Now that I’ve got your attention, I’d like to mention something that’s been bothering me. This idea that we all order our affairs under a system of predictable rules sounds very nice, but I do wonder whether it’s compatible with some of the other things that you seem to be signed up for. Some of you, I know, are worried about this so-called 1 per cent, and even about the 1 per cent of the 1 per cent: the people who own lots of stuff. Not only do they own lots of stuff, but they own the kind of stuff that is useful if you want to own even more stuff. That’s how it goes. And, of course, they also have the means to bring about a favourable “regulatory environment”, so that they get to hold onto that stuff.
Now I suppose you want to do something about that? Yes? One option would be to let them hang onto all their existing assets – after all, they got them justly (or at least non-criminally) according to the rules of the system they themselves helped to formulate – but to introduce a new system of rules (call it a “basic structure” if you like) that works to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Assume you have the knowledge to design it with the distributive effects you want (big assumption that!). Let that system grind away for long enough – a few generations perhaps – and you’ll have shifted things a little bit in the right direction. (Assuming, that is, that the 1 per cent don’t use their residual wealth and influence to throw you off-track as soon as you hit the first bump.)
I think you can see where I’m going by now. If you really want a shift in the distribution of wealth and income, if you really really want it, then realistically you’re going to have to use state power to do a bit of _ex post_ redistribution. You’re going to have to take stuff from some people and give it to others. Doesn’t necessarily have to be that total Marxian expropriation of the expropriators: a comprehensive programme of debt cancellation would fit the bill. Life is about making choices: and you’re going to have to choose. Is it outrageous to dispossess someone of the wealth they acquired under the rules of the game; or are you going to say that substantive fairness sometimes matters more?
Now I know there are some wrinkles there. What about predictability? What about incentives? Sure. (Of course the predictability of stable property rules is a bit overstated: all those people who got their houses repossessed when the economy went bad didn’t see that coming!) You might have to duck and weave. You might have to convince property owners that you’ll only go so far and no further. But don’t kid yourselves that you can do the redistribution you want and treat the rule of law as absolute. If robbing the rich appals you, become a libertarian instead.
(UPDATE: Well I’ve clearly managed to confuse a bunch of people with this post. Probably a consequence of trying to make a serious point in a knockabout style. I had in mind not any old garden-variety idea of the rule of law but something a bit more specific, namely that society ought to be run according to predictable rules that provide individuals with certainty that their efforts won’t be nullified by state action, a view associated with Hayek but endorsed by Rawlsians. So _mea culpa_ for that.)
Discussion of those badminton players seems to divide into two camps: those who think it is fine to exploit the letter of the law to gain strategic advantage and therefore can’t see a problem, and those who don’t. Bracketing off for a second the embarrassing fact for those in the first camp that there does actually seem to have been a rule against deliberately losing, it’s plain that this is just a particular instance of a more general syndrome. There are people who devise and employ elaborate schemes to evade or avoid (I never know which is which) their taxes whilst staying just within the law. There are bankers who stay technically within a literal interpretation of the banking regulations, whilst engaging in dubious practices which undermine the regulator’s intention. There are employers who try to evade workplace regulations by reclassifying their workers as independent contractors. There are states which harp on about the technical details of the laws of war as they happily murder civilians. Well sometimes we need to punish the technically innocent but morally culpable. And it helps _encourager les autres_ to internalize the ethos behind the laws rather than seeing them as being just an inconvenient system of traffic control.
Rule-of-law fetishists, Hayekians, and the like tend to think this is just appalling. Legislators, regulators, sports administrators and similar, should devise watertight systems of rules within which people are entitled simply to go for it. But it is highly questionable that such watertight frameworks are possible, even in principle. So we need to give the enforcers some discretionary power to zap the bad people: people who knew perfectly well that what they were doing was at or over the moral and legal boundaries but didn’t care. (On the tax front, the UK’s plan to introduce a General Anti-Avoidance Rule is designed to punish just these characters.) Such power is, of course, liable to abuse. But that’s just the way things unavoidably are. The solution is not to pretend that we can make the rules work perfectly, but to make sure the enforcers are genuinely democratically accountable and removable.
Oh Christ. IMAGINATIVE EMPATHY FAIL. The imaginative empathy fail button at CT headquarters is turning around and blaring and stuff and I am sick so I don’t have time to deal with this plus it’s an annoying sound. Everyone, please try to imagine you are a poor person for at least 45 seconds at a minimum. Also, if you look at an 80-comment thread and only one commenter with a visibly female handle has said anything, would you please just, go get someone off the street or something, or like maybe the woman next to you at Starbucks, to comment? Don’t tell her it’s about libertarianism!! Don’t be hitting on her either. Unless you’ve got mad game like Kells. Tell her I asked you to. Anyway.
Do you know how becoming a Jesuit differs from taking on a job that is unpleasant? You don’t need to become a Jesuit to get money to buy food and clothes for your family! For real! You’re not even supposed to have a family! So is there an issue there, about whether one can potentially contract oneself to SeaOrg or the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and come out missing your freedom? Yes, and that is what separates cults from churches in most people’s mind. This could be an interesting sidebar discussion but it has nothing to say about the “putting up with awful things to have a job” issue. [click to continue…]
This post is mostly by way of trying to make Bertram, Robins and Gourvitch’s post sticky, as it deserves to stay at the top for a while. If you haven’t read their post yet, do so. If you are already reasonably conversant with their points, proceed under the fold, if you like, for what is really just a Hayek-inflected restatement and reinforcement of some of their main points. (Also, it’s effectively a late, long footnote to the Red Plenty seminar): [click to continue…]
[This post was co-written by Chris Bertram, “Corey Robin”:http://coreyrobin.com/ and “Alex Gourevitch”:http://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/ ]
“In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 79
Libertarianism is a philosophy of individual freedom. Or so its adherents claim. But with their single-minded defense of the rights of property and contract, libertarians cannot come to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace. When they do try to address that unfreedom, as a group of academic libertarians calling themselves “Bleeding Heart Libertarians” have done in recent months, they wind up traveling down one of two paths: Either they give up their exclusive focus on the state and become something like garden-variety liberals or they reveal that they are not the defenders of freedom they claim to be.
Today (the 28th, which it now is in Geneva) is the 300th birthday of Jean-Jacques Rousseau! It is fair to say that Jean-Jacques has divided people pretty sharply ever since he first came to public notice in 1749. There are those who love him, despite his madness, his misogyny and his occasional penchant for alarming political formulations, and there are those who loathe him as the progenitor of totalitarianism. For what it’s worth, I’m in the first camp.
Rousseau’s genius is to have perceived that the gains of modernity were accompanied by significant loss. He was obsessed with the idea that as civilization has developed, we have acquired new needs, needs which exceed our capacity to satisfy them alone. From that dependence on others arises a threat to our freedom; from our living together with others springs a new self-consciousness and a sense of how we appear in the eyes of others. Dependence on others provides each of us with powerful incentives to get others to do what we want; our consciousness of how we appear to them leads us to yearn for their recognition, for their love and respect. But knowing that they too have an incentive to represent themselves to us in ways that get us to fulfil their material and recognitional needs, we are forever gripped by anxiety, jealousy and resentment. We, and others, are dancers in a terrible masked ball of inauthenticity, from which we cannot escape.
Or maybe we can. Maybe we can be educated so that our sense of self-esteem is less dependent on the opinion of others. Maybe we can bring into being a social form in which each of us is secure in the recognition of our fellow citizens and in which we cease to be dependent on the whims of our fellows, but are subject instead to impartial laws that we ourselves have chosen.
That was Rousseau’s project, and it has not been without consequence: without Rousseau, no Kant, no Hegel, perhaps no Marx or Nietzsche; without Rousseau perhaps also no Robespierre (though he would have rejected as laughable the Jacobin claim to incarnate the general will). But we also should not forget, on his birthday, his contributions to music and literature, the beauty and pain of his autobiographical writings, and his sensibility to nature and contribution to the science of botany.
On “Unfogged”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2012_06_03.html#012211, Lizardbreath continues the ‘fuck me or you’re fired’ debate
bq. The Crooked Timber discussion is pretty good, with attention to issues of abuse of power, and how sex work is fundamentally different from other work, so even if you think it should be legal, there should be more protections for sex workers. What I found interesting, though, is a simple point that’s implicit but not really highlighted in the CT conversation: that using consent as a baseline rule of thumb for determining whether someone is being wrongfully mistreated or injured in an interaction between people isn’t useful at all. … And while bringing sex into it helps drive my belief that there’s something wrong with quid pro quo harassment even where the victim consents, I don’t think there’s a specific sex-only problem with consent. Unpaid internships work just as well: in a tight labor market, you can get people who are willing to work hard and usefully without pay so that they have the experience for their resumes, and may be able to get paying work in the future. People who do this sort of unpaid work are clearly straightforwardly consenting to do it. They’re still being exploited by their employers, and an agreement to work for an employer for free, in the absence of an educational or charitable motive, is still the sort of thing that should be prohibited. Workplace safety rules? People will consent to take jobs knowing that they’re likely to get hurt — the workers’ knowledge and consent does not mean that it’s all right to leave the safety guards off the machine tools. … lack of consent can tell you there’s a problem, but the presence of consent doesn’t, by itself, give rise to any kind of presumption that an employment or other relationship is not a serious problem.
And, on email, by coincidence, Doug Henwood points me to this “very interesting discussion of charter cities by David Ellerman”:http://www.blog.ellerman.org/2011/02/the-charter-cities-debate-and-democratic-theory/.
bq. One of the interesting sidelights of the charter cities and seasteading debates is how they “out” the lack of any necessary connection between liberalism and democracy. As Mallaby puts it in the FT article about Romer: “In mild professorial language, [Romer] declares that poor countries should hand control of these new cities to foreign governments, which should appoint technocratic viceroys. The better to banish politics, there must be no city elections.”
bq. For classical liberalism, the basic necessary condition for a system of governance is consent. Consent could be to a non-democratic constitution which alienates the right of self-governance to some sovereign–which in the case of a charter city would be the technocratic viceroys, or their principals such as some well-meaning foreign governments. Consent plus free entry and exit suffice to satisfy the governance requirements of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism per se sees no moral necessity in democratic self-governance at all (with or without safeguards). Most modern libertarians are not “against” democracy; it nice if you have it (and it works well with safeguards) but it is also OK if you don’t have it but have a consent-based non-democratic governance regime with good rules and the possibility of exit.
What’s wrong with an employer saying to an employee (who needs the job, has bills to pay and kids to feed): “If you want to keep your job, you’d better let me fuck you”?
Rather like the wrongness of slavery, this strikes me as being one of those cases where my confidence that it is wrong outstrips my confidence in any of the explanations about why it is wrong, but, contemplating the case, I experience no great sense of puzzlement about its wrongness. But then, I’m not a libertarian.
I came across philosophical reflection on the issue at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians site after following a link from a “Corey Robin posting on employers who insist that their workers piss themselves rather than take toilet breaks”:http://coreyrobin.com/2012/03/08/lavatory-and-liberty-the-secret-history-of-the-bathroom-break/ . This instance of private tyranny elicited a comment at Corey’s site from one of the “Bleeding-Heart Libertarian” crowd, Jessica Flanigan, “deploring trade unions”:http://coreyrobin.com/2012/03/08/lavatory-and-liberty-the-secret-history-of-the-bathroom-break/#comment-4609 . An odd reaction to the case, you might think. “Flanigan had herself written on workplace coercion at BHL”:http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/03/workplace-coercion/ , and, in the course of her discussion, commended Japa Pallikkathayil’s excellent “paper on coercion”:http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3521354.0011.016?view=toc at _The Philosophers’ Imprint_ . [click to continue…]
Over the last couple of years, Cosma Shalizi and I have been working together on various things, including, _inter alia_, the relationship between complex systems, democracy and the Internet. These are big unwieldy topics, and trying to think about them systematically is hard. Even so, we’ve gotten to the point where we at least feel ready to start throwing stuff at a wider audience, to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a paper we’re working on, which argues that we should (for some purposes at least), think of markets, hierarchy and democracy in terms of their capacity to solve complex collective problems, makes the case that democracy will on average do the job _a lot better_ than the other two ways, and then looks at different forms of collective information processing on the Internet as experiments that democracies can learn from. A html version is under the fold; the PDF version is here. Your feedback would very much be appreciated – we would like to build other structures on top of this foundation, and hence, really, _really_ want criticisms and argument from diverse points of view (especially because such argument is exactly what we see as the strength of democratic arrangements).
Via Martin O’Neill on FB, I see that reminiscences of Jerry Cohen by Philippe Van Parijs, John Roemer, Myles Burnyeat, Gideon Cohen and Tim Scanlon are now online (pdf). Enjoy.
Contrary to early indications, NR folks have had quite a bit to say about the Derbyshire firing. I thought this probably wouldn’t happen because then they would have to say that the Derb was basically in the right on the intellectual merits, tone issues aside. Which would be awkward. But they have gone there (to their intellectual credit and/or moral discredit – you decide). For example, here’s the latest from John O’Sullivan:
The paradoxical result is that a piece that begins as a criticism of anti-white racism gradually morphs into something akin to an expression of white racism. It therefore strengthens the anti-white racism it is meant to satirize which, as it happens, is a growing problem in the U.S. — not in the suburbs or backwoods but in the corporate executive suites, the media elites, the courts, the bureaucracy, and of course the entire industry of sensitivity training which used to go under the more honest title of “Political Reeducation” in the gulag. Combined with class snobbery, as it usually is, anti-white racism produces bigotry and discrimination against innocent persons too, less viciously than past discriminations perhaps, but also more unanswerably because it operates under the virtuous disguise of anti-discrimination and social justice.
Let me begin with an apology—for two things, actually. First, for the fact this response to the seminar on my debt book was so long in coming. It happening that at the time the seminar was going on I was desperately trying to finish a book with a very firm deadline (not to mention I was also struggling with a flu, which added all sorts of interesting complications. I did finish it though. Only just.) Second, for the fact that, to make up for the delay, I seem to have overcompensated and the response became… well, as you can see, a little long.
Sorry.
Allow me also to remark as well how flattered I am by so much of this discussion. When I wrote the book it never occurred to me I would end up being compared with the likes of Polanyi, Nietzsche, or even Ernest Mandel. I shall try very hard not to let this go to my head. Now how shall I start? It would be ungracious not to respond to each in some way. But I think it might be best to start by clarifying a few issues that seem to crop up pretty frequently, both in this seminar and in other reviews and comments I’ve seen on the internet. Then I will take on the specific responses. [click to continue…]
This morning brings news of new plans by Britain’s Tory/LibDem coalition, this time to privatize parts of the road network. Presented (again) merely as a way of getting things working more efficiently, this is both part of a pattern and – the philosophical point here – a further reduction in the liberty of individuals. The pattern is a gradual shift of resources that used to be common in to the private or quasi-private sector. Not long ago, higher education was free: now it is not. Fairly large amounts of formerly public space in cities are now in the hands of private developers who employ security guards to enforce their rules on what can be done on their land. Government plans to privatize publicly-owned forest and woodland have been defeated, but for how long? The “reforms” of Britain’s National Health Service allow for new charges to be brought in for treatments and services deemed “non-essential” (although NHS trusts are already denying treatment for some conditions that used to be treated for free). Generally, there’s a shift from formerly taxpayer-funded services towards privatized ones that users have to pay for.
No doubt our “libertarian” friends approve of this shift, but those who don’t have an ideologically distorted view of liberty should be alarmed. First, the extension of chargeable private space means that the range of actions permitted to individuals who lack money is reduced. Lack of money reduces your purely negative freedom,[1] as anyone who tries to perform actions encroaching on the state-enforced private property of others will quickly discover. Second — and this point should hold even for those silly enough to reject the view that private property restricts the freedom of those who have less of it — the increase in privatized public space means that we are increasingly subject to the arbitrary will of private owners concerning what we can and can’t do. Rights of assembly? Rights of protest? Rights to do things as innocuous as take a photograph? All of those things are now restricted or prohibited on formerly public land across the United Kingdom or subject to the permission of the new private owner. The interest of those who endorse a republican conception of freedom is thereby engaged, as is those of liberal persuasion who think a list of basic liberties should be protected: less public space, less capacity to exercise those basic liberties. The proposed privatization of the roads is just an extension of this.
(The Liberal Democrats as part of the Tory-led coalition bear a particularly heavy responsibility for failing to prevent these changes for which the UK government has no democratic mandate. With luck they will be destroyed at the next election, as they deserve to be. Let no-one forget, though, how far the last Labour government took us down this path and legitimized these changes through measures like student fees and the Private Finance Initiative.)
fn1. For an argument to this effect and a demolition of the idea that lack of money confers lack of ability rather than unfreedom, see G.A. Cohen, “Freedom and Money”:http://howardism.org/appendix/Cohen.pdf (PDF)
David Graeber’s three social principles – hierarchy, exchange and communism – are useful devices to think about the world, particularly when you become sensitized to the way in which one can turn into or mask another. One site of human interaction that may be illuminated by Graeber’s principles is the modern university: perhaps especially the British version which has evolved from nominally democratic modes of governance to extremely hierarchical ones within a generation. [click to continue…]