Archives: March 2009

The positive external effects of stimulus

Some politicians have expressed great frustration over the fact that not all countries are doing their part in engaging in deficit spending and/or manipulating the money supply to stimulate “the economy.” It is not difficult to imagine how such a perspective will invariably culminate in complaints that countries that have not done enough to stimulate the economy are “free riding” on the policies of other countries.  This, in turn, will increase demands for international  policy “coordination” or  increased transfer of power to supranational organizations.  There is a striking parallel between this kind of reasoning and the rationale for making forced contributions to public goods. As Anthony de Jasay has noted in his book Social Contract, Free Ride:

The high road to coercion is the contractarian pretension that acceptance by a person of a share in a benefit he did not solicit is tantamount to his tacit acceptance of an obligation to provide a share of the corresponding contribution in the same way as those who did solicit the benefit.

One of Russell Kirk’s 10 conservative principles is to “pay attention to the principle of variety…as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.” Another is to “uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism” because “when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger.“

The increased calls for coordination, harmonization, and centralization as expressed in appeals for more authority for the federal government, the European Union, and international monetary organizations and the attacks on “harmful” tax havens and free-riding countries constitute the elements of a renewed enthusiasm for increased uniformity and less diversity.

Recommended reading:  The Political Economy of the Antifederalists (PDF)

John Rawls and the sin of merit

For those who have always suspected a strong religious undertone in the writings of John Rawls, the following piece by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel will come as a revelation. Reflecting on Rawls’s senior thesis “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An interpretation based on the concept of community” they write:

…the moral and social convictions that the thesis expresses in religious form are related in complex and illuminating ways to the central ideas of Rawls’s later writings on moral and political theory.

Most illuminating is the continuity between Rawls’s older and later views on merit:

He sides with Augustine in denying that we can earn salvation by our own merit – by freely choosing virtue, or by works of any kind: “There is no merit before God. Nor should there be merit before Him. True community does not count the merits of its members. Merit is a concept rooted in sin, and well disposed of.

It should be no surprise then that some writers have identified Rawls as a cryptocalvinist:

My contention is that Rawls is not a philosopher, but a minister. Like his Calvinist forebears, he is trying to establish the kingdom of God on Earth. Unlike them, he doesn’t admit it….The great engineering problem of designing a system in which fallible humans can govern each other and get along simply does not exist in Rawls’ philosophy.

In another post the author proposes “the “ultracalvinist hypothesis”:

the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called “progressive,” “multiculturalist,” “universalist,” “liberal,” “politically correct,” etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.

This perspective reflects a respectable Nietzschean tradition in which modern liberalism and socialism are not departures of religious thinking but the logical culmination of a religious / communitarian mindset. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this phenomenon is the highly puritan nature of contemporary “political correctness. “

John Rawls is often associated with rationalism but the concept of rationally in Rawls’s work is not that of the classical economist but that of the pre-Hobbesian moralist. His work offers little if any contribution to the scientific study of human nature or human interaction.

HT Marginal Revolution

Cold analytical reasoning

In his remarks (PDF) introducing Liberale Vernunft, Sociale Verwirrung, a selection of  essays translated in German, Anthony de Jasay contrasts his approach of critical analysis of modern liberalism with futile attempts to justify a strict liberal alternative by appealing to arbitrary values and emotions.

On taking the counter-offensive, I should also like to see it use the weapon and the mode of combat that gives liberalism an advantage over its adversaries: cold analytical reasoning instead of rhetorical appeals to “values” and the emotions they ignite. Rhetoric about the love of freedom, free enterprise and individual responsibility will never beat appeals to “positive rights”, fair shares and social solidarity. But demonstration of the faulty logic or the brazen arbitrariness that underlies these slogans may beat them, not so much in the minds of the general public, but in the minds of those young academic teachers and journalists who will be decisive in shaping the minds of the general public of the future.

In a recent piece on social justice The Library of Economics and Liberty Jasay writes that no case for the presumption of equality can be made in analogy with the presumption of liberty:

There is not even a presumption of equality based on some asymmetry between equality and inequality in the same way as there is a logically derivable presumption for liberty, for title to possessions and for innocence. All the latter are based on claims to the contrary being verifiable but not falsifiable, hence on the burden of proof lying squarely with the accusation that can verify and not with the defence that cannot falsify the accusation.

No such asymmetry favours an equal distribution of goods, nor an unequal one. You can say that the distribution is to be equal unless sufficient reason is brought why it should be unequal. But you can no less sensibly say that it should be unequal unless sufficient reason is brought why it should be equal. The two statements are formally equivalent.

As Jasay sees it, equality is not a fact of life, nor a demand of reason.