Archives: January 2009

Murray Rothbard’s obscure case for the obvious

Libertarians are not doing themselves a favor by taking on the burden of proof to argue for something that most people take for granted. Bryan Caplan makes a similar point about Murray Rothbard’s defense of “libertarian rights:”

I object that anything that people do is ipso facto “natural,” so there’s no way you’re going to get moral precepts out of this.  But in any case, all this talk violates the fundamental rule of philosophical reasoning (indeed, all reasoning): You don’t use the obscure to argue for the obvious.  It’s silly to say, “Murder violates man’s nature, so murder is wrong,” when you can just say, “Murder is wrong.”

As Caplan rightly observes, Rothbard is on much firmer ground when he points out that “government habitually perform actions which almost everyone would admit were wrong if they were committed by a private individual.” The strength of such an argument is that it just confines itself to demonstrating that most people hold incoherent views. This position is even available to people who do not believe in human rights at all.

A persuasive case against libertarian “natural rights” philosophy has been made by L.A. Rollins in his book The Myth of Natural Rights (review here). The social philosopher Anthony de Jasay uses the framework of critical rationalism to argue for the presumption of liberty.

Karl Popper’s authoritarian social technologies

Karl Popper is known for his influential contributions to the philosophy of science and critical rationalism.  Unfortunately, his attempt to apply critical rationalism to political philosophy produced writings of a more impatient and dubious nature. For example, in 1960 Popper wrote:

..the empiricist’s questions ‘How do you know? What is the source of your assertion?’ are wrongly put. They are not formulated in an inexact or slovenly manner, but they are entirely misconceived; they are questions that beg for an authoritarian answer…They can be compared with that traditional question of political authority, ‘Who should rule’, which begs for an authoritarian answer such as ‘the best’, ‘or ‘the wisest’, or ‘the people’, or ‘the majority’…This political question is wrongly put and the answers which it elicits are paradoxical. It should be replaced by a completely different question such as ‘How can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers…cannot do too much damage?’ I believe that only by changing our question in this way can we hope to proceed towards a reasonable theory of political institutions.

Popper’s reformulated question simply takes for granted that we need a mechanism of collective choice  to revolve conflicts between people and produce public goods.  Not only that, as a social democrat he did not just restrict government to such a role but expected it to fight “evil” and “suffering:”

We must construct social institutions, enforced by the power of the state, for the protection of the economically weak from the economically strong. The state must see to it that nobody need enter into an inequitable arrangement… (in: The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1962)

As a hardline political consequentialist, Popper proposed his idea of  “piecemeal social engineering”  to generate a “social technology” to improve the world we live in. As such, he places himself in a long tradition of activist philosophers who take a look at society, conclude that it can be “improved”, and advocate collective choice mechanisms to discover and implement such changes. Fortunately, Popper’s political views have been subjected to a rigorous critical dissection by the social philosopher Anthony de Jasay in his article The Twistable is not Testable: Reflections on the Political Thought of Karl Popper (reprinted in Against Politics).

Popper’s question about “organizing our political institutions” should be replaced with questions that do not assume that the issue of government has been settled. Such questions  may include ‘Can conflicts about scarce resources be resolved without resorting to non-unanimous decision making’ or ‘Can public goods be provided without coercion?’ One attempt to reconcile Popper’s anti-justificatory critical rationalism and anarchism is Jan Lester’s book Escape From Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare, and Anarchy Reconciled.

Barack Obama versus Michael Bakunin

There are great expectations about the ability of academics to shape society by “smart” policies. The anarchist Michael Bakunin had not much useful to say about economics but he was a realistic observer of intellectuals and power:

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with legislation for and the organisation of society, and that, inspired only by the purest love of truth, it frames none but the laws in absolute harmony with the latest discoveries of science. Well, I maintain, for my part, that such legislation and such organisation would be a monstrosity, and that for two reasons: first, that human science is always and necessarily imperfect, and that, comparing what it has discovered with what remains to be discovered, we may say that it is still in its cradle. So that were we to try to force the practical life of men, collective as well as individual, into strict and exclusive conformity with the latest data of science, we should condemn society as well as individuals to suffer martyrdom on a bed of Procrustes, which would soon end by dislocating and stifling them, life ever remaining an infinitely greater thing than science.

The second reason is this: a society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending – such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of those missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits. It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy.

But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible – namely that a scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were composed of the most illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed them, such is the history of all academies. The greatest scientific genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially licenced savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his spontaneity, his revolutionary hardihood, and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what he loses in power of  thought. In a word, he becomes corrupted.

Crass Keynesianism

A recurrent comment about public policies inspired by Keynesian economics is that they are crass or vulgar. Instead of seeing a complicated  and unpredictable interplay of individuals pursuing their own ends, society is perceived as a giant machine (“the economy”) that needs to be manipulated to produce specific policy outcomes (“economic growth”).  Public policies inspired by Keynesian economics do not hesitate to interfere with what many people would consider completely private matters such as how much to save or spend.

Whereas traditional Marxism still aspired to replace the government of people with the administration of things, no such hopes exist in Keynesian economics (or its more recent incarnation, New Keynesian Economics) which mandates continuous government intervention. It is not hard to notice the similarity between such a perspective and  modern liberalism, which requires a similar activist role for government. Both philosophies feel uncomfortable with traditions, conventions, or deontological constraints that limit complete control of the building blocks of society.

It remains a mystery why progressives seem to prefer Keynesian economics to free market economics. Whereas advocates of free markets usually leave decisions about labor, spending, and consumption to the individual, Keynesian public policy makers routinely encourage consumption for consumption’s sake. One wonders how progressives reconcile their critique of consumerism and predatory advertising  with such grandiose plans to stimulate the economy. To be fair, some advocates of liberty have embraced the same paradigm, producing a parallel form of “crass libertarianism”. In such philosophies a person and his property should be respected  not because not doing so constitutes a tort, but because freedom produces “growth.”

A recent publication that focuses on the cultural dimensions of economic paradigms is  Jörg Guido Hülsmann’s Deflation and Liberty, in which prevailing monetary dogmas are reviewed as an expression of  interests and power. A reading of this work in light of James M. Buchanan’s collection Ethics and Economic Progress, which presents an economic case for hard work and saving, will be attempted on this blog in the future.

Pavlov’s dogs of stimulus

In his latest column “To Spend or Not to Spend,” Anthony de Jasay discusses the current plans to borrow and spend our way out of economic recession. A central place in such policy proposals is taken by the renewed enthusiasm for Keynesian economics, a school of economic thinking that appears to have been formulated for activist politicians (which raises some interesting questions about the relationship between the popularity of economic “ideologies” and policy needs). Keynesian economics raises some serious epistemological problems and questions about the ability of  its recommended policies to produce predictable and consistent effects. As de Jasay writes:

…for all its admirable originality and inner consistency the Keynesian system has notorious faults. Perhaps the principal one is that it holds out an open invitation to lesser Keynesians to treat the economy as a complex machine made of rigid Meccano parts whose mechanical properties are fixed and known. There is the propensity to consume, the marginal efficiency of capital, liquidity preference and so forth, great impersonal data that make the whole economy move in certain ways when they move—but why do they move? It is all macro and no micro. It is too easy to forget that the data are the sums of human decisions subject to human expectations and they change as expectations change. The eminent Polish economist and statesman Leszek Balcerovicz holds that the authors of fiscal stimulus packages must be taking people for Pavlov’s dogs who react predictably to signals because they live by conditioned reflexes and not by calculating reason.

In the January 12, 2009 issue of the American Conservative, David Gordon reviews Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 and wonders why price adjustments in the market should not be allowed to “solve” the recession instead of engaging in a new round of interventions that set the stage for another  bust, and so forth. But why does the economy face collapse at all? Gordon quotes from Krugman’s own work to support the Austrian Business Cycle Theory [ABCT]. Over at the Ludwig von Mises website, Juan Ramón Rallo Julián presents a case that “the current crisis fits perfectly with how Austrian economists have explained these events since the beginning of the 20th century.”