Rob Henderson reams out libertarians; Kulak reports from two festivals, and praises libertarians; Yuval Levin on 21st-century political troubles; David Roman vs. Joseph Henrich
I thought a similar thing about Henderson's essay--there's a difference between what I think the government should police and what I would encourage my kids to pursue for what I think would be a good life*. That essay has an underlying assumption that I want government to "help people" and that we think it would be effective at it. Mostly I want enough to stop physical violence, but then for it not to be in the way.
*I've been very persuaded by this Substack and also observing my parents and in-laws that having grandkids to enjoy is the end goal, so I keep telling people that each of our 3 kids is an investment in having a grandkid some day, even if that's 25 years from now!
It'd probably be best try and reframe the discussion away from "helping people" at all. Encourage, but don't coerce people into making decisions that are shown to be good and sustainable for both the individual and society. Sounds easy, probably isn't.
Problem 1: If A buys a gold-mining stock, B buys shares that track the price of gold, C buys gold bars held in a vault for him, D buys and takes possession of a gold bar, E buys gold jewelry, and F buys fake gold jewelry, who consumed and who invested?
Problem 2: Pretty much any consumption tax favors investment. Investment favors the rich. It's difficult for a consumption tax not to increase the wealth divide. Maybe not impossible to address but surely a problem where failure is more likely than not.
I'll take A-D. This is an issue at the stage of what counts as "non-consumption" deduction on the "income" tax form.
These are not even the most difficult cases. A gets a PhD in quantum computing from Cal Tech B gets a PhD in Kinetic Dance from know party school, South Podunk U C uses all her savings for a life saving medical treatment. D uses he savings for the same treatment but dies anyway. Who consumed?
As for increasing wealth disparities, that would depend on what amount of a bequest is considered "consumption"
But I'll take these issues compared to similar ones about what it "income."
From some conversation I had on Notes with David Roman, he has no problem with Joseph Henrich’s empirical data, but he sees that Henrich’s historical explanation is nonsense.
From Wikipedia, the idea that “early Christian marriage rules forced a marked change from earlier norms” was proposed in 1983 by Jack Goody, but in 1984 “Brent Shaw and Richard Saller counter in their more comprehensive treatment that cousin marriages were never habitual or preferred in the western empire.” See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage
Here is what I see: Henrich had some great data that shows a strong effect of Christianity on Western culture and psychology. In order to maintain high academic status and sell books to his center-left academic audience he needed to give an explanation that doesn’t make him seem like a Christian apologist (e.g. he can’t cite Jesus’s revolutionary Sermon on the Mount or Christian core belief). So he chose to point to the pope’s marriage bans, which he could describe as a historical accident. Nevermind that it is the much weaker position of an existing debate, which he doesn’t mention.
Tom Holland and Larry Siedentop give much more believable explanations for the Christian origins of Western exceptionalism. They both go back to Paul, popularized ideas from Jesus and the early apostles.
"Libertarian: People should be free to choose, reaping the rewards from, and paying the consequences for, their choices."
That's not a political program, though. I've never had the chance to vote for it nor seen it enunciated by anyone in political life. The radical drug enthusiasts never propose that the addicts be left on the curb to die without intervention, or that their kids not be taken up by the state and placed in the nests of others in the manner of cowbirds. They never propose that we close the jails and reduce the police force and go back to having a night watchman, leaving precincts that have pathologized themselves via their own choices, to live with those choices without forcing the rest of us to endure an ever-increasing criminal justice system and its financial burdens and necessary duplicity and gaslighting - and its oppressive coercive presence (thanks, libertarians!).
Indeed, I saw entertained in a city I once lived in, a notion that we might make it mandatory for all citizens to carry Narcan ... I heard no pushback on this. I don't look for it to happen and yet it would not actually surprise me if this became a thing.
Consequences indeed. Ultimately if your ideas lead to consequences that are too unpalatable to you to think through out loud - then you're really only left with - yes, a vibe. To be as fair as possible, I will concede that it is more than a vibe, though - it's a spirit and a welcome one. But it's not a philosophy.
Even AK stated his libertarianism in terms of a wish of how things might be, leaving out the hard part. And hard parts are the only parts that matter, when we talk about reality.
I'm not in favor of doing away with laws or law enforcement. Going to prison is a consequence of hurting others. Putting violent criminals back out on the streets is a progressive policy, not a libertarian one.
Nor am I proposing that we let people die because they made bad choices. I do oppose, however, forcing people to, through their taxes, bear the consequences of those bad choices. I believe that voluntary charities are not only far more moral, but also more efficient and effective at helping people than are government welfare programs. The former deal with individuals and individual problems. The latter tend to deal with categories. In the end, government welfare is less likely to help get people out of poverty or to overcome their addictions than to make them more comfortable in and with their poverty and their addictions.
Years ago, for example, a city (in California, of course) paid to upgrade the wheels on the shopping carts that homeless people had stolen. They replaced the hard rubber wheels with larger, softer ones so that the carts would be less noisy and easier to push.
I'm certainly not in favor of doing away with law enforcement, nor would ever have thought of it! - though I could do with less. Remember Andy of Mayberry? Or any old Western movie? That was not a huge exaggeration of how law enforcement looked in little towns.
Now the LEO operations in many towns and especially the counties look like tactical outfits. Why shouldn't they? They rake in the dough stopping drug shipments on the interstate. They decorate their SUVs with skulls. They can seem like - the "good" gang. Or the best gang we're going to get, since we apparently have to have gangs. (What would we watch on TV without our giant criminal underclass, a group we so love that we actively import more from other countries?)
In Austin, a town supposedly so laid-back that Willie Nelson is its patron saint, albeit living at a slight remove and never having shown much interest in it - police shooting somebody usually fatally has become almost a weekly occurrence.
Now, I'm not gonna lie and pretend an empathy that I can't summon at will - I read about those incidents and I assume the world is a better place with those people out of it.
But howevermuch I may lack empathy, I definitely don't assume that a world where the police have to shoot people all the time is a better world than a counterfactual not brought to us by the left and the "libertarian" working in concert.
• Stop adding fad courses to the K-12 curricula that leave less time for students to learn the basics.
• Stop teaching children that they are either oppressors or oppressed by virtue of their skin color.
• Stop teaching minority children that the deck is stacked against them and that they have no hope of bettering their lives or those of their loved ones through their own efforts.
Employment
• Eliminate minimum wage laws, which make it difficult for the least employable (that is, the least educated, least skilled, least experienced, least physically and mentally able, and most discriminated against) to find jobs.
• Reduce job licensing restrictions.
• Reduce business startup regulations.
Welfare Programs
• Stop paying people to be unemployed.
• Stop paying women to have children out of wedlock.
• Stop penalizing welfare recipients who get a job.
• Stop penalizing welfare recipients who are married or who get married.
Housing
• Stop imposing rent controls, which create shortages of low-cost housing.
• End or reduce zoning restrictions, which also create shortages of low-cost housing.
• End housing policies that encourage people to take out mortgages they can’t afford.
Economy
• End the Fed’s loose monetary policies.
• Reduce regulation.
• Reduce (or, better, eliminate) the capital gains tax.
• Reduce tariffs. Eliminate tariffs on goods from allied nations.
• End public unions.
• Eliminate farm subsidies.
• Eliminate corporate subsidies.
• Stop bailing out financial institutions and thereby creating moral hazard and w with it increased financial risk.
• Stop increasing investment risk with complex laws and regulations whose meaning can be determined only after the fact in a courtroom.
Law Enforcement
• End civil asset forfeiture, which encourages cities to use their police forces as revenue collectors and are especially hard on the poor who cannot afford to hire the legal talent needed to recover their property.
• Stop letting police unions prevent bad police officers from being fired.
• Limit qualified immunity.
Healthcare
• Require all healthcare providers to post their prices.
• Eliminate “certificates of need” that allow entrenched healthcare providers to decide whether they’re willing to compete with newcomers.
• Reform IP laws to prevent drug companies from gaming the system by making irrelevant changes to their drugs’ molecules, recommended dosages, and delivery systems.
• End the AMA's ability to limit the number of medical schools and new doctors.
I love that you can make a list like that. I could never keep track of all that. I wish you would run for office; though we differ so fundamentally, I would like voting for someone who brings specific proposals, rather than more ideology.
About half past six AM the other morning, my husband than whom there is no one less threatening, in his energy-efficient Japanese car [that has proven to be a liability in certain rural jurisdictions where they exercise some discretion about who to hit up to pay their salaries, you or the pickup truck] with its untinted windows and its cheerful single bumper sticker (that I put there, he is so conservative he dislikes even bumper stickers ;-) was puttering along as he drove out of town when a county cop (although he was in the city, this city of 2 million) came screaming behind him in that way they have of at first making you think they want *you* to get out of *their* way (this happens sometimes to those of us who go the speed limit or less). So he pulled over out of their way, but it was he that they were stopping. Did you know that you just went through a school zone? That it's 25 and you were going 32? His puzzlement partially stemmed from his having gone past a school more than a mile back, so he was confused about why it took them so long to catch up to him.
But anyway, he was yes-sir-ing the man at his window, handing over his license and waiting for his ticket, in no wise desirous of disputing his guilt in his distracted morning hurry to get out of town ahead of the traffic* --
-- when he noticed that this routine traffic stop had required not one but two cops, the other of whom was standing a few feet from his other side window with his hand on his gun.
I believe he had just enough libertarian spirit to remark this to the cop who was writing his ticket, along the lines of - your buddy over there seems about to pull on me, no need. Or maybe this was imaginary dialogue of the sort you say later to your wife.
Either way, it was over the top, of course. And yet in the course of daily duty for cops these days - and it may not be attracting the very best - this might be a very rational thing to do. I mean, has there ever been a worse time to be a cop? Being pro-cop nowadays is metaphorically kind of like being pro-sending them to Vietnam, forever.**
*Ahead of any children being anywhere near the school at that hour, but as you can imagine his wife came down on him when like a ton of bricks when he mentioned that to her - you know you are *not* supposed to have thoughts about who is or isn't there, you're supposed to obey the sign without thinking, that's the way it works! Which he should know - we lived across from an elementary school for more than 20 years, and he never once got a ticket. He's vowed not to take that street anymore with its three different school zones at quick intervals.
**And I don't blame them for catching the 7mph over speeders, instead of going after the guys who do 90 on the freeway playing their games. Nobody goes after them unless they break 100 and somebody calls it in. It would be hard to catch those guys; maybe that's why there are no police on the freeway anymore unless they are taking it to get to a call. It is like much else, it is easier to enforce the law among the law-abiding. It can sometimes make you wonder, though, what the point of it all is, that there should seem to be less enforcement overall, while policing and fire/EMS (involved often in the same sorts of things) take up the greatest part of local budgets.
Neoliberal: People should be free to choose, reaping the rewards from, and paying the consequences for, their choices when choosing among alternatives that do not involve negative externalities because in that case they are reaping more of the reward and paying less of the consequences of those choices and since some of the rewards/consequences of choices reflect luck and are known to do so, it makes sense to transfer some of the rewards from the lucky to the unlucky.
The neoliberal protest march sign:
“We demand more mutually beneficial transactions between consenting adults (many of whom will have recently migrated to the US) in goods and services produced and consumed with no un-Pigou taxed/subsidized (or regulatory equivalents) negative/positive externalities with some of the benefits of these transactions subject to progressive consumption taxes for redistribution to (otherwise) low consumption people.”
Rob Henderson's essay, "You Can't Be Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative," has a paywall, but his theory is well known.
Well, it is reasonable to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
Social liberalism is reasonable because prohibition backfires. Any reduction in prevalence of self-defeating behaviors via prohibition usually is outweighed by increases in organized crime, corruption, and distortions of law enforcement.
As Arnold notes, freedom entails responsibility. A wise culture will abhor vice and encourage work, family, and civic community.
Rob Henderson gets it wrong, I think, when he writes that social liberals believe that "people should not adhere to strong social norms." My intuitions:
(a) Most social liberals believe that people should adhere to healthy norms.
(b) However, the "progressives" among social liberals are too quick, not to endorse, but *to excuse* norm violations by "the oppressed". Specifically, progressives tend to believe that disadvantage makes it too hard to choose responsibly. Progressives tend to have causal models of behavior of the oppressed.
Fiscal conservatism is a political antidote to myopia and impulsiveness; i.e., to the psychology of irresponsibility and vice.
Rob Henderson gets it wrong when he writes that fiscal conservatives believe that "there should be no safety net available." On the contrary, fiscal conservatives have a range of views about social safety nets. Many tend to believe that a sound social safety net should be circumscribed by acute need (and perhaps also by desert), and should incorporate healthy incentives towards responsibility where feasible. Some (like Arnold) advocate a modest, well-designed Universal Basic Income.
What all stripes of fiscal conservatives have in common are (a) wise recognition that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and (b) a norm against kicking the can down the road to the grandchildren.
"Social liberalism is reasonable because prohibition backfires. Any reduction in prevalence of self-defeating behaviors via prohibition usually is outweighed by increases in organized crime, corruption, and distortions of law enforcement."
This is an empirical question and its not clear the empirics are on the side of your claim in all instances.
Our own society prohibits many things without the kind of side effects you list. And other societies prohibit many hot button issues without side effects (Singapore has harsh drug laws and no drug gangs).
"My intuition is that most social liberals believe that people should adhere to healthy norms"
I don't know if I agree. For instance, could you produce a list of "healthy norms" that all social liberals would agree on, and that they would be willing to publicly agree on and "judge" people that didn't follow them?
"Many tend to believe that a sound social safety net should be circumscribed by acute need (and perhaps also by desert), and should incorporate healthy incentives towards responsibility where feasible. Some (like Arnold) advocate a modest, well-designed Universal Basic Income."
These are at cross purposes. Need based programs address acute need but have bad incentives. UBIs don't address acute need but have better incentives.
Whatever welfare system one comes up with, the tradeoffs are always going to be more harsh when there are a lot of dysfunctional people versus fewer dysfunctional people, so its in the states interest to have fewer dysfunctional people, even if that limits drug use or gambling or whatever.
Right on prohibition. I am not an advocate of the war on drugs and I'm ambivalent about the fact that most western governments don't actually take it very seriously in practice.
But I'll admit that it could be successfully fought and 'won' if tried, that is, that in 2024 there is no longer any constraint based in technical feasibility that would prevent any government which wants to from effectively reducing the manufacture, sale, distribution, or use of pretty much anything to any arbitrary level depending how much they want to spend on the effort in terms of resources and privacy violation, especially if that thing is tangible in nature.
Just because making something illegal creates a black market in that thing doesn't mean the black market is big enough or the side-effect harms larger the the harms prevented to declare some kind of "natural law of inevitable backfire".
Calling for a list of "healthy" norms obviously prejudges the issue, but liberals definitely have a list of social norms they expect people to follow and are extremely judgmental about violations of.
Thomas Sowell reminds us that there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Re: Singapore. It is a city-state. Singapore's policies are not feasible in the USA.
I don't assert that the empirics are against prohibitions in all instances. Rather, it seems that the empirics indicate that prohibitions usually backfire.
Some healthy norms that most social liberals would endorse:
Practice fidelity. Say no to hard drugs. Don't get intoxicated in public. Think ahead. Follow the "sequence of success." Try and stand on your own two feet. Do your part for others. Practice gratitude. Healthy mind in healthy body. Live and let live. Good fences make good neighbors. Money has its places, but be mindful of where money is out of place.
Yes, there is a public interest to have fewer dysfunctional people. Well said. But do prohibitions in large, modern societies reduce dysfunction?
Note that "the states" cultivate a revenue interest in gambling. I recall a state lottery ad: "You've got to be in it to win it." This sort of policy is upside down.
My intuition is that one way to reduce dysfunction would to be to break up or disrupt the "one size fits all" model of schooling. Let a hundred flowers bloom in paths to equip youths for the labor market when they are teens.
"Note that "the states" cultivate a revenue interest in gambling."
Nowhere was the schizophrenia more evident to me than, the other day on the interstate, Mississippi or Louisiana, can't remember - I passed a many-storied hotel/casino with an enormous picture of Gordon Ramsey hanging down the side of the building, to advertise some restaurant within - and - since the PSA is compulsory on all such signage - a warning about gambling addiction and a hotline number to call that was itself like 10 feet high, so that I actually thought for a second that the PSA was the point of the thing.
That can be pretty vague. If it means marital fidelity then liberals don't have a stance as such. Chastity obviously isn't a liberal virtue. Not cheating on a spouse? Liberals always had a tongue in cheek relationship with mistresses, and nowadays they are open about things like polyamory, etc. Divorce? Liberals are pretty big into easy divorce, and the divorce rate is very high.
"Say no to hard drugs."
What's a hard drug? If it's always wrong to do hard drugs, why even make them legal?
"Success sequence:
Finish high school.
Get a full-time job once you finish school.
Get married before you have children."
Why do you think people fail to follow the success sequence?
Data wise, the answers seem to be:
1) They had a substance abuse problem
2) They had sex before marriage
But liberals don't object to pre-marital sex at all, and if you've got easily available drugs it seems like a decent number of people will become abusers.
I think a guy like Charles Murray is illustrative here. He's one of those more "hard-nosed" liberals. But the only people Charles Murray is willing to criticize are deadbeat dads. When asked if we should criticize single moms for not following the success sequence, he recoils! Can't be "judgmental".
I dunno we already criticize and punish low status men that fail at live and it hasn't stopped the dysfunction. There is no positive vision being offered or guidelines that keep people on the straight and narrow.
Ffs, how are intelligent and observant people still falling into this trap?! Say something racist, or criticize single moms or women generally qua women directly for that matter, or misgender someone like McCloskey, in the presence of liberals, and discover how truly socially nonjudgmental liberals are. Admitting that you don't care about your children's education because null hypothesis will probably tank your social stock too, now that I think of it.
They are nonjudgmental about the kind of pro-social and pro-flourishing norms that Rob Henderson thinks would have made the lives of him and the people around him growing up a lot better.
On luxury believes he certainly is aware of how judgmental liberals are.
Fair enough, but not specifying that and leaving it at plain "liberals are nonjudgmental" leads to other people falling into this trap. I observed enough of this phenomenon on Twitter to feel the urge to point out the omission every time I see it. People who do in fact know better (evidence being that they immediately acknowledge the error once it is pointed out to them) will say (and presumably think) things like "liberals/goodthinkers are scared of judging people" or "contemporary hamartiology ascribes evil to systems and abstractions and in doing so removes man as a moral actor" (i.e. does not judge people as individual moral actors).
I think it was you who put this well the other day: quantity has a quality all its own.
I have read AK on UBI and while he is most persuasive on the tax aspect, I see this as a symbolic thing that can get away from you, not unlike abortion.
It will codify the idea that working should not be rewarded (yes, I know that AK thinks it will actually make working more rational).
But while the latter positive outcome may or may not happen - it is certain that explicitly rewarding people for not working will flow all too neatly into the left's favorite, maybe ultimate, inversion - that the productive people of the world are the bad people of the world, and vice-versa.
That idea is in my view legitimately threatening to the material prosperity that has enabled the, er, production of all the people who supposedly require such a thing, and the ability of others to entertain giving it to them.
I realize it will be seen as uncool to say that. And I'm sorry to say it. I don't want to seem uncool. And I'm certainly not a person who holds herself out as among the productive, due to certain mental and temperamental defects - so in a way it's almost a painful admission.
"But I believe that you should make choices that put you onto the path of becoming a grandparent and a good example for your grandchildren."
I like the way you said this,a lot, and I have only met rationalists at one Boston meet up for like 20 minutes, but I wonder if the same people who are into that stuff are the same people who will make good libertarian parents.
Levin so utterly fails in his history in avoiding the dominating characteristic which Trump supporters see in Trump.
He fights.
Fights and fights and fights. Including with the kind of insults that Dems have long been using, but Romney & Tea Party Reps are too polite to engage in. Both seem oblivious to the fact that Trump’s policies are very much what Levin says, near the end, would be attractive (2028 advice):
stop illegal immigration, make legal easier for productive folks; T+
NOT free trade for all, it has hurt many , tho mostly free trade; T+
Reduce 3-H costs: healthcare, housing, higher ed. x-x-T+ with housing not a Pres. issue.
Lots of good stuff with too much oblivious Trump hate to be good. How much horse manure needs to be in a steak dinner before you pass on it?
luxury belief - I chuckled when I read this. It seemed quite the indictment, until I thought about it. I get that the term luxury belief is rather specific but what is it when you have freedom to do what you want and if you screw it up someone comes in and stops your fall? And what is it when you are protected from doing harm to yourself?
My desire is for a safety net to be there for people who can't do things for themselves, recognizing that who this is and what should be done for them is near impossible to determine in most cases. Maybe the "luxury belief" is thinking there needs to be a safety net for people who try and fail or don't even try.
In practice, the government does aggressively enforce sexual morality when you invite the courts or the Parenting Cops (AKA CPS) to supervise your family life, which many, many people find themselves doing. States have all kinds of sophisticated rubrics for judging how fit of a parent you are, and lawyers are adept at gussying up or tarnishing a parent's reputation.
Even the most socially liberal of states supervises bedroom behavior quite closely when it is invited to in hours-long hearings with parades of witnesses, subpoenaed device records, and all the rest of what you would expect from the panopticon.
So I think a question here is should the social laws guide the people in such a way that makes family breakdown less likely, or do we continue to have the situation in which the laws provide no guidance, but the laws work extensively to put guardrails on the family breakdown process? In the courts you see frequently see people of very limited intelligence mislead by various pied pipers that tell them to let their freak flag fly, and then they get mulched by some combination of their spouse, their children, and the courts.
"Roman’s essay is well worth reading. But he never takes on the empirical evidence that Henrich provides that proximity to Catholic outposts produced behavioral differences."
The church as the main enforcer of that taboo would seem to be supported by this evidence. But Roman still has a good point in that the Church does not seem to be the originator of the taboo.
I can't read Rob's article because of a paywall, but I'll offer two things.
1) The vast majority of (intellectual) libertarians don't just have some theory of government intervention, but preach personal non-judgementalism.
2) Rob's point is that self destructive behaviors inevitably have externalities, and so allowing self destructive behaviors can't possibly be libertarian since they affect others.
Let's take drug legalization, whether we are talking Meth in Portland or Weed in NYC. After a couple of years of this everyone seems to think "this is a fucking disaster". Shocker of shocker junkies harm themselves and those around them.
If I had to give up my ability to get high so that I could have Singapore level law and order (and taxes) I would certainly make that trade. Maybe that is un-libertarian of me, but I think freedom would increase on net.
P.S. I can't really respect the stance that abortion *should* be legal. I can accept the stance that given public opinion today there is no reasonable political path to outlawing it, and thus one should not expend political capital on the issue. But that would put it in the same category as slavery during the American revolution. It's wrong, but it's not the thing to be fighting over at this moment. I won't take the cope of claiming that it's not fundamentally wrong simply because I'm not willing to fight that fight at the moment.
Externality eats libertarianism. Well, it eats welfare economics based libertarianism. Every thing anybody does affects other people. So if your touchstone is "the greatest good for the greatest number", you have to take into account those effects. But that's hardly simple. There will be different effects on different people, or on different classes of people. Short-run effects and long-run effects may be different. The future is inherently uncertain and "unintended consequences" are not uncommon. Especially when it's not just a matter of people acting on their preferences but of people changing their preferences (e.g., whether to smoke cigarettes).
Yesterday's Marginal Revolution had a slug-fest along these lines in the comments on an article about marijuana legalization in New York City.
Abortion being something that has been quietly practiced probably forever, its existence could only not threaten the overall well-being of society if it was overlooked and not talked about. It's not the only thing like this, of course. And perhaps in a nation of hundreds of millions, that reticence was never going to work. But clearly, to have given "official" and institutional imprimatur to the concept "No life is better than life" has resulted in an uncomfortable status quo, possibly more jarring than people realize*; and one in which AK has to explain that his idea of the good life is one where grandchildren are a possibility.
And it's a shame because had the radicalism of abortion not been placed front and center and made the highest pursuit, pro or con, of our shared civic life, people I believe would have been more likely to continue on a path of pretty normal "planned" or at least curtailed parenthood. As they seemed to be doing. But feminists couldn't abide motherhood, so here we are. And GOP legislators eagerly enter in, wondering why we need this or that bird or lizard. Why do we need life? We're all going to live on Mars anyway. Who cares about Christmas Day bird counts? Only a few crazy - conservatives.
*As someone who is principally interested in conservation, and so when I use the word Life I am not primarily or at all picturing babies - I can tell you that the stealthy spread of this attitude is no small matter. I think even the pope may be wobbling. It is an unsettling thought, this shift - like learning that the earth's poles are about to flip.
In support of your argument, a family secrete disclosed by my late mother involved a close relative who had a (presumably illegal) abortion when her husband was away serving in WWII, ostensibly out of concern that he might not survive the war. If there was any difficulty involved in obtaining the abortion, or risks associated with the procedure, they weren't part of the story my mother told me. For the record, the husband did survive the war, and they went on to have children, so the procedure would seem to have been competently performed.
This is where the econo-libertarian's virulent rejection of the idea of "externalities" in the case of the environment, puts them several squares back in terms of processing other instances of externalities.
All-or-nothing-ism affects this group like no other, and leads to some curious beliefs often at war with each other.
Nitpick, but Kulak is almost certainly not a she he has the blonde catgirl picture for marketing reasons that he has written about at length somewhere.
The thing most Freedom Loving Libertarians get wrong is …
Freedom.
Most normal people want a lot of freedom, but it’s the child Freedom From responsibility, they don’t want to pay for mistakes. Not other people’s, especially, but also not their own.
Freedom from hunger sounds good, but freedom from work, from production, from any duty or any restraint other than ‘no direct physical harm’ leads to civ decay.
Freedom from social norms leads to a lot of undesirable behavior.
I’d rather social pressure, rather than law, push folks to have good, virtuous behavior. But now, unlike when younger, I’m more willing to support govt laws against very undesirable behavior, like pooping in a public park or street.
Rule of law also needs to mean that Dem rioters get arrested for damages as much as Rep rioters for similar damages. Equal treatment. Which we increasingly don’t have.
And Kling support for impeachment without a crime hugely weakens rule of law.
Yuval Levin: "I think that contemporary post-liberalism is a way of seeing the downsides of the liberal society and missing or ignoring or dismissing the upsides."
NatCons go further, claiming that liberalism failed because it couldn't defend itself against progressives. But no idea defends itself. Defense requires people who understand not only the idea but the proposed alternatives and can articulate why the idea works and the alternatives do not. Neither Trump nor the NatCons are capable of such a defense.
I thought a similar thing about Henderson's essay--there's a difference between what I think the government should police and what I would encourage my kids to pursue for what I think would be a good life*. That essay has an underlying assumption that I want government to "help people" and that we think it would be effective at it. Mostly I want enough to stop physical violence, but then for it not to be in the way.
*I've been very persuaded by this Substack and also observing my parents and in-laws that having grandkids to enjoy is the end goal, so I keep telling people that each of our 3 kids is an investment in having a grandkid some day, even if that's 25 years from now!
It'd probably be best try and reframe the discussion away from "helping people" at all. Encourage, but don't coerce people into making decisions that are shown to be good and sustainable for both the individual and society. Sounds easy, probably isn't.
Progressive consumption tax + child allowance would be a good start.
I've never been able to figure out why anyone thinks any kind of consumption tax would solve more problems than it creates
What sort or problems do you have in mind vis a vis other taxes that raise the same amount of revenue?
Problem 1: If A buys a gold-mining stock, B buys shares that track the price of gold, C buys gold bars held in a vault for him, D buys and takes possession of a gold bar, E buys gold jewelry, and F buys fake gold jewelry, who consumed and who invested?
Problem 2: Pretty much any consumption tax favors investment. Investment favors the rich. It's difficult for a consumption tax not to increase the wealth divide. Maybe not impossible to address but surely a problem where failure is more likely than not.
I'll take A-D. This is an issue at the stage of what counts as "non-consumption" deduction on the "income" tax form.
These are not even the most difficult cases. A gets a PhD in quantum computing from Cal Tech B gets a PhD in Kinetic Dance from know party school, South Podunk U C uses all her savings for a life saving medical treatment. D uses he savings for the same treatment but dies anyway. Who consumed?
As for increasing wealth disparities, that would depend on what amount of a bequest is considered "consumption"
But I'll take these issues compared to similar ones about what it "income."
+1
From some conversation I had on Notes with David Roman, he has no problem with Joseph Henrich’s empirical data, but he sees that Henrich’s historical explanation is nonsense.
From Wikipedia, the idea that “early Christian marriage rules forced a marked change from earlier norms” was proposed in 1983 by Jack Goody, but in 1984 “Brent Shaw and Richard Saller counter in their more comprehensive treatment that cousin marriages were never habitual or preferred in the western empire.” See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage
Here is what I see: Henrich had some great data that shows a strong effect of Christianity on Western culture and psychology. In order to maintain high academic status and sell books to his center-left academic audience he needed to give an explanation that doesn’t make him seem like a Christian apologist (e.g. he can’t cite Jesus’s revolutionary Sermon on the Mount or Christian core belief). So he chose to point to the pope’s marriage bans, which he could describe as a historical accident. Nevermind that it is the much weaker position of an existing debate, which he doesn’t mention.
Tom Holland and Larry Siedentop give much more believable explanations for the Christian origins of Western exceptionalism. They both go back to Paul, popularized ideas from Jesus and the early apostles.
Libertarian: People should be free to choose, reaping the rewards from, and paying the consequences for, their choices.
Crony Capitalist: I should reap the rewards of my choices and lay any costs on the government.
Progressive: People should be free to choose, with the government reaping most of the rewards and paying all of the consequences.
Woke: My civil rights are violated if the government doesn't force other people to affirm, celebrate, and pay for my choices.
"Libertarian: People should be free to choose, reaping the rewards from, and paying the consequences for, their choices."
That's not a political program, though. I've never had the chance to vote for it nor seen it enunciated by anyone in political life. The radical drug enthusiasts never propose that the addicts be left on the curb to die without intervention, or that their kids not be taken up by the state and placed in the nests of others in the manner of cowbirds. They never propose that we close the jails and reduce the police force and go back to having a night watchman, leaving precincts that have pathologized themselves via their own choices, to live with those choices without forcing the rest of us to endure an ever-increasing criminal justice system and its financial burdens and necessary duplicity and gaslighting - and its oppressive coercive presence (thanks, libertarians!).
Indeed, I saw entertained in a city I once lived in, a notion that we might make it mandatory for all citizens to carry Narcan ... I heard no pushback on this. I don't look for it to happen and yet it would not actually surprise me if this became a thing.
Consequences indeed. Ultimately if your ideas lead to consequences that are too unpalatable to you to think through out loud - then you're really only left with - yes, a vibe. To be as fair as possible, I will concede that it is more than a vibe, though - it's a spirit and a welcome one. But it's not a philosophy.
Even AK stated his libertarianism in terms of a wish of how things might be, leaving out the hard part. And hard parts are the only parts that matter, when we talk about reality.
I'm not in favor of doing away with laws or law enforcement. Going to prison is a consequence of hurting others. Putting violent criminals back out on the streets is a progressive policy, not a libertarian one.
Nor am I proposing that we let people die because they made bad choices. I do oppose, however, forcing people to, through their taxes, bear the consequences of those bad choices. I believe that voluntary charities are not only far more moral, but also more efficient and effective at helping people than are government welfare programs. The former deal with individuals and individual problems. The latter tend to deal with categories. In the end, government welfare is less likely to help get people out of poverty or to overcome their addictions than to make them more comfortable in and with their poverty and their addictions.
Years ago, for example, a city (in California, of course) paid to upgrade the wheels on the shopping carts that homeless people had stolen. They replaced the hard rubber wheels with larger, softer ones so that the carts would be less noisy and easier to push.
I'm certainly not in favor of doing away with law enforcement, nor would ever have thought of it! - though I could do with less. Remember Andy of Mayberry? Or any old Western movie? That was not a huge exaggeration of how law enforcement looked in little towns.
Now the LEO operations in many towns and especially the counties look like tactical outfits. Why shouldn't they? They rake in the dough stopping drug shipments on the interstate. They decorate their SUVs with skulls. They can seem like - the "good" gang. Or the best gang we're going to get, since we apparently have to have gangs. (What would we watch on TV without our giant criminal underclass, a group we so love that we actively import more from other countries?)
In Austin, a town supposedly so laid-back that Willie Nelson is its patron saint, albeit living at a slight remove and never having shown much interest in it - police shooting somebody usually fatally has become almost a weekly occurrence.
Now, I'm not gonna lie and pretend an empathy that I can't summon at will - I read about those incidents and I assume the world is a better place with those people out of it.
But howevermuch I may lack empathy, I definitely don't assume that a world where the police have to shoot people all the time is a better world than a counterfactual not brought to us by the left and the "libertarian" working in concert.
The following is my libertarian (classical liberal?) agenda. Mostly, it's following Barack Obama's advice that we stop doing stupid stuff.
Education
• Stop forcing children to go to bad schools.
• Stop preventing parents from sending their children to the schools of their choice.
• Stop letting teachers’ unions prevent schools from firing bad teachers.
• Require that teachers have degrees in the subjects they teach.
• Stop promoting students to the next grade even if they haven’t learned the material.
• Stop emphasizing self-esteem above accomplishment.
• Stop adding fad courses to the K-12 curricula that leave less time for students to learn the basics.
• Stop teaching children that they are either oppressors or oppressed by virtue of their skin color.
• Stop teaching minority children that the deck is stacked against them and that they have no hope of bettering their lives or those of their loved ones through their own efforts.
Employment
• Eliminate minimum wage laws, which make it difficult for the least employable (that is, the least educated, least skilled, least experienced, least physically and mentally able, and most discriminated against) to find jobs.
• Reduce job licensing restrictions.
• Reduce business startup regulations.
Welfare Programs
• Stop paying people to be unemployed.
• Stop paying women to have children out of wedlock.
• Stop penalizing welfare recipients who get a job.
• Stop penalizing welfare recipients who are married or who get married.
Housing
• Stop imposing rent controls, which create shortages of low-cost housing.
• End or reduce zoning restrictions, which also create shortages of low-cost housing.
• End housing policies that encourage people to take out mortgages they can’t afford.
Economy
• End the Fed’s loose monetary policies.
• Reduce regulation.
• Reduce (or, better, eliminate) the capital gains tax.
• Reduce tariffs. Eliminate tariffs on goods from allied nations.
• End public unions.
• Eliminate farm subsidies.
• Eliminate corporate subsidies.
• Stop bailing out financial institutions and thereby creating moral hazard and w with it increased financial risk.
• Stop increasing investment risk with complex laws and regulations whose meaning can be determined only after the fact in a courtroom.
Law Enforcement
• End civil asset forfeiture, which encourages cities to use their police forces as revenue collectors and are especially hard on the poor who cannot afford to hire the legal talent needed to recover their property.
• Stop letting police unions prevent bad police officers from being fired.
• Limit qualified immunity.
Healthcare
• Require all healthcare providers to post their prices.
• Eliminate “certificates of need” that allow entrenched healthcare providers to decide whether they’re willing to compete with newcomers.
• Reform IP laws to prevent drug companies from gaming the system by making irrelevant changes to their drugs’ molecules, recommended dosages, and delivery systems.
• End the AMA's ability to limit the number of medical schools and new doctors.
I love that you can make a list like that. I could never keep track of all that. I wish you would run for office; though we differ so fundamentally, I would like voting for someone who brings specific proposals, rather than more ideology.
Running for office is proof that one is unfit for office.
About half past six AM the other morning, my husband than whom there is no one less threatening, in his energy-efficient Japanese car [that has proven to be a liability in certain rural jurisdictions where they exercise some discretion about who to hit up to pay their salaries, you or the pickup truck] with its untinted windows and its cheerful single bumper sticker (that I put there, he is so conservative he dislikes even bumper stickers ;-) was puttering along as he drove out of town when a county cop (although he was in the city, this city of 2 million) came screaming behind him in that way they have of at first making you think they want *you* to get out of *their* way (this happens sometimes to those of us who go the speed limit or less). So he pulled over out of their way, but it was he that they were stopping. Did you know that you just went through a school zone? That it's 25 and you were going 32? His puzzlement partially stemmed from his having gone past a school more than a mile back, so he was confused about why it took them so long to catch up to him.
But anyway, he was yes-sir-ing the man at his window, handing over his license and waiting for his ticket, in no wise desirous of disputing his guilt in his distracted morning hurry to get out of town ahead of the traffic* --
-- when he noticed that this routine traffic stop had required not one but two cops, the other of whom was standing a few feet from his other side window with his hand on his gun.
I believe he had just enough libertarian spirit to remark this to the cop who was writing his ticket, along the lines of - your buddy over there seems about to pull on me, no need. Or maybe this was imaginary dialogue of the sort you say later to your wife.
Either way, it was over the top, of course. And yet in the course of daily duty for cops these days - and it may not be attracting the very best - this might be a very rational thing to do. I mean, has there ever been a worse time to be a cop? Being pro-cop nowadays is metaphorically kind of like being pro-sending them to Vietnam, forever.**
*Ahead of any children being anywhere near the school at that hour, but as you can imagine his wife came down on him when like a ton of bricks when he mentioned that to her - you know you are *not* supposed to have thoughts about who is or isn't there, you're supposed to obey the sign without thinking, that's the way it works! Which he should know - we lived across from an elementary school for more than 20 years, and he never once got a ticket. He's vowed not to take that street anymore with its three different school zones at quick intervals.
**And I don't blame them for catching the 7mph over speeders, instead of going after the guys who do 90 on the freeway playing their games. Nobody goes after them unless they break 100 and somebody calls it in. It would be hard to catch those guys; maybe that's why there are no police on the freeway anymore unless they are taking it to get to a call. It is like much else, it is easier to enforce the law among the law-abiding. It can sometimes make you wonder, though, what the point of it all is, that there should seem to be less enforcement overall, while policing and fire/EMS (involved often in the same sorts of things) take up the greatest part of local budgets.
Strange story. Someone in comments suggests anabolic steroid use might be to blame.
See the “Law Enforcement” section of my libertarian agenda above.
Wow
Neoliberal: People should be free to choose, reaping the rewards from, and paying the consequences for, their choices when choosing among alternatives that do not involve negative externalities because in that case they are reaping more of the reward and paying less of the consequences of those choices and since some of the rewards/consequences of choices reflect luck and are known to do so, it makes sense to transfer some of the rewards from the lucky to the unlucky.
The neoliberal protest march sign:
“We demand more mutually beneficial transactions between consenting adults (many of whom will have recently migrated to the US) in goods and services produced and consumed with no un-Pigou taxed/subsidized (or regulatory equivalents) negative/positive externalities with some of the benefits of these transactions subject to progressive consumption taxes for redistribution to (otherwise) low consumption people.”
Conservative march chant: What do we want? Steady, incremental progress! When do we want it? In due course!
Progressive march chant: What do we want? Perfection! When do we want it? 1,000 years ago!
Conservatives should join my neo liberal march. :)
Rob Henderson's essay, "You Can't Be Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative," has a paywall, but his theory is well known.
Well, it is reasonable to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
Social liberalism is reasonable because prohibition backfires. Any reduction in prevalence of self-defeating behaviors via prohibition usually is outweighed by increases in organized crime, corruption, and distortions of law enforcement.
As Arnold notes, freedom entails responsibility. A wise culture will abhor vice and encourage work, family, and civic community.
Rob Henderson gets it wrong, I think, when he writes that social liberals believe that "people should not adhere to strong social norms." My intuitions:
(a) Most social liberals believe that people should adhere to healthy norms.
(b) However, the "progressives" among social liberals are too quick, not to endorse, but *to excuse* norm violations by "the oppressed". Specifically, progressives tend to believe that disadvantage makes it too hard to choose responsibly. Progressives tend to have causal models of behavior of the oppressed.
Fiscal conservatism is a political antidote to myopia and impulsiveness; i.e., to the psychology of irresponsibility and vice.
Rob Henderson gets it wrong when he writes that fiscal conservatives believe that "there should be no safety net available." On the contrary, fiscal conservatives have a range of views about social safety nets. Many tend to believe that a sound social safety net should be circumscribed by acute need (and perhaps also by desert), and should incorporate healthy incentives towards responsibility where feasible. Some (like Arnold) advocate a modest, well-designed Universal Basic Income.
What all stripes of fiscal conservatives have in common are (a) wise recognition that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and (b) a norm against kicking the can down the road to the grandchildren.
[I edited my comment for grammar.]
"Social liberalism is reasonable because prohibition backfires. Any reduction in prevalence of self-defeating behaviors via prohibition usually is outweighed by increases in organized crime, corruption, and distortions of law enforcement."
This is an empirical question and its not clear the empirics are on the side of your claim in all instances.
Our own society prohibits many things without the kind of side effects you list. And other societies prohibit many hot button issues without side effects (Singapore has harsh drug laws and no drug gangs).
"My intuition is that most social liberals believe that people should adhere to healthy norms"
I don't know if I agree. For instance, could you produce a list of "healthy norms" that all social liberals would agree on, and that they would be willing to publicly agree on and "judge" people that didn't follow them?
"Many tend to believe that a sound social safety net should be circumscribed by acute need (and perhaps also by desert), and should incorporate healthy incentives towards responsibility where feasible. Some (like Arnold) advocate a modest, well-designed Universal Basic Income."
These are at cross purposes. Need based programs address acute need but have bad incentives. UBIs don't address acute need but have better incentives.
Whatever welfare system one comes up with, the tradeoffs are always going to be more harsh when there are a lot of dysfunctional people versus fewer dysfunctional people, so its in the states interest to have fewer dysfunctional people, even if that limits drug use or gambling or whatever.
Right on prohibition. I am not an advocate of the war on drugs and I'm ambivalent about the fact that most western governments don't actually take it very seriously in practice.
But I'll admit that it could be successfully fought and 'won' if tried, that is, that in 2024 there is no longer any constraint based in technical feasibility that would prevent any government which wants to from effectively reducing the manufacture, sale, distribution, or use of pretty much anything to any arbitrary level depending how much they want to spend on the effort in terms of resources and privacy violation, especially if that thing is tangible in nature.
Just because making something illegal creates a black market in that thing doesn't mean the black market is big enough or the side-effect harms larger the the harms prevented to declare some kind of "natural law of inevitable backfire".
Calling for a list of "healthy" norms obviously prejudges the issue, but liberals definitely have a list of social norms they expect people to follow and are extremely judgmental about violations of.
Thomas Sowell reminds us that there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Re: Singapore. It is a city-state. Singapore's policies are not feasible in the USA.
I don't assert that the empirics are against prohibitions in all instances. Rather, it seems that the empirics indicate that prohibitions usually backfire.
Some healthy norms that most social liberals would endorse:
Practice fidelity. Say no to hard drugs. Don't get intoxicated in public. Think ahead. Follow the "sequence of success." Try and stand on your own two feet. Do your part for others. Practice gratitude. Healthy mind in healthy body. Live and let live. Good fences make good neighbors. Money has its places, but be mindful of where money is out of place.
Yes, there is a public interest to have fewer dysfunctional people. Well said. But do prohibitions in large, modern societies reduce dysfunction?
Note that "the states" cultivate a revenue interest in gambling. I recall a state lottery ad: "You've got to be in it to win it." This sort of policy is upside down.
My intuition is that one way to reduce dysfunction would to be to break up or disrupt the "one size fits all" model of schooling. Let a hundred flowers bloom in paths to equip youths for the labor market when they are teens.
"Note that "the states" cultivate a revenue interest in gambling."
Nowhere was the schizophrenia more evident to me than, the other day on the interstate, Mississippi or Louisiana, can't remember - I passed a many-storied hotel/casino with an enormous picture of Gordon Ramsey hanging down the side of the building, to advertise some restaurant within - and - since the PSA is compulsory on all such signage - a warning about gambling addiction and a hotline number to call that was itself like 10 feet high, so that I actually thought for a second that the PSA was the point of the thing.
"fidelity"
That can be pretty vague. If it means marital fidelity then liberals don't have a stance as such. Chastity obviously isn't a liberal virtue. Not cheating on a spouse? Liberals always had a tongue in cheek relationship with mistresses, and nowadays they are open about things like polyamory, etc. Divorce? Liberals are pretty big into easy divorce, and the divorce rate is very high.
"Say no to hard drugs."
What's a hard drug? If it's always wrong to do hard drugs, why even make them legal?
"Success sequence:
Finish high school.
Get a full-time job once you finish school.
Get married before you have children."
Why do you think people fail to follow the success sequence?
Data wise, the answers seem to be:
1) They had a substance abuse problem
2) They had sex before marriage
But liberals don't object to pre-marital sex at all, and if you've got easily available drugs it seems like a decent number of people will become abusers.
I think a guy like Charles Murray is illustrative here. He's one of those more "hard-nosed" liberals. But the only people Charles Murray is willing to criticize are deadbeat dads. When asked if we should criticize single moms for not following the success sequence, he recoils! Can't be "judgmental".
I dunno we already criticize and punish low status men that fail at live and it hasn't stopped the dysfunction. There is no positive vision being offered or guidelines that keep people on the straight and narrow.
Ffs, how are intelligent and observant people still falling into this trap?! Say something racist, or criticize single moms or women generally qua women directly for that matter, or misgender someone like McCloskey, in the presence of liberals, and discover how truly socially nonjudgmental liberals are. Admitting that you don't care about your children's education because null hypothesis will probably tank your social stock too, now that I think of it.
They are nonjudgmental about the kind of pro-social and pro-flourishing norms that Rob Henderson thinks would have made the lives of him and the people around him growing up a lot better.
On luxury believes he certainly is aware of how judgmental liberals are.
Fair enough, but not specifying that and leaving it at plain "liberals are nonjudgmental" leads to other people falling into this trap. I observed enough of this phenomenon on Twitter to feel the urge to point out the omission every time I see it. People who do in fact know better (evidence being that they immediately acknowledge the error once it is pointed out to them) will say (and presumably think) things like "liberals/goodthinkers are scared of judging people" or "contemporary hamartiology ascribes evil to systems and abstractions and in doing so removes man as a moral actor" (i.e. does not judge people as individual moral actors).
I think it was you who put this well the other day: quantity has a quality all its own.
I have read AK on UBI and while he is most persuasive on the tax aspect, I see this as a symbolic thing that can get away from you, not unlike abortion.
It will codify the idea that working should not be rewarded (yes, I know that AK thinks it will actually make working more rational).
But while the latter positive outcome may or may not happen - it is certain that explicitly rewarding people for not working will flow all too neatly into the left's favorite, maybe ultimate, inversion - that the productive people of the world are the bad people of the world, and vice-versa.
That idea is in my view legitimately threatening to the material prosperity that has enabled the, er, production of all the people who supposedly require such a thing, and the ability of others to entertain giving it to them.
I realize it will be seen as uncool to say that. And I'm sorry to say it. I don't want to seem uncool. And I'm certainly not a person who holds herself out as among the productive, due to certain mental and temperamental defects - so in a way it's almost a painful admission.
"But I believe that you should make choices that put you onto the path of becoming a grandparent and a good example for your grandchildren."
I like the way you said this,a lot, and I have only met rationalists at one Boston meet up for like 20 minutes, but I wonder if the same people who are into that stuff are the same people who will make good libertarian parents.
Levin so utterly fails in his history in avoiding the dominating characteristic which Trump supporters see in Trump.
He fights.
Fights and fights and fights. Including with the kind of insults that Dems have long been using, but Romney & Tea Party Reps are too polite to engage in. Both seem oblivious to the fact that Trump’s policies are very much what Levin says, near the end, would be attractive (2028 advice):
stop illegal immigration, make legal easier for productive folks; T+
NOT free trade for all, it has hurt many , tho mostly free trade; T+
Reduce 3-H costs: healthcare, housing, higher ed. x-x-T+ with housing not a Pres. issue.
Lots of good stuff with too much oblivious Trump hate to be good. How much horse manure needs to be in a steak dinner before you pass on it?
luxury belief - I chuckled when I read this. It seemed quite the indictment, until I thought about it. I get that the term luxury belief is rather specific but what is it when you have freedom to do what you want and if you screw it up someone comes in and stops your fall? And what is it when you are protected from doing harm to yourself?
My desire is for a safety net to be there for people who can't do things for themselves, recognizing that who this is and what should be done for them is near impossible to determine in most cases. Maybe the "luxury belief" is thinking there needs to be a safety net for people who try and fail or don't even try.
In practice, the government does aggressively enforce sexual morality when you invite the courts or the Parenting Cops (AKA CPS) to supervise your family life, which many, many people find themselves doing. States have all kinds of sophisticated rubrics for judging how fit of a parent you are, and lawyers are adept at gussying up or tarnishing a parent's reputation.
Even the most socially liberal of states supervises bedroom behavior quite closely when it is invited to in hours-long hearings with parades of witnesses, subpoenaed device records, and all the rest of what you would expect from the panopticon.
So I think a question here is should the social laws guide the people in such a way that makes family breakdown less likely, or do we continue to have the situation in which the laws provide no guidance, but the laws work extensively to put guardrails on the family breakdown process? In the courts you see frequently see people of very limited intelligence mislead by various pied pipers that tell them to let their freak flag fly, and then they get mulched by some combination of their spouse, their children, and the courts.
"Roman’s essay is well worth reading. But he never takes on the empirical evidence that Henrich provides that proximity to Catholic outposts produced behavioral differences."
The church as the main enforcer of that taboo would seem to be supported by this evidence. But Roman still has a good point in that the Church does not seem to be the originator of the taboo.
I can't read Rob's article because of a paywall, but I'll offer two things.
1) The vast majority of (intellectual) libertarians don't just have some theory of government intervention, but preach personal non-judgementalism.
2) Rob's point is that self destructive behaviors inevitably have externalities, and so allowing self destructive behaviors can't possibly be libertarian since they affect others.
Let's take drug legalization, whether we are talking Meth in Portland or Weed in NYC. After a couple of years of this everyone seems to think "this is a fucking disaster". Shocker of shocker junkies harm themselves and those around them.
If I had to give up my ability to get high so that I could have Singapore level law and order (and taxes) I would certainly make that trade. Maybe that is un-libertarian of me, but I think freedom would increase on net.
P.S. I can't really respect the stance that abortion *should* be legal. I can accept the stance that given public opinion today there is no reasonable political path to outlawing it, and thus one should not expend political capital on the issue. But that would put it in the same category as slavery during the American revolution. It's wrong, but it's not the thing to be fighting over at this moment. I won't take the cope of claiming that it's not fundamentally wrong simply because I'm not willing to fight that fight at the moment.
Externality eats libertarianism. Well, it eats welfare economics based libertarianism. Every thing anybody does affects other people. So if your touchstone is "the greatest good for the greatest number", you have to take into account those effects. But that's hardly simple. There will be different effects on different people, or on different classes of people. Short-run effects and long-run effects may be different. The future is inherently uncertain and "unintended consequences" are not uncommon. Especially when it's not just a matter of people acting on their preferences but of people changing their preferences (e.g., whether to smoke cigarettes).
Yesterday's Marginal Revolution had a slug-fest along these lines in the comments on an article about marijuana legalization in New York City.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/independence-day-assorted-links.html
Abortion being something that has been quietly practiced probably forever, its existence could only not threaten the overall well-being of society if it was overlooked and not talked about. It's not the only thing like this, of course. And perhaps in a nation of hundreds of millions, that reticence was never going to work. But clearly, to have given "official" and institutional imprimatur to the concept "No life is better than life" has resulted in an uncomfortable status quo, possibly more jarring than people realize*; and one in which AK has to explain that his idea of the good life is one where grandchildren are a possibility.
And it's a shame because had the radicalism of abortion not been placed front and center and made the highest pursuit, pro or con, of our shared civic life, people I believe would have been more likely to continue on a path of pretty normal "planned" or at least curtailed parenthood. As they seemed to be doing. But feminists couldn't abide motherhood, so here we are. And GOP legislators eagerly enter in, wondering why we need this or that bird or lizard. Why do we need life? We're all going to live on Mars anyway. Who cares about Christmas Day bird counts? Only a few crazy - conservatives.
*As someone who is principally interested in conservation, and so when I use the word Life I am not primarily or at all picturing babies - I can tell you that the stealthy spread of this attitude is no small matter. I think even the pope may be wobbling. It is an unsettling thought, this shift - like learning that the earth's poles are about to flip.
In support of your argument, a family secrete disclosed by my late mother involved a close relative who had a (presumably illegal) abortion when her husband was away serving in WWII, ostensibly out of concern that he might not survive the war. If there was any difficulty involved in obtaining the abortion, or risks associated with the procedure, they weren't part of the story my mother told me. For the record, the husband did survive the war, and they went on to have children, so the procedure would seem to have been competently performed.
This is where the econo-libertarian's virulent rejection of the idea of "externalities" in the case of the environment, puts them several squares back in terms of processing other instances of externalities.
All-or-nothing-ism affects this group like no other, and leads to some curious beliefs often at war with each other.
Nitpick, but Kulak is almost certainly not a she he has the blonde catgirl picture for marketing reasons that he has written about at length somewhere.
The thing most Freedom Loving Libertarians get wrong is …
Freedom.
Most normal people want a lot of freedom, but it’s the child Freedom From responsibility, they don’t want to pay for mistakes. Not other people’s, especially, but also not their own.
Freedom from hunger sounds good, but freedom from work, from production, from any duty or any restraint other than ‘no direct physical harm’ leads to civ decay.
Freedom from social norms leads to a lot of undesirable behavior.
I’d rather social pressure, rather than law, push folks to have good, virtuous behavior. But now, unlike when younger, I’m more willing to support govt laws against very undesirable behavior, like pooping in a public park or street.
Rule of law also needs to mean that Dem rioters get arrested for damages as much as Rep rioters for similar damages. Equal treatment. Which we increasingly don’t have.
And Kling support for impeachment without a crime hugely weakens rule of law.
Both parties are right. It would be bad if the other one won, but a lot worse if the one was the Republicans. :)
Yuval Levin: "I think that contemporary post-liberalism is a way of seeing the downsides of the liberal society and missing or ignoring or dismissing the upsides."
NatCons go further, claiming that liberalism failed because it couldn't defend itself against progressives. But no idea defends itself. Defense requires people who understand not only the idea but the proposed alternatives and can articulate why the idea works and the alternatives do not. Neither Trump nor the NatCons are capable of such a defense.