Bryan Caplan on Encouraging Libertarianism; Matt Shapiro Questions Vaccine Efficacy; Infovores questions FIRE's ranking methodology; Niccolo Soldo and Ed West on TERFs
“People want to hear that they have been screwed over by the market, that politicians care about them, and that public officials know what to do.”
Something different is going on in where I come from (India). People acknowledge the politicians are scummy, that public officials are corrupt and interested only in self-enrichment.
Yet, if only we had better ‘leaders’, put more funding into an already failing X scheme, punished the corrupt more severely (and changing nothing about the things that enable corruption in the first place), we would get a benevolent and progressive State that will usher in Utopia. This is the belief a lot of people I think here are stuck in, there is still no trust in markets.
That sounds pretty much exactly what is the case in the US, and pretty close to Caplan's view as well. My guess it is something of a human universal, focusing on individual leaders and not the incentive system and process so much.
People, generally speaking, want a scapegoat and they do not want to accept responsibility for their choices and the consequences of their decisions. This leads to the political / social environment where every "leader" is corrupt and untrustworthy " but those politicians who reflect "my" worldview and are sympathetic to my fears deserve support.
Consequently, most of American politics - that which I directly observe - involves the government & media dictating what are acceptable views and sympathies. This is the convenient way of keeping power. The challenge is human diversity is too great to have one dominant viewpoint. Plus, the social reality / contradictions are becoming too inconvenient to ignore.
If the 2022 midterms show that Americans reject the Biden narrative that Democrats are good and Republicans are evil (ie Republicans win in Pennsylvania and Nevada and Arizona) then we will see an awakening in the Democratic party. The Liberal politics of embracing and promoting the fringe and victimized of society will be put on the shelf, replaced by a new message.
Invisible Sun; if my previous response seemed dismissive please forgive. This morning I am in the mood to share your optimism. As the left ("cancel culture") and right ("nationalist") both move towards grievance based identity politics I would like to believe social liberals and classical liberals would find some common ground in individual liberty.
"This is going to sound self-serving, but I think that libertarians do not have mass appeal because we are reluctant to engage in demagoguery and in turn we are easily demagogued. People want to hear that they have been screwed over by the market, that politicians care about them, and that public officials know what to do. Our message is the opposite. Bryan also says that libertarian ideals are inherently psychologically unappealing to ordinary humans."
This is a self serving cope.
I would say the primary background ideology of your average middle class white American is something like the Small L libertarianism of Hank Hill. Mike Judge has championed this kind of ideology throughout his career quite successfully.
It's true that think tank libertarianism is unpopular. But if libertarianism wants to hang its hat around drag queen story hour and open borders it's going to have a hard time and deserve to have a hard time.
I would also point out that the libertarian movements failure to stand up to COVID insanity basically invalidated it. Whether the response was active collaboration (Tyler Cowen) to bitching on the internet but otherwise denigrating anyone actually protesting the moment of maximum tyranny came and the formal libertarian movement did nothing practical to stop it.
I agree that the usual libertarian movement heads really dropped the ball on COVID. Dropped it, and occasionally scored an own goal. It wasn't universal, but the libertarian "exception for public health" allowed a rather large amount of authoritarianism to pass by. (That exception being along the lines of "government can legitimately step in with extraordinary measures in the case of public health emergencies".) That is a very large defect, and I think some libertarian thinkers have noticed that allowing for health emergencies without a robust way to check on such things is akin to allowing for war emergencies without some way to check that there are actual foreign troops landing on the shores.
You are right though, the Libertarian Party and leading libertarians (Cowen) had their opportunity to shine and failed miserably. Fear and confirmation bias did their work just as well with them as it did with so many who failed to actually look and see if the problem was as bad as the state claimed.
Don Boudreuax is a true Libertarian and I respect him greatly. I disagree with his advocacy of pure international "free-trade"- given the issue of regulatory arbitrage that greatly disadvantages American manufacturing - but I am glad individuals like Boudreaux have a voice.
But yes, generally speaking Covid showed many Libertarians to be self-serving cowards.
Did you read Reason at all during the pandemic? I’m practically a broken record on this type of criticism, but Reason is both the most quintessentially ‘mainstream libertarian’ outlet and a powerful institution within libertarianism, not some obscure blog, and your description re covid doesn’t apply to it remotely.
Tyler Cowen (and Tabarrok) are widely known and self-acknowledged moderate libertarians who stay reasonably close to the mainstream (perhaps because their Straussians, who knows).
<i>I would say the primary background ideology of your average middle class white American is something like the Small L libertarianism of Hank Hill.</i>
Interesting comparison.
But I would say most Americans are small S socialists: everyone wants a finger on the scale for their cause. Reading Caplan et al has me hearing: "what we need is a central authority to seize political power and impose libertarianism upon the populace with policy and enforcement."
Along these lines I find it maddening for Caplan and crew to support our current open border policy, when the thing is a big socialist enterprise, with direct payments to immigrants; slotting them into our social safety net; issuing them legal aid in our rather elaborate immigration court system, and the other bureaucratic support agencies; etc.
The closest real world example people site is Singapore.
Singapore is what one might call "extreme right" on social policy. All of the big libertarian bugaboos are illegal and severely punished there. Drugs, crime, disorder, gambling, illegal immigration, etc are all tightly controlled and carry draconian penalties.
On economic policy Singapore routinely scores very high on economic freedom, but huge swaths of the country are not operated in a doctrinaire libertarian fashion. They have universal healthcare. State hospitals. Maybe you feel they have designed a "right wing" version of universal healthcare, but its still universal healthcare. The government owns most of the real estate. Apartments are doled out based on racial and class based allocations. There is a lot of forced savings and other interference in the market.
Milton Friedmen once called the draft slavery, but everyone in Singapore has to do mandatory service.
Singapore is a democracy with free and fair elections, but everyone agrees that there are a lot of rules that heavily favor the PAP. The elections aren't "rigged", but the PAP would need to get pretty unpopular to lose, and that hasn't happened yet.
Singapore is also essentially an ethno-state. Immigration policy keeps the Chinese % of the population at 75%, and it's the Chinese that overwhelmingly support the PAP.
The PAP logo is literally the kind of stock photo one would use to generic fascists in a Hollywood movie.
Despite all this, a lot of libertarians talk of Singapore highly and would probably trade what they have for what Singapores got.
What I would conclude is that people don't mind basic social insurance (not welfare) if its done efficiently, that they dislike social disorder and underclass behavior more then they like the right to get high, and they will embrace whatever regulatory structure gets results.
I don't think libertarians even make the pretense of offering solutions to the concerns of the average voter.
I think if you take a big picture view, Democrats are basically offering something like a Galbraith brand of anodyne corporatist capitalism. A critic might rightfully call it fascism or mercantilism in the way that big corporate elites (in both for and non profit sectors) and government interests merge, but it also comes along with a safety net and handouts. It's definitely a vision of society slouching toward Gomorra, but I think for the average person who's more worried about immediate realities than long-term trends, it presents as "safe". Stuff won't get too bad, and if it does, they'll course correct to keep shambling forward and keep the gravy train rolling.
Republicans basically offer the same but with a slightly different set of interests. You get less overt corruption and less free reign for academic weirdos, but also less safety net and handouts. There's a background threat of suddenly having to worry about things you shouldn't have to (oh shit, we just banned abortion?) that puts a lot of people ill at ease.
Libertarians offer the worst of both worlds. Academic weirdos eager to reduce the age of consent to 8, transgenderize your kids, replace you with an illegal immigrant, and then tell you that all those big companies with fancy people are your moral superiors (just look at how rich they are) and companies are perfectly within their rights to censor and not do business with whomever they please. And if you agreed to the TOS, then hand over your DNA and shut up about it.
Generally agree, but: "There's a background threat of suddenly having to worry about things you shouldn't have to..." is something we should embrace at some level; otherwise we get free-lunched into oblivion.
America's biggest problem is mature Mancur-Olson syndrome: special-interest gridlock mediated by cronyism. Libertarians mostly do not acknowledge this, and specifically do not acknowledge that one can no longer draw any useful line between "government," which Libertarians loathe, and "corporate oligarchy," which Libertarians worship. Many Libertarians fantasize that "private actors" are morally pure and would never do anything coercive or dishonest. Such beliefs are transparently absurd and that is why Libertarians have little public credibility and amass no power.
The particular oligarchs who fund the formal expressions of "Libertarianism" such as the LP and Reason magazine use those only: (a) to recruit midwits still struggling mentally with the NAP to support one or another special-interest group in overclass faction fights; and (b) to divert potential rebels against the oligarchy into tail-chasing debates over sterile philosphical issues like the (long-exploded) NAP. The oligarchy loves to see young Libertarians squabbling over the proper interpretation of their favorite Ayn Rand passages rather than agitating against the oligarchy.
Most "small-L" libertarians correctly perceive that market-based approaches to most problems are best for society as a whole. However, such "open" orderings are not short-run-best for special interests. Open orderings are only really "open" when they host a relatively large number of relatively equal players, but then competition limits all players' profits. Investors prefer ever more concentrated orderings which yield larger profits to specific players even as a sector produces less output (and less "consumer surplus") overall. Various special interests collude to transfer parts of the "market" realm of the economy into the "managed" or "cronyized" (oligopoly) realm and thereby transfer wealth to themselves even if it diminishes overall wealth. Such collusion does not take place only through the "government" channel and is not driven only by "government" actors. Small-L "libertarians" who righteously deny this dynamic (reciting Reason-magazine propaganda in favor of market concentration bought and paid-for by greedy oligarchs) can never make more than small ephemeral political gains because they can only ever earn a few crumbs from the oligarchs for supporting one or another special-interest in a faction fight that does not challenge the system.
Since there is no useful distinction between "government" and "private" actors now, serious proposals for reform must address and utilize both. Small-L libertarians proud of their midwit philosophical purity actively oppose using any part of "government" against any part of "the private sector" even when the target part of the "private sector" is actively using the target part of "government" for its own purposes (consider the US FCC for example).
*America's third biggest problem is insanely aggressive imperialist foreign policy.
I consider myself very pro vax, but I would guess that even in your age group further boosters probably aren't much additional benefit as long as one is vigilant about doing a course of paxlovid once infected. Which (again, for your age group) should be a no brainer regardless.
But if you don't get much in the way of acute side effects from boosters, there's also no downside risk in your age group, so no need to feel like a chump.
That said I cracked up when Shapiro intimated that 60 percent effectiveness against hospitalization after five months counts as ineffective. Some people just want to put a negative spin on everything.
"...Shapiro intimated that 60 percent effectiveness against hospitalization after five months counts as ineffective."
Not fair. He was noting that the bosses were tossing around a 95% effectiveness, while data was a start at ~60% or less for most vaccine regimens that then dwindled to zero.
“People want to hear that they have been screwed over by the market, that politicians care about them, and that public officials know what to do.”
Something different is going on in where I come from (India). People acknowledge the politicians are scummy, that public officials are corrupt and interested only in self-enrichment.
Yet, if only we had better ‘leaders’, put more funding into an already failing X scheme, punished the corrupt more severely (and changing nothing about the things that enable corruption in the first place), we would get a benevolent and progressive State that will usher in Utopia. This is the belief a lot of people I think here are stuck in, there is still no trust in markets.
That sounds pretty much exactly what is the case in the US, and pretty close to Caplan's view as well. My guess it is something of a human universal, focusing on individual leaders and not the incentive system and process so much.
People, generally speaking, want a scapegoat and they do not want to accept responsibility for their choices and the consequences of their decisions. This leads to the political / social environment where every "leader" is corrupt and untrustworthy " but those politicians who reflect "my" worldview and are sympathetic to my fears deserve support.
Consequently, most of American politics - that which I directly observe - involves the government & media dictating what are acceptable views and sympathies. This is the convenient way of keeping power. The challenge is human diversity is too great to have one dominant viewpoint. Plus, the social reality / contradictions are becoming too inconvenient to ignore.
If the 2022 midterms show that Americans reject the Biden narrative that Democrats are good and Republicans are evil (ie Republicans win in Pennsylvania and Nevada and Arizona) then we will see an awakening in the Democratic party. The Liberal politics of embracing and promoting the fringe and victimized of society will be put on the shelf, replaced by a new message.
May it be so.
"The Liberal politics of embracing and promoting the fringe and victimized of society will be put on the shelf, replaced by a new message."
Not likely. I expect to hear things like, we didn't get our message out, voter suppression, Republicans are evil, their supporters are stupid.
Agree.
Invisible Sun; if my previous response seemed dismissive please forgive. This morning I am in the mood to share your optimism. As the left ("cancel culture") and right ("nationalist") both move towards grievance based identity politics I would like to believe social liberals and classical liberals would find some common ground in individual liberty.
"This is going to sound self-serving, but I think that libertarians do not have mass appeal because we are reluctant to engage in demagoguery and in turn we are easily demagogued. People want to hear that they have been screwed over by the market, that politicians care about them, and that public officials know what to do. Our message is the opposite. Bryan also says that libertarian ideals are inherently psychologically unappealing to ordinary humans."
This is a self serving cope.
I would say the primary background ideology of your average middle class white American is something like the Small L libertarianism of Hank Hill. Mike Judge has championed this kind of ideology throughout his career quite successfully.
It's true that think tank libertarianism is unpopular. But if libertarianism wants to hang its hat around drag queen story hour and open borders it's going to have a hard time and deserve to have a hard time.
I would also point out that the libertarian movements failure to stand up to COVID insanity basically invalidated it. Whether the response was active collaboration (Tyler Cowen) to bitching on the internet but otherwise denigrating anyone actually protesting the moment of maximum tyranny came and the formal libertarian movement did nothing practical to stop it.
I agree that the usual libertarian movement heads really dropped the ball on COVID. Dropped it, and occasionally scored an own goal. It wasn't universal, but the libertarian "exception for public health" allowed a rather large amount of authoritarianism to pass by. (That exception being along the lines of "government can legitimately step in with extraordinary measures in the case of public health emergencies".) That is a very large defect, and I think some libertarian thinkers have noticed that allowing for health emergencies without a robust way to check on such things is akin to allowing for war emergencies without some way to check that there are actual foreign troops landing on the shores.
You are right though, the Libertarian Party and leading libertarians (Cowen) had their opportunity to shine and failed miserably. Fear and confirmation bias did their work just as well with them as it did with so many who failed to actually look and see if the problem was as bad as the state claimed.
Don Boudreuax is a true Libertarian and I respect him greatly. I disagree with his advocacy of pure international "free-trade"- given the issue of regulatory arbitrage that greatly disadvantages American manufacturing - but I am glad individuals like Boudreaux have a voice.
But yes, generally speaking Covid showed many Libertarians to be self-serving cowards.
Did you read Reason at all during the pandemic? I’m practically a broken record on this type of criticism, but Reason is both the most quintessentially ‘mainstream libertarian’ outlet and a powerful institution within libertarianism, not some obscure blog, and your description re covid doesn’t apply to it remotely.
Tyler Cowen (and Tabarrok) are widely known and self-acknowledged moderate libertarians who stay reasonably close to the mainstream (perhaps because their Straussians, who knows).
<i>I would say the primary background ideology of your average middle class white American is something like the Small L libertarianism of Hank Hill.</i>
Interesting comparison.
But I would say most Americans are small S socialists: everyone wants a finger on the scale for their cause. Reading Caplan et al has me hearing: "what we need is a central authority to seize political power and impose libertarianism upon the populace with policy and enforcement."
Along these lines I find it maddening for Caplan and crew to support our current open border policy, when the thing is a big socialist enterprise, with direct payments to immigrants; slotting them into our social safety net; issuing them legal aid in our rather elaborate immigration court system, and the other bureaucratic support agencies; etc.
Authoritarian libertarianism seems a contradiction, but let's at least try to guess at it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXU2vZTTeMU
The closest real world example people site is Singapore.
Singapore is what one might call "extreme right" on social policy. All of the big libertarian bugaboos are illegal and severely punished there. Drugs, crime, disorder, gambling, illegal immigration, etc are all tightly controlled and carry draconian penalties.
On economic policy Singapore routinely scores very high on economic freedom, but huge swaths of the country are not operated in a doctrinaire libertarian fashion. They have universal healthcare. State hospitals. Maybe you feel they have designed a "right wing" version of universal healthcare, but its still universal healthcare. The government owns most of the real estate. Apartments are doled out based on racial and class based allocations. There is a lot of forced savings and other interference in the market.
Milton Friedmen once called the draft slavery, but everyone in Singapore has to do mandatory service.
Singapore is a democracy with free and fair elections, but everyone agrees that there are a lot of rules that heavily favor the PAP. The elections aren't "rigged", but the PAP would need to get pretty unpopular to lose, and that hasn't happened yet.
Singapore is also essentially an ethno-state. Immigration policy keeps the Chinese % of the population at 75%, and it's the Chinese that overwhelmingly support the PAP.
The PAP logo is literally the kind of stock photo one would use to generic fascists in a Hollywood movie.
Despite all this, a lot of libertarians talk of Singapore highly and would probably trade what they have for what Singapores got.
What I would conclude is that people don't mind basic social insurance (not welfare) if its done efficiently, that they dislike social disorder and underclass behavior more then they like the right to get high, and they will embrace whatever regulatory structure gets results.
I don't think libertarians even make the pretense of offering solutions to the concerns of the average voter.
I think if you take a big picture view, Democrats are basically offering something like a Galbraith brand of anodyne corporatist capitalism. A critic might rightfully call it fascism or mercantilism in the way that big corporate elites (in both for and non profit sectors) and government interests merge, but it also comes along with a safety net and handouts. It's definitely a vision of society slouching toward Gomorra, but I think for the average person who's more worried about immediate realities than long-term trends, it presents as "safe". Stuff won't get too bad, and if it does, they'll course correct to keep shambling forward and keep the gravy train rolling.
Republicans basically offer the same but with a slightly different set of interests. You get less overt corruption and less free reign for academic weirdos, but also less safety net and handouts. There's a background threat of suddenly having to worry about things you shouldn't have to (oh shit, we just banned abortion?) that puts a lot of people ill at ease.
Libertarians offer the worst of both worlds. Academic weirdos eager to reduce the age of consent to 8, transgenderize your kids, replace you with an illegal immigrant, and then tell you that all those big companies with fancy people are your moral superiors (just look at how rich they are) and companies are perfectly within their rights to censor and not do business with whomever they please. And if you agreed to the TOS, then hand over your DNA and shut up about it.
Generally agree, but: "There's a background threat of suddenly having to worry about things you shouldn't have to..." is something we should embrace at some level; otherwise we get free-lunched into oblivion.
America's biggest problem is mature Mancur-Olson syndrome: special-interest gridlock mediated by cronyism. Libertarians mostly do not acknowledge this, and specifically do not acknowledge that one can no longer draw any useful line between "government," which Libertarians loathe, and "corporate oligarchy," which Libertarians worship. Many Libertarians fantasize that "private actors" are morally pure and would never do anything coercive or dishonest. Such beliefs are transparently absurd and that is why Libertarians have little public credibility and amass no power.
The particular oligarchs who fund the formal expressions of "Libertarianism" such as the LP and Reason magazine use those only: (a) to recruit midwits still struggling mentally with the NAP to support one or another special-interest group in overclass faction fights; and (b) to divert potential rebels against the oligarchy into tail-chasing debates over sterile philosphical issues like the (long-exploded) NAP. The oligarchy loves to see young Libertarians squabbling over the proper interpretation of their favorite Ayn Rand passages rather than agitating against the oligarchy.
Most "small-L" libertarians correctly perceive that market-based approaches to most problems are best for society as a whole. However, such "open" orderings are not short-run-best for special interests. Open orderings are only really "open" when they host a relatively large number of relatively equal players, but then competition limits all players' profits. Investors prefer ever more concentrated orderings which yield larger profits to specific players even as a sector produces less output (and less "consumer surplus") overall. Various special interests collude to transfer parts of the "market" realm of the economy into the "managed" or "cronyized" (oligopoly) realm and thereby transfer wealth to themselves even if it diminishes overall wealth. Such collusion does not take place only through the "government" channel and is not driven only by "government" actors. Small-L "libertarians" who righteously deny this dynamic (reciting Reason-magazine propaganda in favor of market concentration bought and paid-for by greedy oligarchs) can never make more than small ephemeral political gains because they can only ever earn a few crumbs from the oligarchs for supporting one or another special-interest in a faction fight that does not challenge the system.
Since there is no useful distinction between "government" and "private" actors now, serious proposals for reform must address and utilize both. Small-L libertarians proud of their midwit philosophical purity actively oppose using any part of "government" against any part of "the private sector" even when the target part of the "private sector" is actively using the target part of "government" for its own purposes (consider the US FCC for example).
*America's third biggest problem is insanely aggressive imperialist foreign policy.
I consider myself very pro vax, but I would guess that even in your age group further boosters probably aren't much additional benefit as long as one is vigilant about doing a course of paxlovid once infected. Which (again, for your age group) should be a no brainer regardless.
But if you don't get much in the way of acute side effects from boosters, there's also no downside risk in your age group, so no need to feel like a chump.
That said I cracked up when Shapiro intimated that 60 percent effectiveness against hospitalization after five months counts as ineffective. Some people just want to put a negative spin on everything.
"...Shapiro intimated that 60 percent effectiveness against hospitalization after five months counts as ineffective."
Not fair. He was noting that the bosses were tossing around a 95% effectiveness, while data was a start at ~60% or less for most vaccine regimens that then dwindled to zero.
Well, it is pretty ineffective if you are traveling to Milwaukee in a few weeks. Depends on the use case :)