let people pay to immigrate, with a price set high enough to keep the pace of immigration “reasonable”
---
I assume that there would be some kind of auction with a fixed number of slots.
Under such a regime, we could actually use market prices to discover the value of immigration. If individuals really became dramatically more productive upon moving to America then the bid would go up. If it got high enough (one million, etc) or low enough you could increase/decrease the number of slots in the next auction. Instead of debating this endlessly with studies, we would just know who the market thinks is right.
Never going to happen though. Besides the crassness of it, the real problem is illegal immigration, birthright citizenship, and family reunification. You can't charge for the cow when you give the milk away for free.
The problem is that it doesn't matter what the law says if an administration is safe to ignore it at scale, which is the actual current state of affairs. It's impossible to take any such reform proposals seriously unless the advocate is willing and able to explain how they are going to deal with this issue. You can't argue merits if you can't predict consequences. You can't negotiate a compromise for a blank check.
I think that is the key problem, that we just don't prosecute criminals or enforce the law. In all the recent crimes involving illegal immigrants one hears about (murders etc.) the common thread is that the illegal had been interacting with authorities numerous times, often for crimes other than illegal immigration, and those crimes were ignored. Immigrants or not, we can't have a safe and civilized society if crimes against people and property are routinely ignored.
It's not just migrants. It's very common in serious criminal trials for the defendant to have been "justice-involved" (or whatever the latest Orwellian newspeak euphemism we are supposed to use this week) dozens or even hundreds of times in iterative catch-and-release until finally doing something bad enough that it couldn't also be ignored. Last year NYT had a story that 327 shoplifters were arrested, released, then re-arrested over 6,000 times in a single year, and of course they weren't getting arrested every time they were caught, and weren't getting caught every time they broke the law, so it's clear they were "career criminals" whose actions are so tolerated by the system as to be effectively decriminalized without anyone having to go to the trouble of changing the actual law.
There is no such thing as law, fair notice, rights to physical integrity or property, due process, equal justice, separation of powers, "a republican form of goverment", and so forth so long as politicians in jurisdictions with authority over millions of people are free to ignore the duty to actually enforce the laws as written in a uniform and effective manner, to change policy while circumventing the prescribed mechanisms for doing so, to wield the pretense of law as a weapon to fight political battles, to selectively play favorites and let friends get away with murder while ruining lives of enemies for petty infractions.
Both conservatives and libertarian public intellectuals have been totally asleep at the wheel regarding this higher level problem, a system breakdown of institutional functioning that dwarfs all their other concerns and debates in implication and significance, especially because all those debates are totally pointless if even in the ideal case of passed reforms nothing will actually get implemented. They are plenty aware of it, but extremely reluctant to engage with the subject or strategize about it. I can only guess that the reason is that all the answers are pretty ugly or would involve compromising on their usual stances or principles, but again, I think they are getting that wrong, because at the systemic level the logic behind those stances and principles does not apply.
There’s more than a bit of cognitive dissonance in maintaining that we need more gun laws while also believing that we shouldn’t enforce the gun laws that we already have.
It's not really cognitive dissonance. More like rhetorical-dissonance. In economics (and analysis of methods of empirical epistemology more generally) there is the distinction between stated and revealed preferences, and observation of the often dramatic differences between the two, which tells us to stop placing much weight in what people say or how they answer surveys and instead watch what they actually do. The things they say about different subjects are often 'dissonant', that is, inconsistent, incoherent, intellectually irreconcilable, etc., but most being at least somewhat distorted by lies or delusions from pressures of social judgment or self-regard, one shouldn't expect them to line up in any sensible way. But the things they do often reveal by inference a much more coherent, consistent, and rational pursuit of actual internal strategies and interests.
The same is true for the way these advocates use political, legal, or ideological rhetoric. They say a lot of things in public that contradict each other because those statements are "diplomatic propaganda" and coded distortions of genuine views by the needs of political expediency. The bogus cover stories and excuses deployed in each of these instances are bogus in their own unique ways, and can't possibly line up without whole new bogus intellectual superstructures, and often not even then. Those internal genuine views, however, can be much more coherent, but are just too objectionable to be expressed aloud in explicit terms.
In this particular case, the coherent progressive position is that policy can fix social problems but must be implemented in a manner consistent with moral dyad assessments of "ideological capacity for culpability" insofar as identifying appropriate and inappropriate targets for the intervention.
To the progressive, the typical person committing gun crime is oppressed thus an innocent baby who feels but can't choose and to the extent he has any agency whatsoever only acts the way he does out of necessity because compelled by corrupting social forces. Meanwhile, the typical firearms manufacturing corporation is an evil, greedy robot who has agency and chooses and acts and plots and schemes but neither feels nor has any sense of morality and would sell your grandmother to a feedlot for a dollar if it could get away with it.
Now you can see the internal coherence behind the rhetorical dissonance. Gun crime is bad. But it is the guns that are bad, not the gun criminals. We need more gun laws to lower gun crime, but the right target is the guns themselves, the whole supply chain for those funds, but not the people using the guns to commit crimes, an activity for which they cannot be blamed, and that will disappear when the guns disappear.
The trouble is, an ideology which grants a blanket excuse to an entire class of people and that rejects the legitimacy of applying the law to them for an increasingly broad range of anti-social behaviors is a recipe for a lot more anti-social behavior.
That's my point, that the issue isn't migrants it is the fact that no one bothers to enforce the laws so criminals just keep doing it over and over. Migrants get a lot of attention for it, but native criminals enjoy the same seeming invulnerability to law. My guess is that the migrants, not having local groups, tend to spread their crime a little more evenly around as opposed to natives who tend to keep it in their local group?
In any case, step 1 is "prosecute people for crimes."
Step 1 is figuring out how to stop progressive officials from not prosecuting people for crimes. The general answer is to force them to have skin in the game, but then who is going to force them and how?
What the analysis of these problems always reveals is that because the stakes are so high there is no naturally constraining principle to limit escalation if conflict and one has to keep solving even larger problems further upstream until one gets to the terminal questions of power and sovereignty which cannot be answered by resort to institutional mechanisms constrained by politically downstream factors. Our system is now unsalvageable by means of ordinary reform, and it will be replaced by another one inevitably, one way or another.
Well, one way to get elected officials to start prosecuting people for crimes would be to start tracking (making public) all the times they fail to and then elect other people who promise to do so, then repeat until it happens. It worked for NYC, at least for a few years, so it isn't impossible. Part of that is doing the work of showing people that these criminals are not only not terribly large in number, but repeatedly being let off by our public servants that are supposed to be prosecuting them, and that our towns and cities would be much nicer if we had law enforcement that did their job. Right now we have the opposite.
Step 1, in my view, is to take away government's monopoly on prosecuting people for crimes, ideally by legalizing private prosecution as in the UK by victims or attorneys acting on their behalf.
That could be really beneficial, yes. I know the UK still has problems with getting criminals prosecuted and punished, but the concept is sound if one can figure out how to avoid the pitfalls.
It does occur to me that part of the problem of having a government that is responsible for 10,000 things is that many things start to fall through the cracks because people can't pay attention. I recall seeing a stat once that the US has something like 500 criminal cases per year per judge, more than 1 per day. I don't know if that is true, but if it is it explains a lot of the backlog of getting things tried. I wouldn't be too surprised at all to find that most prosecutors' offices and courts are way understaffed, for much the same reason that infrastructure maintenance never gets done: it isn't sexy for a campaign promise because the average person rarely thinks of it.
You bring up a crucial question: How can we maintain a civil society if politically favored people are allowed to flaunt the law themselves while using it as a weapon against their political enemies? It seems to me that we've got to get back to a place in which laws are respected. A good first step would be to ensure that our laws are respectable.
My proposal: Eliminate all the unnecessary and redundant laws, and then enforce the core ones that remain, such as murder, theft, etc. Eliminate 99.9% of Title 18, for example, and perhaps we can get a consensus on enforcing what's left.
I agree. There are FAR too many superfluous laws and regulations, so much so that most people have no idea what is actually legal or illegal, and most crimes (whether people would regard them as such or not) go entirely unpunished. If you aren't willing to kill someone over it it shouldn't be a crime, but if you are going to make it a crime you had better be willing to kill the criminal. At the moment we have the exact opposite, a ton of crimes we aren't willing to kill people over, except when it is politically pleasing to those making the decision to enforce it.
Lots of people want to be legal immigrants, and have no intention of being illegals. That's because they're law-abiding people with high income potential, who can live better lives elsewhere instead of living in the shadows here. THOSE people, we very effectively keep out: because of the fear of illegals, there is - for most high-skilled people - literally NO way to become a legal immigrant here. They can't even stand in line: there is no line.
Rather than a direct auction (it's crass and would favor idle wealth and heirs rather than productive prospective citizens), I'd set an income threshold. You show a history of earning that much, or an employer who guarantees to pay your minimum tax bill even if they lay you off. You pay taxes based on the higher of a) your actual taxable income or b) the income threshold for at least 5 years, then get a green card. Fail to do so, you get invited to leave; remember, these are people who WON'T STAY illegally. From time to time you adjust the income threshold to get to a better inflow of skilled immigrants.
Alternate history thought experiment: what if alcohol prohibition had lasted 50-100 years instead of 12? Would we still have seen a rapid collapse of the illegal alcohol trade, and rapid establishment of widely-patronized legal alcohol sellers and producers, when it was repealed? Or would people have stuck to the moonshines, and moonshine dealers, that they had come to know and rely on, especially if excise taxes meant that the illegal product remained somewhat cheaper?
Path dependence remains underrated and is a cause for patience. This is particularly true for cannabis, where the regulatory landscape remains very uncertain and hazardous for would-be Diageos of weed for the reasons other commentators have pointed out.
1) How "deep" is a substance embedded in the culture?
2) How damaging is the substance on public life?
3) How beneficial is the substance to public life?
For alcohol the answer was probably something like "not illegal, but the prohibitionists had a point".
For meth? For fentanyl?
I think its a lot easier to keep hard drugs with no cultural embedness out then it is to expunge a (somewhat softer) substance with thousands of years of cultural roots.
Even Singapore makes alcohol legal, but that doesn't mean we need faces of meth shooting up on the streets.
If ethyl alcohol was never part of human history and somehow first synthesized in say 1956, it would be controlled as a schedule I depressive like GHB and would rank easily in the top five of the most personally and socially harmful drugs.
But, when you add in hundreds or thousands of years of biological change and cultural adaptation, with high taxes, tight controls, and the dramatic drop in the consumption-level from the prohibition era cultural reset ... it still ranks easily in the top five most harmful drugs.
In America, alcohol really was once the fentanyl of the late 19th century, turning entire city districts into the equivalent of those videos of Philadelphia streets full of tranq zombies, and more disgusting than Bourbon Street at dawn on a hot Sunday morning before they hose it down. Somehow we've muddled through to a much better social equilibrium than that, but there's still plenty of fallout. I don't favor prohibition or abstinence and I enjoy drinking a lot, but I'm compelled to admit that the ability to do so legally comes at a substantial social cost.
There are also still a lot of substances that are much less harmful than alcohol, and should definitely be rescheduled and decriminalized (most hallucinogens)
But like any vehicular or public intoxication, it doesn’t have to be ok anywhere and everywhere.
There’s a world of difference between low risk/occurrence and often especially medically beneficial drugs (think MDMA and psilocybin for therapy) and the kind of open air disasters of the SF Tenderloin with people keeling over on fentanyl.
Likewise a problem of opiate restrictions driving people in pain to dangerous street drugs, or teens dying because they think something is one thing and get contaminated fentanyl or more harmful analogues.
Prohibition isn’t working, despite many recent harm reduction strategies like safe injection seeming like a bust. But there’s also a large difference between people on the streets who tend to have severe mental health and personal security issues and people at a house party.
Sounds to me like you’d be better classified as a classical liberal than a libertarian. OR as a libertarian that focuses on economic issues and doesn’t agree with the (now mainline) libertarian view on foreign policy.
I agree with all of these points except to say that there are many ways to greatly expand legal immigration that would work. Eg. A Canadian point system. Also, immigrants as a group commit fewer crimes than natives, so I don’t think the crime angle is the issue with the current border situation, it’s the undocumented and unaccountable nature of having millions of people in the country essentially hiding from the government and legal system at all that’s the problem.
Words and categories change in usage over time. A few years ago I would’ve agreed with you. At this point, what was a subcategory “classical liberal” is now for all intents and purposes so different from what the common libertarian seems to believe that it is more useful to think of it as a whole separate category. In other words - the Mises caucus “won”. They effectively co-opted the category “libertarian” away from its prior meaning. If you’re a classical liberal, then calling yourself a “libertarian” in most circles does more to obscure that it does to illuminate what you actually believe.
Don’t blame me, I’m just observing the facts here.
You're just talking about little-l vs. big-L: libertarian vs. Libertarian. I have thought of myself for a long time as libertarian, but not doctrinaire (similar in most respects to Arnold's description in this post). And the Libertarian Party has had a lot of wackos for a long time, not just recently.
Terms are useful when they convey information to others. If I tell people I'm a "small l" vs a "big L" they'll be even more confused that doesn't do much other than convey (to people who have half a clue about this stuff) whether I'm referring to the party or the ideology.
Well, FWIW, I am completely with MikeW in that whenever I say I’m a libertarian I too always add “small ‘l’.”
The Libertarian party IS whack. When I first heard their platform on the radio one time in the 1990s when I was stuck in traffic, about 50% of it was wonderful and eye-opening, described with clarity and made perfect sense. But the other 50% was batshit crazy…
I almost agree, but would edit that: "50% *sound* batshit crazy." Most LP members are quite sensible if you can get them to explain their positions, but many have trouble doing so coherently.
I belonged to the LP for ten years, but eventually left them because their refusal to purge the kooks means they can never win elections.
I’ll concede that neither term is ideal. I call myself a libertarian-leaning conservative, or conservative-leaning libertarian.
I disagree with you strongly re: what the typical libertarian themselves believe. There are far more of us classical liberals than there are the no-government anarcho-capitalist types. But yes, many non-libertarians think of them when they hear the word libertarian.
But even fewer non-economists understand what the term classical liberal is than understand roughly what a libertarian is.
But I still disagree with you that even though there is no doubt that a good number of people think of “no government” anarcho-capitalism when they think of “libertarian”, not all nor even most do.
Maybe we run in very different circles. Here's my experience (I live between two lefty Urban areas in the US). I basically run into four groups...
1. Run-of-the-mill low information lefty: If I say I'm a "libertarian" they will have only a vague idea that this means something about loving guns and hating immigrants. If I say "classical liberal" they will have no clue whatsoever. Answer: I usually just go right into talking about specific policy ideas rather than ideological terminology.
2. High-information lefties: If I use the term "libertarian" they'll assume I'm a mix of a Trump supporter with an anarchist. They'll probably throw out the name "Ron Paul" and believe what I most care about is ending the fed and "something something guns". They'll assume I grew up on a farm somewhere.
3. In a room full of different kinds of libertarians: If I say "libertarian" I haven't helped anyone understand what I believe. Most of the people in that room don't call themselves libertarians at all - they call themselves all kinds of things like "seasteader" or "cosmotarian" or "Free-stater" or whatever.
4. Low information righties: If I say "libertarian" to them will not have a clue what I'm talking about, but will think "something something guns, something something want too many immigrants".
So, in conclusion, the term "libertarian" really is quite useless nowdays. Worse than useless, it'll get people to put you in a box that you don't fit into. It's become a useless term... at least around here.
Before woke became a thing, I mostly told people I’m economically conservative, socially liberal. On each of which I was with about 60% of the country.
Since woke, I no longer say I’m socially liberal, since I don’t agree with the woke left on almost anything. OTOH, I don’t agree with the majority of social conservatives’ public policy positions (beyond non-early term abortions), even though I agree with most of their values.
So at least for social issues, I’d argue that there remains some value with the term libertarian.
Not sure how well that is documented, but the government is certainly counting on that impression; if it felt it was a statistic to watch, it would hardly be letting in these gang members whose affiliations are tattooed on their bodies, and for which there is evidently a cheat sheet. But it is letting them in, so it must feel the impression will be maintained no matter what happens.
I think a big divide between conservatism and libertarianism is that conservatives want to wield political power to achieve results.
I've read many a Reason think piece about how Christopher Rufo is evil, but he's the one getting things done. Conservatives are the ones winning office and passing school vouchers, not libertarians. If we get school vouchers (real school vouchers for everyone, not some means tested charter school thing only for poor blacks) it will likely be because the Rufo's of the world convince people that the alternative if your kids being exposed to LibsofTikTok. Not because of the same CATO paper that's been published for decades.
I watched a recent Peter Thiel interview in which he said he is no longer a libertarian because he realized that saying one was a libertarian was another way of saying "I don't want power and responsibility" which made it easier to fit in with leftists and not get into the messy business of politics.
This was readily apparent to me during COVID (conservatives fighting for freedom, DC libertarians MIA because desperate not to get TRUMP coded).
"I've read many a Reason think piece about how Christopher Rufo is evil, but he's the one getting things done."
It seems to me Christopher Rufo should be a libertarian hero, by helping gut DEI policies and getting universities back to focusing on what they are supposed to do.
The same is true of Ron DeSantis. He's taken a few things too far (such as agreeing to Florida's social media law), but almost everything he has done has been pro-libertarian. And as long as we have public schools, it is inevitable that government will get involved, so they are by definition not libertarian. So the attacks on him for the supposed "don't say gay bill" are silly, from the libertarian perspective anyway.
With regards to "using state power", something I've written about previously is that there are qualitatively different levels of doing so analogous to different levels of abstraction in the infrastructure of a society's legal system that require different kinds of analysis, but that people arguing in conservative-libertarian debates tend to fail to distinguish those levels and end up applying instincts and heuristics good for one level to another where they are not appropriate. Because of the inherent asymmetry between mandates and prohibitions, these qualitative differences apply even to acts which would seem at first glance to mirror each other, but which a more careful analysis would show to be operating at different scales of generality in the context. For example, no matter whether one judges either or both such acts to be good or bad, a state telling state universities *not* to discipline students for speech code violations is not in the same category of "use of state power" as that state forcing universities to be liable for student violations of a particular speech code.
Indeed. Conservatives often fall prey to the temptation to use power for good, when any use of power will inevitably turn to evil. They often forget that government having the power to punish those who you don't like will be used against them in the future. So when conservatives (or Republicans in general) take power at the federal level they very rarely do anything to reduce that power to avoid abuses in the future.
You are missing the fundamental distinction between using/not using power vs. being in power i.e. holding public office. Conservatives being in power was indeed good with COVID because they generally didn't use power to enforce mandates, which is to say they didn't use power. Conservatives often do use power, or expand existing power to use, however, to deleterious effects. See the Patriot Act for instance. One can be in power but not use or create power to be used. The problem that conservatives have, which leftists have in spades, is the belief that if they use power to achieve some end it will work out because it is them forcing people to do what they want, forgetting at the very least that sooner or later someone else will be in power that will use that power in ways they don't like.
So again, big difference between being in power and using power. Generally you have to be in power to use power, but using power to achieve ends is generally a bad idea. The ideal conservative recognizes that government is not the solution, but the problem, and when in power reduces the power than those in power can use.
"Conservatives having power made a dramatic difference during COVID which was very obvious to everyone."
Well, some conservatives (Ron Desantis, the South Dakota governor whose name I'm blanking on at the moment) made a dramatic difference, but it was really a pro-libertarian outcome. Other conservatives (such as Mike Pence) and no compunction against using the government to enforce lockdowns for the supposed "common good."
I'm unaware of what state Mike Pence was Governor of.
Not only states, but even school boards ended up splitting completely on R vs D lines.
My own state got rid of masks in schools the day we elected a republican governor. I would go so to say that victory started a rollback of nearly all COVID restrictions (once the Dems realized it was a losing issue).
If AK really believes that the average person, especially the average man, does not prefer a state of affairs where he is busy and useful during the day - "drudgery" - and if that is what America must continue trending towards, then it seems to me we might as well eliminate public schooling altogether. If folks will not be working together in future, there's no need for the civic inculcation aspect. Neighborhood school or charter, who cares - is it possible to imagine there's some great difference?
(The charter schools down here seem weird and cultlike, the kids in their stupid bowties or whatnot, no open space to play on, often no schoolyard at all, no auditorium or even gym - frequently housed in windowless corrugated metal buildings, sometimes strip center retail space - they seem like hell in other words. You get a glimpse inside when those cringey videos of the charter school kid getting accepted at 67 schools (! - thus spending your time, applying to that many schools, being rather obviously disqualifying, intelligence-wise) turn up on the internet - no one who sees or reads about these places and cheers could possibly be conservative, so if charters are a win that's down to libertarians. And not in the sense of: choice is liberty. In the sense of, the governor's kinda-trashy buddy is going to make bank, or thinks he is, starting a network of charter schools, with a little rent-seeking help from his politico friends.)
This is a great moment to do it. You have the country's demographics changing in ways favorable to the idea. No one could be less interested in education than the arrivals of recent decades. They may miss the babysitting angle a bit but will otherwise not notice or care if all the schools closed tomorrow, it will not stop them coming over the border. And they'd not be wrong.
Your experience of charter schools is unfortunate. I have sent my kids to some really good charter schools that were just nicer public schools, although requiring a basic uniform and having much higher performance standards. It might well come down a lot to what the state and local laws look like, and what local people are willing to accept.
I think the big problem is that we encourage non-work while discouraging semi-skilled and other blue collar work to the extent that people who go into debt to attain very low paying dead end white collar jobs are esteemed above those who learn a skill and work at even pretty well paid blue collar jobs. Our sense of what is high and low status is really messed up, with honest, self supporting blue collar work being seen as only marginally above living off the state.
Voltaire had it right. Maybe religions or other charities can do a better job of putting the idle to constructive work than government can, but someone needs to be doing it. Our city streets are full of walking examples of what happens when it isn't done.
Conspicuously off the list of libertarian victories: gun rights, especially regarding concealed carry, have trended in the libertarian direction for the last couple of decades.
That's true. However, the progressive reaction has been, "Go ahead and see what we do to you if you ever try to use those gun rights or any deadly force where we are in charge. You'll claim self-defense, but we'll arrest you for murder."
The case of Jose Alba is revealing, and that was with a knife, a 61 year old with no criminal record defending himself from a 35 year old assailant. Months after the fiasco, insiders started leaking what really went down. Police and prosecutors saw the video and knew in the first 10 minutes what happened and that there was no basis for charging anything, but Bragg made it immediately racial-political, insisted on murder charge, and concocted the "fight risk" rationale never applied to any other suspect in similar circumstances (Alba had a plane ticket to vacation in his native country), to ask for $500k bail in a post-bail era (later bumped down to only $50k) and throw Alba in Riker's for a week until the other shop owners could help post bond. If Alba wasn't a Hispanic immigrant from the Dominican Republic he would have languished there, but since he was, the racial-political calculation flipped in his favor, and with the video having gone public, bodega owners pressed Mayor Adams to pressure Bragg to reverse. They waited as long as they could - over two weeks - before simply asking the judge to withdraw all charges and dismiss the case as they weren't going to even present before a grand jury which, as Tom Wolfe put it, will indict a ham sandwich. They rationale was that they looked at the evidence and realized there was no basis for the charge. But they had looked at the evidence on day one and knew that. So they said, "well, that video evidence was just over the edge of supporting a change of murder, at least in the second degree, but then when the medical examiner report came in, some precise detail about the depth of the laceration resulting from when Alba stabbed Martin in the neck convinced us that, no, whoops, drop all charges. 3.35 centimeters deep? Murder. 3.3 centimeters? Self-defense, have a nice day sir, sorry to bother you, we very much hope you enjoyed your brief stay with us at Rikers.
Who wants to go through that? Solving for equilibrium means a qualitative step down in urban quality of life, viability of retail business, and so forth, and so on.
I think most of the points you claim to differ from libertarians on are points that libertarians have a fair bit of disagreement on amongst themselves.
Also, I think over-regulation is causing many of the issues with legalization/decriminalization of marijuana. When the black (and gray) markets provide a more favorable business climate than the legal market, the black market will dominate. This is what has happened in California, and to a large extent in Washington state.
Similarly, fentanyl became a problem after cracking down on heroin, which became a problem (this time around) after cracking down on prescription opioids. There are root causes to address beyond the drugs themselves.
Fentanyl history is a little more complicated. It was barely known in the US until the 70s long after state - and much later federal - efforts to control the older opioids. Courtwright's Dark Paradise has some good history on it. The federal level goes back plenty far too, plenty of anti-narcotic actions (when we got the term 'narcs') a century ago after the Harrison Act. Before fentanyl had ever been synthesized, the 1956 NCA said the penalty for selling heroin to a minor was death (the past is a foreign country).
Fentanyl became a problem because fentanyl was the solution. The solution to medical management of serious pain, for which purpose it is still the substance most widely used. It is a genuine miracle drug - astonishingly effective, potent, cheap, and, when used at small doses as prescribed and intended, works for the most people with the fewest side effects. But every single substance in that family (piperidine-ring- containing agonists of receptors related to pain) can be diverted and abused recreationally - by itself or, often, as an enhancer of other drugs - with people turning themselves into addicted junkies and overdosing often into medical crisis or death. Whichever of these substances is the most popular for medical use is going to be most popular for abuse, and this timing is technologically determined and has nothing to do with what one particular country decides to do with regards to shifts in drug policy.
There has been a lot of effort over half a century put into trying to discover an alternative family of substances that are just as effective but without these common severe downsides and my impression is that they have all led to dead ends, and our understanding of the nature of the biochemical basis of human pain gives plenty of reason to believe it's just not possible due to the inseparable integration of the components and systems involved. The solution to the problem won't be chemical and we are forced by nature to achieve it via social mechanisms. That's too bad. Our society is really good at chemistry and really bad at regulating people, but here we cannot play to our strengths and must cope with our weakness.
Edit: One important reason conservatives (or traditionalists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, whatever) like to look to the past for examples and models on what might work better for us is precisely because the balance of strengths was completely reversed for our ancestor cultures. That is, they didn't have much tech, and thus had to rely mostly on social mechanisms and institutions, and by necessity and facing extreme levels of external competitive pressure, had to get really good at it. These skills have suffered substantial atrophy in the past century almost in proportion to every technological innovation of an alternative substitute, in much the same manner that no one knows how to memorize a hundred phone numbers and street names (let alone entire epic poems) or use paper road maps or multiply large numbers in their head anymore because our smartphones do all that for us. Just as there is "Risk Homeostasis" and trying to make people safer encourages them to take more risks, there is also apparently "Organizational Capital Homeostasis" in that every new technology that comes out that is supposed to help manage people doesn't actually improve anything despite being useful because neutralized by managers getting worse at managing. And when something can't be fixed by that tech and needs solid management skill, there is no one left sufficiently competent to fix it.
School choice is nice but it will have almost no effect on student learning. Jarring as it sounds, American schools do about as well as can be expected. Because once you reach a certain minimum standard, which most of American schools do meet, there are really only two things that matter: how smart the kids are and how motivated they are.
Perhaps the major disappointment of modern life is that the first is not very changeable. Early "interventions" that seem to build up mental firepower largely fade away as the child grows.
To change the second would require wholesale changes in the curriculum, because young people simply are not interested in much of what is taught. We pretend that we can make it interesting. "Have better lesson plans." "Make your math problems about things they're interested in, like how many sneakers someone has, or how much money hip-hop artists make." That might make things 0.02 SDs better.
Allowing parents to sort into schools catering to kids with different levels of smarts and motivation would help quite a bit, along with different interests. School choice can provide finer tuned school experiences to match student capabilities in a way one size fits all public schools based merely on location can't.
"Allowing parents to sort into schools catering to kids with different levels of smarts and motivation" may well make the experience more pleasant for the actual consumers (as opposed to the customers, who in a choice system are generally the parents). But it won't do much for actual learning. I realize this is like saying there is no Santa Claus.
Today every charter school is severely constrained in what it can teach by individual state standards. A charter cannot decide, "Kids aren't much interested in this, and will probably never use it, so we won't even attempt to teach it." They must obey what the state education department says they are required to do.
1: Charter schools/school choice/vouchers or whatever, I am talking more about the overall idea. Actual implementations will vary that will adjust how things go, so if the state absolutely makes sure every school teaches exactly the same things in the same way, sure, there won't be a difference. That is likely to not be the main outcome, however.
2: Even if teaching the same basic subject matter there is a huge difference in how much time that takes, and thus what else can be taught. I could probably get my 10 year old to pass a GED test this year if I tried, and many college freshmen that I have seen have really bare bones knowledge. So if we allow schools that actually break kids up into cohorts based on the kids' capabilities those schools could teach kids at the top end everything the state requires and then have... what, 6 hours left in every day for whatever else is interesting?
3: Even if the only difference in outcomes is based on "all the parents who care take their kids out of School A and put them in School B because B is slightly better" that's still better if only because it demonstrates that School B is doing something better concretely (consumer choice) and because it allows students to get out of a worse school. The absolute worst thing one can do for education is give the state a monopoly on it.
1.) The states don't "make[s] sure every school teaches exactly the same things in the same way". But they do tell every school, you must teach X, Y, Z ... and there are a lot of those letters.
A major, almost unknown outside the business, force for uniformity are regional accreditation agencies. Here in New England, most every school every tenth year goes through a NEASC (New England Association of Schools and Colleges) Review. The teachers have to gather all sorts of information, submit it to NEASC, and then have a site visit. The NEASC team will then send back a report with many, many "suggestions" for improvement. You will have to report back on what you have done to implement the suggestions. Only then will they decide whether to renew your accreditation. You will not be surprised that most of what the team is looking for is well within education orthodoxy.
If you want to, say, decline to have a school library, and instead use the town library and the internet, figuring that will be important after students graduate, the team will inform you that you have to have a library with a certain number of volumes, a certain number of which have to have been published after a certain year.
2) Yes, tracking would speed some students through. It would also have a "disparate impact".
3) In lots of places, the high school is "where everybody goes" because people want to be with their friends. It's also a Schelling Point, with locals caring about the football team and the softball team. Most parents don't have the ability to tell if one school is "slightly better" than another. They are remarkably satisfied with where their children go. Maybe that would change with a thoroughgoing market for choice but right now, most parents would stand pat.
I mean, look, yea there are things that make it harder depending on where you are. But what's the alternative? Just abolishing the public school system root and branch is my first best preference, but I don't see that as being more likely than getting a decent school choice option. I also don't see abolishing the public school system as more likely than getting a decent school choice option and abolishing the NEASC.
And yea, it would have disparate impact. There are a lot of problems to be fixed in our society, aren't there?
You are missing a bit of a point, though: parents do care about where their kids go, and that is why the real estate prices in good school districts are bonkers compared to similarly situated areas without good school districts. Conditional on having already moved to the school and put their kids there, yes, parents poll as being satisfied with where their children go, but that's because they already made the choice about what school district they are willing to pay for.
Now, you tell parents "You can live wherever in the area and still send your kids to whatever school you can deliver them to" and you will see real estate prices equalize across areas right quick (controlling for other factors).
The answer to the question, "what's the alternative?" requires answering two other questions first, "what results do I want from schools?" and "what can schools actually do?" Unfortunately, the answer to the second question often frustrates the answer to the first question.
To admit this is depressing. If you are in the business or in advocacy, it can even take away your reason for living.
To repeat my mantra: good students make good schools; good schools don't make good students. Parents pay ridiculous house prices to live in an area with good students. Unless you can equalize where good students are, you will not equalize real estate prices.
I agree. Unlimited "school choice" would be a lot freer than today's charter schools. But most of what gets debated in state legislatures under the term "school choice" about charter schools and allowing transferring between existing public schools. Every one of those schools is "severely constrained in what it can teach by individual state standards."
“School choice is nice but it will have almost no effect on student learning. Jarring as it sounds, American schools do about as well as can be expected. Because once you reach a certain minimum standard, which most of American schools do meet, there are really only two things that matter: how smart the kids are and how motivated they are.”
Well imo just because what you say in your last sentence is clearly *directionally* true does NOT mean that true school choice would have no impact on student learning.
At minimum, it would mean parents who don’t want their children leftist ideologized in school could send their kids to schools that don’t do this. Eliminating this negative and restoring the hours to actual learning alone would help
Further, given that test scores have gone down over time, and I don’t believe anyone has shown that this is *entirely* because of student quality, there is no doubt in my mind that the average education at the average K-12 school has gone down over the last 30 years.
Certainly, anything that is removed from teaching leaves time for something else--though it is important not to fall for the seemingly obvious "more taught" means "more learned". It doesn't. I gather that "removing my kids from left-wing propaganda" is a reason many people have for home-schooling. If there were enough parents that felt strongly enough, they could organize a non-lefty charter school, or pay someone else to organize one.
Test scores have gone down somewhat, but not a lot. My personal suspicion is that it's a combination of COVID, young people's decreasing attention span and increasing hunger to be entertained, and the changing mix of school children (a polite way of saying fewer white kids).
Test scores have been going down for decades; they dropped much more during COVID, for very obvious reasons.
Its fine to say people can home school - organizing their own charter school is an absurd suggestion - and a few do, but most do not have the time or capability to do that.
As I said, I agree that you are directionally correct with your claim (that outcomes can only go up so much with better schooling), but claiming that they wouldn’t go up in any meaningful way is misplaced. The test score data over time alone is powerful evidence of this.
My charter school hypothetical was meant to show that school choice could have some effect. But as you say, it would be minimal. I was responding to something you said that I thought was over-optimistic, "At minimum, it [school choice] would mean parents who don’t want their children leftist ideologized in school could send their kids to schools that don’t do this." That only works if those other schools exist.
The decline in test scores is certainly evidence that test scores can go up in some meaningful way. It would be "powerful evidence" if the underlying population was staying the same. But it's not. Not at all. Today's population is a population with less potential.
Even with a the population that is changing, declining test scores would be "powerful evidence" that schools now do something considerably worse (and thus could reverse that and change for the better) if test scores went down a lot. But they didn't.
P.S. you can look community by community at test scores in suburban counties and see declines that exceed any changes in demographics, so while I do not deny that demographics surely play some role in declining test scores, there is no way they explain most of it. And surely you have no hard evidence that they do.
We will have to agree to disagree. But be clear when I said school choice, I meant true school choice, including any private school, not just government charter schools.
And of course until such a voucher system existed, it is very difficult to get many such schools to exist to compete with the taxpayer funded, free to consumer government monopoly schools.
Milwaukee alone provides evidence - if not conclusive proof, I grant - that school choice funded by vouchers can indeed lead to better outcomes. Of course some meaningful portion of this is selection bias, but you surely cannot show that it is primarily or totally selection bias.
Kids in the worst public schools in particular deserve better.
Fair enough. The drum I keep banging is that "how good a school is is largely determined by how smart and motivated the students are--and that the schools cannot do much to change student intelligence or motivation." No one wants to believe this. Education research rarely tries to measure either of them, so the hypothesis is basically not tested.
Even if I might be persuaded that some of your argument is correct, and even if your claim that public American schools do about as well as could be expected in suburbia, you undermine your own claim there by pointing out the motivation (and associated habits) point. Your claim that most urban public schools do this adequately is prima facie preposterous.
I am saying that students bring in motivation and that given the prescribed curriculum, schools can't do much to increase students' motivation.
I'm not just saying that suburban schools "do about as well as can be expected." I am saying that almost all American schools do. The fact that lots of kids leave severely lacking in intellectual skills and knowledge is sad but can't really be changed much. I know, awful. So how can I say that? Only the entire history of American schools. Sure, a century ago, high school graduates did better than today. But less than half the age group even went to high school.
Of course I am prepared to accept the Null Hypothesis. But we could get the same outcomes spending a lot less money. And with a lot less left-wing dogma built into the system.
School choice won't give you the same results with less money, but a lot more. Public schools have economies of scale.
Besides, the major drivers of school costs are disabled kids and immigrants, both protected by a lot of federal law and court cases.
All school choice will do is increase spending. And get no better results. Meanwhile, like most school choice proponents you ignore the actually expensive and wasteful spending.
Perhaps. But, and this is going to sound terribly pessimistic, one of the unique things about education is that by definition, the consumers don't know what education is (they are, after all, uneducated), and the potential customers, the parents, often feel they don't really either. Education is wonderful and somewhat mysterious and who knows what it is? Why the professional educators. So at least for a while, any new system is going to use much of the same personnel with the same mind-sets doing much the same thing they always did.
Maybe you could convince the parents that care that you have a significantly better way. But it's going to be an uphill battle.
“ I'm not just saying that suburban schools ‘do about as well as can be expected.’ I am saying that almost all American schools do.”
I understand that is exactly what you’re saying. And I think what you’re saying is wrong, and dangerous.
Even though I probably agree with you that for, say, 80% of students the outcomes in today’s inner-city schools might not be that different even with a superior system. But for the 20% (or 15% or 7% or 35%, none of us can know for sure) that would have better outcomes, your essential answer that we might as well just leave the current terrible system as it is, is imo monstrous.
And no, you can only say what you say based on the history of American *public* schools, and mostly only from the last 50-65 years. Prior to that, results were clearly better than they were 25 years ago, and far better than they are today.
Go watch the season of the The Wire - imo the greatest TV series ever - about Baltimore public schools, and then tell me again that nothing at all can be changed for the better
". But for the 20% (or 15% or 7% or 35%, none of us can know for sure) that would have better outcomes, your essential answer that we might as well just leave the current terrible system as it is, is imo monstrous."
What you need to understand is that "better" in these cases would still be below average. We aren't missing any diamonds. There aren't even kids of average intelligence testing below average. Our schools catch those.
I realize this may be distressing to you, but The Wire is not a documentary. And even given that it's not a documentary, at no point does it suggest that any of the kids in school are actually smart.
"Prior to that, results were clearly better than they were 25 years ago, and far better than they are today."
This is utter nonsense. You can't seriously believe that schools were doing *better* before 65 years ago. That's demonstrably untrue. Never mind that we weren't educating blacks, or that we didn't bother educating immigrants unless they wanted to be educated. In 1960, the *white* high school completion rate was 43%, and the black completion rate was just over 20%. In the 1950s, only 1 in 4 kids took algebra and only 1 in 10 took geometry.
It is an article of faith among many, on the left and on the right, that the current system of public schools is "terrible". And therefore major changes must be made which will improve things majorly. I am saying that no changes possible today would make much difference in the way of student achievement. Certainly, some schools could be more orderly, and I'm assuming that's a major problem with the schools portrayed in The Wire. I have never seen it. I have been told it is exceptionally well-done. But it is a work of fiction.
Comparing now and, say, 1955, I am not at all sure that the results from the "colored" schools in Little Rock, Arkansas back then were any better than the results from the public schools in Chicago today. I am also fairly sure that the results from Great Neck, New York back then were not any better than the results there today (both very good).
I wanted to add a different opinion on non-profits. I reckon it is still a voluntary association of people and resources, and you can get the same problems at large scale that we get in gov't and for-profits - inefficiencies, bureaucracies, spin, bad incentives.
But I reckon it's a very important type of organization that we wouldn't want to do away with and that for-profits can't replace. Sure, there are many non-profits that really don't move the needle on whatever cause or desired outcome they want to produce and they stick around because they can come up with proof of SOME impact and convince donors that they're delivering enough value.
But here are some non-profits where I just don't see any effective for-profit or gov't substitute:
1) my local marching band booster foundation - volunteer parents raising money to pay for new uniforms, flags, props, instruments, transportation and food during competition season...I've been a part of many of these kinds of non profits- supporting a student program. I don't see a for-profit solution for this.
2) And here's a non-profit I'm following that seems be helping solve a tragedy of the commons:
Have a look at https://theoceancleanup.com/ => they're cleaning plastic and trash out of the ocean and rivers. I wonder if a for-profit could come up with a business model to do what they are doing? Would anyone pay a for-profit to clean up international waters? Don't non-profits have the potential to deliver value in the place of government.
3) Another role for non-profits: I reckon for a healthy society, you need watchdogs on ALL concentrations of power, whether government, for-profit or non-profit (think Institute for Justice, Pacific Legal Foundation). Is there a business model for this that would perform better, have better incentives long term?
You don’t have to do away with non-profits at all; the issue is which of them deserve tax-deductible status for donations. I am pretty much right with AK on that point.
I think that the weakness of many libertarians on crime would be my most significant area of discontentment with the movement. I'm not sure where most non-conservative libertarians stand on the post-covid and post-George Floyd crime wave. Specifically, the role that Soros-funded DAs like George Gascon, Chesa Boudin, Kim Foxx, Larry Krasner, and Alvin Bragg have played in firing career criminal prosecutors, setting overly lenient bails and plea bargaining, and just generally not enforcing the law. I remember when the justification for drug decriminalization was that it would free up law enforcement to focus predominantly on felonies and violent crimes. Instead, the broken windows theory has been vindicated. There is just an embarrassing lack of law and order in American cities now purely because of bad policies that have undone two decades of consistently declining crime rates pre-covid.
The anarcho-capitalists are against government-sponsored police, but the rest of libertarians - be it we classical liberals, or the Ayn Rand Objectivist types - have always supported police as one of the undeniably legitimate and necessary functions of government.
Leftists are 100% responsible for “defund the police” and DAs that don’t enforce the law; libertarians ain’t the ones responsible for this issue, whatever other legit beefs you have with libertarian ideology on other aspects of crime.
I know that libertarians aren't responsible, they have virtually no political power at all so they aren't responsible for really any policies whether they are good or bad. I am just wondering where the median Reason Magazine or Cato Institute type of libertarian stands on these issues now. From what I recall, most libertarians in the 2010s were against drug laws and laws against "victimless crimes", harsh sentencing, and mass incarceration. Cato's Freedom in the 50 States project uses it as a metric of overall freedom as well. https://www.freedominthe50states.org/incarceration
We are almost entirely agreeing that many libertarians stands are left of center on all the issues you enumerate; so-called mass incarceration being the one on which there is probably the greatest range of positions among libertarians.
I agree with Cato on most other issues, but differ with them on at least some of their stands on crime. They do indeed have some power and were partly responsible for the one imo net bad piece of legislation Trump pushed through on “criminal justice reform”.
I am saying only that not just the median but the large majority of libertarians are against “defund the police”, and the overwhelming majority are against DAs who don’t enforce basic existing victim-based laws like shoplifting, car theft, etc.
These stands are not the slightest bit inconsistent with being “soft” on drugs, prostitution, and even being soft on drug crime sentences or overall sentences for non-violent crimes.
I could be ok with being soft on (most) drugs while being hard on the question of keeping urban public spaces safe, secure, clean, not smelling like skunk-quality weed, and free of beggars, vagrants, and junkie encampments. I've often said that I would be a lot more sympathetic to such advocacy if they could offer me this "package deal" to allay my worries. Alas, "they won't fix it first", and the typical advocate likes to insist against all reason that these intimately-connected matters are separable and should be discussed in isolation as matters of abstract principle. I don't think the intellectual equivalent of asking everyone to don horse blinders constitutes a valid framework for debate at all.
I see ways to solve the second problem that you don't. For instance, we could make drug possession and use legal inside a private home with the resident's permission, thus allowing the police open season against "homeless" junkies. We could also have cities start privatizing parks and other public spaces by letting neighborhood associations take them over, thus allowing them to hire guards and expel those who steal or make messes.
Something like this had better happen before all our cities are wrecked and become permanent Third World horribles.
There are million things that might work if the people in charge wanted to fix the issue, but they don't. So there is no point trying to come up with clever proposals that don't involve kicking those people out of power. In math there are seemingly simple problems that one can prove are "X- complete", that is, actually as hard to solve as some very hard X. And in policy the analogy is a "Regime-Change Complete Problem".
People mistakenly think they could solve the seemingly small, local problem with some clever, simple proposal. But they are missing the forest for the trees when they forget that the problem exists because significant power actively resists and will thus react to neutralize and crush any possible simple solution. This is why so much intellectual discourse and political debate is just incredibly stupid and wearisome, because norms of permissible discourse constrain aspiring reformers precisely to the zone of reforms which can't reform anything.
Arnold has mentioned a few times that there is no compensation system intended to motivate employees that can work for long because eventually everyone figures out how to game the system and starts deviating from what you want them to do, and then, even worse, the whole corporate culture and organizational capital degenerates as the gaming culture sets in like cement in ways that generate their own "constituencies" and are hard to reverse and repair once established. So, periodically, you just need to reset the system to put everyone's game-playing skills back at square 1 and never give them enough time to figure out the new game before they get surprised with yet another new and different one.
Well, our whole ideological-political order and system of government has gotten itself stuck in one of those system-gaming bad equilibria where the hold on and use of power can no longer be controlled and contained by the means originally intended and implemented in the design of the rules of the game. Don't hate the players, hate the game, or, at least, don't only hate the players. When a social problem is at root caused by the insulation that system-gaming provides to these incumbents from that problem, it's time for a new system they will try to stop from happening, and so every problem boils down to being able to defeat the incumbents entirely at the level above the current game, that is, all the way up.
I agree with most of your takes. Including that overturning Roe v Wade (which was of course correct as a matter of constitutional law) has not been a big win.
I disagree only with your assertion that it should be completely left to the woman to choose. Abortion at 37 weeks is murder. The whole point here is that the unborn child has rights too. Elected representatives of the people *should* be making the decisions. Anti-libertarian Europe has for the most part gotten this correct. Had there been no judicial activism with Roe v. Wade in the first place, it is very likely we would have as well.
Alternatively, a constitutional Roe v Wade ruling would have said clearly that a woman does indeed have a more or less complete right to privacy in the 1st trimester, a viable fetus (a.k.a “third trimester”) has almost universal protection against murder except extreme health risk to the mother, and in between states can regulate as they see fit, and Congress has no right to regulate this issue at all.
I still hold out mild hope that some future Court will make this sane, constitutional ruling that is 100% consistent with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I agree. The irony of Roe v. Wade is that most states right now would probably have more lenient abortion laws like Europe had the Burger Court not falsely ruled that there was a constitutional right to abortion. My understanding is that there was hardly a pro-life movement at all prior to Roe v. Wade.
I think Dr. Kling is missing the key point in Dobbs: the Supreme Court returned abortion to the political process in the states, which is where it belongs. Roe (not Rowe) was a terrible decision as a matter of legal drafting - it concocted a federal constitutional right to a procedure that was generally illegal at the time of both the Founding and the ratification of the 14th Amendment (which is more or less where abortion rights ended up being rooted by Casey, decades later). You can't get a better example of the Supreme Court legislating than Roe - it struck down laws in almost every state. Regardless of whether one is pro-choice or pro-life, if one is pro-federalism (which is a good libertarian position), abortion is a matter for the states. For anyone interested in the background to the abortion debate, I highly recommend reading the superb book, The Family Roe, which traces the histories of the various people involved in abortion on all sides and does so very fairly (the author is pro-choice). Puts a real human face on every aspect of the case. For those interested in the legal issues, there's no substitute for wading through Roe, Casey v. Planned Parenthood (a case in which the SCT tried to make sense of Roe without overruling it), and Dobbs itself. The many opinions on all sides of those cases make really interesting reading. IMHO, Dobbs got it right -this is an issue for the states to deal with. For a fascinating discussion of whether Roe mattered, Gerard Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope (which critiques the idea that the SCT is the place to get social change) has a mixed verdict on it. (He's pro-choice as well and unhappy with Dobbs). Really thought-provoking about courts vs legislatures as where change belongs.
There is no doubt you are at barest minimum mostly correct re: constitutionality and judicial activism overreach of Roe, and therefore that Dobbs was correct as a matter of constitutional law and federalism, and I doubt that Kling would argue with you there much, if at all.
I took his point that as a matter of election politics the Dobbs decision has been a net loser for the right of center in this country, regardless of one’s position on what policy re: abortion should be. And it’s really hard to argue that he’s wrong there.
I agree - the right seemed to have no plan for when they achieved their goal. But the point on which libertarians should defend Dobbs is as a decision about federalism and the limits of the federal courts. Those are important libertarian values.
As one active on the Right, I would say you are mostly wrong about us having no plan. Most of the pro-life movement is still active but now at the local level, seeking to get extremely bad state laws (like CA and NY which now allow post-birth "abortions") voted out or overturned.
But at the national level the itopic is a waste of time, because anything Congress does on it will and should be overturned.
The pro-life activists may well have had a strategy for post-Dobbs in terms of firuther promoting their priority issue,, but the right overall, including specifically the politicians and consultants responsible for winning elections, has not.
And the simple fact remains that the total ban wins that the pro-life activists have attained (and I have no doubt genuinely believe in) in states controlled by the GOP have clearly hurt GOP elections results in other states. Whether or not they have hurt GOP election results within some of those states I cannot say.
Libertarianism to me is more principle than ideology. Not just political language but syntax. If politics is tribal competition, libertarianism limits the scope of the wins as well as the losses. So it will never be a winning tribe because it's not tribal and knows its wins are provisional. But we can't afford to lose the principle.
“I do not think that drug legalization achieves what it is supposed to achieve.” How about eliminating the federal prohibition, and putting this to the voters in each state, county and city?
Agreed, the tension between state level legalization and federal prohibition is really making for some awkward dynamics. Legal sellers can't get banking, for instance, due to federal regulation and pressure.
States, counties, and cities already have a variety of drug and alcohol laws. Repealing federal prohibition is enough because it will throw the decision back to them where it always belonged.
Well, for consumption I agree 100% that it should be a state issue. But for drugs coming across national borders, in practice there needs to be a federal role to keep out supply, at least for the most destructive drugs, no?
Why can't state governments enforce their borders just as effectively or better than the federal government? Each federal border is also a state border correct?
Your second statement/question is true but mostly irrelevant. If, e.g. AZ is fairly lax on hard drugs but IA is not, the fact that the federal border is a state border is meaningless.
The problem with your first question/assertion is that thankfully we don’t police interstate border crossings in this country.
Now, if you want to argue that supply interdiction should simply not be a part of the fight against cartels and hard drugs, and we should simply do law enforcement where laws are violated, that *is* indeed a perfectly reasonable argument. But I don’t think it’s one that more than 50% of your fellow citizens would agree with, at least for certain classes of drugs for which the vast majority of the supply comes from other countries.
Personally, if we had the proper border security that we lack today, I’d be ok with legal transportation across that border of properly revealed/regulated drugs that were explicitly legal in a given state if combined with just minimal tracking that the drugs in question were transported directly to that state, as a libertarian-ish middle ground.
It is disappointing that you give “celebrating alternative sexual identity” as a libertarian position (with which you disagree), rather than *allowing* alternative sexual identity. Conflating *allowing* with *celebrating* is a standard invalid move of critics of libertarianism.
Strongly disagree. So long as the LGBT movement was merely about legalizing gay sex in private, there was no libertarian objection to it. Creating gay marriage and requiring every state to recognize it in law made that debatable. But today people are being persecuted for making fun of men who pretend to be women, or for just not going along with the pretense themselves. That persecution is anti-liberty and has to stop. I'll use the pronouns I want. And still worse, pervs who want to violate women's privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms or to talk our children into sterilizing themselves for life are pretending ithey have a civil right. It's their targets who do.
let people pay to immigrate, with a price set high enough to keep the pace of immigration “reasonable”
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I assume that there would be some kind of auction with a fixed number of slots.
Under such a regime, we could actually use market prices to discover the value of immigration. If individuals really became dramatically more productive upon moving to America then the bid would go up. If it got high enough (one million, etc) or low enough you could increase/decrease the number of slots in the next auction. Instead of debating this endlessly with studies, we would just know who the market thinks is right.
Never going to happen though. Besides the crassness of it, the real problem is illegal immigration, birthright citizenship, and family reunification. You can't charge for the cow when you give the milk away for free.
The problem is that it doesn't matter what the law says if an administration is safe to ignore it at scale, which is the actual current state of affairs. It's impossible to take any such reform proposals seriously unless the advocate is willing and able to explain how they are going to deal with this issue. You can't argue merits if you can't predict consequences. You can't negotiate a compromise for a blank check.
I think that is the key problem, that we just don't prosecute criminals or enforce the law. In all the recent crimes involving illegal immigrants one hears about (murders etc.) the common thread is that the illegal had been interacting with authorities numerous times, often for crimes other than illegal immigration, and those crimes were ignored. Immigrants or not, we can't have a safe and civilized society if crimes against people and property are routinely ignored.
It's not just migrants. It's very common in serious criminal trials for the defendant to have been "justice-involved" (or whatever the latest Orwellian newspeak euphemism we are supposed to use this week) dozens or even hundreds of times in iterative catch-and-release until finally doing something bad enough that it couldn't also be ignored. Last year NYT had a story that 327 shoplifters were arrested, released, then re-arrested over 6,000 times in a single year, and of course they weren't getting arrested every time they were caught, and weren't getting caught every time they broke the law, so it's clear they were "career criminals" whose actions are so tolerated by the system as to be effectively decriminalized without anyone having to go to the trouble of changing the actual law.
There is no such thing as law, fair notice, rights to physical integrity or property, due process, equal justice, separation of powers, "a republican form of goverment", and so forth so long as politicians in jurisdictions with authority over millions of people are free to ignore the duty to actually enforce the laws as written in a uniform and effective manner, to change policy while circumventing the prescribed mechanisms for doing so, to wield the pretense of law as a weapon to fight political battles, to selectively play favorites and let friends get away with murder while ruining lives of enemies for petty infractions.
Both conservatives and libertarian public intellectuals have been totally asleep at the wheel regarding this higher level problem, a system breakdown of institutional functioning that dwarfs all their other concerns and debates in implication and significance, especially because all those debates are totally pointless if even in the ideal case of passed reforms nothing will actually get implemented. They are plenty aware of it, but extremely reluctant to engage with the subject or strategize about it. I can only guess that the reason is that all the answers are pretty ugly or would involve compromising on their usual stances or principles, but again, I think they are getting that wrong, because at the systemic level the logic behind those stances and principles does not apply.
There’s more than a bit of cognitive dissonance in maintaining that we need more gun laws while also believing that we shouldn’t enforce the gun laws that we already have.
It's not really cognitive dissonance. More like rhetorical-dissonance. In economics (and analysis of methods of empirical epistemology more generally) there is the distinction between stated and revealed preferences, and observation of the often dramatic differences between the two, which tells us to stop placing much weight in what people say or how they answer surveys and instead watch what they actually do. The things they say about different subjects are often 'dissonant', that is, inconsistent, incoherent, intellectually irreconcilable, etc., but most being at least somewhat distorted by lies or delusions from pressures of social judgment or self-regard, one shouldn't expect them to line up in any sensible way. But the things they do often reveal by inference a much more coherent, consistent, and rational pursuit of actual internal strategies and interests.
The same is true for the way these advocates use political, legal, or ideological rhetoric. They say a lot of things in public that contradict each other because those statements are "diplomatic propaganda" and coded distortions of genuine views by the needs of political expediency. The bogus cover stories and excuses deployed in each of these instances are bogus in their own unique ways, and can't possibly line up without whole new bogus intellectual superstructures, and often not even then. Those internal genuine views, however, can be much more coherent, but are just too objectionable to be expressed aloud in explicit terms.
In this particular case, the coherent progressive position is that policy can fix social problems but must be implemented in a manner consistent with moral dyad assessments of "ideological capacity for culpability" insofar as identifying appropriate and inappropriate targets for the intervention.
To the progressive, the typical person committing gun crime is oppressed thus an innocent baby who feels but can't choose and to the extent he has any agency whatsoever only acts the way he does out of necessity because compelled by corrupting social forces. Meanwhile, the typical firearms manufacturing corporation is an evil, greedy robot who has agency and chooses and acts and plots and schemes but neither feels nor has any sense of morality and would sell your grandmother to a feedlot for a dollar if it could get away with it.
Now you can see the internal coherence behind the rhetorical dissonance. Gun crime is bad. But it is the guns that are bad, not the gun criminals. We need more gun laws to lower gun crime, but the right target is the guns themselves, the whole supply chain for those funds, but not the people using the guns to commit crimes, an activity for which they cannot be blamed, and that will disappear when the guns disappear.
The trouble is, an ideology which grants a blanket excuse to an entire class of people and that rejects the legitimacy of applying the law to them for an increasingly broad range of anti-social behaviors is a recipe for a lot more anti-social behavior.
That's my point, that the issue isn't migrants it is the fact that no one bothers to enforce the laws so criminals just keep doing it over and over. Migrants get a lot of attention for it, but native criminals enjoy the same seeming invulnerability to law. My guess is that the migrants, not having local groups, tend to spread their crime a little more evenly around as opposed to natives who tend to keep it in their local group?
In any case, step 1 is "prosecute people for crimes."
Step 1 is figuring out how to stop progressive officials from not prosecuting people for crimes. The general answer is to force them to have skin in the game, but then who is going to force them and how?
What the analysis of these problems always reveals is that because the stakes are so high there is no naturally constraining principle to limit escalation if conflict and one has to keep solving even larger problems further upstream until one gets to the terminal questions of power and sovereignty which cannot be answered by resort to institutional mechanisms constrained by politically downstream factors. Our system is now unsalvageable by means of ordinary reform, and it will be replaced by another one inevitably, one way or another.
Well, one way to get elected officials to start prosecuting people for crimes would be to start tracking (making public) all the times they fail to and then elect other people who promise to do so, then repeat until it happens. It worked for NYC, at least for a few years, so it isn't impossible. Part of that is doing the work of showing people that these criminals are not only not terribly large in number, but repeatedly being let off by our public servants that are supposed to be prosecuting them, and that our towns and cities would be much nicer if we had law enforcement that did their job. Right now we have the opposite.
Step 1, in my view, is to take away government's monopoly on prosecuting people for crimes, ideally by legalizing private prosecution as in the UK by victims or attorneys acting on their behalf.
That could be really beneficial, yes. I know the UK still has problems with getting criminals prosecuted and punished, but the concept is sound if one can figure out how to avoid the pitfalls.
It does occur to me that part of the problem of having a government that is responsible for 10,000 things is that many things start to fall through the cracks because people can't pay attention. I recall seeing a stat once that the US has something like 500 criminal cases per year per judge, more than 1 per day. I don't know if that is true, but if it is it explains a lot of the backlog of getting things tried. I wouldn't be too surprised at all to find that most prosecutors' offices and courts are way understaffed, for much the same reason that infrastructure maintenance never gets done: it isn't sexy for a campaign promise because the average person rarely thinks of it.
You bring up a crucial question: How can we maintain a civil society if politically favored people are allowed to flaunt the law themselves while using it as a weapon against their political enemies? It seems to me that we've got to get back to a place in which laws are respected. A good first step would be to ensure that our laws are respectable.
*flout
My proposal: Eliminate all the unnecessary and redundant laws, and then enforce the core ones that remain, such as murder, theft, etc. Eliminate 99.9% of Title 18, for example, and perhaps we can get a consensus on enforcing what's left.
I agree. There are FAR too many superfluous laws and regulations, so much so that most people have no idea what is actually legal or illegal, and most crimes (whether people would regard them as such or not) go entirely unpunished. If you aren't willing to kill someone over it it shouldn't be a crime, but if you are going to make it a crime you had better be willing to kill the criminal. At the moment we have the exact opposite, a ton of crimes we aren't willing to kill people over, except when it is politically pleasing to those making the decision to enforce it.
Lots of people want to be legal immigrants, and have no intention of being illegals. That's because they're law-abiding people with high income potential, who can live better lives elsewhere instead of living in the shadows here. THOSE people, we very effectively keep out: because of the fear of illegals, there is - for most high-skilled people - literally NO way to become a legal immigrant here. They can't even stand in line: there is no line.
Rather than a direct auction (it's crass and would favor idle wealth and heirs rather than productive prospective citizens), I'd set an income threshold. You show a history of earning that much, or an employer who guarantees to pay your minimum tax bill even if they lay you off. You pay taxes based on the higher of a) your actual taxable income or b) the income threshold for at least 5 years, then get a green card. Fail to do so, you get invited to leave; remember, these are people who WON'T STAY illegally. From time to time you adjust the income threshold to get to a better inflow of skilled immigrants.
Alternate history thought experiment: what if alcohol prohibition had lasted 50-100 years instead of 12? Would we still have seen a rapid collapse of the illegal alcohol trade, and rapid establishment of widely-patronized legal alcohol sellers and producers, when it was repealed? Or would people have stuck to the moonshines, and moonshine dealers, that they had come to know and rely on, especially if excise taxes meant that the illegal product remained somewhat cheaper?
Path dependence remains underrated and is a cause for patience. This is particularly true for cannabis, where the regulatory landscape remains very uncertain and hazardous for would-be Diageos of weed for the reasons other commentators have pointed out.
1) How "deep" is a substance embedded in the culture?
2) How damaging is the substance on public life?
3) How beneficial is the substance to public life?
For alcohol the answer was probably something like "not illegal, but the prohibitionists had a point".
For meth? For fentanyl?
I think its a lot easier to keep hard drugs with no cultural embedness out then it is to expunge a (somewhat softer) substance with thousands of years of cultural roots.
Even Singapore makes alcohol legal, but that doesn't mean we need faces of meth shooting up on the streets.
If ethyl alcohol was never part of human history and somehow first synthesized in say 1956, it would be controlled as a schedule I depressive like GHB and would rank easily in the top five of the most personally and socially harmful drugs.
But, when you add in hundreds or thousands of years of biological change and cultural adaptation, with high taxes, tight controls, and the dramatic drop in the consumption-level from the prohibition era cultural reset ... it still ranks easily in the top five most harmful drugs.
In America, alcohol really was once the fentanyl of the late 19th century, turning entire city districts into the equivalent of those videos of Philadelphia streets full of tranq zombies, and more disgusting than Bourbon Street at dawn on a hot Sunday morning before they hose it down. Somehow we've muddled through to a much better social equilibrium than that, but there's still plenty of fallout. I don't favor prohibition or abstinence and I enjoy drinking a lot, but I'm compelled to admit that the ability to do so legally comes at a substantial social cost.
There are also still a lot of substances that are much less harmful than alcohol, and should definitely be rescheduled and decriminalized (most hallucinogens)
But like any vehicular or public intoxication, it doesn’t have to be ok anywhere and everywhere.
There’s a world of difference between low risk/occurrence and often especially medically beneficial drugs (think MDMA and psilocybin for therapy) and the kind of open air disasters of the SF Tenderloin with people keeling over on fentanyl.
Likewise a problem of opiate restrictions driving people in pain to dangerous street drugs, or teens dying because they think something is one thing and get contaminated fentanyl or more harmful analogues.
Prohibition isn’t working, despite many recent harm reduction strategies like safe injection seeming like a bust. But there’s also a large difference between people on the streets who tend to have severe mental health and personal security issues and people at a house party.
Sounds to me like you’d be better classified as a classical liberal than a libertarian. OR as a libertarian that focuses on economic issues and doesn’t agree with the (now mainline) libertarian view on foreign policy.
I agree with all of these points except to say that there are many ways to greatly expand legal immigration that would work. Eg. A Canadian point system. Also, immigrants as a group commit fewer crimes than natives, so I don’t think the crime angle is the issue with the current border situation, it’s the undocumented and unaccountable nature of having millions of people in the country essentially hiding from the government and legal system at all that’s the problem.
While it’s true that not all libertarians are classical liberals, in fact classical liberals are libertarians.
Words and categories change in usage over time. A few years ago I would’ve agreed with you. At this point, what was a subcategory “classical liberal” is now for all intents and purposes so different from what the common libertarian seems to believe that it is more useful to think of it as a whole separate category. In other words - the Mises caucus “won”. They effectively co-opted the category “libertarian” away from its prior meaning. If you’re a classical liberal, then calling yourself a “libertarian” in most circles does more to obscure that it does to illuminate what you actually believe.
Don’t blame me, I’m just observing the facts here.
You're just talking about little-l vs. big-L: libertarian vs. Libertarian. I have thought of myself for a long time as libertarian, but not doctrinaire (similar in most respects to Arnold's description in this post). And the Libertarian Party has had a lot of wackos for a long time, not just recently.
Terms are useful when they convey information to others. If I tell people I'm a "small l" vs a "big L" they'll be even more confused that doesn't do much other than convey (to people who have half a clue about this stuff) whether I'm referring to the party or the ideology.
Well, FWIW, I am completely with MikeW in that whenever I say I’m a libertarian I too always add “small ‘l’.”
The Libertarian party IS whack. When I first heard their platform on the radio one time in the 1990s when I was stuck in traffic, about 50% of it was wonderful and eye-opening, described with clarity and made perfect sense. But the other 50% was batshit crazy…
“50% was batshit crazy“
Agreed this describes big L Libertarians but I'd argue it also describes Democrats and Republicans.
I almost agree, but would edit that: "50% *sound* batshit crazy." Most LP members are quite sensible if you can get them to explain their positions, but many have trouble doing so coherently.
I belonged to the LP for ten years, but eventually left them because their refusal to purge the kooks means they can never win elections.
I’ll concede that neither term is ideal. I call myself a libertarian-leaning conservative, or conservative-leaning libertarian.
I disagree with you strongly re: what the typical libertarian themselves believe. There are far more of us classical liberals than there are the no-government anarcho-capitalist types. But yes, many non-libertarians think of them when they hear the word libertarian.
But even fewer non-economists understand what the term classical liberal is than understand roughly what a libertarian is.
But I still disagree with you that even though there is no doubt that a good number of people think of “no government” anarcho-capitalism when they think of “libertarian”, not all nor even most do.
Maybe we run in very different circles. Here's my experience (I live between two lefty Urban areas in the US). I basically run into four groups...
1. Run-of-the-mill low information lefty: If I say I'm a "libertarian" they will have only a vague idea that this means something about loving guns and hating immigrants. If I say "classical liberal" they will have no clue whatsoever. Answer: I usually just go right into talking about specific policy ideas rather than ideological terminology.
2. High-information lefties: If I use the term "libertarian" they'll assume I'm a mix of a Trump supporter with an anarchist. They'll probably throw out the name "Ron Paul" and believe what I most care about is ending the fed and "something something guns". They'll assume I grew up on a farm somewhere.
3. In a room full of different kinds of libertarians: If I say "libertarian" I haven't helped anyone understand what I believe. Most of the people in that room don't call themselves libertarians at all - they call themselves all kinds of things like "seasteader" or "cosmotarian" or "Free-stater" or whatever.
4. Low information righties: If I say "libertarian" to them will not have a clue what I'm talking about, but will think "something something guns, something something want too many immigrants".
So, in conclusion, the term "libertarian" really is quite useless nowdays. Worse than useless, it'll get people to put you in a box that you don't fit into. It's become a useless term... at least around here.
Fair enough.
Before woke became a thing, I mostly told people I’m economically conservative, socially liberal. On each of which I was with about 60% of the country.
Since woke, I no longer say I’m socially liberal, since I don’t agree with the woke left on almost anything. OTOH, I don’t agree with the majority of social conservatives’ public policy positions (beyond non-early term abortions), even though I agree with most of their values.
So at least for social issues, I’d argue that there remains some value with the term libertarian.
I don't think libertarian has ever been a well-known term. I doubt that it's any worse now than it ever was.
“fewer crimes”
Not sure how well that is documented, but the government is certainly counting on that impression; if it felt it was a statistic to watch, it would hardly be letting in these gang members whose affiliations are tattooed on their bodies, and for which there is evidently a cheat sheet. But it is letting them in, so it must feel the impression will be maintained no matter what happens.
I think a big divide between conservatism and libertarianism is that conservatives want to wield political power to achieve results.
I've read many a Reason think piece about how Christopher Rufo is evil, but he's the one getting things done. Conservatives are the ones winning office and passing school vouchers, not libertarians. If we get school vouchers (real school vouchers for everyone, not some means tested charter school thing only for poor blacks) it will likely be because the Rufo's of the world convince people that the alternative if your kids being exposed to LibsofTikTok. Not because of the same CATO paper that's been published for decades.
I watched a recent Peter Thiel interview in which he said he is no longer a libertarian because he realized that saying one was a libertarian was another way of saying "I don't want power and responsibility" which made it easier to fit in with leftists and not get into the messy business of politics.
This was readily apparent to me during COVID (conservatives fighting for freedom, DC libertarians MIA because desperate not to get TRUMP coded).
"I've read many a Reason think piece about how Christopher Rufo is evil, but he's the one getting things done."
It seems to me Christopher Rufo should be a libertarian hero, by helping gut DEI policies and getting universities back to focusing on what they are supposed to do.
The same is true of Ron DeSantis. He's taken a few things too far (such as agreeing to Florida's social media law), but almost everything he has done has been pro-libertarian. And as long as we have public schools, it is inevitable that government will get involved, so they are by definition not libertarian. So the attacks on him for the supposed "don't say gay bill" are silly, from the libertarian perspective anyway.
With regards to "using state power", something I've written about previously is that there are qualitatively different levels of doing so analogous to different levels of abstraction in the infrastructure of a society's legal system that require different kinds of analysis, but that people arguing in conservative-libertarian debates tend to fail to distinguish those levels and end up applying instincts and heuristics good for one level to another where they are not appropriate. Because of the inherent asymmetry between mandates and prohibitions, these qualitative differences apply even to acts which would seem at first glance to mirror each other, but which a more careful analysis would show to be operating at different scales of generality in the context. For example, no matter whether one judges either or both such acts to be good or bad, a state telling state universities *not* to discipline students for speech code violations is not in the same category of "use of state power" as that state forcing universities to be liable for student violations of a particular speech code.
Indeed. Conservatives often fall prey to the temptation to use power for good, when any use of power will inevitably turn to evil. They often forget that government having the power to punish those who you don't like will be used against them in the future. So when conservatives (or Republicans in general) take power at the federal level they very rarely do anything to reduce that power to avoid abuses in the future.
Conservatives having power made a dramatic difference during COVID which was very obvious to everyone.
Conservatives having power is why some states have school vouchers and some don't. Why some states build housing and some don't. Etc Etc.
Conservatives use power to improve things all the fucking time. I would love if conservatives took more power in my state.
You are missing the fundamental distinction between using/not using power vs. being in power i.e. holding public office. Conservatives being in power was indeed good with COVID because they generally didn't use power to enforce mandates, which is to say they didn't use power. Conservatives often do use power, or expand existing power to use, however, to deleterious effects. See the Patriot Act for instance. One can be in power but not use or create power to be used. The problem that conservatives have, which leftists have in spades, is the belief that if they use power to achieve some end it will work out because it is them forcing people to do what they want, forgetting at the very least that sooner or later someone else will be in power that will use that power in ways they don't like.
So again, big difference between being in power and using power. Generally you have to be in power to use power, but using power to achieve ends is generally a bad idea. The ideal conservative recognizes that government is not the solution, but the problem, and when in power reduces the power than those in power can use.
"Conservatives having power made a dramatic difference during COVID which was very obvious to everyone."
Well, some conservatives (Ron Desantis, the South Dakota governor whose name I'm blanking on at the moment) made a dramatic difference, but it was really a pro-libertarian outcome. Other conservatives (such as Mike Pence) and no compunction against using the government to enforce lockdowns for the supposed "common good."
I'm unaware of what state Mike Pence was Governor of.
Not only states, but even school boards ended up splitting completely on R vs D lines.
My own state got rid of masks in schools the day we elected a republican governor. I would go so to say that victory started a rollback of nearly all COVID restrictions (once the Dems realized it was a losing issue).
If AK really believes that the average person, especially the average man, does not prefer a state of affairs where he is busy and useful during the day - "drudgery" - and if that is what America must continue trending towards, then it seems to me we might as well eliminate public schooling altogether. If folks will not be working together in future, there's no need for the civic inculcation aspect. Neighborhood school or charter, who cares - is it possible to imagine there's some great difference?
(The charter schools down here seem weird and cultlike, the kids in their stupid bowties or whatnot, no open space to play on, often no schoolyard at all, no auditorium or even gym - frequently housed in windowless corrugated metal buildings, sometimes strip center retail space - they seem like hell in other words. You get a glimpse inside when those cringey videos of the charter school kid getting accepted at 67 schools (! - thus spending your time, applying to that many schools, being rather obviously disqualifying, intelligence-wise) turn up on the internet - no one who sees or reads about these places and cheers could possibly be conservative, so if charters are a win that's down to libertarians. And not in the sense of: choice is liberty. In the sense of, the governor's kinda-trashy buddy is going to make bank, or thinks he is, starting a network of charter schools, with a little rent-seeking help from his politico friends.)
This is a great moment to do it. You have the country's demographics changing in ways favorable to the idea. No one could be less interested in education than the arrivals of recent decades. They may miss the babysitting angle a bit but will otherwise not notice or care if all the schools closed tomorrow, it will not stop them coming over the border. And they'd not be wrong.
Your experience of charter schools is unfortunate. I have sent my kids to some really good charter schools that were just nicer public schools, although requiring a basic uniform and having much higher performance standards. It might well come down a lot to what the state and local laws look like, and what local people are willing to accept.
"A job is not something you should want to save".... Mostly but not entirely true. Some kinds of work are possibly intrinsic to The Good Life.
I think the big problem is that we encourage non-work while discouraging semi-skilled and other blue collar work to the extent that people who go into debt to attain very low paying dead end white collar jobs are esteemed above those who learn a skill and work at even pretty well paid blue collar jobs. Our sense of what is high and low status is really messed up, with honest, self supporting blue collar work being seen as only marginally above living off the state.
Voltaire had it right. Maybe religions or other charities can do a better job of putting the idle to constructive work than government can, but someone needs to be doing it. Our city streets are full of walking examples of what happens when it isn't done.
Conspicuously off the list of libertarian victories: gun rights, especially regarding concealed carry, have trended in the libertarian direction for the last couple of decades.
That's true. However, the progressive reaction has been, "Go ahead and see what we do to you if you ever try to use those gun rights or any deadly force where we are in charge. You'll claim self-defense, but we'll arrest you for murder."
The case of Jose Alba is revealing, and that was with a knife, a 61 year old with no criminal record defending himself from a 35 year old assailant. Months after the fiasco, insiders started leaking what really went down. Police and prosecutors saw the video and knew in the first 10 minutes what happened and that there was no basis for charging anything, but Bragg made it immediately racial-political, insisted on murder charge, and concocted the "fight risk" rationale never applied to any other suspect in similar circumstances (Alba had a plane ticket to vacation in his native country), to ask for $500k bail in a post-bail era (later bumped down to only $50k) and throw Alba in Riker's for a week until the other shop owners could help post bond. If Alba wasn't a Hispanic immigrant from the Dominican Republic he would have languished there, but since he was, the racial-political calculation flipped in his favor, and with the video having gone public, bodega owners pressed Mayor Adams to pressure Bragg to reverse. They waited as long as they could - over two weeks - before simply asking the judge to withdraw all charges and dismiss the case as they weren't going to even present before a grand jury which, as Tom Wolfe put it, will indict a ham sandwich. They rationale was that they looked at the evidence and realized there was no basis for the charge. But they had looked at the evidence on day one and knew that. So they said, "well, that video evidence was just over the edge of supporting a change of murder, at least in the second degree, but then when the medical examiner report came in, some precise detail about the depth of the laceration resulting from when Alba stabbed Martin in the neck convinced us that, no, whoops, drop all charges. 3.35 centimeters deep? Murder. 3.3 centimeters? Self-defense, have a nice day sir, sorry to bother you, we very much hope you enjoyed your brief stay with us at Rikers.
Who wants to go through that? Solving for equilibrium means a qualitative step down in urban quality of life, viability of retail business, and so forth, and so on.
Thumbs down. What someone "should" do is a moral question, independent of unjust laws. If Alba is charged, no honorable jury will convict him.
I think most of the points you claim to differ from libertarians on are points that libertarians have a fair bit of disagreement on amongst themselves.
Also, I think over-regulation is causing many of the issues with legalization/decriminalization of marijuana. When the black (and gray) markets provide a more favorable business climate than the legal market, the black market will dominate. This is what has happened in California, and to a large extent in Washington state.
Similarly, fentanyl became a problem after cracking down on heroin, which became a problem (this time around) after cracking down on prescription opioids. There are root causes to address beyond the drugs themselves.
Fentanyl history is a little more complicated. It was barely known in the US until the 70s long after state - and much later federal - efforts to control the older opioids. Courtwright's Dark Paradise has some good history on it. The federal level goes back plenty far too, plenty of anti-narcotic actions (when we got the term 'narcs') a century ago after the Harrison Act. Before fentanyl had ever been synthesized, the 1956 NCA said the penalty for selling heroin to a minor was death (the past is a foreign country).
Fentanyl became a problem because fentanyl was the solution. The solution to medical management of serious pain, for which purpose it is still the substance most widely used. It is a genuine miracle drug - astonishingly effective, potent, cheap, and, when used at small doses as prescribed and intended, works for the most people with the fewest side effects. But every single substance in that family (piperidine-ring- containing agonists of receptors related to pain) can be diverted and abused recreationally - by itself or, often, as an enhancer of other drugs - with people turning themselves into addicted junkies and overdosing often into medical crisis or death. Whichever of these substances is the most popular for medical use is going to be most popular for abuse, and this timing is technologically determined and has nothing to do with what one particular country decides to do with regards to shifts in drug policy.
There has been a lot of effort over half a century put into trying to discover an alternative family of substances that are just as effective but without these common severe downsides and my impression is that they have all led to dead ends, and our understanding of the nature of the biochemical basis of human pain gives plenty of reason to believe it's just not possible due to the inseparable integration of the components and systems involved. The solution to the problem won't be chemical and we are forced by nature to achieve it via social mechanisms. That's too bad. Our society is really good at chemistry and really bad at regulating people, but here we cannot play to our strengths and must cope with our weakness.
Edit: One important reason conservatives (or traditionalists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, whatever) like to look to the past for examples and models on what might work better for us is precisely because the balance of strengths was completely reversed for our ancestor cultures. That is, they didn't have much tech, and thus had to rely mostly on social mechanisms and institutions, and by necessity and facing extreme levels of external competitive pressure, had to get really good at it. These skills have suffered substantial atrophy in the past century almost in proportion to every technological innovation of an alternative substitute, in much the same manner that no one knows how to memorize a hundred phone numbers and street names (let alone entire epic poems) or use paper road maps or multiply large numbers in their head anymore because our smartphones do all that for us. Just as there is "Risk Homeostasis" and trying to make people safer encourages them to take more risks, there is also apparently "Organizational Capital Homeostasis" in that every new technology that comes out that is supposed to help manage people doesn't actually improve anything despite being useful because neutralized by managers getting worse at managing. And when something can't be fixed by that tech and needs solid management skill, there is no one left sufficiently competent to fix it.
School choice is nice but it will have almost no effect on student learning. Jarring as it sounds, American schools do about as well as can be expected. Because once you reach a certain minimum standard, which most of American schools do meet, there are really only two things that matter: how smart the kids are and how motivated they are.
Perhaps the major disappointment of modern life is that the first is not very changeable. Early "interventions" that seem to build up mental firepower largely fade away as the child grows.
To change the second would require wholesale changes in the curriculum, because young people simply are not interested in much of what is taught. We pretend that we can make it interesting. "Have better lesson plans." "Make your math problems about things they're interested in, like how many sneakers someone has, or how much money hip-hop artists make." That might make things 0.02 SDs better.
A colorful disturbing graph:
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1202722271418146817?lang=en
Allowing parents to sort into schools catering to kids with different levels of smarts and motivation would help quite a bit, along with different interests. School choice can provide finer tuned school experiences to match student capabilities in a way one size fits all public schools based merely on location can't.
"Allowing parents to sort into schools catering to kids with different levels of smarts and motivation" may well make the experience more pleasant for the actual consumers (as opposed to the customers, who in a choice system are generally the parents). But it won't do much for actual learning. I realize this is like saying there is no Santa Claus.
Today every charter school is severely constrained in what it can teach by individual state standards. A charter cannot decide, "Kids aren't much interested in this, and will probably never use it, so we won't even attempt to teach it." They must obey what the state education department says they are required to do.
Ok, a couple of points here.
1: Charter schools/school choice/vouchers or whatever, I am talking more about the overall idea. Actual implementations will vary that will adjust how things go, so if the state absolutely makes sure every school teaches exactly the same things in the same way, sure, there won't be a difference. That is likely to not be the main outcome, however.
2: Even if teaching the same basic subject matter there is a huge difference in how much time that takes, and thus what else can be taught. I could probably get my 10 year old to pass a GED test this year if I tried, and many college freshmen that I have seen have really bare bones knowledge. So if we allow schools that actually break kids up into cohorts based on the kids' capabilities those schools could teach kids at the top end everything the state requires and then have... what, 6 hours left in every day for whatever else is interesting?
3: Even if the only difference in outcomes is based on "all the parents who care take their kids out of School A and put them in School B because B is slightly better" that's still better if only because it demonstrates that School B is doing something better concretely (consumer choice) and because it allows students to get out of a worse school. The absolute worst thing one can do for education is give the state a monopoly on it.
1.) The states don't "make[s] sure every school teaches exactly the same things in the same way". But they do tell every school, you must teach X, Y, Z ... and there are a lot of those letters.
A major, almost unknown outside the business, force for uniformity are regional accreditation agencies. Here in New England, most every school every tenth year goes through a NEASC (New England Association of Schools and Colleges) Review. The teachers have to gather all sorts of information, submit it to NEASC, and then have a site visit. The NEASC team will then send back a report with many, many "suggestions" for improvement. You will have to report back on what you have done to implement the suggestions. Only then will they decide whether to renew your accreditation. You will not be surprised that most of what the team is looking for is well within education orthodoxy.
If you want to, say, decline to have a school library, and instead use the town library and the internet, figuring that will be important after students graduate, the team will inform you that you have to have a library with a certain number of volumes, a certain number of which have to have been published after a certain year.
2) Yes, tracking would speed some students through. It would also have a "disparate impact".
3) In lots of places, the high school is "where everybody goes" because people want to be with their friends. It's also a Schelling Point, with locals caring about the football team and the softball team. Most parents don't have the ability to tell if one school is "slightly better" than another. They are remarkably satisfied with where their children go. Maybe that would change with a thoroughgoing market for choice but right now, most parents would stand pat.
I mean, look, yea there are things that make it harder depending on where you are. But what's the alternative? Just abolishing the public school system root and branch is my first best preference, but I don't see that as being more likely than getting a decent school choice option. I also don't see abolishing the public school system as more likely than getting a decent school choice option and abolishing the NEASC.
And yea, it would have disparate impact. There are a lot of problems to be fixed in our society, aren't there?
You are missing a bit of a point, though: parents do care about where their kids go, and that is why the real estate prices in good school districts are bonkers compared to similarly situated areas without good school districts. Conditional on having already moved to the school and put their kids there, yes, parents poll as being satisfied with where their children go, but that's because they already made the choice about what school district they are willing to pay for.
Now, you tell parents "You can live wherever in the area and still send your kids to whatever school you can deliver them to" and you will see real estate prices equalize across areas right quick (controlling for other factors).
The answer to the question, "what's the alternative?" requires answering two other questions first, "what results do I want from schools?" and "what can schools actually do?" Unfortunately, the answer to the second question often frustrates the answer to the first question.
To admit this is depressing. If you are in the business or in advocacy, it can even take away your reason for living.
To repeat my mantra: good students make good schools; good schools don't make good students. Parents pay ridiculous house prices to live in an area with good students. Unless you can equalize where good students are, you will not equalize real estate prices.
Charter schools are indeed better than nothing, but charter schools are not “school choice”.
I agree. Unlimited "school choice" would be a lot freer than today's charter schools. But most of what gets debated in state legislatures under the term "school choice" about charter schools and allowing transferring between existing public schools. Every one of those schools is "severely constrained in what it can teach by individual state standards."
“School choice is nice but it will have almost no effect on student learning. Jarring as it sounds, American schools do about as well as can be expected. Because once you reach a certain minimum standard, which most of American schools do meet, there are really only two things that matter: how smart the kids are and how motivated they are.”
Well imo just because what you say in your last sentence is clearly *directionally* true does NOT mean that true school choice would have no impact on student learning.
At minimum, it would mean parents who don’t want their children leftist ideologized in school could send their kids to schools that don’t do this. Eliminating this negative and restoring the hours to actual learning alone would help
Further, given that test scores have gone down over time, and I don’t believe anyone has shown that this is *entirely* because of student quality, there is no doubt in my mind that the average education at the average K-12 school has gone down over the last 30 years.
Certainly, anything that is removed from teaching leaves time for something else--though it is important not to fall for the seemingly obvious "more taught" means "more learned". It doesn't. I gather that "removing my kids from left-wing propaganda" is a reason many people have for home-schooling. If there were enough parents that felt strongly enough, they could organize a non-lefty charter school, or pay someone else to organize one.
Test scores have gone down somewhat, but not a lot. My personal suspicion is that it's a combination of COVID, young people's decreasing attention span and increasing hunger to be entertained, and the changing mix of school children (a polite way of saying fewer white kids).
Test scores have been going down for decades; they dropped much more during COVID, for very obvious reasons.
Its fine to say people can home school - organizing their own charter school is an absurd suggestion - and a few do, but most do not have the time or capability to do that.
As I said, I agree that you are directionally correct with your claim (that outcomes can only go up so much with better schooling), but claiming that they wouldn’t go up in any meaningful way is misplaced. The test score data over time alone is powerful evidence of this.
My charter school hypothetical was meant to show that school choice could have some effect. But as you say, it would be minimal. I was responding to something you said that I thought was over-optimistic, "At minimum, it [school choice] would mean parents who don’t want their children leftist ideologized in school could send their kids to schools that don’t do this." That only works if those other schools exist.
The decline in test scores is certainly evidence that test scores can go up in some meaningful way. It would be "powerful evidence" if the underlying population was staying the same. But it's not. Not at all. Today's population is a population with less potential.
Even with a the population that is changing, declining test scores would be "powerful evidence" that schools now do something considerably worse (and thus could reverse that and change for the better) if test scores went down a lot. But they didn't.
P.S. you can look community by community at test scores in suburban counties and see declines that exceed any changes in demographics, so while I do not deny that demographics surely play some role in declining test scores, there is no way they explain most of it. And surely you have no hard evidence that they do.
We will have to agree to disagree. But be clear when I said school choice, I meant true school choice, including any private school, not just government charter schools.
And of course until such a voucher system existed, it is very difficult to get many such schools to exist to compete with the taxpayer funded, free to consumer government monopoly schools.
Milwaukee alone provides evidence - if not conclusive proof, I grant - that school choice funded by vouchers can indeed lead to better outcomes. Of course some meaningful portion of this is selection bias, but you surely cannot show that it is primarily or totally selection bias.
Kids in the worst public schools in particular deserve better.
Fair enough. The drum I keep banging is that "how good a school is is largely determined by how smart and motivated the students are--and that the schools cannot do much to change student intelligence or motivation." No one wants to believe this. Education research rarely tries to measure either of them, so the hypothesis is basically not tested.
Even if I might be persuaded that some of your argument is correct, and even if your claim that public American schools do about as well as could be expected in suburbia, you undermine your own claim there by pointing out the motivation (and associated habits) point. Your claim that most urban public schools do this adequately is prima facie preposterous.
I am saying that students bring in motivation and that given the prescribed curriculum, schools can't do much to increase students' motivation.
I'm not just saying that suburban schools "do about as well as can be expected." I am saying that almost all American schools do. The fact that lots of kids leave severely lacking in intellectual skills and knowledge is sad but can't really be changed much. I know, awful. So how can I say that? Only the entire history of American schools. Sure, a century ago, high school graduates did better than today. But less than half the age group even went to high school.
Of course I am prepared to accept the Null Hypothesis. But we could get the same outcomes spending a lot less money. And with a lot less left-wing dogma built into the system.
School choice won't give you the same results with less money, but a lot more. Public schools have economies of scale.
Besides, the major drivers of school costs are disabled kids and immigrants, both protected by a lot of federal law and court cases.
All school choice will do is increase spending. And get no better results. Meanwhile, like most school choice proponents you ignore the actually expensive and wasteful spending.
Perhaps. But, and this is going to sound terribly pessimistic, one of the unique things about education is that by definition, the consumers don't know what education is (they are, after all, uneducated), and the potential customers, the parents, often feel they don't really either. Education is wonderful and somewhat mysterious and who knows what it is? Why the professional educators. So at least for a while, any new system is going to use much of the same personnel with the same mind-sets doing much the same thing they always did.
Maybe you could convince the parents that care that you have a significantly better way. But it's going to be an uphill battle.
“ I'm not just saying that suburban schools ‘do about as well as can be expected.’ I am saying that almost all American schools do.”
I understand that is exactly what you’re saying. And I think what you’re saying is wrong, and dangerous.
Even though I probably agree with you that for, say, 80% of students the outcomes in today’s inner-city schools might not be that different even with a superior system. But for the 20% (or 15% or 7% or 35%, none of us can know for sure) that would have better outcomes, your essential answer that we might as well just leave the current terrible system as it is, is imo monstrous.
And no, you can only say what you say based on the history of American *public* schools, and mostly only from the last 50-65 years. Prior to that, results were clearly better than they were 25 years ago, and far better than they are today.
Go watch the season of the The Wire - imo the greatest TV series ever - about Baltimore public schools, and then tell me again that nothing at all can be changed for the better
". But for the 20% (or 15% or 7% or 35%, none of us can know for sure) that would have better outcomes, your essential answer that we might as well just leave the current terrible system as it is, is imo monstrous."
What you need to understand is that "better" in these cases would still be below average. We aren't missing any diamonds. There aren't even kids of average intelligence testing below average. Our schools catch those.
I realize this may be distressing to you, but The Wire is not a documentary. And even given that it's not a documentary, at no point does it suggest that any of the kids in school are actually smart.
"Prior to that, results were clearly better than they were 25 years ago, and far better than they are today."
This is utter nonsense. You can't seriously believe that schools were doing *better* before 65 years ago. That's demonstrably untrue. Never mind that we weren't educating blacks, or that we didn't bother educating immigrants unless they wanted to be educated. In 1960, the *white* high school completion rate was 43%, and the black completion rate was just over 20%. In the 1950s, only 1 in 4 kids took algebra and only 1 in 10 took geometry.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
It is an article of faith among many, on the left and on the right, that the current system of public schools is "terrible". And therefore major changes must be made which will improve things majorly. I am saying that no changes possible today would make much difference in the way of student achievement. Certainly, some schools could be more orderly, and I'm assuming that's a major problem with the schools portrayed in The Wire. I have never seen it. I have been told it is exceptionally well-done. But it is a work of fiction.
Comparing now and, say, 1955, I am not at all sure that the results from the "colored" schools in Little Rock, Arkansas back then were any better than the results from the public schools in Chicago today. I am also fairly sure that the results from Great Neck, New York back then were not any better than the results there today (both very good).
I wanted to add a different opinion on non-profits. I reckon it is still a voluntary association of people and resources, and you can get the same problems at large scale that we get in gov't and for-profits - inefficiencies, bureaucracies, spin, bad incentives.
But I reckon it's a very important type of organization that we wouldn't want to do away with and that for-profits can't replace. Sure, there are many non-profits that really don't move the needle on whatever cause or desired outcome they want to produce and they stick around because they can come up with proof of SOME impact and convince donors that they're delivering enough value.
But here are some non-profits where I just don't see any effective for-profit or gov't substitute:
1) my local marching band booster foundation - volunteer parents raising money to pay for new uniforms, flags, props, instruments, transportation and food during competition season...I've been a part of many of these kinds of non profits- supporting a student program. I don't see a for-profit solution for this.
2) And here's a non-profit I'm following that seems be helping solve a tragedy of the commons:
Have a look at https://theoceancleanup.com/ => they're cleaning plastic and trash out of the ocean and rivers. I wonder if a for-profit could come up with a business model to do what they are doing? Would anyone pay a for-profit to clean up international waters? Don't non-profits have the potential to deliver value in the place of government.
3) Another role for non-profits: I reckon for a healthy society, you need watchdogs on ALL concentrations of power, whether government, for-profit or non-profit (think Institute for Justice, Pacific Legal Foundation). Is there a business model for this that would perform better, have better incentives long term?
You don’t have to do away with non-profits at all; the issue is which of them deserve tax-deductible status for donations. I am pretty much right with AK on that point.
I think that the weakness of many libertarians on crime would be my most significant area of discontentment with the movement. I'm not sure where most non-conservative libertarians stand on the post-covid and post-George Floyd crime wave. Specifically, the role that Soros-funded DAs like George Gascon, Chesa Boudin, Kim Foxx, Larry Krasner, and Alvin Bragg have played in firing career criminal prosecutors, setting overly lenient bails and plea bargaining, and just generally not enforcing the law. I remember when the justification for drug decriminalization was that it would free up law enforcement to focus predominantly on felonies and violent crimes. Instead, the broken windows theory has been vindicated. There is just an embarrassing lack of law and order in American cities now purely because of bad policies that have undone two decades of consistently declining crime rates pre-covid.
The anarcho-capitalists are against government-sponsored police, but the rest of libertarians - be it we classical liberals, or the Ayn Rand Objectivist types - have always supported police as one of the undeniably legitimate and necessary functions of government.
Leftists are 100% responsible for “defund the police” and DAs that don’t enforce the law; libertarians ain’t the ones responsible for this issue, whatever other legit beefs you have with libertarian ideology on other aspects of crime.
I know that libertarians aren't responsible, they have virtually no political power at all so they aren't responsible for really any policies whether they are good or bad. I am just wondering where the median Reason Magazine or Cato Institute type of libertarian stands on these issues now. From what I recall, most libertarians in the 2010s were against drug laws and laws against "victimless crimes", harsh sentencing, and mass incarceration. Cato's Freedom in the 50 States project uses it as a metric of overall freedom as well. https://www.freedominthe50states.org/incarceration
We are almost entirely agreeing that many libertarians stands are left of center on all the issues you enumerate; so-called mass incarceration being the one on which there is probably the greatest range of positions among libertarians.
I agree with Cato on most other issues, but differ with them on at least some of their stands on crime. They do indeed have some power and were partly responsible for the one imo net bad piece of legislation Trump pushed through on “criminal justice reform”.
I am saying only that not just the median but the large majority of libertarians are against “defund the police”, and the overwhelming majority are against DAs who don’t enforce basic existing victim-based laws like shoplifting, car theft, etc.
These stands are not the slightest bit inconsistent with being “soft” on drugs, prostitution, and even being soft on drug crime sentences or overall sentences for non-violent crimes.
I could be ok with being soft on (most) drugs while being hard on the question of keeping urban public spaces safe, secure, clean, not smelling like skunk-quality weed, and free of beggars, vagrants, and junkie encampments. I've often said that I would be a lot more sympathetic to such advocacy if they could offer me this "package deal" to allay my worries. Alas, "they won't fix it first", and the typical advocate likes to insist against all reason that these intimately-connected matters are separable and should be discussed in isolation as matters of abstract principle. I don't think the intellectual equivalent of asking everyone to don horse blinders constitutes a valid framework for debate at all.
I see ways to solve the second problem that you don't. For instance, we could make drug possession and use legal inside a private home with the resident's permission, thus allowing the police open season against "homeless" junkies. We could also have cities start privatizing parks and other public spaces by letting neighborhood associations take them over, thus allowing them to hire guards and expel those who steal or make messes.
Something like this had better happen before all our cities are wrecked and become permanent Third World horribles.
There are million things that might work if the people in charge wanted to fix the issue, but they don't. So there is no point trying to come up with clever proposals that don't involve kicking those people out of power. In math there are seemingly simple problems that one can prove are "X- complete", that is, actually as hard to solve as some very hard X. And in policy the analogy is a "Regime-Change Complete Problem".
People mistakenly think they could solve the seemingly small, local problem with some clever, simple proposal. But they are missing the forest for the trees when they forget that the problem exists because significant power actively resists and will thus react to neutralize and crush any possible simple solution. This is why so much intellectual discourse and political debate is just incredibly stupid and wearisome, because norms of permissible discourse constrain aspiring reformers precisely to the zone of reforms which can't reform anything.
Arnold has mentioned a few times that there is no compensation system intended to motivate employees that can work for long because eventually everyone figures out how to game the system and starts deviating from what you want them to do, and then, even worse, the whole corporate culture and organizational capital degenerates as the gaming culture sets in like cement in ways that generate their own "constituencies" and are hard to reverse and repair once established. So, periodically, you just need to reset the system to put everyone's game-playing skills back at square 1 and never give them enough time to figure out the new game before they get surprised with yet another new and different one.
Well, our whole ideological-political order and system of government has gotten itself stuck in one of those system-gaming bad equilibria where the hold on and use of power can no longer be controlled and contained by the means originally intended and implemented in the design of the rules of the game. Don't hate the players, hate the game, or, at least, don't only hate the players. When a social problem is at root caused by the insulation that system-gaming provides to these incumbents from that problem, it's time for a new system they will try to stop from happening, and so every problem boils down to being able to defeat the incumbents entirely at the level above the current game, that is, all the way up.
My smart-ass take on immigration policy is we should have open borders: for attractive young women.
How dare you not be an extremist libertarian!
I agree with most of your takes. Including that overturning Roe v Wade (which was of course correct as a matter of constitutional law) has not been a big win.
I disagree only with your assertion that it should be completely left to the woman to choose. Abortion at 37 weeks is murder. The whole point here is that the unborn child has rights too. Elected representatives of the people *should* be making the decisions. Anti-libertarian Europe has for the most part gotten this correct. Had there been no judicial activism with Roe v. Wade in the first place, it is very likely we would have as well.
Alternatively, a constitutional Roe v Wade ruling would have said clearly that a woman does indeed have a more or less complete right to privacy in the 1st trimester, a viable fetus (a.k.a “third trimester”) has almost universal protection against murder except extreme health risk to the mother, and in between states can regulate as they see fit, and Congress has no right to regulate this issue at all.
I still hold out mild hope that some future Court will make this sane, constitutional ruling that is 100% consistent with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I agree. The irony of Roe v. Wade is that most states right now would probably have more lenient abortion laws like Europe had the Burger Court not falsely ruled that there was a constitutional right to abortion. My understanding is that there was hardly a pro-life movement at all prior to Roe v. Wade.
I think Dr. Kling is missing the key point in Dobbs: the Supreme Court returned abortion to the political process in the states, which is where it belongs. Roe (not Rowe) was a terrible decision as a matter of legal drafting - it concocted a federal constitutional right to a procedure that was generally illegal at the time of both the Founding and the ratification of the 14th Amendment (which is more or less where abortion rights ended up being rooted by Casey, decades later). You can't get a better example of the Supreme Court legislating than Roe - it struck down laws in almost every state. Regardless of whether one is pro-choice or pro-life, if one is pro-federalism (which is a good libertarian position), abortion is a matter for the states. For anyone interested in the background to the abortion debate, I highly recommend reading the superb book, The Family Roe, which traces the histories of the various people involved in abortion on all sides and does so very fairly (the author is pro-choice). Puts a real human face on every aspect of the case. For those interested in the legal issues, there's no substitute for wading through Roe, Casey v. Planned Parenthood (a case in which the SCT tried to make sense of Roe without overruling it), and Dobbs itself. The many opinions on all sides of those cases make really interesting reading. IMHO, Dobbs got it right -this is an issue for the states to deal with. For a fascinating discussion of whether Roe mattered, Gerard Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope (which critiques the idea that the SCT is the place to get social change) has a mixed verdict on it. (He's pro-choice as well and unhappy with Dobbs). Really thought-provoking about courts vs legislatures as where change belongs.
There is no doubt you are at barest minimum mostly correct re: constitutionality and judicial activism overreach of Roe, and therefore that Dobbs was correct as a matter of constitutional law and federalism, and I doubt that Kling would argue with you there much, if at all.
I took his point that as a matter of election politics the Dobbs decision has been a net loser for the right of center in this country, regardless of one’s position on what policy re: abortion should be. And it’s really hard to argue that he’s wrong there.
I agree - the right seemed to have no plan for when they achieved their goal. But the point on which libertarians should defend Dobbs is as a decision about federalism and the limits of the federal courts. Those are important libertarian values.
As one active on the Right, I would say you are mostly wrong about us having no plan. Most of the pro-life movement is still active but now at the local level, seeking to get extremely bad state laws (like CA and NY which now allow post-birth "abortions") voted out or overturned.
But at the national level the itopic is a waste of time, because anything Congress does on it will and should be overturned.
The pro-life activists may well have had a strategy for post-Dobbs in terms of firuther promoting their priority issue,, but the right overall, including specifically the politicians and consultants responsible for winning elections, has not.
And the simple fact remains that the total ban wins that the pro-life activists have attained (and I have no doubt genuinely believe in) in states controlled by the GOP have clearly hurt GOP elections results in other states. Whether or not they have hurt GOP election results within some of those states I cannot say.
Libertarianism to me is more principle than ideology. Not just political language but syntax. If politics is tribal competition, libertarianism limits the scope of the wins as well as the losses. So it will never be a winning tribe because it's not tribal and knows its wins are provisional. But we can't afford to lose the principle.
Politics is a tribal sport whether you like the fact or not. Arguments about principle will always be misused and abused by all sides.
“I do not think that drug legalization achieves what it is supposed to achieve.” How about eliminating the federal prohibition, and putting this to the voters in each state, county and city?
Agreed, the tension between state level legalization and federal prohibition is really making for some awkward dynamics. Legal sellers can't get banking, for instance, due to federal regulation and pressure.
Agreed.
States, counties, and cities already have a variety of drug and alcohol laws. Repealing federal prohibition is enough because it will throw the decision back to them where it always belonged.
Well, for consumption I agree 100% that it should be a state issue. But for drugs coming across national borders, in practice there needs to be a federal role to keep out supply, at least for the most destructive drugs, no?
Why can't state governments enforce their borders just as effectively or better than the federal government? Each federal border is also a state border correct?
Your second statement/question is true but mostly irrelevant. If, e.g. AZ is fairly lax on hard drugs but IA is not, the fact that the federal border is a state border is meaningless.
The problem with your first question/assertion is that thankfully we don’t police interstate border crossings in this country.
Now, if you want to argue that supply interdiction should simply not be a part of the fight against cartels and hard drugs, and we should simply do law enforcement where laws are violated, that *is* indeed a perfectly reasonable argument. But I don’t think it’s one that more than 50% of your fellow citizens would agree with, at least for certain classes of drugs for which the vast majority of the supply comes from other countries.
Personally, if we had the proper border security that we lack today, I’d be ok with legal transportation across that border of properly revealed/regulated drugs that were explicitly legal in a given state if combined with just minimal tracking that the drugs in question were transported directly to that state, as a libertarian-ish middle ground.
It is disappointing that you give “celebrating alternative sexual identity” as a libertarian position (with which you disagree), rather than *allowing* alternative sexual identity. Conflating *allowing* with *celebrating* is a standard invalid move of critics of libertarianism.
Strongly disagree. So long as the LGBT movement was merely about legalizing gay sex in private, there was no libertarian objection to it. Creating gay marriage and requiring every state to recognize it in law made that debatable. But today people are being persecuted for making fun of men who pretend to be women, or for just not going along with the pretense themselves. That persecution is anti-liberty and has to stop. I'll use the pronouns I want. And still worse, pervs who want to violate women's privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms or to talk our children into sterilizing themselves for life are pretending ithey have a civil right. It's their targets who do.
In the EconLog era there were a bunch of interesting posts by AK on this subject. This one for example: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/libertarianisma.html
I'm more partial to Wilkinson, but YMMV.