Again and again—and in countries all over the world—declines in trust of government correlate strongly with calls for more government regulation in more parts of our lives. “Individuals in low-trust countries want more government intervention even though they know the government is corrupt,” explain the authors of a 2010 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper. That’s certainly the case in the United States, where the size, scope, and spending of government has vastly increased over exactly the same period in which trust and confidence in the government has cratered. In 2018, I talked with one of the paper’s authors, Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist who grew up in the Soviet Union before coming to America. Why do citizens ask a government they don’t believe in to bring order? “They want regulation,” he said. “They want a dictator who will bring back order.” [links omitted]
It seems as though “liberty with ineffectual government” is not an equilibrium.
A trend I have been noticing among libertarian organizations is that they are starting to express worries about populism, polarization, and the sorry state of political discourse.
The takeaway, for me, from the state capacity libertarianism meme is that there is a distinction between a classical liberal and a libertarian. Libertarians will always apply the precautionary principle in any option involving government.
Why progressives, conservatives, and protectionists are so eager to abandon liberty for their vision of orderly conduct is a puzzle to me.
“Why progressives, conservatives, and protectionists are so eager to abandon liberty for their vision of orderly conduct is a puzzle to me.”
Because the need for liberty is only clear when you are not allowed to act as you please. If you get the government to force everyone to act as you want them to, then you don’t see the need for liberty as clearly. Or at all.
An, so the thinking goes, why would you need liberty when the government forces everyone to do what they’re supposed to? Liberty, then, means doing something wrong, by definition. Which is how liberty has become the enemy to these dogmas.
How are you going to enforce universal positive rights without a universal state?
You don’t enforce universal positive rights. Nation-states follow the Golden Rule as a general principle and perform a Positive Sum analysis for nation-states that pathologically violate the Golden Rule externally and or internally.
“According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society…”
Adam Smith: An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, IV 9: OF THE AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS, OR OF THOSE SYSTEMS OF POLITICAL ŒCONOMY, WHICH REPRESENT THE PRODUCE OF LAND AS EITHER THE SOLE OR THE PRINCIPAL SOURCE OF THE REVENUE AND WEALTH OF EVERY COUNTRY
Amen.
In light of this quote, perhaps “Smithian Liberal” is the sticky label Cowen is seeking.
Question: What did Smith mean by “Nation” in his title and why didn’t he use that word instead of ” sovereign” in the quote above?
Because the nation is all the people and the sovereign is a limited group of them, those who rule? From what I know of the UK at the time, technically there was one sovereign, the king, who ruled through his ministers and those under them.
The history of Parliamentary Sovereignty puts it around 1689 with the Bill of Rights. This was long before 1776. No one called the UK a nation-state but the foundations were laid. Maybe the baggage of empire first had to be shed or maybe Smith meant to be inclusive of both true monarchies and sovereign parliaments. Still, I wonder if his notion of Nation in the title is the same as ours now. I do like your top-down vs bottom-up explanation.
Summaries of WoN often say something like, “Smith attacked the idea that the wealth of a nation was how much gold and silver was within the national borders. Rather, it’s wealth was the goods and services produced there.” Since goods and services are used by people, this implies to me that the people are the nation–or at least they are the ones from whom wealth derives its value.
Stop, Stop, Stop.
A “State” is an embodiment of authority. Historically these embodiments have occurred by hysical (violence) and ideological force; more recently through sufficient public acceptance (based on perceptions of authenticity).
State “capacity,” the extensions of authority that are grounded on accrual authenticity,
must “come from somewhere,” the surrender or subordination of something from the powers of the individuals comprising its “public.”
So far this has been reflected in the subordination or actual suppression of individual liberty – where State “capacity” has expanded.
There is no state capacity with the group of senators we have. At this point, the town of Burlington Vermont cannot find a smart senator in town. Hence, no smart senior management, it has to be hired out to the primary dealers and they retain whatever state capacity the senators leave.
I’ve seen Aghion’s stuff before, and I’m not a fan and would recommend you take anything based on what he says with many grains of salt, Piketty-like.
“There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the French (Economists).”
His 2008 paper in which he creates a kind of absurd “minimum wage regulation level” index based on spherical cow “one monopsonistic representative firm” impressively-mathy models and a whole lot of ignoring of the de facto situation on the ground in various countries is exactly the kind of thing which would make Kling queasy.
So, for example, Sweden doesn’t have a law that imposes a minimum wage. Instead, it has a law that requires that nearly everybody in the country that might get paid low wages belong to one of three officially authorized unions that are more-or-less extensions of the state, and then the unions impose minimum wages on the employers. “Outsourced State Action Laundering” with the reality of a indirectly imposed wage floor does not merit a “””total freedom””” score on a regulation index. But to Aghion, it does. Harvard!
He also pretends to measure the degree to which statutes dictate the results of certain tenant eviction cases and don’t let judges do whatever the hell they want as “more regulation”, but that makes no sense at all – quite the contrary! The judge is part of the state. Duh! That makes a big difference!
And the state constraining itself from doing crazy and unpredictable things involves it having less ability to push people around at will and potentially unfairly, not more. If one part of the state has good reason to distrust the official exercising power in another part of the state, the regulation of those officials – to the benefit of ordinary people subject to the decisions of those officials – is a smaller state, not a bigger one.
State Power (and no, spending is not a good measure of the scope and impact of government) is proportional to discretion and uncertainly, while inversely proportional to constraints and predictable application of the rule of law.
Above all else, the typical USA voter is independent, pragmatic, and influenced by results. Peace, prosperity, and personal autonomy are prized. Rhetoric matters little. The great out migrations from high capacity/poor results like CA and NY to low capacity/better results states like FL and TX are the relevant revealed preferences. Ryan Fazio lays it all out nicely: https://nypost.com/2020/02/01/ny-and-ca-spend-billions-more-in-taxes-than-tx-and-fl-and-get-worse-results/
Anarcho-Tyranny.
California and New York (state and city) are terrifyingly capable and powerful states when they want to be. (see Dreher’s “Prada Meets the Pink Police State”.)
And, no surprise, when they don’t want to perform a typical government functions, regardless of what the written law says they are supposed to do, then they just don’t do it, which might look and feel like failure or lack of capacity, but isn’t. It’s complete success at intentionally being bad.
This is exactly the kind of “unrectification of names” I was worried and wrote about with all this “state capacity” talk, because “capacity to implement policies to get the results of good government as defined in a particular way” should be distinguished between that standard with the addendum “and the desire of officials with power to actually go ahead and do those things, leading to the good actions which get those good results.”
What California and New York City have is Potential but Idled State Capacity, not the lack of state capacity. It’s like the idea of a low capacity utilization rate lowering the ratio of actual to potential output.
If one dissolved “political constraints” as an element in “capacity” to elide the distinction, then one is mutilating the normal meaning of the word and furthermore using semantic to exclude stereotypical tyrannies which have tremendous ability to effectively impose their will, but have bad will.
That’s why Anarcho-Tyranny is such a useful concept, because it allows us to understand that a state can both have high capacity and still govern terribly by giving up on policing people hard to police, and instead harassing people the people who are easy to harass, on both a practical and political basis.
Excellent points as always from you.
Relevant to this topic I think is the recent enactment in California of AB 670 outlawing the ability of private homeowners associations from maintaining single family residential restrictions. All private communities must now allow at three or more dwellings to be built per lot.
For state capacity libertarians, if I understand them correctly, this is a fantastic achievement. For old school libertarians, if I understand correctly, this would be a regrettable encroachment on the liberty of private ordering.
In the end, it may likely mean little because the California statewide rent control, solar power requirements, inordinately expensive energy, impending water use limitations, and solicitude for violent criminals, crush any likelihood of human flourishing. Hostile anarcho-tyranny is indeed an apt description.
HOA/property law is a mess. It should not be the case that a developer gets to curse a price of land forever with their commercial preferences. 99% of HOAs are real estate set-ups by the original owner, not private clubs choosing their rules.
It seems like the new purity test for libertarians is to support policies to require all workers to Renton brutalist style high rises. If libertarians were really concerned about land use being tied up in private arrangements, it would seem like we would hear something from them about the tax breaks favoring land donations to non-profit conservation trusts like the Nature Conservancy. Many millions of acres have been set off limits for productive use in deference to donor vanity. Fixing this mess should be a much higher precedent than trying to deny working people safe and pleasant places to live.
And see too excellent new analysis from Kotkin & Cox on USA citizens preferences for opportunity over state capacity: https://www.city-journal.org/red-states-economic-demographic-advantage
And if I could, I would bet that the population outflow from Virginia accelerates as the dystopian hellscape unleashed by the new state capacity libertarian government there intensifies there as the legislature spews out growth-killing state capacity bill after growth killing state capacity bill and energy prices skyrocket after the governor ordered the power company to pass on all the costs of his vanity offshore wind farm project to consumers.
“A trend I have been noticing among libertarian organizations is that they are starting to express worries about populism, polarization, and the sorry state of political discourse.”
I have a few concerns, and I’m curious to see whether these organizations fall into the following pitfalls:
1. “Conversation” not as a genuine attempt to pass Ideological Turing Tests and address counterarguments through rigorous debate, but as euphemism for “Shut up, listen, and do what I want.”
2. “Conversations” with “personnel is policy” Overton Windows of respectability, credentials, and positions strategically over-narrowed to exclude inconvenient, awkward, socially undesirable, or politically incorrect evidence and arguments.
(For instance, does it make sense to say that scholars are both “across the ideological spectrum” and “believe that the liberal tradition, broadly understood, is central to achieving the good society.” Try replacing “the liberal tradition” with “a commitment to Diversity” in that sentence. Across: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” If, as IHS says it does, the tradition includes liberal principles such as “equality before the law”, then will this across the spectrum exclude anyone who believe in Affirmative Action? Rhetorical: of course it won’t, and one wonders if there will be any scholars who are openly against it.)
3. Policy-Based Evidence-Making, and efforts to contract out for hired-gun scholarship and studies purporting to demonstrate the superiority of one’s policy preferences, for the purposes of advocacy, marketing, and influence over elite and public opinion, and in the expectation that such studies will be covered and quoted uncritically by friendly press presenting it as authoritative Scientific Truth.
4. Leveraging Antipathy: Relying on the audience to badly interpret vague, boo-word concepts like populism, polarization, incivility, and so forth as shorthand code associated with, well, I’m guessing something like “Donald Trump and his evil army of disrepectful 4chan incels, moron haters, dumb hick white supremacists, and colluding Russians spraying napalm on our social tinderbox.”
That is, a kind of marketing strategy in which one is hoping that people who really don’t like Donald Trump and his supporters could be nudged to go along with something to which they might ordinarily be skeptical or resist, if they can be persuaded that by doing so it would help in the cause to suppress those horrible people and the horrible things they do.
5. Denied Area-Denial Advocacy (DADA). Fake Debate: framing arguments in such a manner that the most compelling counterarguments sit in the middle of career-suicide minefield, and since they can’t be accessed, won’t be used, and one can pretend they simply don’t exist with the knowledge that one is protected from ever being called out for using this tactic or for a fatal lack of rigor in the basis of their findings, and furthermore, one can use the “presence of absence” of people being silent instead of making those good counterarguments as itself evidence that no good counterarguments exist, and anyone still holding an opposing opinion is merely being stubborn, dogmatic, partisan, irrational, or otherwise biased or incompetent.
Finally, there is the question of what to do if one believes that civil liberalism is at a fundamental disadvantage because uncivil rhetoric promoting illiberal ends is always going to be more effective, seductive, popular, and politically profitable (because of, e.g., fundamental human psychological tendencies deriving from our evolutionary context), and that only illiberal “systems of thought-control” (such as existed before the Gurric Extinction Event) can keep the threat in check.
The way many people deal with the discussion of this tricky question is to avoid it.
Excellent questions.
Going to the IHS website linked to, we read that they separate themselves from all others by their “vision of the good society: a tolerant and pluralistic society in which intellectual and economic progress are the norm, and where individuals and communities flourish in a context of openness, voluntary and peaceful cooperation, and mutual respect.” The notion that this somehow separates them from others is a powerful testament to their fundamental insincerity. Everyone shares this utopian vision. Claiming it as your own is disrespectful of others who disagree with you.
The must-read blog of Ann Althouse frequently comments insightfully on this little game of superiority in discourse.
If the typical voter habitually thinks of government as fixer and problem solver, this may make intuitive sense: if your canteen is broken and leaking water, you keep furiously pouring and more water into it to fill it back up. Maybe voters just keep putting more into broken governments to try to compensate for the leakage that they don’t realize is coming out the bottom.
But to me this undermines the ‘state capacity’ critique of libertarianism. All the evidence we’re seeing suggests to me that the likes of Tyler Cowen should be ailing their criticism in the opposite direction: rather than trying to convince libertarians to embrace larger government, he should be trying to convince progressives (or populists) to stop trying to make government bigger, and focus instead on making it more efficient with the resources it has. Fix the leaks first before pouring more in. If anything I think the threat of budget cuts may be the best way to motivate bureaucracies to do a better job in order to stay off the chopping block. I think making government better at what it does is at most orthogonal to its size, and may even dovetail with aspirations for smaller government than bigger government.
Of course, if I were a cynic prime to conspiracy theories, I’d speculate that those who make the “we have to make it bigger in order to make it work better” argument are mainly concerned about getting a bigger government, not a more efficient one, and they suspect that if we reformed government and made it more efficient at the current (or smaller) size first, then people would see less of a need to enlarge, and would be satisfied to leave it as it is.
I think the obvious answer is that Gillespie is misinterpreting things through a libertarian language, in which low “trust” in government translates into a general belief that government is always totally incompetent and can’t accomplish anything even when it wants to.
But that’s not what people believe or mean when they say they don’t trust the government, and they see government successfully imposing its will on other people and on themselves all the time.
You can, for example, think the government tells a lot of lies all the time, and still believe that it will successfully and ruthlessly prosecute a business into oblivion for being illegally unwoke.
There’s a common assumption among people demanding the government “do something”: The amount of the government is approximately constant. Regulating X means deregulating Y. Adding regulations will not strengthen the government.
They want a dictator who will bring back order.
It’s more complicated – they want order AND law; and especially want a better amount of justice. There’s a LOT of corruption possible in most democracies, including America, Israel, Germany, Japan, the EU, and all ex-commie countries.
“Liberals”, including classical liberals who support liberty, have been really bad at stopping gov’t corruption. Few things are so enraging as injustice combined with getting much richer thru unfair or illegal acts, with the gov’t more supporting those who are corrupt over those who are not.
Harry Potter, and so many other books, include a big dose of injustice to literally justify violence. And if injustice justifies violence, while gov’t is the socially acceptable “violent” group, it naturally follows that all who want to stop injustice want a gov’t strong enough to do that.
Having proportional voting, with multiple parties, probably leads towards more corruption, as well, tho I’m speculating on this.