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Your post could be condensed down to "we will get the tyrants that we ask for." The general public asks for tyrants, and you and I will get them, willy-nilly.

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Good timing, I was listening to your Econtalk on state capacity libertarianism, and I had a few more burrs to work out.

1: What's the answer when the state simply cannot do something well, but people want the state to do it anyway? If the only answer is "Do it as least bad as possible" then getting back to the simple "Just keep the state out of things" seems to be a better road. Simply giving up on convincing people that the government should be limited is going to be a losing position.

2: How does a COO or other government official in charge of things know if the agency in question is doing things as well as they could? How can they prove how much better the CDC should have done?

State Capacity Libertarianism falls prey to the knowledge problem inherent when you don't have competition. In your interview you skipped over the important step in why competition works in markets: competitors show up, find better ways of doing X, then people move their business to them when they see there are better ways. A single agency or service provider (e.g. Comcast) can be truly awful and people put up with it because there is not only no alternative, but also because they don't realize it doesn't have to be that awful. Who does the Federal Reserve get compared to? How does one report on how much better the COVID business would have been if the CDC didn't fall down on the job? What competitor do you learn from?

3: If you can't convince the people to stop wanting the government to do stupid things, how do you convince the people to choose the right people to get the government to stop doing things stupidly? How do you get a government COO that isn't a party hack, another Faucci, someone who decides DIE is the most important thing the government can do, etc.? What's the mechanism for that?

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For the public to accept humility it would have to:

1) Understand how the world works, at least roughly

2) Have at least some common understanding of "the good" that individuals and societies work towards

Without these first principals, I don't see how a dialogue could come about.

I don't think that our system of checks and balances was necessarily even shooting for humility as much as "fear of pushback makes me limit my ambitions."

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Maybe one could contrast State Capacity Libertarianism with Ezra Klein's "State Capacity *Progressivism*" and "State *Incapacity* Libertarianism". SCL vs. SCP vs. SIL.

With SCL, you start with the libertarian preferences against state coercion, admit the state has low current capacity, assume the state's capacity actually could be improved, and arrive at a conclusion that doing so would better satisfy those preferences by resulting in less expansion of coercion.

SCL treats public attitudes calling for or supporting state intervention as relatively static or uncorrelated with dynamic experiences or perceptions of low state capacity. Whatever you are trying to do, you wouldn't want to try to do it via a mechanism which relied on changed public attitudes, because that's not going to happen.

Contract that take on public attitudes with SCP, which is all about changing those attitudes and says everything hinges on them!

With SCP, you start with progressive preference for state action, support - indeed positively insist on - state coercion when in service of progressive goals, assume the state has low current capacity, assume that public support for state action is correlated with that capacity, assume that state capacity can be improved, and thus conclude that one must radically improve state capacity at accomplishing its current missions, in order to convince a state-skeptical public that the government can get great things done again, so that they will feel justified to happily support a big expansion of various grand progressive state projects (and naturally whatever coercion is useful to getting them done) that one couldn't sell them in the currently jaded climate of opinion.

Question: Where would SCL and SCP disagree about any particular effort to improve the state's capacity? SCPers wouldn't support improving the capacity of the parts of the state doing non-progressive things like fighting the drug war or controlling violent crime or illegal immigration and would prefer to drop those missions, but then again, so would many SCLers. Maybe a rift would most likely open up on the question of capacity to tax and redistribute as welfare, but I still kinda doubt it.

But, you know, isn't it a little weird that those two schools of thought would generally agree on the same improvements in capacity, all while hoping they would yield completely different outcomes and consequences, the opposite of what the other one thinks and wants? Are there stranger bedfellows than that?

With SIL, you start with preferences based in personal interests that do not necessarily have an ideological character, and the assumption (often also the direct personal experience) that the state is incompetent, untrustworthy, incapable, and an incurable mess, and thus arrive at instincts and presumptions that are highly skeptical of state action in general, in ways that undermine support for or tolerance of additional coercive measures, which in practice produces effectively more libertarian outcomes.

SIL says that even in the best possible case, the state still *can't* be good at certain things (e.g., information / calculation problem), and that furthermore one is unlikely to get anywhere close to that best case, which takes a lot of other theoretically possible objectives off the table too, "this is why we can't have nice things."

It seems to me that SIL has been the classic approach by libertarian intellectuals - for instance in public choice scholarship - to provide a positivist justification in theory and empirical observation for typical libertarian insights, instincts, and preferences regarding the true nature of state activity. "Even a perfect state can't do A, B, and C, an ideal democratic state with a rogue bureaucracy and judiciary can't do D-M well either and will tend to get worse over time, your particular version of that state is really far gone and there is little you can do to prevent it from fouling up N-Z too, and therefore it's wise to just resist the urge to use the state to do anything, because the justification will always rely on the implicit assumption that it actually can do that thing well. Which it can't: that's a delusion and a mirage."

Like SCP, SIL says that public attitudes can change, but instead of being too skeptical, the public is too naively supportive. So, instead of improving those attitudes by a show of better government capacity and competence, one should be fighting the unending uphill battle against their "leader, do something!" instincts of convincing people that our government is hopelessly terrible at everything it tries and if it ever succeeds it is only by luck of mere chance or by the other kind of luck of our generation having inherited an incredibly rich country from our predecessors and not having blown it all yet.

One might say that an SILer would perversely "hope for failure" even when avoidable and oppose improvement in state capacity as it could have a negative side-effect of an increase in public support for more state action, just as SCPers hope it will. The line of argument from SILer types in the past has been that, on the contrary, they absolutely support the state being very good at the very few things it must do and *can* do well, but that the *only* practical way to do this is *not* in terms of any kind of R&D into institutional reforms which might SCL scholars would want to mine for intellectual output , but precisely by specializing in a few key tasks, *radically de-scoping* the effectively plenary powers and responsibilities of the modern central state and focusing on a narrow, minimal mission set.

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I'm almost certainly too optimistic, but I'd argue that there's a lot of political ground for appearing to "do something" that's liberty enhancing or at least liberty neutral compared to most of the alternatives we see.

Concretely, a smart politician should never say "we can't do this", they would say "the best way to do this is to choose approach X because it's more effective than approach Y" (and, not incidentally, less flailing and does not reduce freedom as much as Y).

Why doesn't this happen in practice? I'd guess several reasons but especially regulatory capture. The menu of policies that policy makers have at their disposal is probably more constrained by the bureaucracy than anything else. Even when they've been sidelined or overruled, CDC and FDA continue to exert enormous influence on COVID responses and there's no serious discussion for reforming or doing away with them.

And why is that? Because they can make life more difficult for the average President than a flailing, ineffective policy.

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The pandemic was literally created with NIH funding from the US National Government. EcoHealth modified bat viruses to make them more infectious to mice with humanized lungs to learn how to fight the viruses. They did this at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that isn't even disputed.

A real libertarian would point this out and not cover it up.

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"The net result is that when leaders do not have the solution to a problem, their incentive is to flail around, destroying liberty in the process."

This presumes that leaders already have tyrannical power available and have politely shelved it out of temporary respect for democracy. That might accurately describe our modern administrative states.

But enlightenment constitutions constructed an order that tied the powerful to the mast far more effectively. Can we not do it again?

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Anecdotally there seems to be a tendency for politicians to expand their perception of “state capacity” the longer they are in office, but I wonder if there exists any evidence of such a correlation? If there is, it might explain the relentless expansion of the state.

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Sorry, Arnold. For leaders to solve problems, first they have to understand the trade-offs. They may ignore the trade-offs intentionally or they may have no idea about them. I suggest reading Tom Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions.

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