A few weeks ago, Handle wrote,
The major problem with any mechanism that lets good people evade government control for good reasons, is that it lets bad people evade government control for bad reasons.
I have been thinking recently about which economic concepts are over-rated and which are under-rated. In general, I think that over-rated concepts fit with our intuition of small-scale society, and under-rated concepts deal with large-scale society. Thus, one under-rated concept is “selection effect.”
In a small scale society, you don’t have to worry about selection effects. You know everybody and you have repeated interactions with everybody.
In a large scale society, you don’t know the people with whom you transact. You apply rules, and those rules will, for better or worse, be attractive to people who like those rules when compared with other rules.
So, going back to the context of the comment, if you offer people the ability to make large financial transfers without being monitored by any government agency, you will attract people who don’t want that monitoring. Some of those people will be good people who are just annoyed by monitoring, but you are going to draw all the people whose motives for avoiding monitoring are not so good. You are going to select for criminals.
As another example, take mortgage origination rules that require the applicant to document income, employment, and assets. The rules are in some respects pretty inefficient. For any given set of mortgage applicants, the documents themselves add essentially no information for predicting default risk.
But when you change the rules to allow “no-doc” loans, you draw in a different pool of potential borrowers. You get the applicants who are not so conscientious and reliable. You get loans from mortgage brokers who do not have a problem coaching applicants to over-state what they earn or what they have in the bank. So even though their credit scores look ok, you are going to select for borrowers who are less conscientious from a pipeline of mortgage brokers who are less honest.
To take a more provocative example, consider the “____ studies” fields in academia. Even if they don’t explicitly require professors to have left-wing ideas, they select for such professors by making uncomfortable anyone with a different point of view. In other fields, this is less the case. But I fear that in those other fields, any lack of diversity along gender or racial lines will be used as a wedge to make them to come up with selection criteria that have the effect of pulling in people with a left-wing viewpoint. In economics, I call this the “road to sociology watch.”
Like everything else in life, these kinds of selection effects are trade-offs. In general my preference is to consider extra liberty to be more valuable than anti-crime mass surveillance. My reasoning: government power cannot be checked by citizens who have no freedom of movement outside government knowledge. The context of Handle’s comment was an abuse of power in exactly that direction.
How much harm would be done by selecting for criminal money laundering in exchange for no mass surveillance? Would that harm outweigh the potential abuse of mass surveillance? Unfortunately I don’t recall being given the option of answering that question for myself…
The flip side of the comment is that the major problem with the state having the ability to detect bad people doing bad things means it must compromise some amount of privacy and track innocent people doing innocent things.
And it’s of course fine to use first order ideological principles to help one solve the moral calculus of the situation and decide on the proper balance or tie-breakers in debatable circumstances. Many of the issues are hard and relevant technologies and culutral patterns change quickly. There is no such thing as a final escape from the exercise of personal authority in terms of a substitute for human judgment, so the best one can do is grasp for a wise, provisional equilibrium instead of flying to extremes of all or nothing. In general, that how’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence works, and why it inescapably tends to be so intellectually incoherent. Coherence is not compatible with anything that requires judgment calls that can’t be reduced to a well-defined process.
But pace Buchanan and Sugden, there are such things as intrinsically collective issues arising out of the fact of living together in society with each other that can’t be hand-waved away and for which a requirement of consent and agreement at the individual level is inappropriate.
At any rate, I think your framing of the analysis fails to reason on the margin. The truth is that nearly everyone these days is under simply incredibly invasive and intimate electronic surveillance all the time (and the constructive ‘consent’ of clicking ‘agree’ on some indecipherable and extensive EULA is such a legal fiction it is no less compelling than other passive acquiescence theories such as the social compact).
Go install Blokada on a smartphone or pi-hole on your network and get just a tiny glimpse into how much privacy-crushing tracking is going on – around one event per minute for an average user. In general, libertarians and legalists tend to focus too much on the state and too little on non-state actors when analyzing these issues from the perspective of the impact on the average person’s life.
One doesn’t need to go full Transparent Society ala David Brin in reaction to this this state of affairs, but one should do one’s analysis in terms of what is the transformation of some marginal increase in state surveillance above this high baseline, into public costs and benefits. It’s not an unreasonable position to say, at this point, that additional state surveillance makes only a trivial difference compared to the surveillance context, but that the public benefits can be, and often are, quite large.
“In general, libertarians and legalists tend to focus too much on the state and too little on non-state actors when analyzing these issues from the perspective of the impact on the average person’s life.”
It seems to me that a fair fraction of libertarians point to government backstop of these things as key to what you are describing, and they they are correct to do so. You may not be familiar with this point, or you may not think it’s worth addressing, but I think it is worth addressing.
Consider how many retail store chains have been very interested in registering and tracking all their customers. They have tried using reasonably functional things like ID fobs and the like, and also more dysfunctional things like the way that Radio Shack was increasingly insistent about getting customer phone numbers and such toward the end. Despite having clear motive, and despite being opposed by only the usual mild grumpy customer pushback, they have never achieved anything like the pervasiveness of tracking that cell phone and Internet and bank and medical and residency tracking do. This is probably related to how retail businesses that don’t do this tracking are permitted to exist.
The transition to banning financial privacy has taken place over my lifetime, and it looks to me exactly like a major change in regulation with only trivial changes in customer and business preferences, and not at all like increasingly sheeplike customers spontaneously abandoning their usual grouchy pushback and embracing businesses which track them. And it’s not just finance. E.g., I’m pretty sure that it’s not just pure customer indifference to medical privacy and ferociously uncontrollable MD curiosity that makes it so that MDs require SSNs when accepting patients.
I basically cannot start a new telecom service without going through the last mile and the associated arbitrary-discretionary-permit artificial oligopoly system. I would be very severely handicapped in starting Internet-related services without going through things like Internet registry services (see e.g. the recent affair with GoDaddy and Gab) and payment services (see e.g. various credit card services and ammo dealers a while ago, or Paypal and Tommy Robinson at the moment) which have their own arbitrary discretionary regulation issues. When the privacy situation in the phone system and the Internet looks like the privacy situation in medicine, and not like the privacy situtation in retail, it seems to me that the most natural explanation is that the government is leveraging its barriers to entry to make it so, rather than that customers don’t care who knows where they are, or what kind of sexual titillation or political badthink they might be looking for at the moment.
As another example of the strength of barriers to entry, consider the headaches with spam phone calls. It is not hard to think of technical solutions to this problem, either clever impersonal automated technical ones like whitelists combined with a modest (70 cents?) charge for off-whitelist callers, or basic management blocking and tackling 101 unsubscribing the nuisance callers after they make a hundred or so spam calls. The lack of ability to introduce a service like that is pretty conspicuous. Have you any suggested reason other than impressive barriers to entry, and/or intrusive micromanagement by regulation, overriding customer preferences and free market innovation at least as hard as my hypothesis for how strongly customer preferences for privacy are being overridden?
In a free market, customer preferences for privacy don’t need to be passionate in order to significantly undermine the kind of surveillance you are attributing to a simple consequence of business “non-state actors”. In most of the really comprehensively intrusive systems you refer to, it seems to me that the key “non-state actors” are acting almost entirely as creatures of a corporatist mixed economy, and hardly at all like businesses in a free market, and so are only “non-state” in the same weak sense as various captive “NGOs” are truly “non-government”. Such an organization may be “non-government” for the purposes of being off the accounting books, or evading some kind of civil service or other regulation (e.g., evading the second amendment issues in shutting down ammo sales), but if its budget is basically government grants and/or its existence depends on competitors not being allowed, then if is if not strictly speaking an arm of the state, it is at least a creature of the state, and it is not so useful to think of it as a non-state actor, or to refer to it as such without qualification.
Handle,
I would distinguish between mass communications surveillance and banking surveillance, as practiced in the US. It’s possible to at least take some steps to limit the possibility of snooping on IP packets. It’s also possible to communicate with between US persons or entities without one entity have an obligation to disclose to USG (without at least some kind of warrant). Both of those conditions are false with banking and finance and payments in the US.
Has any study been made as to the level of financial crime before and after the introduction of Identity Purity tests on people wanting to open new bank accounts, open new investment accounts, employ accountants, employ solicitors and employ estate agents? If these tests are effective there should be some obvious change in the level of crime, even if it is a reduction in the rate of increase rather than an overall reduction.
Any philosophy that requires ‘government control’ of people as a successful outcome is fundamentally ignoring who controls government.
It would certainly appear true at the international level that large scale social concepts are under-rated. If there was ever any substance to the notion of “‘rules-based international order” to begin with it has all decomposed away into an empty husk. Realpolitik is the reality. International treaties and agreements not much more than circus amusements.
And here we are in yet another election marred by vote counting shenanigans. Electoral process corruption is as regular as clockwork. Some sort social concept allowing the US to competently conduct a legitimage election process cannot be valued highly enough. Good luck getting it though.
There is a reason the principle of subsidiarity has endured for millenia as a successful guide to competent governance.
There is a corollary: if you create a regime that selects “high-risk actors” away from the broader regulatory scheme into the new regime, and that regime has much less bad consequence than expected, you can be sure that the entire risk that was being protected against in the broader scheme either doesn’t exist, or was greatly overstated. So, you can now, with some confidence, conduct a relatively radical scale-back of the broader regime. In this sense, a selective escape path can be a useful test of the need for the broader regulatory regime. Of course, it needs to be designed so that, if it demonstrates the need for broader regulation, it can itself be shut down.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned “gun control”. Though not universally true, there is a valid point to the observation that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. “Gun control” advocates seem to believe that outlaws will voluntarily relinquish their guns, fail to hide them when the cops come around to confiscate them, or stop becoming outlaws if (by some miracle) all guns are confiscated. In the meantime, law-abiding citizens who wish to defend themselves from outlaws who keep their guns will then become outlaws. “Gun control” is the quintessence of wishful thinking.
True, which is why the smarter gun control advocates focus on ammo. I seem to recall that the street price of a bullet in Japan is over $50. They still have the occasional shooting among the most serious criminals, but U.S. style mass shootings with an angry amateur shooting dozens of rounds are impractical in Japan.
They’re also… Japanese.
It’s also not hard to make your own ammo thereby supplying a black market.
Scott Alexander has several good posts on similar subjects. For example, Freedom on the Centralized Web:
“There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.”