Going back to Handle’s comment on problems for libertarian thought, he writes,
obsession with explicit state / government action and insouciant attitude regarding social pressures, when, in the modern era, the latter may have emerged as an even worse threat to the exercise of traditional liberties.
The ‘local freedom to coerce’ problem. If we are trying to increase welfare by giving people what they desire, we have to recognize that one of the things people desire is ‘a community’ and for their communities to have particular characters and sets of norms. There are certain forms of social experience or community life which are impossible to coordinate if the overall enterprise is deprived of some of the core, and at least mildly coercive, attributes of sovereignty.
On the first point, John Stuart Mill also worried about social pressure as a restriction on liberty. And on the second point, Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman (at least if I remember correctly the relevant passages in Capitalism and Freedom) were against Federal intervention to protect African-Americans from segregation, even segregation imposed by state and local governments.
So these are longstanding problems for libertarians. My own position is that the best way to deal with social opprobrium or discrimination is to give the people who are hurt by those phenomena as much opportunity to exit as possible. I think that once you construe it as a problem that government must solve (by passing Civil Rights laws or regulating organizations) the overall consequences are likely to be worse than letting the problem be resolved through exit.
I hasten to add that exit is not a solution to every problem. Cities, in particular, are bundles of externalities. For any individual, some of these externalities are positive, and some of them are negative. If the positive externalities are strong enough, you will stay in a city and put up with major negative externalities. In theory, using government to get rid of those negative externalities would be an improvement. In practice, I have to say that it is the local government that is the negative externality where I live. That is, if you ask me what would motivate me to move, the first thing that comes to mind is the local government, which increasingly is going to collect taxes to pay for union pensions, not to provide actual services.
Off topic, but I saw this and immediately thought of the PSST framework: http://www.voxeu.org/article/financial-cycles-labour-misallocation-and-economic-stagnation
The problem with the interventionist position is that there is no good reason to assume that centralized authorities will be intervening on the side of liberty rather than the reverse. So, the Obergefell decision was, indeed, liberty-promoting, but beforehand, the Defense of Marriage Act was an action by the federal government that worked against liberty granted by several state governments.
And what happened in the intervening era? Consider President Obama’s famously ‘evolving’ attitudes toward gay marriage. Nobody with at least two working neurons believes his attitudes really were changing, but he and his advisers had their fingers in the wind and Obama (and other national politicians) came out in favor if gay marriage only when it was safe (and did not much matter) — when a growing majority in favor of gay marriage was no longer in doubt. This (and arguably Obergefell too) was just jumping in at the last minute to try to ratify and grab credit for a bottom-up process (a process that they — and other national figures — had actively or passively resisted when *that* was the politically expedient thing to do).
We can see the same pattern with the drug war. The federal government has been consistently harassing states that have legalized medical and recreational marijuana — with DEA SWAT raids on dispensaries and federal prosecutions and more recently with ‘Operation Choke Point’ which is denying pot businesses access to the banking system.
The beauty of non-interventionism is that it allows spaces for local experiments in greater liberty and for a heterogeneous society to live in peace politically despite great differences in values (between, say, the Amish in Lancaster and the gay community in San Francisco).
I think exit is more limited than may be realized. Not just by the “bundles of externalities” Arnold mentions, but also by the limits on the reciprocal mechanism – entry.
Exit from a poorly run city, overly taxed country, or racist or segregated place, is only useful if (a) you can actually leave and (b) someplace better will actually let you in.
Here, “let you in” means both explicit immigration rules (see syrians trying to get into Europe) but also implicit/market rules (see housing prices in Seattle)
a) Apart from Cuba, North Korea or the Eastern Bloc before 1989, you can almost always leave.
b) Limits on immigration from poor countries are a definite problem. But housing prices in Seattle for those already in the US? Not so much. If things are bad enough where you are that you’re ready to pull up stakes and take off, there’s always someplace better (even if the place you’d consider ‘best’ is not feasible). The ‘best is the enemy of the good’ would apply here, too.
I think the anti-discrimination laws that were passed back in the 1960’s, while well-intentioned, were the start of a very bad trend. Instead of allowing people to associate with whom they pleased, as had been done for every prior immigrant group, and allowing prejudice to wear away to much lower level, these laws represented a change in course. As a result, we have a war by aggrieved groups to fight for victim status. This had led to the government favoring certain beliefs over others, rather than allowing them to coexist.
I find it hard to imagine how the blacks would have escaped segregation by exit.
Some had escaped the worse examples of Jim Crow by exiting to the north.
But they still faced major segregation and Jim Crow laws.
Tell me how they could escape discrimination by exit.
.We tried sending Negros back to Africa after the Civil War and it was a miserable failure.
Remeber,we tried sending
There was no significant movement for relocating slaves after the Civil War. Colonizationists were displaced by Abolitionists because it made less and less sense to proposed “sending back” slaves who had spent their entire lives on American soil, indeed whose parents had, since it had been illegal to import slaves since 1808.
African Americans did reduce their exposure to discrimination by migrating out of the Jim Crow south in huge numbers. Did they escape discrimination entirely? No, of course not. But at that time, big government was no solution either — remember that Woodrow Wilson *reintroduced* segregation in federal offices. At that time, the best African Americans could hope for was to move to places of relevant tolerance AND for the racist majority and for the racists in national government to leave those tolerant oases alone. At that time, the more the central government intervened in racial affairs the worse it was for African Americans. As was the case for gay and marriage in the 1990s. As is the case for the drug war now.
How does one “escape segregation”? Segregation is a triumph of liberty.
There is no law forcing people apart, they freely choose to be apart.
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/
To end segregation you would need to forcibly push people together. Hence things like quotas, disparate impact, etc. Nobody wants diversity, it is forced on them. Diversity is tyranny.
Well that is the question isn’t it? Can it be a triumph of liberty and a failure of humanity? Maybe a bad initial distribution of resources causes a poor human capital distribution resulting in undesirable association which is reinforced through cycles of profit and loss (i.e., the rich get richer). The problem is discernment.
The initial distribution of human capital is largely genetic, and that has a history going back 1,000s years. You can’t blame people the the conditions of England bred for one kind of person and the conditions of sub saharan Africa another. If that’s a failure its not a failure of humanity, its a failure of the natural world. Take it up with God.
The conditions that created it can’t be replicated either in practicality or on the kind of timeline that would be acceptable to people who care about this sort of thing. Tell someone you can solve racism if you just get 1,000 years and unlimited ability to engage in a forced breeding experiment on billions of people. Didn’t we have some guy like that at one point…
Which means the best you can do is manage the human capital deficiency. You do this by keeping the numbers manageable (controlling immigration) and by engaging in practical domestic policies at home. Quotas, disparate impact, racial agitation, etc are not practical policies.
In fact the most practical things for improving the lives of poor people of any race are usually completely anathema to liberal sensibilities.
“The correct view of race is as a spectrum of human differences created by selection pressures and inbreeding. Race therefore isn’t a constant, but it has a certain staying power in that it takes many generations of population change to alter racial characteristics.
Culture echoes race, gifting it with a kind of personality which equates to a stereotype (“averaging” the behavior of a group). This use of race as group stereotype is very close to the traditional meaning of the word race, as in “the Scotch-Irish race”, “the Slavic race”, and so on, in which the word race captures both inbreeding and cultural expression–appearance, manners, temperament, proclivity.
While stereotypes are invariably seen as negative simplifications, the truth is stereotypes are an indispensible part of our thinking, and we hold stereotypes about ourselves as much as about others, both as individuals–being part of a stereotype–and as groups. The negative connotation of stereotyping developed in reaction to group conflict, but stereotypes are often positive. Stereotypes about ourselves and others help us to bond together in groups; the stronger the bond the less costly group formation is (fewer mechanisms are needed to maintain cooperation and suppress cheating).
Nature helps us cooperate by giving us kin preference (in which physical similarity is consequential), without which we would be at best opportunistic foragers hanging together in small, easily dispersed groups. Kin preference combines with stereotyping to allow us to form strong, secure communities and nations.
But groups do not all appear to have the same capacity for organizational complexity. It can be argued whether this is genetic or cultural (i.e. “legacy of the past”) or both–but since it doesn’t appear feasible to deliberately shape culture, it’s an argument that is beside the point. To the extent that a group has a higher capacity than it appears to have, it’s not clear why this should not be observed within a few generations of contact.
When groups with different capacities for organizational complexity share a space, the result is usually that the higher complexity group becomes dominant over the lower complexity group. This relationship can change, and even reverse, assuming the lower complexity group has the capacity to achieve a higher level of complexity, but this is not always the case. IQ, and possibly other cognitive/emotional factors, appear to place a limit on organizational complexity. This is discussed further in The Limits of Human Scale.
With the advent of harm-based morality, the mechanics of group solidarity came under attack due to an obsession with dominant vs. subordinate group interaction. This moralizing targeted dominant group solidarity specifically, because of its tendency to harm the subordinate group (harm should be seen in the context of all group interaction, but this tends not to be the case). Weakened group solidarity, in combination with the formation of mass society, has dramatically increased the costs of organizational complexity, and calls into question our ability to sustain society in present form.
The evidence is all around us: greater surveillance, erosion of fourth amendment protections, historically high levels of criminal incarceration, decline in social relationships and levels of trust, militarization of police, criminalization of speech, etc. These are the costs we have been burdened with as group solidarity has come under attack.
This is, in effect, the result of the war on racism. Like many famous “wars” on abstract concepts, it has mainly produced more of what it is attempting to eliminate. This is not to deny that real social problems provided its impetus–rather that the war is an ineffective remedy for a misdiagnosed problem. The true remedy lies in recognition of how group cohesion develops, what its needs are, and its very large role in reducing the costs of organizational complexity. “
If they exit there is nothing to segregate.
Arnold, you’re wrong about Goldwater. He took issue with Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was an unconstitutional violation of the freedom of association of private businesses and individuals.
Of course, in spite of his later life rabid Social Liberalism (TM) this would put Goldwater squarely on the Wrong Side Of History (TM) on the Civil Rights Issue Of Our Time: the sacred fundamental right to force others to participate in your “wedding.”
Marriages (or associations more generally) are bundles of complementarities and conflicts. They are usually either happy, unhappy, or failed (i.e. exited). In the past, economic and technological conditions made it easier to exit cities in two waves of spreading out, to less dense parts of the country, and later to the suburbs. At the same time, it was legally much harder to exit marriages.
Today we’ve seen a reversal. It’s as easy as it ever was to exit marriage, but it’s hard to exit, or stay away from, the big hubs of the key economic sectors, because that is where all the opportunity and network-effects are.
The local governments that enjoy this ‘captive-audience’ phenomenon are thus insulated from competitive pressures to be good governments, and so will slide towards depredation. That like a bad husband or wife not having to worry about checking their impulses towards inevident abuse because his or her spouse has nowhere to go. Even in happier, non-abusive marriages, one often sees spouses get lazy and lax in regards to consideration and preserving attractiveness and romantic behaviors, if they think they are safe and secure in their position (and they are, alas, often wrong in this assessment.)
Overall, I’m guessing both these developments were bad on net, though I’m not saying there’s much anyone can do about them at this point. It is now probably too easy to dissolve salvageable marriages for frivolous or impulsive reasons, and too hard to leave the badly-governed hubs.