Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

The opposite of FITs

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Ordinarily, I like to focus on good writing and ignore the bad. But this WaPo op-ed is such a classic illustration of how to reinforce closed minds on your own side that I am willing to violate my own rule. Adam Laats writes,

At moments when American culture has taken some progressive turn, conservatives have consistently blamed a single culprit for indoctrinating vulnerable youth with radical ideas: public schools. Local school board meetings offer an attractively close-to-hand target — a place to vent frustrations and feel some measure of control, instead of admitting defeat.

The theme is that conservatives are trying to “turn back the clock.” This is classic asymmetric insight–claiming to understand the other side’s motives better than they do, and not taking their concerns at face value. At no point in his piece does Laats try to articulate what conservatives are saying about critical race theory in schools, much less steel-man their argument.

I should note that it would take only a few minutes to find an equally bad column written by a conservative. In fact, here is Victor Davis Hanson on why he left National Review. Hanson is another master of asymmetric insight. In this case, he claims that the true motives of those on the right who oppose Donald Trump are:

that’s kind of a virtue signal to the left. .. a lot of them felt it was their duty as Republican establishmentarians to tell the world they didn’t approve of Donald Trump’s tweets or his crudity.

I think that a lot of never-Trumpers genuinely believe that U.S. foreign interventions are necessary and that cutting entitlement spending is necessary. And they dislike Mr. Trump’s style because they think it damages the conservative cause.

That is the way to charitable to never-Trumpers, and those are the positions you should argue against. Just to be clear, I was not a never-Trumper, although his post-election complaints are making me one.

VDH is doing the opposite of being charitable. And he does it with the left even more. So you can like him for being on your team, but I don’t think he earns many FIT points.

I wrote The Three Languages of Politics to try to get people to reject this sort of writing and to demand better. To no avail.

The permanent government

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Dominic Cummings writes,

You don’t control the government unless you can shut down parts of the ‘permanent’ bureaucracy and you can’t legally do this in the current regime without grabbing control of a party. It’s hard to imagine sane politics over the next 50 years without somehow closing (or at very least ‘changing beyond recognition’) the GOP, Democrats, Tories, Labour.

The post is endorsed by Tyler Cowen, and I think it says some things that Tyler would not say out loud.

Speaking for myself, I strongly agree with Cummings on this:

Whether Trump wins or loses [in 2024] his candidacy will be terrible for everybody. He demonstrated no interest in actually controlling the government. He didn’t drain even a corner of the swamp, he just annoyed it.

Kling’s ideas for state-capacity libertarianism

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Russ Roberts interviews me. It’s a high-energy interview about my suggestion for having a more rigorous and constrained administrative state.

So, one of the ideas that I have, they’re kind of twin ideas for improving the administrative state. One is to actually have the administrative state organized like a business organization, not[?]–profit-seeking, obviously, there obviously are things you can’t have.

But, actually to have a Chief Operating Officer [COO] who can reorganize, fire, hire, put in systems of accountability. . .
And the other key element, structurally, is I think we need a very powerful audit agency. An agency that can step in and evaluate how the regulatory agencies are doing, make sure that they’re not abusing power, and question them when they’re not being effective.

Russ ends up giving the idea a B-/C+. He likes FITs better.

A listener wrote to me about the audit agency idea:

For what it’s worth, such an organization already exists in [North] America. It’s called the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. Each Canadian province has one of its own too.

Thanks to our first-past-the-post electoral process (with more than two parties participating), we too often get majority governments that are able to ride out the scathing criticism that is often to be found in an auditor general’s annual report. But if the election is near or a minority government has been elected, an auditor general’s report can have quite an impact.

Of course, the U.S. also has the GAO and various Inspectors General. Getting the process to be effective requires more than just creating the position.

FITs update, number 14

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About one of the links, I write,

The essay is mostly about how LA’s one-party Democratic control is bad, and it includes various structural electoral reforms to try to fix that. To me, it seems like a tremendous feat of cognitive dissonance on the part of Progressives that they can observe how badly a Democratic-run city works and still believe that the left is right about everything.

Where you want to repress markets

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Vitalik Buterin writes,

The only reason why political and legal systems work is that a lot of hard thinking and work has gone on behind the scenes to insulate the decision-makers from extrinsic incentives, and punish them explicitly if they are discovered to be accepting incentives from the outside. The lack of extrinsic motivation allows the intrinsic motivation to shine through. Furthermore, the lack of transferability allows governance power to be given to specific actors whose intrinsic motivations we trust, avoiding governance power always flowing to “the highest bidder”.

You don’t want the verdict in a trial to go to the highest bidder. You don’t want regulatory policy determined by the highest bidder.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I do not claim to understand Buterin’s whole post.

Immigration restrictions are domestic restrictions

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From a book review by Alberto Mingardi:

Controlling (“governing”) immigration means imposing restrictions upon natives too. They will be less “at ease” in their hiring people or buying things from strangers whose legal status they would not otherwise be interested in knowing. It also means a further increase in red tape and in requiring documents from people, exacerbating an unfortunate trend in contemporary nation states. Kukathas points to a simple and yet often forgotten fact: immigration control means controlling more those who are not immigrants. It means, for example, checking on factories to make sure every worker is documented; to make sure that families are not employing a maid who does not have a regular permit to stay in that country

We live in an age where Fear Of Others’ Liberty is on the march.

Of I and We

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In a review of Jonathan Sacks’ Morality, I write

I think that the problems of loneliness and loss of meaning that Sacks identifies are due to a breakdown of covenants at a small-scale level. I wish that families were larger and stronger. I wish that neighborhoods had more continuity. I wish that the school environment for children could be informal rather than bureaucratic. I wish that long-term friendships were more prevalent.

For more on these topics, see the biography of
Alexis de Tocqueville in the Online Library of Liberty; and the EconTalk podcast episode Yuval Levin on The Fractured Republic. See also “Camping-Trip Economics vs. Woolen-Coat Economics,” by Arnold Kling, Library of Economics and Liberty, Feb. 2, 2015.
But at the macro level, I think we are better off with a society of contract than with a society of covenant. The more weight we place on “We” at the national level, the less room for the sort of community that I would like to see at a local level. As we think in terms of larger scale, I think it helps to lose the “We.”

Yuval Levin, Martin Gurri, and other FITs

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A self-recommending podcast. For example, around minute 7, Yuval Levin points out that what is unusual currently is that elites in various realms have similar backgrounds. It used to be that the business elite was not culturally similar to the journalistic elite or the political elite. Having elites that have much in common culturally with one another and yet differ sharply culturally from people who are not in elites is a problem.

Here is more of my coverage, along with coverage of other FITs.

Another FITs update

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This is number 4. Robert Wright cites one of the books that influenced me most strongly. And I comment,

Halberstam’s book is probably the best treatise on organizational behavior you could ever read. Principal-agent problems are everywhere. The problem of whether you can trust an expert is a principal-agent problem, and it is central to many problems that we face today. I think of the game of acquiring status in principal-agent terms, and The Best and the Brightest presents a powerful case study of people who acquired status in the foreign policy world on the basis of connections and adherence to groupthink.

NWW watch

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Armin Rosen writes,

“You have democracy in terms of framework, but it’s clan politics,” with elections serving as a method for “preventing potential conflict between clans” and “delivering stability.” Even Faysal Ali Warabe, chairman of the Justice and Welfare Party, conceded, “We campaign on issues, but we’re elected on a tribal basis.”

The description of Somaliland sounds like a limited-access order, as described by North, Weingast, and Wallis. The attempt to go beyond this to an open-access order often fails.