Rob Henderson vs. libertarianism; Foreign Money Corrupting Higher Ed; at Harvard in particular; and higher ed is a big industry; Alice Evans on Economic Development
Relatively easy exit was the genius of the U. S. federal system. People could leave town if the local government or social environment abused them. People didn’t need to cross an ocean or an international border. That is no longer the case. We have centralized domestic policy more than is good for us. People can still exit places like California or Portland, and they increasingly do.
They can’t get away from the small town social environment.
I think this is an underappreciated point, not just in favor of federalism but in understanding why national level laws became so popular in the early 20th century. Moving state and local level decisions to the national level was a method of control, of not letting people exit bad local government or allowing obvious examples of better run regions to make the bad governments look it.
You are confusing personal preference and morality with government policy positions. My stance comes from the view that competent adults should have the freedom to make their own decisions, even if others disapprove, as long as they don't infringe on the rights of others. I see drug use, gambling, and prostitution as victimless crimes that should be matters of personal liberty and should be legal..
While I refrain from these activities and would advocate that others avoid them, my personal preferences or moral views should not determine legality. The government oversteps its legitimate bounds when it regulates behaviors that don't violate the rights of others.
In the economic realm, I have similar views favoring personal freedom. Individuals should have the right to decide how to spend their money and manage their financial affairs free of government interference or overregulation. This fiscal freedom aligns with my socially liberal views on personal liberty.
In summary, while my personal choices are socially conservative, my policy views are both socially liberal (on personal freedoms) and fiscally conservative (on economic freedoms). I arrived at this position through my overarching belief in libertarian principles of limited government and maximal personal autonomy.
I know nothing of the criminal or other backstory but am thinking of a situation where a woman, a drug addict who had managed to hang onto custody of a “tween” age child, despite periods of homelessness, became pregnant with twins. And then, relieved of them, pregnant again.
Two separate budgetary streams were launched for the fostering *and* daycare of these babies, or three if you count the mother becoming essentially the “fourth child” as the state housed her and rehabbed her in an absurd hope she could be made fit to parent. A hope that was obviously good for lawyers and social service workers.
Not sure who’s paying for the care of the older child.
The babies’ developmental delays at least some of which are attributed to drugs and alcohol, are also already billable and obviously will grow with time and school.
I always wonder what about this libertarians find victimless, even if only a fantasy that it’s just the taxpayer who’s the victim.
Or maybe this is all money well-spent in a complacent, pot smoke befogged view?
Or: the crime is just negligent parenting, full stop?
The idea of luxury beliefs is a luxury belief. I thought it was an interesting idea at first pass but I think it's destined for the "snarl word" bin, a fancy sounding way to say "your ideas aren't legitimate and you probably don't even believe them" without engaging in the content of the ideas.
I have a suspicion that "luxury belief" will be used exclusively to mean "things I don't like but don't want to explain why" in the near future.
My children will often engage in behaviors that they can do without harm nine times in a row, but that will reliably cause harm about every tenth time. Say, jumping down several flights of stairs at once. Or flopping down right next to the baby with enough force that if they were off a little bit would land on the baby. Etc.
In libertarian world they haven't violated the non-aggression principle until the negative effect actually occurs. And yet, I can predict with certainty that when these behaviors are engaged in at scale it's pretty much inevitable its going to happen. Rather than ascribe 0% guilt to each instance and 100% guilt when something bad comes of it, I assign X% guilt to every single instance and disallow and punish the behaviors regardless of the results of the individual instance.
With something like drugs I think it's irrelevant what the outcomes are for a specific use or for a specific person. Addiction is a predictable statistical phenomenon when practiced at scale. If the risks and costs of addiction at the societal level fail a cost/benefit analysis, it matters not if there are people who can or could indulge without becoming addicted or if a particular indulgence didn't cause immediate negative effects.
I had this argument with a more doctrinaire libertarian friend of mine, who argued that there is no level of "increasing the risk of harm to others" that could be morally punished by the state. The silliest hypothetical I came up with was "what if a guy is in a park with a big sack full of kitchen knives, and just starts throwing them as high in the air as he can, one after another in a crowded public park?" According to their logic, until a knife hits someone, that person did nothing wrong.
I think there should be some culpability for creating conditions where it's very likely that other people will be harmed, but it's a challenging line to draw without getting involved in "pre-crime."
Then why the squeamishness about drugs? They predictably cause harm to many people with statistical certainty.
One can debate cost of enforcement vs harm reduction, but I sense the libertarian objection goes far beyond such utilitarian calculations and would insist on freedom even where net harm was statistically certain.
The risk of harm has to be fairly direct in order to count? So like if I force you to play Russian roulette I aggress against you but not against your family even though your death would harm them in a broader sense of harm.
As Bob suggests, there's a Coasian problem here. Legalizing drugs will predictably cause harm to many people. But so will making them illegal. When enough people want the product, illegal suppliers will emerge, with violence and corruption following. And many sellers will sell adulterated product, e.g. heroin plus fentanyl instead of pure heroin. Alcohol prohibition between 1920 and 1933 reduced some real problems. The number of people who drank away the rent money or got drunk and beat their wives went down. But it was eventually decided that the negative side effects were worse and prohibition was repealed.
Unfortunately, we do not have anywhere near exact numbers for the positive and negative effects of various drug legalization and prohibition policies. Libertarians tend to convince themselves that the costs of prohibition are high and the costs of legalization low.
"Libertarians tend to convince themselves that the costs of prohibition are high and the costs of legalization low."
Indeed, I think they take a motivated view of the evidence that is not objective.
I think the biggest blind spot of libertarians is their based assumption that there is a set amount of "demand" for various vice products and thus its inevitable that suppliers will arise to meet this demand.
My own view of the vice industry is that there is a great deal of "supply creates its own demand." Drug dealers are always looking for ways to create new addicts. The gambling industry pays a lot of money to find ways to hack peoples evolutionary programming. Etc. Supply creates its own demand, which libertarians tend to ignore.
In those cases where demand is deeply ingrained and the costs of eliminating it are high then perhaps legalization makes sense. But in cases where there is no present demand and legalization would create new demand its best not to let the devil in the door.
Enforcement is not cost free. It has undesirable side effects. It may be better to have strong social norms against abuse. Save legal prohibitions for specific things like driving under the influence. Employers should have the right to prohibit working under the influence.
I mean the debate over whether to use legal force or social opprobrium in relation to particular behaviors is quite old. It varies by drug and societal context and mixes with certain behaviors (you note drunk driving).
If someone said that using meth at all was at least as dangerous as drunk driving (keep in mind that you don't have to be totally sloshed to fail a Breathalyzer) could they not make the case it should be illegal.
Is there precedent for successful use of legal force against an activity to which no significant social opprobrium (i.e. beyond a general "violating law is bad") attaches?
I think you're implying that it's a matter of #2 or #3. #3 is indeed unstable, usually it can only be enforced with strong elite preference or as a kind of temporary state where things were once more like #2.
I was thinking more like #1 or #2. If you accept that a behavior is indeed bad and worth getting rid of then you are debating between those two.
If you don't think a behavior is bad and worth getting rid of then you see the debate between #3 and #4. I.E. between freedom to do the not bad thing versus arbitrary legal crackdown on a thing that shouldn't be illegal.
The dissonance is over feeling the thing is not bad while also seeing that it causes a lot of bad.
Lastly, I know social opprobrium can work because I watched elites achieve this with smoking in my lifetime. They could do the same with pot or whatever if they cared enough.
I agree with your perspective - norms are vital, but the government shouldn't necessarily enforce them. But I'd go further. Part of the reason I don't want government enforcement of social norms is that I don't want the government determining what those norms should be.
It would be unwise to assume that government norm enforcement would straightforwardly promote "good norms" - i.e. traditional responsibility and continence. Just as likely it would promote radical wokism. Realistically it would probably be all over the shop, an incoherent mess. Public Choice teaches us to look sceptically at the notion of an omniscient, omnibenevolent government when it comes to correcting economic market failures. We should exercise the same scepticism regarding norm enforcement.
There is a massive difference between norms that sound good, and norms that work. The former are more likely to emerge from a political process leading to a central mandate. The latter are more likely to emerge from a decentralised learning process with informal enforcement.
"Inevitably hurt themselves" is doing a lot of work in Henderson's thinking. Fairly often people find new ways to thrive without following old norms-- as an extreme example, we no longer have the norm "obey your feudal lord" and that's a very good thing. The genius of a regime of liberty is that it lets people try to do this as they please, and take the consequences whether they turn out to be right or wrong. That's how we learn and grow as a culture, and coercive norm enforcement shuts down the learning process. In general liberty as a discovery process is still underrated, despite all the work Hayek, McCloskey etc have done to explain it.
My prior on the Weiss and Lukianoff/Schlott pieces is to be skeptical, because in the real world it is rare that either "follow the money" conspiratorialism or blaming the baleful influence of a single thinker are good ways to explain large scale social phenomena. The world is more complicated than that.
I'll add too, though it may be banging the same drum a bit much, that the dichotomy between prohibition and unrestricted license is a false one. Risk to bystanders from experimenting with norm violations is a legitimate concern: the time-tested, generally-applicable, minimally-invasive mitigation strategy for that risk is time, place, and manner regulation, not prohibition. There is already, as there should be, a big difference between what is legal to do in the privacy of your own home and what is legal to do out in the middle of the street in broad daylight in front of children; and arguably the path to practical libertarianism is to make that difference even bigger.
“a big difference between what is legal to do in the privacy of your own home and what is legal to do out in the middle of the street in broad daylight in front of children”
It’s illegal to shoot up fentanyl in front of my kids when I’m walking down the street in Portland, OR, or for grown adults to be going out in drag when I walk around San Francisco, CA with my kids?
Much to the contrary, your private home may look a lot like the streets I walk down.
You're conflating two very different things. Being under the influence of fentanyl in public is in fact already illegal, and reasonably so due to the material nuisance it creates for other users of the public square-- just as staggering drunkenly down the street swigging from a vodka bottle is illegal ("drunk and disorderly") even though alcohol is legal. Dressing in drag in public is not illegal, nor should it ever be, because it creates no such nuisance.
I live in SF myself, and I can assure you that what makes the public square worse for people here is the homelessness and the open-air drug markets, not the drag festivals. And what we need is more housing and better enforcement of existing laws against material public nuisances, not culture-war axe grinding from people who are cranky about whatever the hippies are getting up to.
Your own standard has a baked-in value judgment about what is or is not permissible to do on the street in front of children. You say dressing in drag in front of children is not a nuisance, but who are you to decide what is or is not a nuisance in front of children? If I am raising my children to believe that cross-dressing is wrong, it becomes a nuisance to me.
And if the response is that you aren’t deciding and the public square should just be strictly value neutral, some one or some side will still have to give. Which is why when you pass laws legalizing drugs in their own homes people don’t stop there, they view it as society endorsing the use of drugs anywhere.
It’s never really so neat as do whatever as long as it doesn’t harm others and keep it in the privacy of your own home. The public square can never be value neutral—even an absence of a value judgment is itself a value judgment. Some one has to decide what’s constitutes harm or a nuisance, where the privacy of one’s home becomes a street.
Libertarian logic may be airtight in its reasoning but as applied in real life I doubt it can pan out over the long haul as it starts from a false premise as to how most people organize and live their lives. This is the point Rob Henderson was making and he is right to call out the risks associated with organizing society around those principles.
This is why the qualifier "material" is so important. There exist more and less objective harms, and your example is a good one for illustrating the least objective sort. The notion that it constitutes a "nuisance" merely to see people peaceably, quietly behaving in a way you think is morally wrong is absurd, and that logic leads to totalitarianism by the most offense-prone. If you are offended by the sight of someone merely *dressing* in a way that doesn't conform to your traditionalist gender ideas, that's 100% your problem in any sort of free society at all.
And once again, "this is fine to do in private settings but not out in the street" is a stable equilibrium we *know* can work, because it's worked for generations in the case of alcohol. The contention that legalizing something in private necessarily normalizes all sorts of public behavior around it is just experientially false.
Again, thank you for proving my point that to accommodate a neutral public square some people have to exit stage left for their “absurd” views.
Extrapolating from alcohol to fentanyl or heroine seems like quite the leap to claim a win with certainty, and if you really think it’s experimentally false, that is of course your experience, but, but it’s not remotely the typical one. Jack Phillips may beg to differ, and we can all pretend that cancel culture doesn’t exist when we fail to publicly validate others’ life choices.
Haven't you already started making notes for it: all the posts that have appended at the end, "This essay is part of a series on human interdependence."?
Back on December 9, 2022, you wrote: "I want to assemble a bunch of concepts that I think contribute important insights to the topic of human interdependence. ... Each concept deserves its own essay, which I will get to. But the project also requires an overall guide or table of contents, which is this essay. I will constantly be adding to and re-editing this essay."
Is there a term for the logical error one makes by saying that, if you are against laws for or against a subject, you must be against or for that subject (respectively)?
"then-president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who was promoting anti-Americanism and antisemitism through his research think tank"
I don't know this man but alarm bells go off in my head when someone is charged with a negative "ism" with little or no explanation. I know people are called anti-trans for nothing more than opposing puberty blockers or surgery on minors for this purpose. People are often called racist or sexist for similarly weak reason.
>>On the one hand, people should not have to adhere to norms if what you mean by “have to” is that policemen with guns make you adhere to norms. On the other hand, a lot of norms are good. I would like to see more people adhering to good norms.
Agree, but I'd take it a bit further. I don't like to see people punished for violating norms, whether that punishment takes the form of cops or social ostracism.
To me this is the lesson of the "cancel culture" era. Social punishment can be as repressive as government punishment.
I think that violating meaningful social norms is its own punishment - the state doesn't need to put you in jail if you're dishonest, unreliable, etc., you create your own jail.
The issue is how much the state bails people out of the consequences of their actions, and subsidizes the flourishing of bad values in doing so. The idea that the state should guarantee happiness rather than the pursuit of happiness is at the root of so much bad policy.
I am in accord with your view of libertarianism. I would also add that legal prohibition of alcohol and drugs has clearly not worked well and had a lot of very bad side-effects.
Belmont denizens (a) use this luxury belief to excuse self-defeating libertine behaviors in Fishtown, but (b) regiment life within Belmont to minimize and ostracize those behaviors.
The luxury belief is for others who can't afford the luxury.
The fact that Bermuda is number five ($899,593,972) in the list of countries doing undocumented funding seems to imply that even if US authorities decide to restrict this undocumented funding, or foreign funding in general, there will always be a way to circumvent those restrictions if the funders get financially creative enough.
Relatively easy exit was the genius of the U. S. federal system. People could leave town if the local government or social environment abused them. People didn’t need to cross an ocean or an international border. That is no longer the case. We have centralized domestic policy more than is good for us. People can still exit places like California or Portland, and they increasingly do.
They can’t get away from the small town social environment.
I think this is an underappreciated point, not just in favor of federalism but in understanding why national level laws became so popular in the early 20th century. Moving state and local level decisions to the national level was a method of control, of not letting people exit bad local government or allowing obvious examples of better run regions to make the bad governments look it.
It was also an effort by national companies to get a uniform legal environment. I think it backfired.
Here is the comment I posted on Rob's Substack:
You are confusing personal preference and morality with government policy positions. My stance comes from the view that competent adults should have the freedom to make their own decisions, even if others disapprove, as long as they don't infringe on the rights of others. I see drug use, gambling, and prostitution as victimless crimes that should be matters of personal liberty and should be legal..
While I refrain from these activities and would advocate that others avoid them, my personal preferences or moral views should not determine legality. The government oversteps its legitimate bounds when it regulates behaviors that don't violate the rights of others.
In the economic realm, I have similar views favoring personal freedom. Individuals should have the right to decide how to spend their money and manage their financial affairs free of government interference or overregulation. This fiscal freedom aligns with my socially liberal views on personal liberty.
In summary, while my personal choices are socially conservative, my policy views are both socially liberal (on personal freedoms) and fiscally conservative (on economic freedoms). I arrived at this position through my overarching belief in libertarian principles of limited government and maximal personal autonomy.
I know nothing of the criminal or other backstory but am thinking of a situation where a woman, a drug addict who had managed to hang onto custody of a “tween” age child, despite periods of homelessness, became pregnant with twins. And then, relieved of them, pregnant again.
Two separate budgetary streams were launched for the fostering *and* daycare of these babies, or three if you count the mother becoming essentially the “fourth child” as the state housed her and rehabbed her in an absurd hope she could be made fit to parent. A hope that was obviously good for lawyers and social service workers.
Not sure who’s paying for the care of the older child.
The babies’ developmental delays at least some of which are attributed to drugs and alcohol, are also already billable and obviously will grow with time and school.
I always wonder what about this libertarians find victimless, even if only a fantasy that it’s just the taxpayer who’s the victim.
Or maybe this is all money well-spent in a complacent, pot smoke befogged view?
Or: the crime is just negligent parenting, full stop?
P.S. Is that Flynn effect still going strong?
The idea of luxury beliefs is a luxury belief. I thought it was an interesting idea at first pass but I think it's destined for the "snarl word" bin, a fancy sounding way to say "your ideas aren't legitimate and you probably don't even believe them" without engaging in the content of the ideas.
I have a suspicion that "luxury belief" will be used exclusively to mean "things I don't like but don't want to explain why" in the near future.
My children will often engage in behaviors that they can do without harm nine times in a row, but that will reliably cause harm about every tenth time. Say, jumping down several flights of stairs at once. Or flopping down right next to the baby with enough force that if they were off a little bit would land on the baby. Etc.
In libertarian world they haven't violated the non-aggression principle until the negative effect actually occurs. And yet, I can predict with certainty that when these behaviors are engaged in at scale it's pretty much inevitable its going to happen. Rather than ascribe 0% guilt to each instance and 100% guilt when something bad comes of it, I assign X% guilt to every single instance and disallow and punish the behaviors regardless of the results of the individual instance.
With something like drugs I think it's irrelevant what the outcomes are for a specific use or for a specific person. Addiction is a predictable statistical phenomenon when practiced at scale. If the risks and costs of addiction at the societal level fail a cost/benefit analysis, it matters not if there are people who can or could indulge without becoming addicted or if a particular indulgence didn't cause immediate negative effects.
Like pit bull laws that require a history of aggression...
I had this argument with a more doctrinaire libertarian friend of mine, who argued that there is no level of "increasing the risk of harm to others" that could be morally punished by the state. The silliest hypothetical I came up with was "what if a guy is in a park with a big sack full of kitchen knives, and just starts throwing them as high in the air as he can, one after another in a crowded public park?" According to their logic, until a knife hits someone, that person did nothing wrong.
I think there should be some culpability for creating conditions where it's very likely that other people will be harmed, but it's a challenging line to draw without getting involved in "pre-crime."
Not a libertarian but putting others at significant risk is normally seen as violating non aggression even if the risk doesn't manifest in harm.
Then why the squeamishness about drugs? They predictably cause harm to many people with statistical certainty.
One can debate cost of enforcement vs harm reduction, but I sense the libertarian objection goes far beyond such utilitarian calculations and would insist on freedom even where net harm was statistically certain.
The risk of harm has to be fairly direct in order to count? So like if I force you to play Russian roulette I aggress against you but not against your family even though your death would harm them in a broader sense of harm.
As Bob suggests, there's a Coasian problem here. Legalizing drugs will predictably cause harm to many people. But so will making them illegal. When enough people want the product, illegal suppliers will emerge, with violence and corruption following. And many sellers will sell adulterated product, e.g. heroin plus fentanyl instead of pure heroin. Alcohol prohibition between 1920 and 1933 reduced some real problems. The number of people who drank away the rent money or got drunk and beat their wives went down. But it was eventually decided that the negative side effects were worse and prohibition was repealed.
Unfortunately, we do not have anywhere near exact numbers for the positive and negative effects of various drug legalization and prohibition policies. Libertarians tend to convince themselves that the costs of prohibition are high and the costs of legalization low.
"Libertarians tend to convince themselves that the costs of prohibition are high and the costs of legalization low."
Indeed, I think they take a motivated view of the evidence that is not objective.
I think the biggest blind spot of libertarians is their based assumption that there is a set amount of "demand" for various vice products and thus its inevitable that suppliers will arise to meet this demand.
My own view of the vice industry is that there is a great deal of "supply creates its own demand." Drug dealers are always looking for ways to create new addicts. The gambling industry pays a lot of money to find ways to hack peoples evolutionary programming. Etc. Supply creates its own demand, which libertarians tend to ignore.
In those cases where demand is deeply ingrained and the costs of eliminating it are high then perhaps legalization makes sense. But in cases where there is no present demand and legalization would create new demand its best not to let the devil in the door.
Prohibition of drugs has also caused great harm. So now what?
Take it on a case by case basis and use common sense and evidence based reasoning.
Enforcement is not cost free. It has undesirable side effects. It may be better to have strong social norms against abuse. Save legal prohibitions for specific things like driving under the influence. Employers should have the right to prohibit working under the influence.
I mean the debate over whether to use legal force or social opprobrium in relation to particular behaviors is quite old. It varies by drug and societal context and mixes with certain behaviors (you note drunk driving).
If someone said that using meth at all was at least as dangerous as drunk driving (keep in mind that you don't have to be totally sloshed to fail a Breathalyzer) could they not make the case it should be illegal.
> or
Is there precedent for successful use of legal force against an activity to which no significant social opprobrium (i.e. beyond a general "violating law is bad") attaches?
1) Social Opprobrium Alone
2) Social Opprobrium and Legal Enforcement
3) Legal Enforcement without Social Opprobrium
4) Nothing
I think you're implying that it's a matter of #2 or #3. #3 is indeed unstable, usually it can only be enforced with strong elite preference or as a kind of temporary state where things were once more like #2.
I was thinking more like #1 or #2. If you accept that a behavior is indeed bad and worth getting rid of then you are debating between those two.
If you don't think a behavior is bad and worth getting rid of then you see the debate between #3 and #4. I.E. between freedom to do the not bad thing versus arbitrary legal crackdown on a thing that shouldn't be illegal.
The dissonance is over feeling the thing is not bad while also seeing that it causes a lot of bad.
Lastly, I know social opprobrium can work because I watched elites achieve this with smoking in my lifetime. They could do the same with pot or whatever if they cared enough.
I agree with your perspective - norms are vital, but the government shouldn't necessarily enforce them. But I'd go further. Part of the reason I don't want government enforcement of social norms is that I don't want the government determining what those norms should be.
It would be unwise to assume that government norm enforcement would straightforwardly promote "good norms" - i.e. traditional responsibility and continence. Just as likely it would promote radical wokism. Realistically it would probably be all over the shop, an incoherent mess. Public Choice teaches us to look sceptically at the notion of an omniscient, omnibenevolent government when it comes to correcting economic market failures. We should exercise the same scepticism regarding norm enforcement.
There is a massive difference between norms that sound good, and norms that work. The former are more likely to emerge from a political process leading to a central mandate. The latter are more likely to emerge from a decentralised learning process with informal enforcement.
"Inevitably hurt themselves" is doing a lot of work in Henderson's thinking. Fairly often people find new ways to thrive without following old norms-- as an extreme example, we no longer have the norm "obey your feudal lord" and that's a very good thing. The genius of a regime of liberty is that it lets people try to do this as they please, and take the consequences whether they turn out to be right or wrong. That's how we learn and grow as a culture, and coercive norm enforcement shuts down the learning process. In general liberty as a discovery process is still underrated, despite all the work Hayek, McCloskey etc have done to explain it.
My prior on the Weiss and Lukianoff/Schlott pieces is to be skeptical, because in the real world it is rare that either "follow the money" conspiratorialism or blaming the baleful influence of a single thinker are good ways to explain large scale social phenomena. The world is more complicated than that.
I'll add too, though it may be banging the same drum a bit much, that the dichotomy between prohibition and unrestricted license is a false one. Risk to bystanders from experimenting with norm violations is a legitimate concern: the time-tested, generally-applicable, minimally-invasive mitigation strategy for that risk is time, place, and manner regulation, not prohibition. There is already, as there should be, a big difference between what is legal to do in the privacy of your own home and what is legal to do out in the middle of the street in broad daylight in front of children; and arguably the path to practical libertarianism is to make that difference even bigger.
“a big difference between what is legal to do in the privacy of your own home and what is legal to do out in the middle of the street in broad daylight in front of children”
It’s illegal to shoot up fentanyl in front of my kids when I’m walking down the street in Portland, OR, or for grown adults to be going out in drag when I walk around San Francisco, CA with my kids?
Much to the contrary, your private home may look a lot like the streets I walk down.
You're conflating two very different things. Being under the influence of fentanyl in public is in fact already illegal, and reasonably so due to the material nuisance it creates for other users of the public square-- just as staggering drunkenly down the street swigging from a vodka bottle is illegal ("drunk and disorderly") even though alcohol is legal. Dressing in drag in public is not illegal, nor should it ever be, because it creates no such nuisance.
I live in SF myself, and I can assure you that what makes the public square worse for people here is the homelessness and the open-air drug markets, not the drag festivals. And what we need is more housing and better enforcement of existing laws against material public nuisances, not culture-war axe grinding from people who are cranky about whatever the hippies are getting up to.
Not at all—you’re missing the point I am making.
Your own standard has a baked-in value judgment about what is or is not permissible to do on the street in front of children. You say dressing in drag in front of children is not a nuisance, but who are you to decide what is or is not a nuisance in front of children? If I am raising my children to believe that cross-dressing is wrong, it becomes a nuisance to me.
And if the response is that you aren’t deciding and the public square should just be strictly value neutral, some one or some side will still have to give. Which is why when you pass laws legalizing drugs in their own homes people don’t stop there, they view it as society endorsing the use of drugs anywhere.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/oregon-decriminalized-hard-drugs-it-isnt-working-78ee7476
It’s never really so neat as do whatever as long as it doesn’t harm others and keep it in the privacy of your own home. The public square can never be value neutral—even an absence of a value judgment is itself a value judgment. Some one has to decide what’s constitutes harm or a nuisance, where the privacy of one’s home becomes a street.
Libertarian logic may be airtight in its reasoning but as applied in real life I doubt it can pan out over the long haul as it starts from a false premise as to how most people organize and live their lives. This is the point Rob Henderson was making and he is right to call out the risks associated with organizing society around those principles.
This is why the qualifier "material" is so important. There exist more and less objective harms, and your example is a good one for illustrating the least objective sort. The notion that it constitutes a "nuisance" merely to see people peaceably, quietly behaving in a way you think is morally wrong is absurd, and that logic leads to totalitarianism by the most offense-prone. If you are offended by the sight of someone merely *dressing* in a way that doesn't conform to your traditionalist gender ideas, that's 100% your problem in any sort of free society at all.
And once again, "this is fine to do in private settings but not out in the street" is a stable equilibrium we *know* can work, because it's worked for generations in the case of alcohol. The contention that legalizing something in private necessarily normalizes all sorts of public behavior around it is just experientially false.
Again, thank you for proving my point that to accommodate a neutral public square some people have to exit stage left for their “absurd” views.
Extrapolating from alcohol to fentanyl or heroine seems like quite the leap to claim a win with certainty, and if you really think it’s experimentally false, that is of course your experience, but, but it’s not remotely the typical one. Jack Phillips may beg to differ, and we can all pretend that cancel culture doesn’t exist when we fail to publicly validate others’ life choices.
Arnold, yes you should write the "tiny textbook" on human interdependence. Why not start on it now?
Haven't you already started making notes for it: all the posts that have appended at the end, "This essay is part of a series on human interdependence."?
Back on December 9, 2022, you wrote: "I want to assemble a bunch of concepts that I think contribute important insights to the topic of human interdependence. ... Each concept deserves its own essay, which I will get to. But the project also requires an overall guide or table of contents, which is this essay. I will constantly be adding to and re-editing this essay."
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-main-routine
Is there a term for the logical error one makes by saying that, if you are against laws for or against a subject, you must be against or for that subject (respectively)?
"then-president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who was promoting anti-Americanism and antisemitism through his research think tank"
I don't know this man but alarm bells go off in my head when someone is charged with a negative "ism" with little or no explanation. I know people are called anti-trans for nothing more than opposing puberty blockers or surgery on minors for this purpose. People are often called racist or sexist for similarly weak reason.
>>On the one hand, people should not have to adhere to norms if what you mean by “have to” is that policemen with guns make you adhere to norms. On the other hand, a lot of norms are good. I would like to see more people adhering to good norms.
Agree, but I'd take it a bit further. I don't like to see people punished for violating norms, whether that punishment takes the form of cops or social ostracism.
To me this is the lesson of the "cancel culture" era. Social punishment can be as repressive as government punishment.
There’s a valuable role for extreme social enforcement. Some bad actors should be shunned, even though they have not broken the law.
We no longer have a remedy when that’s abused. People can no longer leave town when things get bad enough.
I think that violating meaningful social norms is its own punishment - the state doesn't need to put you in jail if you're dishonest, unreliable, etc., you create your own jail.
The issue is how much the state bails people out of the consequences of their actions, and subsidizes the flourishing of bad values in doing so. The idea that the state should guarantee happiness rather than the pursuit of happiness is at the root of so much bad policy.
I am in accord with your view of libertarianism. I would also add that legal prohibition of alcohol and drugs has clearly not worked well and had a lot of very bad side-effects.
Re: "'It’s a luxury belief.'"
Belmont denizens (a) use this luxury belief to excuse self-defeating libertine behaviors in Fishtown, but (b) regiment life within Belmont to minimize and ostracize those behaviors.
The luxury belief is for others who can't afford the luxury.
The fact that Bermuda is number five ($899,593,972) in the list of countries doing undocumented funding seems to imply that even if US authorities decide to restrict this undocumented funding, or foreign funding in general, there will always be a way to circumvent those restrictions if the funders get financially creative enough.