Society needs a coercive mechanism strong enough to keep defectors in line, but fair enough to command the allegiance of individuals, who must share the costs of creating that larger and mutually beneficial social order. The social contract that Locke said brought individuals out of the state of nature was one such device. The want of individual consent was displaced by a consciously designed substantive program to protect both liberty and property in ways that left all members of society better off than they were in the state of nature. Only constrained coercion can overcome the holdout problems needed to implement any principle of nonaggression.
Read the whole thing. He frames it as a disagreement with Rand Paul. However, most of the criticism seems addressed to Murray Rothbard, rather than at positions that Rand Paul has taken.
In my own thinking, I am increasingly leaning toward the view that government over a large territory and population is the problem. Government at a community level (think of a condo association) is tolerable because of the ease of exit. As you scale up government, the benefits tend to decline and the abuses tend to increase.
I agree with your comment about what I’ll call the effective scale of government.
The U.S. federal system was purposely designed to be distant, slow-moving, and carefully constrained. Now we have this system that is only good at collecting power and avoiding responsibility.
I’d like to think that a parliamentary system would work better. However, I don’t think it would scale.
Neal Stephenson’s book “Diamond Age” is an interesting speculative look at where we might be heading. He posits relatively small groups, called “claves”, who rather purposefully decide what their society will look like. I missed the backstory when I read the book before – anonymous digital currencies, micro-manufacturing (3d printing, etc.), and ubiquitous nano-scale machines made our quaint governments fail.
I agree with the core of Epstein’s argument (at least from his article) – I’d prefer good, effective, and fair government over anarchy. There actually ARE some things that government is good at. Close supervision of governments is required to overcome the agency costs, and that implies much smaller government.
Unfortunately, most people see ease of exit as a problem that is best solved by concentrating power in a more expansive jurisdiction. They see packing up and leaving town as a way to shirk social obligations, rather than an expression of political freedom.
Sounds good – until –
Several of the biggest, nastiest guys from my condo association defect to the condo association next door and they decide to kill a few people in my condo association and demand tribute from the rest of us.
We, of course, join forces with another condo association and retaliate.
It’s coercion all the way down.
“Society needs a coercive mechanism strong enough to keep defectors in line”
Well, no, it doesn’t. I am finding it harder to believe what I’m reading these days. We could talk about externalities and first movers and those are specific cases. I’m more interested in how we have systemic police brutality (not to mention universal surveillance) at the same time that I read about how psychopathic serial killers are almost never caught by detective work and have often been let out of prison early for previous murders. My point is, we need a coercive mechanism to do who knows what while government doesn’t fulfill it’s most basic functions even while utilizing poweres we’ve denied to them? I think not.
Do they fix the freeloader problem or make it worse? We could seriously go issue by issue.
If they are big enough to force defectors in line who can they not keep in line? The correctly defecting? Whistleblowers? Mandate objectors?
Has Epstein taken half a course on public choice? And I know who he is. Why isn’t he writing like it? Why are people tripping over themselves to (ham fistily) attack an ideology they think isn’t worthy of discussion? It is interesting times.
Normative Libertarianism is more restricted than “Social” Libertarianism.
“As you scale up government, the benefits tend to decline and the abuses tend to increase.”
As the functions of governments (all levels) increase, the potential for, and actual, impact on individual liberty increases.
Normative Libertarianism is framed by the impacts of the functions of governments on Liberty and thus to limit those impacts by limiting those functions.
Socially and politically (as a part of socially), we have been witnessing a century of increasing transfers of individual functions (and of direct interactions with other individuals) to functions of governments; supplemented with arrogations (by those charged with the functions transferred) of additional functions, many to provide coercions to direct human conduct and motivations necessary to the implementation of those transfers.
In addition to the impacts on liberty, the mechanisms of governments are becoming “jammed” with incompatible and conflicting functions, many of which do not conform to the structures or capacities of those mechanisms.
By engorgements of functions, governments, institutions, and organizations historically founder.
The framework of Normative Libertarianism thus offers more than the limitation of impacts on liberty.
The attractions of freeloading are ever present, at least when there is someone to freeload from.
My main problem with Rand Paul is his foreign policy. And that issue isn’t addressed by Mr. Epstein at all. I think the NSA has a legitimate role. Whether they are staying within legitimacy I do not know, but there is no question that “bad guys” are trying to kill us. The government is responsible for protection.
I’m sympathetic to Mr. Kling’s plea for smaller units, and certainly more states is a good thing. But I can’t see that having more smaller countries will make the world a safer place.
If what they should be doing can be justified what does that have to do with what they are doing?
What’s curious, as a statist friend of mine has pointed out, is that it is SMALL government bodies (homeowners’ associations, local governments in southern states in the 1950s) that pass some of the most outrageous and petty regulations (lawn care requirements, door color requirements, customer color requirements, etc.), despite the fact that “exit is relatively easy”.
He attributes this to the fact that there are only so many competent people in the world. Better, he says, to have a tournament for control of everything, which attracts the best and brightest, than to have tiny tournaments that enable millions of petty, incompetent bureaucrats to kill us by a thousand cuts. This is especially true since the overlap of jurisdictions and the universality of human nature make it very difficult to escape petty, incompetent bureaucrats in local government by moving – you just find more, very similar, very petty bureaucrats wherever you go. He accepts that big government attracts big corruption: he argues that big, relatively well-run corruption beats mass amounts of petty, incompetent corruption. Essentially, it’s the bureaucratic equivalent of “better one expensive, moderately corrupt but well-run police force than a thousand stupid, violent mafias”.
I find his argument, if not totally compelling, at least somewhat resonant.
> Better, he says, to have a tournament for control of everything, which attracts the best and brightest
You misspelled manipulative and ruthless.
Maybe it is the dysregulation of the centralized government that causes a local “warlord anarchy”.
One, except for Mr. Boyle, I wonder if any of you have been in an HOA or Condo association. As long as you conform to the majority and follow all the petty rules to the letter, everything is fine. Somehow, this does not sound like “Freedom” that libertarians so theoretically celebrate. Dissenters find it not so great and the cost of exit is not easy, especially now given a real estate market that is not very liquid.
My own view is that libertarian, as some of the comments above indicate, is hostile to democracy, and evolves to an ideal of Feudalism, using private coercive force to protect property and extend that protection to those willing and able to pay, or if they cannot pay, to place themselves in a servile position as property worthy of protection. Now some libertarians are true anarchists and utopians, who believe that once the state is dispensed with, all in society would live in voluntary and honest acceptance of the distribution of wealth and property based on merit and industry. However, there was a reason neolithic villages started building walls. Those without wealth, might find that there industry and wit is can obtain it quicker by taking it from others to weak to keep it.
As for the evolution of a state, with property of all protected by well functioning courts and a standing army to a legion of private powers with war of all against all being constant, this is basically what happen in the Western Roman Empire from 200 C.E. to 1,000 C.E. Epstein believes in the vigorous use of state coercion to protect private property (and to create and extend new property rights such as copyright, trademark, and patent). But one always in danger that the person who controls that coercive force can always come along and take the property, as Putin as demonstrated to the oligarchs in Russia.
After several years living in Hong Kong, I’ve come to the conclusion that governments are best when they need to compete for the loyalty and presence of their citizens. In today’s world, this seems very obviously correlated with smaller states where entry and exit are easy, such as Hong Kong, Singapre, Luxembourg, the Caribbean islands, etc. Governments over large territories and populations are much more effective at preventing exit, and thus do not need to be responsive to their populations.
But there is a real problem with this. The “smaller/responsive” is better is possible only because economies of scale are not so important for national units. This is because countries cooperate enough to achieve these scales at the international level. Its not clear that international cooperation would be sufficiently forthcoming if the world was composed only of small states.
International cooperation exists today in commercial relationships, communications, travel, engineering/technical standards, etc. But the most important area where international cooperation exists today is in war and peace. If I imagine a world composed of thousands of small micro-states, it seems obvious to me that, as a result of an overall uncoordinated military, one of the small states would get the idea to expand itself by conquering neighbors, and thus upset the whole system. This is exactly what happened to Greece city-states with Alexander and Macedonia; happened to German countries with Prussia; happened to early Chinese states; and was prevented from happening in Renaissance Italy only because of the activities of larger neighboring states.