In the wake of the Brexit vote, here are my thoughts. I view the issue primarily from a libertarian perspective, which means a bias in favor of free trade and free movement and a bias against centralized bureaucracy.
1. The actual Brexit vote, as I interpret it (and I make no claim to expertise at reading voters’ minds) seemed to rest mostly on hostility to free trade and free movement, with some hostility toward centralized bureaucracy. And if you have not already followed my recommendation and read Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, the Brexit vote is another reason you should.
2. I think that a common currency is a good thing. As readers of my new book will realize, I don’t subscribe to the sort of monetarist macroeconomics that would lead one to say otherwise.
3. I think that freedom of movement is a good thing. Border checkpoints are a bad thing.
4. However, you have to think about how to reconcile freedom of movement with welfare-state benefits. The libertarian approach is to get rid of the welfare-state benefits. A less radical approach is to clarify which benefits are limited to citizens and specify the qualifications for becoming a citizen.
5. As for terrorism coming from immigrants, it seems that we can choose two of the following three: privacy, open borders, and security. I am willing to toss out privacy, as long as the government actors providing security are not themselves able to hide what they are doing. Few card-carrying libertarians would agree with this view. Before you blast away at it, read or re-read David Brin’s Transparent Society Revisited. In any case, I interpret the voters as saying that we should toss out open borders.
6. Some people equate a strong EU with technocrats being able to solve/avert the sovereign debt crisis that threatens several countries. I do not.
7. Some people see the EU as a force for free trade. I see it as a force for trade that is managed, regulated, and harmonized. Is this more or less free than what we would see if trade policies were left up to individual governments? I would guess it is somewhat less free, particularly as we move through time, and the bureaucratic tentacles of the EU tend to spread.
8. Of all the reasons for selling stocks, I think this was the least compelling. I wonder if the stock market was simply poised for a decline, anyway, but it needed some sort of focal point to get the selling going.
On net, I would have voted “Leave.” But I don’t like the anti-immigrant, anti-trade rationale.
With #2, you’ve hit a real lacuna of my understanding. Specifically, I don’t know what the monetarist case against the Euro would be. I thought it was firscal, ie that the PIIGS nations lost the capability to devalue their currency in the debt crises from 2008 till the present really.
In any event, I wasn’t aware that people were still defending the Euro specifically from an a priori perspective. Could you elaborate on that?
“As for terrorism coming from immigrants, it seems that we can choose two of the following three: privacy, open borders, and security. I am willing to toss out privacy, as long as the government actors providing security are not themselves able to hide what they are doing.”
I’d explore the choice of privacy more. Keep in mind that you really mean that a society can monitor its citizens, detect malicious intent and intervene where required. Consider whether this is really feasible and what it might look like.
With #5, and the “transparent society”, the idea of “sousveillance” deals with the state factor, how does it prevent non-state oppression. Specifically, the expansion of the “Twitter mob”/”Google felon”/online “witchhunting” we already see into global scope; a world where pretty much anyone and everyone could become the next Brendan Eich, Jason Richwine, or Donald Sterling.
#1) Many Brexit supporters seem to want to move quickly in negotiating new trade agreements, both with the EU and non-EU countries so I’m not sure how much hostility to free trade contributed to the vote.
#5) Even with closed borders, there is an inherent trade-off between privacy and security (from crime, domestic terrorism, etc.), indeed between many kinds of civil liberties and security. So, I don’t think open borders is really part of a trilemma.
#8) Does this mean that you were a big buyer on Friday? Not buying on the dip would seem like implicit agreement that the lower stock valuations were justified. Similarly, I’m not sure what “poised for a decline” means. If the market thought that stocks were too expensive, they already would have been priced lower.
More trade was a huge part of the argument from Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. And yet there were lots of people who voted with them and lots of people who voted against them who, on both sides, weren’t listening to the words. It’s just the nature of politics and collective decision-making that people end up becoming allies without actually agreeing on the substance of the argument.
What is the evidence that Leavet voters were anti-trade? I wasn’t in the UK to watch the propaganda. Are their survey results correlating Leave with protectionist views? Was the Leave campaign spouting rhetoric about “exporting our jobs” and what-not?
Absent such evidence, all we have are our preconceptions about what particular demographic groups must believe. My own preconception is that the average EU-loving Guardianista is far more anti-trade than the White Van Man.
The number one priority for a lot of voters was: “If I vote for independence, all the cool kids will look at me and think I’m like White Van Man.” And it makes sense to worry about how an election will affect your social life. In politics you’re forced into momentary alliances with people you disagree with on the substance of the policy at issue. You could write a book about politics called What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics.
A lot of people talk about class. Autistic people talk about economics, or the most effective way to organize Europe, or the different levels of government. But most people talk about how “we” are better than “them.” And people sort themselves into these groups on the mistaken idea that “our side” thinks something and “their side” thinks something else.
Kennedy in 1960 was the more strident anti-communist, but a lot of people who voted for him imagined he was left-wing. And Johnson in 1964 was supposedly the peace candidate.
This rational appears to be one of the big contradiction of the libertarian movement. Which is libertarians love the movement of increase of people and goods can not co-exist their love small local governance, institutions and religion. Long term the free movement destroys the the local governance at some point. In reality the EU has increased this flow of people and goods over the decades although in very clumsy bureaucratic way. Most likely the UK & EU breakup will be minor (I am amazed people voted leave without even a real plan here.) but there is potential for further rejection of the EU and decrease movement of people and goods.
Also, it should be noted that most Muslim terrorism in US & EU is caused by second generation of immigrant parents not the actual immigrants. So closing borders now does little impact on terrorism. (It may even short term increase it.)
I see a lot of people who imagine that the EU stands for free trade in some amorphous, symbolic sense, unaware that in a specific, factual sense it imposes a barrier against Brits being allowed to trade with people outside the EU.
I see other people who imagine that the British government has the competence and the will to change the trajectory of British demography. They’re mistaken too.
The “Brexit the Movie” docu seemed focused squarely on regulation. Perhaps that was my bias, though.
Quite recently (like in the last week) I’ve come to conclude that “open borders” are one of the great errors of libertarian argument.
The problem with open borders is how to define it at scale? What if EVERY person in Mexico (or France or Syria or Malawi) who thinks they can do better in the US (or the UK or Germany or Australia) is allowed to immigrate? Will the destination societies survive? In parts of the US we already have huge growing pains just dealing with people who come from elsewhere in the US…. How are the UK or Germany or Poland to absorb, in effect, all of Syria?
This is the failure in “open borders” – the entire population of Earth will not fit in New York or San Francisco or Seattle. Or the UK or Germany. But something like half the population of Earth reasonably (and probably correctly) thinks that being a low-level worker in NY or SF or Sea will be a better life than what they have now. For any one of them, they are right. But we (the US, UK, Germany, etc.) simply cannot absorb them all.
This is the fraud of “open immigration” – for any one immigrant, probably a net win. For the entire population of Syria (or a host of other places) simply not possible.
Not enough talk about elite hypocrisy
Elite professions like finance or law have a shitload of regulatory protectionism
but even economists don’t really like to talk about that
but when non-elites want protectionism for their trades they are racists and economically ignorant and what not
5. The NSA stopped not one anything. There is really no other way to say it. We ran the experiment taking privacy to zero and there was at best a zero and of course in reality a negative effect to security.
(Negative effect proven by the fact only transparency advocates/whistleblowers are prosecuted for “espionage” now. They use loss of privacy for their security, not ours. The alleged tradeoff is actually a negative correlation.)
Anarcho tyranny. The state apparatus is used against the law abiding middle class to exploit them. It ignores the underclass, allowing them to commit what crimes they want, and doesn’t strive to hard to stop terrorism because at the end of the day that’s what justifies their power and budget.
I would call it something else, and am not as fixated on the lower class, but I think something similar.
Such as how the EU tells you who you have to let in and what kind of speech you have to prosecute for hate, etc., without lifting a finger to fix the causes of the conflicts.
Two observations:
1. A common thread runs through my reaction to your thoughts, and I think the reaction of many of those sympathetic to Libertarianism but who view it as (A) a tendency or ideological persuasion in need of some mitigation and correction, and (B) Unable to avoid being used like a mistress by the progressives.
By ‘fine’ I mean acceptable, or at the very least tolerable or endurable below the level of agitation that provokes a substantial backlash.
A metaphor could be for some animal that can be a vector for serious human disease. Some are cute and some are just minor pests. People like cute deer, and will even put out salt licks for them, but if all the local ones start carrying rabies, then those same people will join the cull. Mosquitoes are annoying, but people usually just put on some repellent. But if they are carrying malaria or Zika, then people want to bring back DDT and start talking about gene-drive tech to wipe them out.
So the trouble is to keep the Libertarian policies from being vectors for carrying the progressive disease. But no one knows how to do that, and it appears to be the case that no one has ever done it.
Consider that the people of Rotherham voted 68-32 for Brexit. If you’re not familiar with the recent scandal there, please look it up. There weren’t actually very many immigrants or ethnic minorities in Rotherham: it’s still over 90% ethnic British. But a number of the ones that were there were allowed to get away with (almost as bad as) murder by the PC-whipped authorities responsible to maintain law and order and protect the population. They chose to fulfill that duty, and instead essentially conspired to cover up the issue.
I’m guessing that Rotherhamites would have been open to a few more percent immigration absent this problem, and may not otherwise be hostile to the values surrounding such generous acceptance, but it’s completely reasonable for them to expect that there is no feasible cure to the disease in the present political environment, so the vectors – the only feasible targets – will have to go.
So lets go through some of your thoughts. Is a common currency for the Euro countries a good thing on net? Well, I’m open-minded about that proposition in the abstract, given some other free market assumptions. (BTW, how does this fit in with your fiscal deficit theory when the Central Bank is not connected to any particular sovereign, where there is no fiscal union?)
But in the real world, that common currency is apparently coupled with implicit bail-out and TBTF assumptions, and all kinds of shenanigans and tinkering with financial incentives which distorted capital allocation and realistic evaluation of risk, making entire countries ‘subprime’ bets with private upside and public downside. I’d guess a “European Finance Public Choice” analysis would conclude that such distortions are inevitable, just like they are in the US housing finance market. If having a common currency (potentially removable vector) means suffering from these distortions (incurable disease) then the going after the vector is the only feasible course of action.
Your trade-offs between open-borders and the surveillance state also illustrate this point. People don’t like the surveillance state, but even if they could be persuaded to accept it, they are reasonable to conclude that it won’t actually deliver, because something fundamental is seriously and probably irreparably broken in the surveillance state we already have. Didn’t you just comment about how the FBI totally failed in the case of Mateen – and still can’t even find his wife – even though they had all the information and authority a reasonable person would need to act? So, since most people don’t like losing privacy, and giving it up probably wouldn’t work anyway, and something is also clearly fundamentally broken with the cultural assimilation system, the remaining alternative is to tighten the borders.
Same goes for closing off the welfare state, ending anchor-baby incentives, or creating ‘second class resident immigrants’ ineligible for ever collecting net benefits. Fine in theory, but try getting it past the courts and current politics. Impossible.
In all of these cases we see frustrated people who perceive themselves to be backed into a corner with no mild, reasonable options. They perceive they have to submit or counter-attack. And, as a friend of mine recently put it, “We are evolved to let resentment build up until we cut off our nose to spite our face.”
If Libertarians were trying to recruit and convert a few non-progressives to support their preferred policies, then providing some kind of reliable reassurance that people won’t have to worry about these problems – i.e. “don’t worry, we have developed a new vaccine and a good plan to inoculate the deer” – is probably the fundamental challenge.
2. Question: I’m guessing a generation ago, the vast majority of prominent American Libertarian Intellectuals would have obviously</i< been opposed to an enterprise like the EU and in favor of independence, devolution, and competitive government. Today there are very few who are willing to express any strong opinions in favor of any kind of secession or independence movements, despite the example of the Czechoslovak velvet divorce. In your judgment, what happened?
3. Fun Theory: The vote was reasonably close. If 1.9% of the all voters had chosen Bremain over Brexit, the result would have been the opposite. That number seems to be within the "current-events-influenced swing vote" margin to me. So, as many mainstream commentators have written – including Tyler Cowen with his "revealed threshold level for populist immigration backlash" thesis – it's fair to blame Angela Merkel for the result.
And Merkel wouldn't have acted without Syrian and NEMA instability. And it's fair to attribute a good amount of current NEMA instability to State's naive and disastrous support of the Arab Spring movements, specifically trying to encourage local populist revolts against their authoritarian regimes, but with nothing but warlords, gangsters, and/or radical Islamists to take their place.
And, from what we can gather from media reporting, Hillary Clinton was the biggest supporter of those policies, some of which were pursued more or less behind Obama's back and exceeding his guidance (so we are told), and enacted during her tenure as Secretary of State.
And why was Hillary Clinton Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, well, it's not too much of a stretch to blame Ross Perot's doomed campaign in 1992 if you buy the narrative that he cost Bush Sr. the election and was responsible for sending Bill to the White House, without which there is no way Hillary would have been in that position.
Perot was the Butterfly That Flapped Its Wings, and a quarter century later, Brexit.
Corrections:
1. Chose *not to fulfill that duty.
2. I didn’t close that italics tag correctly.
3. *MENA instead of NEMA.
This is a great comment.
This is a very good comment indeed.
A common currency would make leaving much much more difficult.
Charitably, I would not say that anyone is “anti-immigrant.” More positively, as you mentioned earlier, what the people who are thus described really want is a controlled, transparent immigration system in which local governments have a voice, democratic processes have an influence, and top-down power is not exercised arbitrarily and capriciously. Pretty much the opposite of what Merkel and Obama have each unleashed.
5. In discussions of what to do about terrorism, it seems as if everyone assumes that Washington’s interventionism is a fact of nature and we just have to figure out how to deal with the consequences, one of which is terrorism.
Non-libertarians present this type of scenario all the time. “I know that libertarians want to get rid of X, but given that X isn’t going away, what is the libertarian solution for fixing all the problems created by X? See. You libertarians have no solutions.”