February, 2008

What’s a Libertarian To Root For Now?

by Randy E. Barnett

February 27th, 2008

I appreciate the invitation to participate in this lively debate. Will Wilkinson, the managing editor, has posed a final set of questions that are worth addressing:
Assuming that no transition to ordered anarchy is within reach, what should classical liberal attitudes be toward the status quo? If we’re not going to get a minimal state, or [...]

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Utility, Morality, and the Majority

by Gerald Gaus

February 26th, 2008

I will try my best to engage in close reasoning in response to Anthony de Jasay’s reply to my points. Let me then be very careful, even if this means being a somewhat pedantic. From his previous comments I thought that de Jasay did not wish to engage in a methodological dispute. Obviously I was [...]

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Fairness and Majority Rule

by Anthony de Jasay

February 25th, 2008

Professor Gaus’s contributions of February 21 and 22 to the debate do not seek to answer my charge that his explanation of political outcomes via a holdall “utility function” (whose principal variables are moral sentiments) is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable. He does, however, make a variety of other assertions that do not seem to be [...]

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That Dangerous Invention

by Gerald Gaus

February 22nd, 2008

Mike Munger quotes me as saying: “What de Jasay and so many classical liberals cannot bear is that an expansive welfare state has been supported largely because the majority of voters and politicians believe it is fair and just”. He asks: “Seriously, what kind of riposte is it that?” And he adds “65% of the [...]

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Of Little Green Men and the Fairness of the Welfare State

by Michael C. Munger

February 21st, 2008

A survey, apropos Prof. Gaus’s use of survey research on fairness:
YANKELOVICH PARTNERS, INC. SURVEY - 1997

Source: USA Today, July 7, 1997

Do you believe the government is hiding evidence of intelligent life in space?

 Yes 79%

Do you believe a UFO crashed in Roswell in 1947?

Yes 65%

Seriously, what kind [...]

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The Myth of Interest

by Gerald Gaus

February 21st, 2008

In his reply de Jasay makes two claims.
First, he claims, “The saving grace of using interest as the motive of choice is that for all its narrowness, it deals in matter that is identifiable, ascertainable and with a bit of luck even quantifiable.” There is a well-known, notorious, problem with this old view. If we employ [...]

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More on the Nozickian Minimal State

by Randy E. Barnett

February 20th, 2008

Julian Sanchez thinks that Nozick did make a descriptive argument for why a “monopolistic” dominant protection agency would develop. He may be right and I thank him for his response. But Nozick’s claim in the passages highlighted by Julian is far from transparent.  In the first passage he references, for example, Nozick describes the natural [...]

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Misunderstanding Nozick

by Randy E. Barnett

February 20th, 2008

In his reply to my post, Tony repeats a common mischaracterization of Nozick’s argument. In Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick made no prediction about the emergence of a dominant protection agency. Nor did he describe a mechanism for that emergence. Rather, his argument was that a dominant protection agency could emerge morally without [...]

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I Agree!

by Michael C. Munger

February 20th, 2008

I shall try to respond at great length soon. But I would like to make three brief points:
1. The title of the essay is not intended to be paradoxical, but is intended to make just the point that Anthony makes: No government can make a rock so big that it can’t lift [...]

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The Possibility of Limited Government: Rejoinders

by Anthony de Jasay

February 20th, 2008

I shall try to respond to some of the points made in three interesting papers by way of direct comments on my essay “Government, Bound Or Unbound” or tangent to its subject.
Munger
By entitling his lively paper “Can An Omnipotent Government Make A Rock Bigger Than It Can Lift?” Michael Munger very properly places the debate [...]

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Is Limited Government Possible?

by Randy E. Barnett

February 19th, 2008

Randy Barnett, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at Georgetown University Law Center, notes that limited government is possible because it is actual, but acknowledges that “given that some limits on power clearly remain, these constraints failed to hold the line the Framers were attempting to draw.” Barnett argues that the mechanisms of limited power embodied in the Constitution — reciprocity, checks and balances, and the power of exit — would be more successfully realized in a “polycentric constitutional order in which one would subscribe to a legal system of one’s choice as today one subscribes to cell phone service, health and auto insurance, or private security providers.” Understanding why this would be an improvement “can help us appreciate why restoring the characteristics of the original Constitution as amended by the Fourteenth Amendment … would be far preferable to the constitutional status quo,” Barnett writes.

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Can an Omnipotent Government Make a Rock Bigger Than It Can Lift?

by Michael C. Munger

February 15th, 2008

In his reply, Duke University political scientist Michael Munger agrees with de Jasay’s discussion of “the frontier between the ‘zones’ of individual and collective choice,” and provides a novel illustration. However, Munger disagrees that the problem with the “incentive-compatibility” of limits on power has been overlooked. He offers a classic historical example of incentive-compatible constraints and discusses the value of building conflicts on interest into political institutions through the separation of powers. “The last thing you want is an efficient government. Our only choices are a truly weak, but efficient, limited government, or else a powerful government prevented by strong ties from using most of its powers, most of the time.”

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Our Moral Sense and the Extensive State

by Gerald Gaus

February 13th, 2008

In his reply essay, Gerald Gaus, the James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, argues that Anthony de Jasay has overlooked the importance of distinctively moral rules in regulating behavior. Drawing on recent work in psychology, Gaus distinguishes between conventional rules, which may be changed by the relevant authority without complaint, and moral rules, which may not. If constitutional limits on government fail, it is because these are seen as merely conventional rules out of sync with biologically and culturally evolved moral rules. “The welfare state reigns supreme not because the state and it allies have tricked the rest of us in a power grab,” Gaus argues. “It reigns supreme because in the eyes of most citizens it conforms to the egalitarian fairness norms that have evolved with humans.”

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