Best of the Blogs: EconLog vs. Cowen
by The Editors
March 15th, 2007
Tyler on the Problems of Libertarians
by Arnold Kling
EconLog
March 12, 2007
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Overall libertarians should embrace these developments. We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal.
[...]
What Tyler says in the first part is that as people accept libertarian critiques of command and control, government gets better. This in turn allows government to get bigger, but in softer forms, such as transfer payments.
This may be right. But let me offer a cynical alternative. Government got off of the “commanding heights” of nationalized steel, coal, and railroads not because it rejected command-and-control, but because those no longer represent the heights. The commanding heights of the economy today are education, health care, and leisure, and government is doing everything it can to take over those sectors.
Tyler then argues that pandemics and natural disasters pose a bigger threat today than they did 50 years ago. One reason is more population–we provide a much more inviting target for viruses. That is an interesting observation, and I can see that we may need new social institutions to deal with pandemics, but I hate to see us rely on government to provide those institutions.
On climate change, Tyler writes,
Yes, I know some of you are climate skeptics. But if the chance of mainstream science being right is only 20% (and assuredly it is much higher than that), we still have, in expected value terms, a massive tort.
What does he mean by mainstream science? Is it Al Gore’s scenario of oceans rising by 20 feet? Or is it the “consensus” forecast of an eventual rise of 20 centimeters over the next century? I still think of climate change as something that calls for a just in case approach.
Speaking of pharmaceuticals, Tyler writes,
No matter what our views, I don’t see any uniquely libertarian approach to the resulting questions of intellectual property.
I agree. Libertarians tend to gravitate toward the extremes–either very strong intellectual property rights or no intellectual property rights. I think that the problem is more nuanced.
Tyler asks,
What will the world look like when small and possibly non-traceable groups can afford their own nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction?
I have been thinking about this problem since Bill Joy’s Wired piece over seven years ago. I had a clear picture of the problem as early as this essay, when I wrote,
Surveillance is not necessarily a bad thing.
Friendly surveillance is a good thing. Certainly, it is less expensive and dehumanizing than hostile surveillance.
However, since then, my thinking on solutions has evolved in the direction of The Constitution of Surveillance.
What excites me about Tyler’s essay is that he is exhorting libertarians to join the 21st century, which means paying less attention to the debate with the early-20th-century Progressive movement over government vs. the industrial economy.
What concerns me is that although we have pushed Progressives off of the Commanding Heights of steel and coal, the forces of statism stopped us on Social Security, and they are moving forward on education and health care. Would Tyler say that there is not much point in fighting these trends, because they are inevitable and not terribly harmful? I think I would disagree, certainly on the latter.
Tyler strongly suggests that we need a new libertarian movement, but he is quite modest about what that movement might look like. I have the same sense, and I find my reaction to reading Brian Doherty’s book to be similar to Tyler’s reaction.
[Follow the comments thread at the original post.]
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Worst Advice to Libertarians Ever?
by Bryan Caplan
March 14, 2007
EconLog
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I’m not sure if Tyler Cowen’s advice to libertarians is the worst any serious thinker has ever given us. But it’s up there. I’d like to give my dear friend and benefactor a charitable reading, but I just can’t. Stripped of its rhetorical grace, Tyler’s essay basically makes two big points:
1. We’re really rich, so libertarians should quit trying to roll back the New Deal, even though we’re basically right:
We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal.
[...]
Let’s not obsess over all the interventions represented by the New Deal, even though I would agree that most of those policies were bad ideas.
It’s hard to make any sense of this argument. If Tyler was trying to help libertarians overcome psychological depression by saying, “Sure, we live under statism, but cheer up - you’re rich!” he’d have a point. But “Sure, the New Deal was a bad idea, but quit fighting it - you’re rich!” makes no sense. In fact, the richer you personally are, the more spare resources you have to argue against bad ideas.
But what about Tyler’s argument that prosperity and the growth of government are a “package deal”? Again, it’s hard to make sense of this. There’s got to be more to being a “package deal” than the fact that two things both happened. Here’s the closest that Tyler comes to arguments that prosperity and more government are a “package deal”:
The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand.
The first argument is trivial. With statist preferences, more wealth brings more government. How is that a reason to quit arguing against statist preferences? You could just as easily tell an atheist that more wealth brings more religion - and he’d naturally respond, “It wouldn’t if people knew the truth - and I aim to tell them.”
The second argument builds on the strange assumption that libertarians have made government work better in any sense other than making it do less. Maybe Gore’s “good government” panel made government work better. But as Tyler has previously complained, libertarians barely acknowledge variation in the quality of governance.
2. Libertarians should jump on the scare-mongering bandwagon and start worrying about global warming, epidemics, and nuclear proliferation - not to mention asteroids.
But contrary to Tyler’s suggestion, libertarians have been thinking about scary predictions for a long time. Remember Julian Simon? Long story short: (a) Scary stories are usually greatly exaggerated; (b) Government “corrections” are quite likely to make problems worse; (b) Liberty will suffer in the bargain. The “War on Terror” inspired by the 9/11 attacks provides a nice confirmation of these deep lessons.
The bottom line is that libertarians need to pay attention to these issues because non-libertarians are eager to do something about them. But libertarians’ skeptical presumption against both the likelihood of disaster and the likelihood that government will avert disaster is wise and justified. Journalists (John Stossel excepted) should be learning from us, not the other way around.
The underlying theme of Tyler’s essay is that “times have changed, and libertarians need to change with them.” As he puts it: “America in the mid to late 1970s was a wreck, and libertarians indeed had a lot of the right answers.”
But frankly, I see no reason why Tyler couldn’t have written virtually the same essay in 1975. By historical standards, we were really rich then, too. Gas queues and 10% inflation were hardly the end of the world. Furthermore, in 1975 we also faced an array of threatening menaces. At least one - the Soviet threat - looked far worse than anything we live with today. If Tyler is right that libertarians had a lot of the right answers in the ’70’s, then we still do today.
[Follow the comments thread at the original post.]
March 17th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Does Libertarian Success Just Produce More Government, and Does that Mean We Should Give Up Trying to Shrink It?
In his contribution to the recent C…