I'll preface this by saying I'm a near-daily marijuana user, who resides in a state where it is legal recreationally.
I think the issue with legalizing drugs, gambling, pornography, etc. is that the movements to legalize and/or keep these vices from heavy regulation adopts and pushes a false binary. Either the thing is evil or it is "good, actually."
In the case of marijuana, too many legalization advocates have long treated weed as some sort of miracle drug, with anyone pointing out tradeoffs or downsides being branded a moralistic scold. So, I don't think the problem is legalizing or decriminalizing vices. It's the cultural narrative that not only should these things be left to personal choice (which I 100% agree with), its that these things aren't even vices, and to label them as "vices" is to be some sort of backwards cultural luddite. I think its the nature of activism - to get what you want freed from the shackles of government, a winning argument is that its harms have been overstated or are nonexistent. Once the freedom is granted, society has to some degree swallowed the activist argument - forever changing the perceived morality of exercising that freedom. These are separate streams, but I'm not sure how you untangle them, to be honest, besides society 1) prioritizing and emphasizing personal agency, and 2) redrawing a bright line between "illegal" and "immoral", and 3) embracing the world as it truly is - full of tradeoffs and nuance.
People often confuse libertarians with libertines. That's a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap, but there *is* distance between believing things should not be prohibited and promoting the use of the those same things. Libertarianism is a commentary on what ought to and ought not to be restricted to the individual's discretion, not necessarily the implicit moral endorsement of "whatever choice the individual makes."
In other words, it's possible to believe in drug legalization or decriminalization, while still believing these things are *morally* wrong, or should be used in moderation. But it puts the onus on the individual and not the government to enforce. You can believe I'm ruining my life by using marijuana daily while still believing I should have the freedom to make that choice for myself.
Hear, hear. Things can be legal but still undesirable. My general feeling is that Prohibition showed the dangers of making a popular thing illegal, in terms of increased organized crime and violence. That lesson applies now to drugs. Making drugs illegal has made the crime organizations so rich and powerful. The police, DEA, etc. have been utterly unable to control them, and I don't think it's plausible that they ever will be able to. We need to try something else.
One of the biggest claims by the marijuana legalization crowd was the marijuana being illegal caused crime. But marijuana got legalized and we didn't see any drop-off in crime.
And in truth we probably could have seen this beforehand. There really aren't a lot of "non violent drug offenders" in jail, and many that do meet that label are in actuality "violent offenders that we could more easily get a plea bargain for possession".
The libertarian obsession with drug prohibitions = crime really stunted libertarian understanding of crime and in many ways turned the movement into a pro-criminal movement.
A more accurate empirical take is crime happens because people want to do it and think they will get away with it, and drugs are just one excuse that if removed won't make a difference. On top of that, a very large amount of crime is committed BECAUSE people are high and have low impulse control while high.
I wasn't talking about retail crime, but the big criminal syndicates that are into production, trafficking, and sales of drugs in a big way. And are extremely violent in protection of their business.
How many people that support legalization also regularly scold those that make bad choices?
That Venn Diagram seems to have very little overlap, and wouldn't contain most libertarians. Charles Murray maybe?
If something is a vice, one usually needs laws to regulate that vice. Even though alcohol is legal, we still have lots of laws surrounding its consumption and sale.
If a vice is bad enough its going to require lots of regulation, and all of that might be even harder to enforce then "fuck it you just can't do it at all".
Is television vice? Social media? Soft drinks? Fried foods? Refined carbohydrates? Consumer debt? Maybe active measures should be taken to discourage vice but the proposition looks much more like active measures to combat sin when it is so narrowly focused and largely devoid of data backed arguments.
It seems obvious to me that smartphones should be banned in K-12 schools.
"Consumer debt?"
We have a lot of laws to combat usury, deceptive and manipulative lending practices, or exploitative situations.
Let me give you a very simple example. I can only buy scratch offs down at the 7/11 with a debit card, not a credit card. I routinely forget this the one day a year I get scratch offs for stocking stuffers. That way I can only spend money I have (debit) and not money I don't have (credit). This prevents at least some impulsive debt gambling, and doesn't seem a big imposition.
Are you making the argument that most Libertarians are also libertines, i.e. not only support making certain things legal but are also enthusiastically promoting them (or at least silent with moral judgment)? That sounds plausible enough - that the people who promote legalization don't tend to "pass judgment" on others for indulging in vice.
But my point was that those two positions don't necessarily have to be attached, and I think the issues we're seeing with people being assholes say more about our "non-judgmental" and relativistic culture overall then they do about whether or not things should be legal. There's other ways to interpret this, for sure.
I think part of our polarization problem is that people increasingly look to politics to reflect their own morality - so we're always *really* arguing whether something is moral when we're arguing over what ought to be legal.
I don't agree that you necessarily need laws to regulate vice. This is a common argument from conservatives - who ironically consider themselves small government. Less taxes and regulations are not the only way to have small government. We can also take the stance that government's role in, say, enforcing or reinforcing a baseline morality to be "big government."
Vice can be regulated by social stigma. To be a bit snarky, perhaps you've noticed the "culture war"? Liberals don't necessarily need hard power to enforce their worldview on the rest of us schlubs. I think part of America's "problem" is that the mainstream has always been a more amorphous thing than in the "old world." "Frenchness" at least feels more distinct and specific than to define what it is to be an American. So there's no specific-enough baseline American identity that independently dictates social mores. You could probably more neatly define "American liberal" and "American conservative" lanes of the mainstream, while noting that the liberal lane has the cultural bullhorn at the moment.
I suppose it comes down to whether you view it government's role to maintain/enforce the culture, to reflect it, or be neutral. That's difficult to answer, honestly, as it depends on your view on whether culture flows down from the top or bubbles up from the bottom. I'd interpret you to be in the former camp.
"People often confuse libertarians with libertines." Sounds about right, and makes sense when I think of all the negative stereotypes that conflate libertarians with Ted Nugent, rather than any intelligent libertarian I'm familiar with. Also weird that I've met very few people who think their own behavior craves restraint by the state; but I've met hundreds who think other people need to be restrained--for their own good, naturally.
There is a distinct lack of sense of proportion here: a freedom does not have to be downside-free to be worth allowing on net. And the smell of pot smoke on the street, while indeed an unpleasant nuisance, is not reasonably described as "social breakdown". It is not as if NYC smelled like roses before!
Aroma externality 'nuisance' or pollution is complicated We know what happened with cigarette smoke, which is that the law needing a hook of serious harm on which to hang an intervention resulted in the typical kind of epistemic corruption of mercenary academic hacks and hired gun expert witnesses and miscellaneous bureaucrats fabricating claims that wildly exaggerated the true risks involved. Rozin also has a fascinating paper on people automatically misremembering their prior tolerance and rewriting ("retconning") their own memories so that they have always been at war East Asia.
In Austin, Kansas City, and many other barbeque towns, the question about whether or how much smoke and deliciously irresistible world-class meat-cooking aromas can be emitted into which neighborhoods of what densities has spawned recurrent and passionate political fights. While some people want none of it and to enforce rules mandating venting through catalytic converters (prohibitively costly to most bbq operations), others love the smell and consider it a plus. The imperfect but ok halfway house compromise during more cigarette tolerant days was segregation, that is, having smoking and non-smoking sections, according to one's preferences. Alas, as of yet, no one has taken up my proposal of zoning 50% of neighborhoods for smoke aromas. Makes you wonder about the selection effect of your neighbors and the quality of local schools (and what gets served in the cafeteria, ha!)
I would live in segregated neighborhoods zoned for oak, cherry, and applewood, maybe pecan or walnut, but I'd rather be homeless than live next to those crazy mesquite lowlifes.
My aunt lives in NYC and describes it as a hellscape of crime and general disorder the last few years. And she is rich enough to live on the Upper East Side.
John McWhorter describes his experience with the NYC subway:
In Baltimore I knew many people that experienced violence and observed it often. When president Trump said Baltimore was a trash heap full of rats...even leftists friends who hated him admitted there was a lot of damn garbage everywhere.
How many of the people acting in this manner do you think were on drugs?
I think it's naive to think you are going to have a stoned out population and not have outcomes like this.
I get it. Middle class dudes who like getting stoned don't want to be hassled. I was briefly friends with a dude on my apartment floor just like that. Smoked weed every day. Kind seemed like a directionless layabout. This isn't some kind of grand freedom we should be taking to the barricades for.
How many were on drugs? A ton I'm sure. How many of the ones high on marijuana would have done the same thing or worse if they were sober? 99 percent. Correlation is not causation.
My big complaint is Kling's circle of libertarian pundits, are not libertarian at all. Consider three recent major developments.
1. The US government has coerced all the major social media platforms and all the major news outlets to manipulate public discussion. David Henderson has broadly defended and supported this heavy handed government with libertarian styled arguments. He says that YouTube and Twitter are run by private companies so they can't be involved in censorship, even when it was clear that they were working with and being coerced and coopted by government.
2. The US wages war with Russia which involves forced conscription of Ukrainians to fight. The US destroys gas pipelines and peaceful civilian infrastructure. The US weaponizes the dollar, enacts harsh economnic anti-trade sanctions against a majority of the nations on the planet. We see the rise of BRICS as a serious global rival to the US dollar led economy. Bryan Caplan supports war with Russia and broadly supports all of the above. In the past, Caplan presented himself as an extreme pacifist who opposed even popular wars, an extreme libertarian, and and extreme supporter of free markets and free trade. Now, he seems like an extreme opposite: an extreme pro-war hawk, extreme supporter of anti-trade sanctions on most of the globe, and is an extreme defender of corrupt government elites.
3. The US NIH + NIAID funds reckless virus research that causes a global pandemic that kills 20+ million people and extreme economic damage. Kling declines to comment on this. One of Kling's favorite pundits, Tyler Cowen, has spent his entire career advocating for NIH and an academic system with political power over the rest of society. Cowen pumps doubt into the lab leak hypothesis and expresses anger at those who promote it.
Libertarian is not a synonym for contrarian nor is it skepticism for skepticism sake.
1) Government has a role in information hygiene. And they've always played a role in shaping information, going back longer than the Revolutionary War. That doesn't make what they've done with social media is right. See Matt Welch on CNN last night.
2) The anti-war people have some of the most distorted views of reality around. The Ukrainians are being killed, raped, tortured, kidnapped. They are the ones who want to fight. The US delays resolution by trickling weapon systems one by one. The best information sources are from Eastern Europe as they lived under the warped Russians for a long time, some for longer than the USSR. Estonians are frequently a good source since their English tends to be so good. Their former president has good general coverage of the war https://twitter.com/IlvesToomas. It's good to see reality mugging theory for people like Caplan. Remember he's one who is/was skeptical of the American Revolution.
3) Government funding for medical research is important. And the NIH processes are frequently broken. There are no better chroniclers of the issues than Cowen and Tabarrok. Note that Cowen is putting money where his mouth is with the fast grants.
Of course Libertarianism isn't mere contrarianism. I didn't imply that and I dispute your implication that I did.
On all three issues, you present arguments on the issue itself, but you don't argue or even seem to disagree that the pundits cited are taking the non-libertarian position in these scenarios.
On #2 for example, you make arguments against the "anti-war people" in favor of US military engagement. This is the pro-war position. You can argue the pro-war position is the best choice in this case as Caplan does, but it seems a safe claim that the pro-war position is not the anti-war pacifist libertarian position.
Here is a link by Caplan who argues for arming Ukraine and promoting war with Russia and argues against Hanania who is advocating that the US not escalate conflict.
This criticizes Putin, but it doesn't call for US support of Ukraine. He does say appeasement should be tired but not might work. I've seen him criticize the Ukraine war in other pieces.
But go ahead and ask him point blank if he thinks the US should be supporting Ukraine.
"If you win on drug legalization, and the social order deteriorates, what have you accomplished?" Right on! A bunch of pot smoking, porn watching gamblers is not a very good place for society to be even if none should be criminalized.
Go back to Proverbs 29:18 paraphrased as "without a vision the people parish". Freedom without purpose gets one to a libertine, not libertarian, state. I don't get why so many of today's libertarians don't get it. Can doesn't imply should and there is a balance between the two (rights vs. responsibilities). Unfortunately balance is not a word that's in vogue these days.
Good comment. I think the libertarian argument would be that it's up to each individual to determine what the correct balance is, but you're correct that this is not at all the message people are getting these days from tastemakers and culturally influential types. See Red Barchetta's comment about activism. I find it hard to blame libertarians for this; they/we've never been that culturally influential.
The anti-fat craze may not be the best analogy, but I remember, for a time, that all sorts of things were made non-fat. As a consequence, people ate more (products with sugar) and became even fatter. There is a tacit understanding among some that the repeal of these laws must mean pot was never harmful and one can consume it as much as one wants. Like sugar, we will learn, belatedly, that human craving, completely sated, unhindered by cost or law, has serious consequences. An irony: one of the arguments for legalization was that would help prevent addiction to "harder" stuff. Instead, it is most likely a gateway drug, just like all the squares said it was.
1) Many libertarians wanted to indulge themselves.
Even libertarians that eschew drugs really wanted free love. Free love ain't so free, just like drug use isn't so harmless (including to bystanders). If you start getting honest about this stuff, you inevitably run up against some vice that a libertarian really likes.
2) Libertarians are just kind of cowards. Drug legalization was popular with their friends. Things that aren't popular with their friends they either cave on or just try to ignore.
Libertarians have been very influential in a trees-but-not-the-forest way.
Sort of from the git-go, seems like. To step away from the modern web of inconsistencies, which this subect can't help but be when one's wallet is included in the conversation (tacky, I know) - I think back to something that really exercised people like - you can't make me put a helmet or a life jacket on my kid! Meanwhile in the background the government is expanding beyond the Kuiper Belt, and you're paying for all of it, and its tentacles are in everything.
Maybe being annoyed that the streets are stinky and that too many people have a "deadened gaze" isn't compelling enough to justify caging people? Perhaps such concerns could justify fines, but that doesn't mean we should slow down the whole preventing people from being caged unjustifiably thing while we take the time to work out how to create more proportionate incentives to promote fresh air and lucid gazes..
The marijuana smoke problem I think is being a bit misdiagnosed. Is the problem that weed is mostly legal, or is the problem that NYC and other cities do not bother to enforce rules and regulations they have? In other words, are more laws needed or is the government simply failing to enforce the laws they have on the books?
Given the huge uptick in unpunished crime, shoplifting, rioting etc. I am inclined to believe the latter.
If you put on your Hoppe hat, the marijuana problem is fixable by private organization but is not easy to fix when the polity relies on public transportation infrastructure and lots of public land. Many companies have strict anti-drug policies for employees because of long experience with the problems caused by drug using employees. Some municipalities like in the Southwest are so full of HOAs that to some extent those micro governments can regulate street behavior more effectively. Old municipalities like NYC cannot easily implement the same kind of public order because of legacy buildings and legacy expectations.
Our strange post-'60s interpretation of the Constitution forces municipalities to tolerate a lot of bad public behavior that had been illegal since the reign of Elizabeth I. The Supreme Court decided Lizzie was wrong and that "you can't just arrest vagrants for loitering and being gross in public." NYC worked better when public authorities could implement a pared down version of the Poor Laws with stop and frisk and other quality-of-life enforcement measures. Giuliani Time was essentially an unconstitutional reimplementation of the Poor Laws. I might be alone in coming to this conclusion, but drug control laws are ultimately clumsy proxies for behavior control laws. Drugs are not so much the problem: bums are the problem. But because our system declared Bum Control illegal, instead governments reach for Drug Control as a proxy to achieve the same ends.
If the marijuana smoke bothered you a lot, I advise you to stay away from major west coast cities, where people are openly smoking much more noxious substances.
> A polity, if it’s to function and endure, must offer its members a reason to remain attached, in their loyalties and affections, to the collective. That requires some engagement with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on.
The first sentence is clearly true. But the reasons people remain attached to polities are often a lot more concrete than the second sentence allows, which seems to be very philosophical. I've noted a quote that makes that point:
> The idea that black Cantonians [i.e., Canton, Mississippi] began moving to Chicago in droves during the Second World War in order to escape segregation is appealing but not really true. They moved to escape poverty and in most cases the dignity of making a decent living was far more gratifying at first than the dignity of having equal rights under the law. There is nothing comparable in American life today to the amount of financial gain southern blacks could realize
instantly by moving less than a thousand miles away, to another part of the same country, and getting the kind of unskilled jobs -- laborer, sales clerk -- that were unavailable to them in Canton. -- "The Origins of the Underclass" by Nicholas Lemann, June, 1986
Now that does involve "engagement with ... questions about the good life" but entirely in the sense of "How large is my paycheck?"
Even more concrete is the fact that people walk across deserts so they can become third-class non-citizens in the US, simply because it pays well.
Marijuana possession is either legal or illegal. Although we have made it more confusing because it's legal in some states but illegal in the country as a whole (federal statutes). If it's illegal there must be penalties attached to it (the definition of illegal). In my state, simple possession of marijuana can, depending on circumstances, bring you 30 years in prison. That's quite a scold. Perhaps some of the overblown claims to marijuana benefits can be thought of as an offset to the overblown penalties for its use. Like 30 years in prison.
My complaint about Libertarians is that their warnings are too general to be of much help. Industrial policy can certainly go wrong but in different ways. Only be being prepared to dig in to how any specific industrial policy can go wrong, the warning will just be ignored. Everybody already "knows" that policy can go wrong.
Moreover (is this the same thing?) Libertarians tend to ignore that policy making is or should be dialectic. Legalization of marihuana has created new problems of when it can be consumed. Time to address those.
"On foreign policy, libertarians warn about foreign adventures. Interventionists are asking the same government that is clumsy at home to be adept abroad."
One problem with the libertarian approach to foreign adventures (read: foreign policy) is that there are evil people in the world, some of whom are very powerful and who care not a wit about liberty (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin last century; Putin, Xi, Khameini, Kim today). Unfortunately, resisting and confronting megalomaniacs requires collective action (national defense) and drawing lines between foreign adventures and the national defense, difficult lines to draw. Some (not all) libertarians and others oppose U.S. actions in supporting Ukraine, intervening in the Middle East, and resisting China's expansionism as American adventurism. However, if the likes of Russia, China, No. Korea, and Iran have their way, we won't have the luxury of discussing libertarianism any longer. (See Hong Kong.)
If you carry outwards from minarchism to anarcho-capitalism, you end up accepting the notion that communities (protection services) will have at least some rules that at least some members don’t like, but have to accept as a practical matter of choosing between different communities. I think that theoretical rigor makes anarcho-capitalists a bit more tolerant than minarchists of minor infringements of liberty. Or maybe I’m projecting.
My wife and I have long disagreed on drug legalization, with my first thoughts:
a-legal) reduced drug crimes (stealing to get money), police corruption AND more drug users with worse lives who ?freely?? choose that lifestyle.
vs
b-illegal) more drug crimes but far fewer users.
We both want fewer drug caused problems, and less irresponsible drug use; and mostly agreed to stop arguing about it. It's not yet in the cards for Slovakia.
The deterioration of the social order with legal pot gives me second thoughts. How many wasted drug users do there need to be in order to justify gov't force to stop them?
On third thought - letting irresponsible guys become vacant slothful dopers might well be better than putting most of them in prison during their high crime 15-30 years old lives. Them "punishing" themselves by wasting their own lives by getting high seems better than gov't prison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw "I was goin' pay my child support but then I got high... I messed up my entire life, because I got high" Not just a fun karaoke song!
Becoming an alcoholic wino is partly uncool because homeless alcoholics are so pathetic - becoming a doper is likely to follow that into the "uncool valley". Maybe there's less teen sex & teen abortions & teen non-pot problems from single parent kids with unmarried bio-parent, and our society can learn to deal with pot heads better than with crazies like Jordan Neely. Who might have been both crazy and a pothead, tho. Tradeoffs including some bad results, all the the way down.
The care and feeding of "addicts" or users or freedom fighters if you like, ensure that they will go forth and multiply. I've had a view into the foster care system in recent years and while I would not have expected great parenting skills in this world, the number of people who are wards of the state - I'm talking the parents, not the children - has astonished me. And all of a sudden, the left who gave us this reality, find birth control appalling! In this instance: the reproduction of their favorite class, so useful to them in turning the world upside down. The parents' narcissism is flattered by the state's near-endless effort to "reunite the family" or some semblance of it; rehab is like school, you can fail repeatedly, and if one child is finally at length taken away (you basically agreed to renounce), well - meantime you had twins, while living in your state-issued apartment! The process begins again! It's like a job.
Might individualism and community governance co-exist reasonably well if there are efficient *exit options* for individuals? I have in mind markets for governance.
Take the example, which Arnold raises: Marijuana use as a public nuisance. If there are markets for governance, i.e., efficient exit options for individuals, then some communities might ban or strictly regulate marijuana use, whilst other communities tolerate public marijuana use. The idea is that individuals will self-sort accordingly. Naïve? Where is the rub?
It is an empirical question, whether current bundles of policies in large polities (esp. at the State and Federal levels) are roughly optimal for individual exit and for community governance. Libertarians tend to favor decentralization of governance, if majority rule is the governance mechanism.
To raise another example: The SCOTUS decision, re: abortion, decentralized governance to State legislatures on a controversial issue. Will a substantial number of women use an exit option (i.e., medical travel or change of residence to a State with a different policy)?
However, more broadly, there seems to be a tendency towards centralization of governance. When majority-rule governance is fully centralized at the federal level, then exit -- the safety valve for individualism, the market for governance -- is thwarted.
I've been wondering about the libertarian theory of governance. It seems mostly a critique of all governance. Perhaps decentralization is key. But this seems to run contrary to human nature. The sort of person willing to go through the ordeals of elective office is rarely the sort of person who wants less rather than more power over others.
I'll preface this by saying I'm a near-daily marijuana user, who resides in a state where it is legal recreationally.
I think the issue with legalizing drugs, gambling, pornography, etc. is that the movements to legalize and/or keep these vices from heavy regulation adopts and pushes a false binary. Either the thing is evil or it is "good, actually."
In the case of marijuana, too many legalization advocates have long treated weed as some sort of miracle drug, with anyone pointing out tradeoffs or downsides being branded a moralistic scold. So, I don't think the problem is legalizing or decriminalizing vices. It's the cultural narrative that not only should these things be left to personal choice (which I 100% agree with), its that these things aren't even vices, and to label them as "vices" is to be some sort of backwards cultural luddite. I think its the nature of activism - to get what you want freed from the shackles of government, a winning argument is that its harms have been overstated or are nonexistent. Once the freedom is granted, society has to some degree swallowed the activist argument - forever changing the perceived morality of exercising that freedom. These are separate streams, but I'm not sure how you untangle them, to be honest, besides society 1) prioritizing and emphasizing personal agency, and 2) redrawing a bright line between "illegal" and "immoral", and 3) embracing the world as it truly is - full of tradeoffs and nuance.
People often confuse libertarians with libertines. That's a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap, but there *is* distance between believing things should not be prohibited and promoting the use of the those same things. Libertarianism is a commentary on what ought to and ought not to be restricted to the individual's discretion, not necessarily the implicit moral endorsement of "whatever choice the individual makes."
In other words, it's possible to believe in drug legalization or decriminalization, while still believing these things are *morally* wrong, or should be used in moderation. But it puts the onus on the individual and not the government to enforce. You can believe I'm ruining my life by using marijuana daily while still believing I should have the freedom to make that choice for myself.
Hear, hear. Things can be legal but still undesirable. My general feeling is that Prohibition showed the dangers of making a popular thing illegal, in terms of increased organized crime and violence. That lesson applies now to drugs. Making drugs illegal has made the crime organizations so rich and powerful. The police, DEA, etc. have been utterly unable to control them, and I don't think it's plausible that they ever will be able to. We need to try something else.
One of the biggest claims by the marijuana legalization crowd was the marijuana being illegal caused crime. But marijuana got legalized and we didn't see any drop-off in crime.
And in truth we probably could have seen this beforehand. There really aren't a lot of "non violent drug offenders" in jail, and many that do meet that label are in actuality "violent offenders that we could more easily get a plea bargain for possession".
The libertarian obsession with drug prohibitions = crime really stunted libertarian understanding of crime and in many ways turned the movement into a pro-criminal movement.
A more accurate empirical take is crime happens because people want to do it and think they will get away with it, and drugs are just one excuse that if removed won't make a difference. On top of that, a very large amount of crime is committed BECAUSE people are high and have low impulse control while high.
I wasn't talking about retail crime, but the big criminal syndicates that are into production, trafficking, and sales of drugs in a big way. And are extremely violent in protection of their business.
How many people that support legalization also regularly scold those that make bad choices?
That Venn Diagram seems to have very little overlap, and wouldn't contain most libertarians. Charles Murray maybe?
If something is a vice, one usually needs laws to regulate that vice. Even though alcohol is legal, we still have lots of laws surrounding its consumption and sale.
If a vice is bad enough its going to require lots of regulation, and all of that might be even harder to enforce then "fuck it you just can't do it at all".
Is television vice? Social media? Soft drinks? Fried foods? Refined carbohydrates? Consumer debt? Maybe active measures should be taken to discourage vice but the proposition looks much more like active measures to combat sin when it is so narrowly focused and largely devoid of data backed arguments.
"Social media?"
It seems obvious to me that smartphones should be banned in K-12 schools.
"Consumer debt?"
We have a lot of laws to combat usury, deceptive and manipulative lending practices, or exploitative situations.
Let me give you a very simple example. I can only buy scratch offs down at the 7/11 with a debit card, not a credit card. I routinely forget this the one day a year I get scratch offs for stocking stuffers. That way I can only spend money I have (debit) and not money I don't have (credit). This prevents at least some impulsive debt gambling, and doesn't seem a big imposition.
"Soft drinks? Fried foods? Refined carbohydrates?"
Many cities have started to impose "sugar taxes", which I support. I think we can tax unhealthy foods much like we tax alcohol.
Of course the easiest fix would be to stop subsidizing cheap carbohydrates which the government currently does.
Are you making the argument that most Libertarians are also libertines, i.e. not only support making certain things legal but are also enthusiastically promoting them (or at least silent with moral judgment)? That sounds plausible enough - that the people who promote legalization don't tend to "pass judgment" on others for indulging in vice.
But my point was that those two positions don't necessarily have to be attached, and I think the issues we're seeing with people being assholes say more about our "non-judgmental" and relativistic culture overall then they do about whether or not things should be legal. There's other ways to interpret this, for sure.
I think part of our polarization problem is that people increasingly look to politics to reflect their own morality - so we're always *really* arguing whether something is moral when we're arguing over what ought to be legal.
I don't agree that you necessarily need laws to regulate vice. This is a common argument from conservatives - who ironically consider themselves small government. Less taxes and regulations are not the only way to have small government. We can also take the stance that government's role in, say, enforcing or reinforcing a baseline morality to be "big government."
Vice can be regulated by social stigma. To be a bit snarky, perhaps you've noticed the "culture war"? Liberals don't necessarily need hard power to enforce their worldview on the rest of us schlubs. I think part of America's "problem" is that the mainstream has always been a more amorphous thing than in the "old world." "Frenchness" at least feels more distinct and specific than to define what it is to be an American. So there's no specific-enough baseline American identity that independently dictates social mores. You could probably more neatly define "American liberal" and "American conservative" lanes of the mainstream, while noting that the liberal lane has the cultural bullhorn at the moment.
I suppose it comes down to whether you view it government's role to maintain/enforce the culture, to reflect it, or be neutral. That's difficult to answer, honestly, as it depends on your view on whether culture flows down from the top or bubbles up from the bottom. I'd interpret you to be in the former camp.
"People often confuse libertarians with libertines." Sounds about right, and makes sense when I think of all the negative stereotypes that conflate libertarians with Ted Nugent, rather than any intelligent libertarian I'm familiar with. Also weird that I've met very few people who think their own behavior craves restraint by the state; but I've met hundreds who think other people need to be restrained--for their own good, naturally.
There is a distinct lack of sense of proportion here: a freedom does not have to be downside-free to be worth allowing on net. And the smell of pot smoke on the street, while indeed an unpleasant nuisance, is not reasonably described as "social breakdown". It is not as if NYC smelled like roses before!
I don't even mind the smell of marijuana, personally.
Aroma externality 'nuisance' or pollution is complicated We know what happened with cigarette smoke, which is that the law needing a hook of serious harm on which to hang an intervention resulted in the typical kind of epistemic corruption of mercenary academic hacks and hired gun expert witnesses and miscellaneous bureaucrats fabricating claims that wildly exaggerated the true risks involved. Rozin also has a fascinating paper on people automatically misremembering their prior tolerance and rewriting ("retconning") their own memories so that they have always been at war East Asia.
In Austin, Kansas City, and many other barbeque towns, the question about whether or how much smoke and deliciously irresistible world-class meat-cooking aromas can be emitted into which neighborhoods of what densities has spawned recurrent and passionate political fights. While some people want none of it and to enforce rules mandating venting through catalytic converters (prohibitively costly to most bbq operations), others love the smell and consider it a plus. The imperfect but ok halfway house compromise during more cigarette tolerant days was segregation, that is, having smoking and non-smoking sections, according to one's preferences. Alas, as of yet, no one has taken up my proposal of zoning 50% of neighborhoods for smoke aromas. Makes you wonder about the selection effect of your neighbors and the quality of local schools (and what gets served in the cafeteria, ha!)
I would live in segregated neighborhoods zoned for oak, cherry, and applewood, maybe pecan or walnut, but I'd rather be homeless than live next to those crazy mesquite lowlifes.
Yeah what happened to "fear of other people's freedom"?
My aunt lives in NYC and describes it as a hellscape of crime and general disorder the last few years. And she is rich enough to live on the Upper East Side.
John McWhorter describes his experience with the NYC subway:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/opinion/jordan-neely-subway-death.html
In Baltimore I knew many people that experienced violence and observed it often. When president Trump said Baltimore was a trash heap full of rats...even leftists friends who hated him admitted there was a lot of damn garbage everywhere.
How many of the people acting in this manner do you think were on drugs?
I think it's naive to think you are going to have a stoned out population and not have outcomes like this.
I get it. Middle class dudes who like getting stoned don't want to be hassled. I was briefly friends with a dude on my apartment floor just like that. Smoked weed every day. Kind seemed like a directionless layabout. This isn't some kind of grand freedom we should be taking to the barricades for.
How many were on drugs? A ton I'm sure. How many of the ones high on marijuana would have done the same thing or worse if they were sober? 99 percent. Correlation is not causation.
The ubiquity of the smell leads people to fret over the scale of people choosing mindlessness.
My big complaint is Kling's circle of libertarian pundits, are not libertarian at all. Consider three recent major developments.
1. The US government has coerced all the major social media platforms and all the major news outlets to manipulate public discussion. David Henderson has broadly defended and supported this heavy handed government with libertarian styled arguments. He says that YouTube and Twitter are run by private companies so they can't be involved in censorship, even when it was clear that they were working with and being coerced and coopted by government.
2. The US wages war with Russia which involves forced conscription of Ukrainians to fight. The US destroys gas pipelines and peaceful civilian infrastructure. The US weaponizes the dollar, enacts harsh economnic anti-trade sanctions against a majority of the nations on the planet. We see the rise of BRICS as a serious global rival to the US dollar led economy. Bryan Caplan supports war with Russia and broadly supports all of the above. In the past, Caplan presented himself as an extreme pacifist who opposed even popular wars, an extreme libertarian, and and extreme supporter of free markets and free trade. Now, he seems like an extreme opposite: an extreme pro-war hawk, extreme supporter of anti-trade sanctions on most of the globe, and is an extreme defender of corrupt government elites.
3. The US NIH + NIAID funds reckless virus research that causes a global pandemic that kills 20+ million people and extreme economic damage. Kling declines to comment on this. One of Kling's favorite pundits, Tyler Cowen, has spent his entire career advocating for NIH and an academic system with political power over the rest of society. Cowen pumps doubt into the lab leak hypothesis and expresses anger at those who promote it.
Libertarian is not a synonym for contrarian nor is it skepticism for skepticism sake.
1) Government has a role in information hygiene. And they've always played a role in shaping information, going back longer than the Revolutionary War. That doesn't make what they've done with social media is right. See Matt Welch on CNN last night.
2) The anti-war people have some of the most distorted views of reality around. The Ukrainians are being killed, raped, tortured, kidnapped. They are the ones who want to fight. The US delays resolution by trickling weapon systems one by one. The best information sources are from Eastern Europe as they lived under the warped Russians for a long time, some for longer than the USSR. Estonians are frequently a good source since their English tends to be so good. Their former president has good general coverage of the war https://twitter.com/IlvesToomas. It's good to see reality mugging theory for people like Caplan. Remember he's one who is/was skeptical of the American Revolution.
3) Government funding for medical research is important. And the NIH processes are frequently broken. There are no better chroniclers of the issues than Cowen and Tabarrok. Note that Cowen is putting money where his mouth is with the fast grants.
Of course Libertarianism isn't mere contrarianism. I didn't imply that and I dispute your implication that I did.
On all three issues, you present arguments on the issue itself, but you don't argue or even seem to disagree that the pundits cited are taking the non-libertarian position in these scenarios.
On #2 for example, you make arguments against the "anti-war people" in favor of US military engagement. This is the pro-war position. You can argue the pro-war position is the best choice in this case as Caplan does, but it seems a safe claim that the pro-war position is not the anti-war pacifist libertarian position.
I've yet to see Bryan come out in support of the Ukraine war, though your right that most GMU libertarians are raging war hawks.
However, Richard Hanania definitely did a complete 180 and will probably do so again if things swing the other way.
Here is a link by Caplan who argues for arming Ukraine and promoting war with Russia and argues against Hanania who is advocating that the US not escalate conflict.
https://betonit.substack.com/p/the-ethics-of-putin
This criticizes Putin, but it doesn't call for US support of Ukraine. He does say appeasement should be tired but not might work. I've seen him criticize the Ukraine war in other pieces.
But go ahead and ask him point blank if he thinks the US should be supporting Ukraine.
"If you win on drug legalization, and the social order deteriorates, what have you accomplished?" Right on! A bunch of pot smoking, porn watching gamblers is not a very good place for society to be even if none should be criminalized.
Go back to Proverbs 29:18 paraphrased as "without a vision the people parish". Freedom without purpose gets one to a libertine, not libertarian, state. I don't get why so many of today's libertarians don't get it. Can doesn't imply should and there is a balance between the two (rights vs. responsibilities). Unfortunately balance is not a word that's in vogue these days.
Good comment. I think the libertarian argument would be that it's up to each individual to determine what the correct balance is, but you're correct that this is not at all the message people are getting these days from tastemakers and culturally influential types. See Red Barchetta's comment about activism. I find it hard to blame libertarians for this; they/we've never been that culturally influential.
The anti-fat craze may not be the best analogy, but I remember, for a time, that all sorts of things were made non-fat. As a consequence, people ate more (products with sugar) and became even fatter. There is a tacit understanding among some that the repeal of these laws must mean pot was never harmful and one can consume it as much as one wants. Like sugar, we will learn, belatedly, that human craving, completely sated, unhindered by cost or law, has serious consequences. An irony: one of the arguments for legalization was that would help prevent addiction to "harder" stuff. Instead, it is most likely a gateway drug, just like all the squares said it was.
1) Many libertarians wanted to indulge themselves.
Even libertarians that eschew drugs really wanted free love. Free love ain't so free, just like drug use isn't so harmless (including to bystanders). If you start getting honest about this stuff, you inevitably run up against some vice that a libertarian really likes.
2) Libertarians are just kind of cowards. Drug legalization was popular with their friends. Things that aren't popular with their friends they either cave on or just try to ignore.
Libertarians have been very influential in a trees-but-not-the-forest way.
Sort of from the git-go, seems like. To step away from the modern web of inconsistencies, which this subect can't help but be when one's wallet is included in the conversation (tacky, I know) - I think back to something that really exercised people like - you can't make me put a helmet or a life jacket on my kid! Meanwhile in the background the government is expanding beyond the Kuiper Belt, and you're paying for all of it, and its tentacles are in everything.
Maybe being annoyed that the streets are stinky and that too many people have a "deadened gaze" isn't compelling enough to justify caging people? Perhaps such concerns could justify fines, but that doesn't mean we should slow down the whole preventing people from being caged unjustifiably thing while we take the time to work out how to create more proportionate incentives to promote fresh air and lucid gazes..
The marijuana smoke problem I think is being a bit misdiagnosed. Is the problem that weed is mostly legal, or is the problem that NYC and other cities do not bother to enforce rules and regulations they have? In other words, are more laws needed or is the government simply failing to enforce the laws they have on the books?
Given the huge uptick in unpunished crime, shoplifting, rioting etc. I am inclined to believe the latter.
If you put on your Hoppe hat, the marijuana problem is fixable by private organization but is not easy to fix when the polity relies on public transportation infrastructure and lots of public land. Many companies have strict anti-drug policies for employees because of long experience with the problems caused by drug using employees. Some municipalities like in the Southwest are so full of HOAs that to some extent those micro governments can regulate street behavior more effectively. Old municipalities like NYC cannot easily implement the same kind of public order because of legacy buildings and legacy expectations.
Our strange post-'60s interpretation of the Constitution forces municipalities to tolerate a lot of bad public behavior that had been illegal since the reign of Elizabeth I. The Supreme Court decided Lizzie was wrong and that "you can't just arrest vagrants for loitering and being gross in public." NYC worked better when public authorities could implement a pared down version of the Poor Laws with stop and frisk and other quality-of-life enforcement measures. Giuliani Time was essentially an unconstitutional reimplementation of the Poor Laws. I might be alone in coming to this conclusion, but drug control laws are ultimately clumsy proxies for behavior control laws. Drugs are not so much the problem: bums are the problem. But because our system declared Bum Control illegal, instead governments reach for Drug Control as a proxy to achieve the same ends.
If the marijuana smoke bothered you a lot, I advise you to stay away from major west coast cities, where people are openly smoking much more noxious substances.
> A polity, if it’s to function and endure, must offer its members a reason to remain attached, in their loyalties and affections, to the collective. That requires some engagement with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on.
The first sentence is clearly true. But the reasons people remain attached to polities are often a lot more concrete than the second sentence allows, which seems to be very philosophical. I've noted a quote that makes that point:
> The idea that black Cantonians [i.e., Canton, Mississippi] began moving to Chicago in droves during the Second World War in order to escape segregation is appealing but not really true. They moved to escape poverty and in most cases the dignity of making a decent living was far more gratifying at first than the dignity of having equal rights under the law. There is nothing comparable in American life today to the amount of financial gain southern blacks could realize
instantly by moving less than a thousand miles away, to another part of the same country, and getting the kind of unskilled jobs -- laborer, sales clerk -- that were unavailable to them in Canton. -- "The Origins of the Underclass" by Nicholas Lemann, June, 1986
Now that does involve "engagement with ... questions about the good life" but entirely in the sense of "How large is my paycheck?"
Even more concrete is the fact that people walk across deserts so they can become third-class non-citizens in the US, simply because it pays well.
Marijuana possession is either legal or illegal. Although we have made it more confusing because it's legal in some states but illegal in the country as a whole (federal statutes). If it's illegal there must be penalties attached to it (the definition of illegal). In my state, simple possession of marijuana can, depending on circumstances, bring you 30 years in prison. That's quite a scold. Perhaps some of the overblown claims to marijuana benefits can be thought of as an offset to the overblown penalties for its use. Like 30 years in prison.
I got halfway through this and thought, "this author needs to read Arnold Kling, they have a lot in common."
I'm not always the quickest on the draw.
My complaint about Libertarians is that their warnings are too general to be of much help. Industrial policy can certainly go wrong but in different ways. Only be being prepared to dig in to how any specific industrial policy can go wrong, the warning will just be ignored. Everybody already "knows" that policy can go wrong.
Moreover (is this the same thing?) Libertarians tend to ignore that policy making is or should be dialectic. Legalization of marihuana has created new problems of when it can be consumed. Time to address those.
"On foreign policy, libertarians warn about foreign adventures. Interventionists are asking the same government that is clumsy at home to be adept abroad."
One problem with the libertarian approach to foreign adventures (read: foreign policy) is that there are evil people in the world, some of whom are very powerful and who care not a wit about liberty (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin last century; Putin, Xi, Khameini, Kim today). Unfortunately, resisting and confronting megalomaniacs requires collective action (national defense) and drawing lines between foreign adventures and the national defense, difficult lines to draw. Some (not all) libertarians and others oppose U.S. actions in supporting Ukraine, intervening in the Middle East, and resisting China's expansionism as American adventurism. However, if the likes of Russia, China, No. Korea, and Iran have their way, we won't have the luxury of discussing libertarianism any longer. (See Hong Kong.)
If you carry outwards from minarchism to anarcho-capitalism, you end up accepting the notion that communities (protection services) will have at least some rules that at least some members don’t like, but have to accept as a practical matter of choosing between different communities. I think that theoretical rigor makes anarcho-capitalists a bit more tolerant than minarchists of minor infringements of liberty. Or maybe I’m projecting.
My wife and I have long disagreed on drug legalization, with my first thoughts:
a-legal) reduced drug crimes (stealing to get money), police corruption AND more drug users with worse lives who ?freely?? choose that lifestyle.
vs
b-illegal) more drug crimes but far fewer users.
We both want fewer drug caused problems, and less irresponsible drug use; and mostly agreed to stop arguing about it. It's not yet in the cards for Slovakia.
The deterioration of the social order with legal pot gives me second thoughts. How many wasted drug users do there need to be in order to justify gov't force to stop them?
On third thought - letting irresponsible guys become vacant slothful dopers might well be better than putting most of them in prison during their high crime 15-30 years old lives. Them "punishing" themselves by wasting their own lives by getting high seems better than gov't prison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw "I was goin' pay my child support but then I got high... I messed up my entire life, because I got high" Not just a fun karaoke song!
Becoming an alcoholic wino is partly uncool because homeless alcoholics are so pathetic - becoming a doper is likely to follow that into the "uncool valley". Maybe there's less teen sex & teen abortions & teen non-pot problems from single parent kids with unmarried bio-parent, and our society can learn to deal with pot heads better than with crazies like Jordan Neely. Who might have been both crazy and a pothead, tho. Tradeoffs including some bad results, all the the way down.
The care and feeding of "addicts" or users or freedom fighters if you like, ensure that they will go forth and multiply. I've had a view into the foster care system in recent years and while I would not have expected great parenting skills in this world, the number of people who are wards of the state - I'm talking the parents, not the children - has astonished me. And all of a sudden, the left who gave us this reality, find birth control appalling! In this instance: the reproduction of their favorite class, so useful to them in turning the world upside down. The parents' narcissism is flattered by the state's near-endless effort to "reunite the family" or some semblance of it; rehab is like school, you can fail repeatedly, and if one child is finally at length taken away (you basically agreed to renounce), well - meantime you had twins, while living in your state-issued apartment! The process begins again! It's like a job.
Might individualism and community governance co-exist reasonably well if there are efficient *exit options* for individuals? I have in mind markets for governance.
Take the example, which Arnold raises: Marijuana use as a public nuisance. If there are markets for governance, i.e., efficient exit options for individuals, then some communities might ban or strictly regulate marijuana use, whilst other communities tolerate public marijuana use. The idea is that individuals will self-sort accordingly. Naïve? Where is the rub?
It is an empirical question, whether current bundles of policies in large polities (esp. at the State and Federal levels) are roughly optimal for individual exit and for community governance. Libertarians tend to favor decentralization of governance, if majority rule is the governance mechanism.
To raise another example: The SCOTUS decision, re: abortion, decentralized governance to State legislatures on a controversial issue. Will a substantial number of women use an exit option (i.e., medical travel or change of residence to a State with a different policy)?
However, more broadly, there seems to be a tendency towards centralization of governance. When majority-rule governance is fully centralized at the federal level, then exit -- the safety valve for individualism, the market for governance -- is thwarted.
I've been wondering about the libertarian theory of governance. It seems mostly a critique of all governance. Perhaps decentralization is key. But this seems to run contrary to human nature. The sort of person willing to go through the ordeals of elective office is rarely the sort of person who wants less rather than more power over others.