zealots aka human scum :-)

@PaulB: It is demonstrably not always the case that the equilibrium state of a social system is socially optimal.

And how is “socially optimal” defined? Do you think there might be a difference between the theoretical world, in which the theorist can assume knowledge of each participant’s definition, and the real world, in which policy makers cannot?

lemuel, again you’re right, but the reason that non-smokers tolerate these campaigns and generally encourage them, including for example by telling off smokers who try to flout the new laws, is that they have immediate positive benefits for the majority of people’s social lives.

This is very different to, for example, if the government attempted to enforce a ban on another dangerous, voluntary act that had no ramifications for the non-users. The obvious example I’m thinking of, which would be completely intolerable to the Australian public, is a ban on any of the major contact sports at amateur level – or even significant changes to the rules to make them safer. People who do not watch the sport and don’t play it would object strongly to such laws and would never use social pressure to enforce them. This is also why attempts by doctors to ban boxing have failed so spectacularly.

The same has generally been true of drinking laws – most people turn a blind eye to under-age drinking if they think it’s harmless, and until government campaigns made the effects clear, people didn’t even stop their mates drunk driving. This changed when people became aware of its effects on people other than the driver, and determined that they had a social responsibility – backed up by law and beautifully parodied in The Simpsons – to prevent their friends from doing this.

This should make it pretty clear that it’s nothing to do with puritanism, as the militant crazies on here are claiming, and a lot to do with the majority’s vision of how their health funds should be spent, and how their public spaces should be ordered.

Another thing the libertards ranting here might want to consider is what would happen to their health care in a pure libertarian world. Does MylesSG seriously think that treatment for smoking-related diseases would be covered by his private health fund in an unregulated libertopia? In the US the health insurers are already considering a levy on smokers, and smokers currently only pay their way because their high tobacco taxes subsidize the services they don’t receive (social security and aged care).

In libertopia, regardless of the level of tobacco taxes, it’s highly unlikely you’d be able to get health insurance at all past your 40s Even if you did, the chance that you’d be able to get access to scarce organs when yours failed would be vanishingly low. But, with unadulterated and unregulated tobacco company propaganda, Myles SG and metamorf (whose comments here clearly show them to be easy victims of the last individualist idea they heard) will undoubtedly be smokers in libertopia.

It’s quite ironic that your capacity for libertarian self-righteousness on this issue depends entirely on the high taxes you pay and government regulation of the health insurance industry. But I suppose being libertarians, you’re long since inured to the ironies of your own positions.

Metamorf #253: “Ah, yes. Spoken like a character in a Jules Verne novel.”

–Actually written by somebody sitting at a COMPUTER.

Metamorf, at #242 you wrote, “But, next to climate, economics is a much more perilous predictive enterprise, beset with many more and greater uncertainties.” So I don’t fall into misunderstanding your ironies again, perhaps you would list the ways in which economics is more perilous than climate.

The thread will have to get old, if you don’t wish to address any real point. I have no doubt that GCM models will change and I also have no doubt that they will continue to be inaccurate. I would like to know of any case in the history of science where a mathematical model has deterministically predicted any n-compartment system. Don’t bother answering because I don’t think it matters. Instead, let’s suppose that we get only a mild return to the temperatures of Medieval times. The paleo evidence is that the western half of North America at that time was becoming very arid, no soil retention due to flash-flooding, higher rate of forest fires, etc. Now the questions for you are: (1) Do you really believe that the total economic benefits of causing the entire western half of the United States to turn into a sand-dune desert, will be greater than the total economic costs of dealing with it? (2) Flipping benefits and costs around, do you believe that the total economic costs of providing price incentives (such as by Pigouvian taxes or cap and trade or whatever) for the development of new energy technologies, will be greater than the total economic benefits of doing this? And finally, (3) Having given your likely answers: Do you believe that your net economic benefits of turning the western half of the United States into a desert will be larger that your net costs of climate mitigation incentives for that area? Because you write a lot about “uncertainty”, but the problem I see is in what you appear to be certain of.

“Because you write a lot about “uncertainty”, but the problem I see is in what you appear to be certain of.”

Libertarianism is right by default unless it is proven wrong with a 100% certainty. Since there is always uncertainty in the real world, libertarianism is the only certainty. QED.

For the record, I’m not a libertarian and arguing for a pluralistic society based on compromise and respect for minorities as opposed to the dictatorship of the majority and constant overreaching by organs of the state doesn’t make me a libertarian.

Why? Because somebody with the pseudonym “libertarian” says so. This is modern conservatism, a militant rejection of science and rationality that threatens our survival.

You note “rejection of science” as if it is some bad thing. Where were you when all the “science” in the 1930’s pointed toward Socialism (in either the left-wing or the right-wing variety) as the only scientific solution to humanity’s ills? When even such a deeply self-honest and realistic man as Eric Blair thought there’s no other way out but Socialism?

I should think the dogma and doctrine of Classical Liberalism has served humanity better. Sir James Cowperthwaite dogmatically applied classical liberalism to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong became richer than Britain. What you call science is in fact inferior to classical liberal doctrine in its perception of truth and the common weal.

In any case, a thread on libertarianism has garnered 280 comments. Given the consistently tiny numbers of libertarians in the world, I wonder why?

Where were you when all the “science” in the 1930’s pointed toward Socialism (in either the left-wing or the right-wing variety) as the only scientific solution to humanity’s ills?

I wonder if there is some difference in countries that currently offer a good living standard and those same countries in the 1930s.

I have ample evidence that the costs of abrupt decarbonization of the world economy will be large

How much work is “abrupt” doing here? When would be a good time to start decarbonization of the world economy, at what rate, and using which mechanisms?

We should start decarbonizing when we are confident that CO2 is a real threat. There are two components to evaluating the threat: 1) how much will temperature rise, and 2) what changes will such temperature increases cause. At present, all of the modeling I see underestimates uncertainty in 1) and overestimates negative impacts in 2).

Thanks, libertarian. I see a problem with pronouns here, though, of which there are several at work, some explicit and others implicit, but in need of being rendered explicit. There are two explicit in the passage above: “we” and “I,” and two implicit: “they1” (i.e., those who are doing the modeling you disagree with) and “they2” (those who make policy). It would seem then you’re faced with a struggle between you (“I” above) and “they1” as to how to convice “we” (the public) and “they2” (policy makers) who is more believable. Is that how you see things?

Your pronoun summary is correct, save that if I understand you correctly I don’t think the quoted passage refers to “they2”. It refers to two types of “they1”: “they1a” – the climate modelers, and “they1b” – the “impact-on-humankind-of-climate-change” modelers, which isn’t a discipline as such but is contributed to by economists, environmentalists, etc. “they2” (policy-makers) consume the models from “they1b” who in turn consume the models from “they1a”.

Also, I don’t think “I” need to convince policy makers, just the public (policy-makers will follow, at least in a functioning democracy).

So, slightly rephrasing you, “I” am struggling to convince “we” (the public) that “they1a” (and to a lesser extend “they1b”) are not believable. And by “not believable” I mean their predictions are far more confident than the evidence warrants (not that their predictions are necessarily wrong).

libertarian is quite right that there is more uncertainty in climate change projections than popular reports tend to suggest. We simply don’t know whether net feedback effects will be negative or positive, and it’s hard to see how we could know without running the experiment.

But it is bizarre to conclude from that that the right thing to do is to run the experiment. It’s not as if we have unlimited supplies of fossil fuels in any case. Our choices are either to burn fossil fuels as fast as extraction costs permit, and hope that the environment can cope, or to slow down as much as we can, hope that the environment survives that burden, and leave more reserves of fossil fuels for future generations to use.

Exhaustion of finite resources while risking profound adverse effects on the environment is the opposite of what conservatism ought to mean, which makes it puzzling that it’s the popular policy of right-wing politicians. Nor do I understand why libertarians want to ignore negative externalities if they’re in any way uncertain. Can someone explain to me why this is a polarizing left-right issue?

“Can someone explain to me why this is a polarizing left-right issue?”

Because “What you call science is in fact inferior to classical liberal doctrine in its perception of truth and the common weal.”

PaulB and John Protevi, I intended to leave this thread (and this will be my last) but this is hard to watch. Why don’t you take these guys seriously? Why is it so hard to believe that they mean what they say? You have somebody tell you he doesn’t care whether food production collapses due to desertification as long as his dogmatic belief in the superiority of unregulated market capitalism isn’t called into question, and another one openly announcing that science should really be rejected (I never expected them to be that open about their anti-science stance but there you have it) and you try to argue with them about Nash equilibria? What do you expect? Consider John’s hint.

Wow, this really is the thread that will not die, isn’t it? Let me make one last try to clear up some things, and then I’ll be movin’ on, promise.

chris: Socialism turned out to be neither a threat nor a menace but, in fact, merely a possibly overzealous and narrow view of some potentially useful insights about public goals and actions.

Tell that to the citizens of all the actually existing socialist states prior to 1990, or to the citizens of Cuba and North Korea now. Interesting, though, that you agree with right wing critics of Obama that his administration fits an “expansive” definition of socialism.

PaulB: Nor do I understand why libertarians want to ignore negative externalities if they’re in any way uncertain.

Well, I think we should all want to know something about the costs and benefits involved in doing something about any supposed negative externalities, else we risk incurring greater costs than the externalities themselves. It’s not limited to libertarians, it’s not that hard, and it doesn’t involve “ignoring” anything. As to your question why it’s a “polarizing left-right issue”, I certainly agree that it shouldn’t be. But the explanation that I keep coming across is that it’s fed by underlying and non-rational commitments and antipathies — involving industrial civilization, “wasteful lifestyles”, etc. — that are aspects of the current left-right split.

@294: I’m no expert in Game Theory, but as I understand it, when you can see the payoffs for all participants, when the payoffs can be assigned numerical values to make them easier to compare, and when the participants can simply be assumed to agree on the payoffs, then it becomes possible for a theorist, overviewing the game as a whole, to define a “socially optimal” set of strategies. In the real world few if any of those conditions pertain, and the notion of “socially optimal” becomes much harder to define in any practical way.

Re: the bar owner, that wasn’t a scenario I came up with, and I was simply responding to the conditions described by others. In the first case, for example, the assumption was that the owner found all sorts of advantages to a smoking ban — so in that case (assuming the advantages outweighed any disadvantages) then I said he would or could have found it to his advantage to ban smoking himself. There’s a lesson there: in general, if something is to your advantage, you really don’t need the state to tell you to do it, you actually can just decide to do it on your own, assuming you’re free to do so. In the second case, the assumption was that no owner would actually ban smoking voluntarily — so in that case I said that must be because owners understand that they can satisfy more customers by allowing smoking than by banning it. If that’s not the case, then someone would be able to figure out that they could satisfy more customers with a ban, and hence do more business — i.e., to translate the obvious, at least one of the players would be able to alter her strategy to get a better payoff, and so the absence of non-smoking bars is not a “Nash Equilibrium”.

John Protevi, by the way, as always, adds value to a conversation, whether or not you agree with him. piglet, not so much.

Libertarian #278 Unfortunately for your argument, I’m not writing about “abrupt decarbonization”, while on the other hand, the evidence that the western U.S. (and southern Europe) tends toward desertification in warmer climates is so far from “scant” as to be currently uncontested. It is even visually obvious. Moreover, Pigouvian taxes don’t have to be geared to the cost of the externality if they are meant to provide a price incentive to alternative innovation. (And don’t forget to include the costs of U.S. foreign policy to the externality of fossil fuels though perhaps you have judged that is exaggerated too.) But the one thing you’ve really overlooked is basic growth economics: economists from Adam Smith through to the present have presented voluminous evidence that technical innovations crossbreed from one industrial sector to another, and so the benefits of new energy technologies or any other new technologies almost always include multiplied economic growth and/or cost-savings. In all, you have yet to amount any sort of argument against the certainty that price incentives to encourage alternative developments is a big win-win. If it weren’t, then markets would never work to begin with.

‘pissing on someone in public and telling them to go home if they don’t like it is not “pluralistic,” Myles SG’

Yes it is. What about bars for people who want to get pissed on? (they do exist). would you ban them. What about venues where consensual Sadi-masochism takes place? Majorities and the state are constantly trying to ban them.

Smoking is a slightly harder case because it is popular and so risks dominating a Market (unlike fetish bar). But I reckon the problem could be solved by deregulating alcohol licensing. If every non-smoking cafe wre allowed to serve beer if they wanted to, then there would be more options for the non-smoking alcohol seeker.

Can someone explain to me why this is a polarizing left-right issue?

To piss off hippies.

I think “hippies”@303 means “people who think they can drown out my Springsteen with their Simon and Garfunkel or Billy Joel if they turn the volume up high enough, but their taste in music is proof they are losers.”

Tell that to the citizens of all the actually existing socialist states prior to 1990, or to the citizens of Cuba and North Korea now.

You mean the dictatorships? Dictatorships are bad whether or not they pretend to be socialist. (We could have a nice long argument about whether it’s possible for a dictatorship to be *genuinely* socialist or whether the dictator and cronies are ipso facto a ruling class who rule for themselves and not the people, but it’s beside the point: ostensibly-socialist dictatorships and non-ostensibly-socialist dictatorships both suck, so it’s obvious that the problem is the dictatorship.)

I’m perfectly willing to concede that dictatorship is the path to serfdom — hell, you hardly need a path at that point. But what does that have to do with socialism?

You are familiar with the term “social democracy” and know what it describes, right? Several of the most prosperous *and most free* nations on Earth? That’s who I was talking about in comment 290, not North Korea.

Indeed, “libertarian” is aptly self-named, since his distrust of markets is typical of libertarians as a group

Oh yes, libertarians hate free markets. And socialists love them. I think quiggin has gone emeritus. @288 I advocate using market based approaches to CO2 reduction if we need to. I simply disagree that we have enough information to decide the “if”.

We simply don’t know whether net feedback effects will be negative or positive, and it’s hard to see how we could know without running the experiment.

Then we should cutoff public funding for climate resesrach today, PaulB, because answering that question is exactly what these guys are being paid for. That said, we’re already running the experiment and it is not supporting the models. We will get the answer without having to go the whole way. It would just be made a whole lot easier if the people charged with getting the answer were more honest and were not pushing their own policy agenda.

what are your strategies for achieving the goal of convincing the public about your views on the over-confidence of the two groups of modelers (they1 and they2)?

I don’t have a strategy. But I do what I can, given the time available. Point out the problems when I see them. Write letters to the editor of my local newspaper in response to incorrect claims from alarmists. Post on blogs. I use my real name which carries some authority except when inappropriate like here (I’d rather give quiggin some of his own snarky mediicine under a pseudonym). Most of my friends are die-hard AGW believers, but they can’t easily dismiss me so that helps to at least get people thinking that they are not being fed the whole story.

This seems to be the “strategy” of most educated skeptics. There’s not a lot else we can do. We are by definition outsiders. But it seems to be working reasonably well.

Thanks. Two points seem to need clarification.

I use my real name which carries some authority except when inappropriate like here (I’d rather give quiggin some of his own snarky mediicine under a pseudonym).

Insofar as John Quiggin blogs under his real name, and links to his personal website, it would seem that giving him some of his own snarky medicine would require you to do the same.

This seems to be the “strategy” of most educated skeptics. There’s not a lot else we can do. We are by definition outsiders. But it seems to be working reasonably well.

If I understand your position correctly, you say it’s too soon to tell if AGCC will have worse ecological / economic effects than the allegedly bad economic effects of changing our current energy tax structure. (I say “allegedly bad” to incorporate the above arguments about innovation under a Pigouvian tax.) But I don’t understand how saying that makes you an “outsider” as that view seems very well represented in various power clusters in the USA. And secondly I don’t see how claiming to be an “outsider” can mesh with your claims of success. The fact that your position (let’s not change the tax structure) has worked up until now (the US has not in fact changed its energy tax structure) seems to indicate that you advocate the “insider” position.

As an aside to some of the earlier comments on this post, I’m always amused by those who view Hong Kong as a Libertarian Paradise.

Here in HK, we have:
– a very efficient and inexpensive public health system (about USD 12.5 per day for hospital stays);
– very efficient and cheap public transport;
– a public housing system which caters for quite a large percentage of the population;
– probably the most disciplined and least corrupt police force in Asia (and certain parts of Europe, and the US too, probably);
– compulsory registration of all citizens and residents with quite strict border controls; and
– a huge and highly paid Civil Service (best paid in the world, I think).

On the actual libertarian side, it is very easy to start a small business here, as long as you don’t try and compete with the big companies, and your tax bill won’t be more than about 16% thanks to some very profitable companies actually paying their taxes thanks to a simple (but progressive) tax regime. And there isn’t a minimum wage (yet: coming soon at about USD 3.80 per hour!), so you can fantasize that you’re taking advantage of cheap labour (who have subsidised housing, healthcare, travel, and security).

Walt, you are quite right: we want to avoid heavy-handed government interference unless we are quite sure we need them. But cap and trade, pigovian taxes, etc are heavy-handed government interference.

“But cap and trade, pigovian taxes, etc are heavy-handed government interference.”

Compare 104 and 105. Myles and libertarian need to straighten this out among them libertarians. This thread has only 316 comments so plenty of space left.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, Walt, but our Communist plot to destroy capitalism is now entering its second and final phase.

Libertarian, you _will_ be amply rewarded on your return to Moscow but for now could you please ratchet it down a bit? We wanted a catastrophic breakdown in the system that leaves the way clear for revolution, not to destroy the planet altogether.

Spaseeba!

I have numerous objections to libertarian thinking but one of the main ones I have is that if you were actually to take their vision of the state seriously, in order to have a society that doesn’t collapse you would need a greater than usual level of cooperative effort in the private sphere, civil society, whatever you want to call it. Some libertarians will pay lip service to this when you raise various objections, “Of course, civic organizations, charities can do that.” It all sounds suspiciously like something added as a PR afterthought so as not to sound to much like Ebeneezer Scrooge.

The problem I have is that the types of personalities most attracted to libertarian thinking is that they are precisely the sorts of persons who have zero interest in such private cooperative enterprises. And even if they were, I think this ignores the realities of the modern world. Most of us do not live in Little House on the Prairie. The type of small town world view and reality that would take to support a minimal state doesn’t exist in very many places.

I should have typed, “we relegate bad events to a tail by USING mathematical syllogisms.” Or perhaps it should be, singing mathematicized syllogisms. Anyway a rather weak entailment of ideas not robust of real ecological evidence. Though libertarians are not the only ones guilty of this.

The problem I have is that the types of personalities most attracted to libertarian thinking is that they are precisely the sorts of persons who have zero interest in such private cooperative enterprises.

Jamey, conservatives give way more to private charity that do liberals. I don’t have statistics for libertarians but I imagine that also holds true.

It’s plausible to suppose that the climate is in a metastable equilibrium.

I agree. But I think the metastability works differently.

When the planet is cold (ice ages), it is also dry (cold air holds less water), and cloud cover is less affected by temperature changes (cold to slightly-less-cold is not enough to affect the clouds when there is not a whole lot of evaporation going on anyway), so feedback from increased water vapor is large and positive. Feedback is also large and positive from ice-albedo, so you have a doubly-whammy, which allows very small changes in radiative forcing due to orbital oscillations to cause large changes in temperature.

When the planet is warm, the air is moister, so incremental increases in water-vapor have less impact on temperature than during the ice ages. It is also plausible that cloud cover is more dramatically affected by heating in a warmer planet, because you are in a high-evaporation phase. So you’d expect feedbacks to reduce or even become negative as the planet warms.

This explains why the climate is stable and yet the earth can oscillate between ice-ages and warm periods.