Freedom!

Not being fammiliar with that particular index of “freedom,” I don’t want to comment on it. But I am familiar with the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom, and it is an ongoing source of amusement/outrage to me that, while it includes government spending (more is worse) and taxes (higher is worse), there is *nothing* in the index that measures access to education or to health care–both of which are, it seems to me, very important in determining an individual’s freedom, economic or otherwise. (Of course, to the extent that government pays for education and/or health care, then increased access would show up as a negative factor for freedom…)

OP: hardly self-evident

To put it more kindly than I would have thought possible (or necessary).

Libertarian notions of freedom invariably are one sided, and this illustrates it perfectly. Count only the costs of government, none of the benefits.

Freedom to walk the high wire without a safety net. Notice that they include motorcycle helmet laws?

But the true measure of freedom for Koch-funded Mercatus is how much it benefits the ultra wealthy and corporate citizens. Sure, they throw a number of sops to conservative home-schoolers to pretend they are concerned with freedoms of the little people too, but the aim is the continuous propaganda drumbeat of freedom for corporations to privatize wealth and socialize costs.

” The freedom index is an attempt to index the degree of, or degree of burdensomeness of, government regulation to white property-owning males in power.”

There, FTFY.

This wasn’t even a reasonable index of the burden of regulations. It was akin to a frat-boy party index of various schools claiming to be academically rigorous.

You might ask the dead firefighters in West, Texas about the “burdens of government regulation.”

Oh wait, you can’t ’cause they’re dead, because the ‘burden of regulation’ like telling the government, and hence, first responders, you have 270 tons of explosives on site, or ‘putting a fertilizer plant with 270 tons of explosives on site may not be a good idea in a residential neighborhood’ is just a terrible,terrible tyranny on the noble business owner free upstanding libertarian male, and so not required in that bastion of freedom, Texas.

In a nutshell, THAT is “Libertarianism” and why people don’t like it, because it is ENTIRELY concerned with protecting, preserving and extending ‘regimes of private power’, also known under it’s classical moniker: “Might makes Right”

I thought about finding out if North Korea and Somalia ranked highly using Mercatus’s spreadsheet, but realized that it would take too long to do for how unsure I was of the conclusion. I assume they’d be at the top of the list because Somalia has no functioning government regulations and North Korea has really low taxes.

I recently did a road trip through North Dakota and imagined it was what North Korea feels like if you replaced Kim Jong Un pictures with anti-abortion propaganda: desolate and bossy.

According to a 2005 Tax Foundation study, four out of the five freest states also get a good deal more money from the federal government than they pay out. (For example, North Dakota, #1 on the freedom list, received $1.68 in federal spending for every $1.00 collected in federal taxes in 2005; South Dakota, #2, $1.53.) Hmm…

There’s a modest but quite discernible relationship between “freedom” and economic productivity. It’s just not the one Mercatus might have liked.

the exercise holds promise chiefly as a solution to a coalition-building problem: how to “simultaneously preserve libertarianism as a distinct brand and also preserve libertarianism’s strong alliance with social conservatism.”

Convince yokels it’s the best of all possible worlds.

Why is it that the states I most want to live in are the unfree states? For some reason, the unfree lifestyle I can live in California, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Washington, etc. is hard to resist. But why don’t I want to live a life of glorious freedom in Oklahoma, for example?

Maybe some people just don’t like freedom.

Aren’t you overthinking this again? Just list the states in order of Romney’s percentage of the vote in the last presidential election and you’re done.

I wonder what the results would be if you applied this method to the states of the world.

“It’s only the “government will do something” part of marriage that is missing.”

Yeah, yeah, I hear something like this every time libertarians talk about governmental discrimination. They don’t care about a negative right not to be discriminated against in the provision of governmental services or benefits. So, for example, if the government was giving out loans to white people but not black people, they wouldn’t care. They’d just say that the government shouldn’t give loans to anyone. Similarly, the libertarian solution to governments giving marriage benefits to straight but not gay people is to say that governments shouldn’t give marriage benefits to anyone at all.

I think the libertarian question is, for what purposes the use of coercive force (‘violence’) is legitimate. Maybe original coercive force, since everyone thinks self-defense is all right. Maybe some other word instead of ‘legitimate’ which implies a notion of law, which already implies government — the monopoly of the aforesaid coercive force. Just because some libertarians are stupid (vide supra) doesn’t mean they all are. Necessarily.

Anarcissie @ 25

Niggling about violence and coercion seems to sidestep the question of the relationship of public goods to private goods, and public power to private power. Libertarians seem to be reluctant to concede the possibility of any, but private interests and private goods; the concept of a state to manage a common wealth is more repugnant than a fist in a face.

I may have mentioned this before, but it’s odd that the libertarian response to gay marriage never seems to include the suggestion that the government stop keeping tabs on people’s genders.

“Oklahoma is mediocre on tort abuse, health insurance freedom, occupational freedom, and utility deregulation. However, its number of health insurance coverage mandates is better (lower) than average.”

I like how they have to remind me which way is “better”.

Anarcissie: “Maybe original coercive force, since everyone thinks self-defense is all right. ”

Libertarians (in the U.S. meaning of that word, of course) like to dwell on this distinction between original force and response to force, because it allows them to recommend any kind of coercion they like. Every use of force is in response to something (real or imagined), so this is a distinction without a difference. If someone steals a loaf of bread from your shop, and you shoot him, then you were only responding to his prior use of coercive force. If you throw a woman who had an abortion in jail, well, she initiated force first. Protestors in public spaces? Certainly using force to keep people out, so gun them down. And most serious political conflicts are supported by years-old, decades-old, or centuries-old claims that the other side started it first and you’re only defending yourself.

So I think that “for what purposes the use of coercive force (‘violence’) is legitimate” is the wrong question. And in any case U.S.-libertarians (i.e. propertarians) have one of the worst answers that I’ve heard. They’d get rid of every part of the state *except* just the parts that keep poor people from sleeping under privately owned bridges and the parts that allow the U.S. to go to war worldwide on whim.

I think one has to distinguish existential from proprietary freedom. They are of course entangled, but they are certainly distinct. The libertarians basically align with expanded proprietarial freedom for the wealthy and diminished existential freedom for the wage class – in other words, the rich should pay low taxes and low wages.
Interestingly, when a nation does achieve a high degree of existential freedom, it pisses the libertarians off. There was a recent drive by piece in the NYT about Denmark’s “excessive” welfare system. It frustrates the libertarian right because Denmark is wealthy and, by most measures, extraordinarily happy in doing what economists piously say they are all about: creating a society in which the majority claim to be happy. One of the ways people are happy – and this is where the proprietorial and the existential cross – is in having free time. The surplus of free time in Denmark is very disturbing to the libertarian:

Denmark has among the highest marginal income-tax rates in the world, with the top bracket of 56.5 percent kicking in on incomes of more than about $80,000. But in exchange, the Danes get a cradle-to-grave safety net that includes free health care, a free university education and hefty payouts to even the richest citizens.

Parents in all income brackets, for instance, get quarterly checks from the government to help defray child-care costs. The elderly get free maid service if they need it, even if they are wealthy.

But few experts here believe that Denmark can long afford the current perks. So Denmark is retooling itself, tinkering with corporate tax rates, considering new public sector investments and, for the long term, trying to wean more people — the young and the old — off government benefits.

“In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it,” said Karen Haekkerup, the minister of social affairs and integration, who has been outspoken on the subject. “My grandmother was offered a pension and she was offended. She did not need it.

“But now people do not have that mentality. They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. And it has brought us a good quality of life. But now we need to go back to the rights and the duties. We all have to contribute.””
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/world/europe/danes-rethink-a-welfare-state-ample-to-a-fault.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Of course, no experts are cited concerning the rotten state of Denmark, because in actuality it is a highly successful state with a population that works less and earns more. The story (typical for the NYT, whose foreign reporting leans right) is a good example of the sheer indignation felt by the wealthy when the economy actually works for all.

Re: Where are the two most “unfree” places? California and New York — the places where people actually want to live. Where are the “free” ones? They include North Dakota and Oklahoma, which as everyone knows are huge magnets for population

Uh, California and New York are both experiencing net domestic emigration (i.e. more Americans are leaving those states than moving to them). North Dakota and Oklahama both have positive migration rates (more Americans move to those states than leaving them, though that’s a very recent trend driven by the oil industry). You can argue of course, that where people move to isn’t a good indicator of where they’d like to live. But to say that California and New York are ‘huge magnets for [domestic] population’ isn’t accurate. The increase in population in states like CA, NY, MA, etc. (if New York is even increasing) is driven entirely by immigration.

Re: What if you want to have an abortion? Or not have the government prevent you from marrying your gay partner?

Gay marriage is pretty clearly a one-sided issue of freedom (the freedom to marry vs. the government denying that freedom in the name of some other value), but abortion really isn’t. You can make a libertarian argument that the freedom of the unborn child to live is more important than the freedom of the mother to have an abortion.

I’m not a libertarian, of course, so I’m not interested in making libertarian arguments against abortion (or for/against much of anything else) but they can certainly be made. In general, I think this whole line of thinking is wrongheaded: freedom is valuable because it makes other things posisble (happiness, virtue, etc.) it’s not something we necessarily need to see as the ultimate good to be maximized.

@33 etc. — I think you all would find it more interesting to argue with the kind of libertarians who understand that property (and similar constructions, like national boundaries) are an ‘original’ use of coercive force. In the case of your baker and thief, we have competing claims, backed up by force, to a scarce resource, a loaf of bread, which must be decided in some forceful way — physical combat, the feelings of those who happen to be standing around, tradition, laws administered by a government, or some combination of them.

The Mercatus Index sounds fairly stupid, but I suppose there are people who might feel politically freer (more able to do what they want to do, and not do what they don’t want to do) in North Dakota than in California or Denmark. It’s not totally inconceivable. I live in stop-and-frisk country myself, but I am unlikely to be stopped and frisked because of my apparent caste and class, so I’m ‘free’. I don’t know what would happen to me out in North Dakota.

““Oklahoma is mediocre on tort abuse, health insurance freedom, occupational freedom, and utility deregulation.”

Utility deregulation makes you more free? Who knew?

“I’ve made this point before, but it’s interesting to me that American right-libertarians seem to have jumped on the “tort abuse” bandwagon. Once upon a time, they were in love with “stateless” medieval Iceland and its use of weregild to motivate good behavior. Right-libertarian societies in science fiction also seem to dwell on private courts and reparations as an enforcement mechanism. Their hypothetical non-FDA / non-USDA / non-OSHA world was repeatedly justified by talking up how the threat of reparations would be sufficient to keep businesses honest. Yet mysteriously, in the here and now, they seem to have decided that existing large private entities should be free from government regulations and free from any substantial threat of reparations. Meanwhile, as a non-wealthy person, I could easily be wiped out by even a comparatively small judgment that would be permissible under most versions of tort reform. Odd, that.”

Well said!

The increase in population in states like CA, NY, MA, etc. (if New York is even increasing) is driven entirely by immigration.

So, uh, people want to live there?

Funny how sometimes people wanting to move from one place to another shows that they want to move towards greater “freedom” however defined, and sometimes I guess that they just want to preferentially move to unfree hellholes.

This doesn’t in any way follow. It’s entirely plausible that people, on average, move toward places that are more free. If immigrants come from places that are less free than New York, then it’s perfectly plausible that they move to New York, while people already in New York move out.

I think New York though is a bad example, because the finance industry that dominates its jobs and economics is particularly predatory.

Hector: “freedom is valuable because it makes other things possible (happiness, virtue, etc.) it’s not something we necessarily need to see as the ultimate good to be maximized.”

I dunno. One wisecracking biblical philosopher said that it’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion, but this view is controversial, to say the least…

North Dakota is the fastest-growing state in the country.

When you have no people percentages are easy to move.

“… and they move to North Dakota because of the oil industry and the low cost of living. ”

“…while North Dakota may have been demographically moribund ten years ago, that’s decidedly not the case right now.”

How many people are moving there?

Libertarians want to move violent “coercion” down from the state down to the individual level

Not quite. Based on their obvious pining for the Gilded Age, hiring a private mercenary company a la Pinkerton’s to brutalize and kill the less powerful on one’s behalf would apparently still be fine. If the poors really needed protection from the private armies of the already rich and powerful, they could contract with their own private security firm. (There’d bound to be an affordable one, because it would be an obvious market opening.)

Re: How many people are moving there?

About 28,000 between 2010-2012. Oddly, Washington D.C. has a higher growth rate right now than any state (they had about 30,000 move in in that same time period.)

When you have no people percentages are easy to move.

“Fastest-growing” is such a dubious claim.

For those half-following along feeling vaguely mystified at North Dakota’s prominence: it turns out a state’s population grows when people are born there. (Less snarkily: the statistic that Hector is terribly butchering is, as you probably already suspected, not adjusted to discount for fertility rate; North Dakota is one of the top 10 U.S. states as ranked by fertility rate. When you have no people percentages are really easy to move. 28,000 people sure as hell did not move to North Dakota in the past three years.)

North Dakota’s population has gone up by 57,000 in 2 years. But in the same period, the Borough of Brooklyn grew by 60,000, beating North Dakota by 3,000 souls. http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/03/17/brooklyn-leads-new-york-city-population-boom/

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/popcur.shtml

Just to clarify, I wasn’t trying to defend the Mercatus bit of libertarian idiocy. I brought up North Dakota simply because 1) it was mentioned in the thread, 2) I hear it commonly talked about by my unemployed acquaintances as a place to go strike it rich in the oil industry, 3) I wanted to make the broader point that people migration patterns are mostly driven by jobs and economics, not ‘freedom’. South Africa, famously, was a big center for immigration from surrounding African countries, even though it was quite the opposite of a free or equal country.

I take the point about birth rates, but North Dakota’s fertility rate is only about 25% higher than Massachusetts (which is near the bottom). It’s no doubt a contributor to the growth rate, but probbaly not the biggest one. Again, this is all a very recent trend, and probably has to do with recent oil prices and the vagaries of the oil industry.

Brooklyn is teeming with children.

I love that Berlin footnote. I mean, did he really not realize that it kinda sorta totally undermined his (anyway tediously convoluted) argument? Surely he wasn’t that dense? That is what you’re kind of saying too, yes? Just to be clear, this:

The 50-state index might be thought an inadvertent proof-by-example of Berlin’s point that you can’t tot up negative freedoms in this way. (The problem is the subject itself, not our counting methods, however painstaking.)

If I’m right in supposing that the “subject itself” is negative liberty, the problem surely isn’t that we can’t list negative liberties and count them (and subtract infringements, etc.), the problem is that—as the Berlin passage makes painfully obvious—we can’t make any sense of a “metric” of negative liberty without bringing in “life-plans”, the importance of and ranking of various life projects and values, second-order desires/rational endorsements, etc. At which point, we have left the land of negative liberty far far behind. So, it’s the concept that’s fucked, not the possibility of adding up instances of it.

(Shorter: I really can’t recommend Charles Taylor’s “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty” enough.)

“I have to wonder if the flip side is going to happen. When gay marriage is legal, will their be legal or social sanctions against Christian clerics who refuse to marry too men or two women. I think not, but the point you make rather troubles me.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Are you really that stupid? Do you know of any cases where any denomination in the USA has been in legal trouble due to refusal to conduct marriages which violate that denomination’s principles?

Oh, sorry — you did write “seem,” so I guess you were just blowing smoke. Carry on, then.

I’m sure Hector can point us to the current regulations that force a church to marry any opposite-sex couple that walks in the door.

When gay marriage is legal, will their be legal or social sanctions against Christian clerics who refuse to marry too men or two women.

Maybe not against the clerics, but almost certainly against the churches. (Given that it’s already happening–churches have been successfully sued for not letting same-sex couples marry in their facilities (Ocean Grove).)

Now SamChevre is just lying. He knows very well that the Ocean Grove decision was not about a church but about a tax exemption which a Methodist camp organization held on its beachfront pavilion, conditional on the pavilion being open to everyone. And furthermore it was about civil union ceremonies, not even weddings.

No church ever is or will be required to marry any heterosexual couple it doesn’t want to marry, and ditto for gay couples.

Conservatives need to stop lying. Of course, in that case they’ll have precious little to say.

But not to any regulations which actually exist now, in the real USA,

What about England?

Nonsense, there are no regulations in force or proposed that do or would force churches or other religious institutions to perform same-sex marriages. There was a great deal of discussion in this subject in fact, with the usual suspects getting their knickers in a twist even with a regulatory “triple lock” in place (I.e. three different safeguards).

You might I suppose be talking about the Equalities Act, which provides that people, bodies or institutions providing a service to the public may not discriminate on the basis of certain attributes. This does not apply to marriage.

Me: “But not to any regulations which actually exist now, in the real USA,”

Katherine: “What about England?”

This reminds me of the trip to Niagara Falls with a Korean nursing student and her mother; we went through Detroit, and then stopped in Windsor to get breakfast at a McDonalds. The mother was very perplexed at the money she had received in change (that evening there was a spot of bother, because both of them were on one-time entry visas).

Steve, flash a rainbow card, and tell them that you’re an agent of the UNAOP (United Nations Antichrist Obama Police). He’ll probably just keel over from fear, that he missed the Rapture.