Socialist Fade-out
Interesting article from the Boston Globe (possible free registration demanded) on the growing influence of capitalism on the Israeli kibbutzim.
As of December 2006, 61 percent of kibbutzim were paying differential salaries to their members and more than 20 percent had decided to transfer ownership of kibbutz houses from the collective to the members who live in them. At Gan Shmuel, north of Tel Aviv, the kibbutz leased large tracts of agricultural land to developers for a shopping mall and McDonald’s. At Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea, the kibbutz guest house is now managed by an outside company that employs kibbutz members.
Voluntary socialism is tricky. To remain voluntary, it needs continuing ideological conformity. The more differences between people, the harder it is to cooperate, and the more the minority feels tyrannized by the majority.
Voluntary socialism may exist when conditions are ripe for it, but as new opportunities present themselves, and new challenges develop, people will find themselves not always thinking in step. Some will choose to start owning property and trading in the marketplace. Socialists then faces the choice whether to fight the tide and repress capitalism, losing the voluntaryst element of their society, or embrace the inevitable pull of the market.
Russian Nostalgia
I worry about Russia sometimes. Much as I admire their culture, they have just a little too much fondness for democidal tyrants. For example, why are they still giving Lenin’s embalmed corpse a bath every year? You have to see the pictures, linked by Iconoplex, to believe it. Just leave him in the ground already!
This is a shorter post than usual; I downloaded Ecto and wanted to test it.
Flirting with the Enemy
One unfortunate fact of this era is the way the Bush Administration, and many other conservatives, tend to stereotype dissenters as unpatriotic sympathizers with the enemy. This is an unscrupulous attempt to deflect legitimate criticism.
Yet there is a kernel of truth in every stereotype, as evidenced at The Heathlander, a hard left blog I came across via the WordPress portal. Its author, Jamie Stern-Weiner (can that be a real name?), explains “resistance to the occupation of Iraq is legitimate. It has the support of the majority of the Iraqi people, and by and large it does not target civilians.”
I’m not going to fault him for being unpatriotic (he’s apparently British, but of course Britain has been supporting the US in Iraq). I reject patriotism and nationalism. One should analyze the rightness or wrongness of policies logically and without prejudice. If the invasion of Iraq was wrong (not merely unwise, but morally wrong), then violent resistance to the occupation could be justified.
But I will fault his logic in defending the insurgency. He projects his own values onto the insurgents, defending them not as they are, but as they would be if he were leading them.
Though he responds with great verbiage to criticism of the insurgents, there is one quoted criticism I did not see him address. It is by Thomas Friedman who says of the insurgents, “They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis.” His point is to consider the insurgents with respect to their objective. Stern-Weiner notably neglects the purpose of the insurgency (hence its likely outcome should it succeed), and he focuses just on its intrinsic morality as an action.
For a simple thought experiment, imagine a bank robbery in progress. To make my experiment more palatable to leftist readers, let’s say most of this bank’s customers are working class residents, and the robber is part of a criminal syndicate set up by Republicans to skirt campaign finance laws. So there should be no sympathy for the robber. Hell, let’s just call him Karl Rove.
Distracted by the bag of money the bank teller just handed him, Rove is suddenly disarmed and knocked out by an adroit customer. Without giving the teller time enough to breath a sigh of relief, the customer picks up the bag of money and the gun and shoots three people on his way out the door.
If we analyze only the use of force against Rove, the customer’s resistance could seem justified. But once that resistance is understood in a larger context, where it is not to right a wrong, but to perpetuate another wrong, its moral color changes.
It’s cliché that the ends don’t justify the means. But nor do the means — the act of resistance against a wrongful use of force — automatically justify the ends. The goals of the insurgents, as far as I can tell, are not to set up some sort of pleasant democracy. To the extent they are influenced by Baathism, Islamism, or naked lust for power, the outcome of their success would almost certainly be despotism.
The current US-installed government is not looking too good to me right now, but if it were violently overthrown by people with no democratic or (small-l) libertarian credentials, I expect things would get much worse. Thus I don’t support the insurgency, even while I am opposed to the war. The latter, of course, does not require the former.
Update: Jamie Stern-Weiner is male, so I corrected pronouns in this post. My apologies for that. I’ve known female Jamie’s and guessed the wrong way.
Feminism and Language
Cheryl Cline posts an interesting article by Charles Johnson and Roderick Long comparing libertarianism and feminism. The gist of it is that if libertarians applied their principles more thoroughly they would find much to agree with feminists.
I know I’ve enjoyed Long’s stuff before, but I thought this essay had lots of superficial analogies and blanket statements such that, on the whole, I thought it was very misguided. For example, it says libertarians are…
…surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say….When feminists say that gender and sexuality are socially constructed, libertarians often dismiss this as metaphysical subjectivism or nihilism. But libertarians do not call their own Friedrich Hayek a subjectivist or nihilist when he says that “the objects of economic activity,” such as “a ‘commodity’ or an ‘economic good,’ nor ‘food’ or ‘money,’” cannot be “defined in objective terms.”
This strikes me as very confused. Hayek is an economic subjectivist and libertarians would not have trouble calling him that. One should not conflate economic subjectivism and metaphysical subjectivism. There is no inconsistency in believing in objective reality and that economic value is relative to the particular desires of individuals. But it gets worse:
Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority.1 Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.
The first sentence, to the extent I can parse it, is wrong. The footnote in the article helps explain what the authors mean, with an example of women “consenting” to rape by dressing provocatively. Yet libertarians categorically do not approve of rape and do not make arguments suggesting women tacitly consent to sex by the way they dress. At least, if there is such a pro-rape contingent of libertarians, I have yet to come across it.
Further, libertarians think gender roles are not oppressive to the extent women are not forced to accept them; I doubt you could find any libertarians defending the (enforced) gender roles in conservative Muslim societies, on the grounds that some women there may seem to accept those roles. If women voluntarily partake in a certain type of gender role, one may argue about its pros and cons, but it is not oppression.
When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rape—as when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Against Our Will, p. 15)—libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that “government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action,” that it rests “in the last resort” on “the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” and that its “essential feature” is “the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning” [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.
Yet it is too much to ask. The comparison between the feminisists’ view of rape and libertarians’ view of the state is inapt. The feminist viewpoint (at least as depicted here) seems like a considerable overstatement, in that the omnipresent threat of rape does not seem to be a part of most relationships in modern western societies. This article was published in 2005, yet seems at least 50 years out of date. Rape continues to be a problem, of course, perhaps because it is often hard to prove, hence hard to punish, but I think libertarians are right in doubting it is some overarching threat against women in general. Different cultures, and perhaps some elements within our own culture, may have a tendency to approve of rape or tacitly condone it, but this is deplorable and I certainly don’t see libertarians turning a blind eye to it.
By contrast, the violence of the state really is an overarching threat against all citizens, in that its laws and regulations are imposed by force against citizens regardless of consent. That not every government official literally uses force is simply a consequence of specialization. While again I don’t want to imply rape is less of a problem than it is, it is at least possible for women to live without the constant threat of rape; it is not possible to live without the constant threat that you must obey the government’s rules or go to jail.
Some of the article is good, but I think it generally has a mistaken conception of the intent of libertarianism, which is not as a “comprehensive” theory of human freedom. Libertarianism is primarily concerned with violence and law — when it is right to whack someone to make him do what you want, and when it isn’t.
Other matters, like gender roles, are important but should be kept separate, out of the realm of law and force. They are matters people should resolve through persuasion and voluntary action. That is not to say everything is black and white; it is just to say we have to make distinctions to the best of our ability. In trying to bundle social structures like “patriarchy” (which doesn’t even seem to be much of a factor these days) with rape and violence against women (which are actual crimes), this article tries to conflate what should be kept apart.
Keep Your Eye on the Ball
For a while now I’ve thought the real action in the war on terror remains in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with Iraq being a major and unfortunate diversion.
Al Qaeda’s regrouping in Pakistan and setting up base camps, not to mention recent resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, are not exactly welcome news.
I notice the Democrats are taking a lot of heat for not “supporting the troops” in Iraq. I wonder if they could deflect this criticism by diverting some (or even all) of the manpower and resources they would withdraw from Iraq to focus on those who actually attacked us.
Update: Maybe I’m just flattering myself, but it seems Tony Blair is a fan of the site:
Britain said Friday it will increase its troop strength in southern Afghanistan to bolster NATO forces battling Taliban militants, days after Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was pulling some British troops out of Iraq.
Rape & Punish
Ilya Somin adeptly addresses the prison rape problem, one which he says is widely agreed to be a problem but about which nothing is ever done. It is an institutional problem, he explains, arising from government’s inability or unwillingness to protect the politically weak.
Much as I found his post incisive, his response — ending the war on drugs (hence drastically reducing the number of prisoners at risk) and privatizing prisons — doesn’t go far enough. The whole model of punitive incarceration needs to change. It makes very little sense:
We should adopt a restitution-based model instead of all this. If someone commits a crime, force him to indemnify the victim, plus legal costs, plus a deterrence factor that takes into account the severity of the crime and the probability of getting caught. Many first-time offenders (and offenders deemed more trustworthy) would not even need incarceration; they could pay restitution to the victim and go on with their lives.
This involves rolling the criminal justice system into the tort system, considering crimes more like severe torts (but not exactly). A preponderance of evidence is too weak a standard to mete out punishment for murder, for example, so the changeover would have to import some legal standards and procedures from criminal law.
As many criminals are indigent or nearly so, prisons would be oriented to productive enterprises rather than holding bins, keeping the inmates under wraps until they have paid off their debt. This brings to mind the stereotypical inmate job: making license plates (or, perhaps more recently, telemarketing). But as the focus is on reaching an economic goal, rather than serving out a term, prisoners would have a much greater incentive to work hard, so they could get out sooner.
In fact, the prisoner could be given leighway to choose among various prisons that might best exploit his particular skillset. It’s important to recognize a separation between the prison and whomever the criminal owes his debt. Competition between prisons would create pressure to adopt humane policies; a prison known for turning a blind eye to rape would lose business to competitors that better protect their inmates. Conversely, inmates would have to compete to be accepted at more desirable prisons; “slacker” inmates would end up at the worst places.
While Somin does suggest privatization, it is not enough to continue with the current model but simply subcontracting the operation of prisons to private operators. At best, this might result in somewhat greater efficiency, but the larger institutional problems would remain. A complete revamp is needed, focusing on introducing competition to make prisons better protect inmates, while simultaneously forcing offenders to recompense their victims. Our current system primarily benefits the unions or private contractors operating the prisons, and the politicians who feed off of our fear and anger.
Branson’s Prize
John Tierney reports on Richard’s Branson’s $25 million prize offered for removing 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The article doesn’t contain any viable-sounding suggestions for accomplishing that (though presumably if Tierney had some ideas, he would have quit the Times already). Much of the article is in fact criticism of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
Private initiatives such as Branson’s prize are a welcome development. In order to change behavior, you need to change incentives. The environmentalist side of the argument is to offer severe negative incentives — extensive government restriction of the economy — in the hope of preventing a worse environmental outcome. Nobody wants to go that route, and in particular nobody wants to commit to such restrictions while other nations have not. If we can find a way to make the environment greener by making it profitable for someone to make it greener, we’re going to be much better off.
Smart(er) dust
Engadget reports on RFID “dust,” 0.0025 square millimeter 128 bit tags. Imagine how ubiquitous they will be in 20 years.
While there are legitmate privacy concerns, I wonder if they could be used to help eliminate some of the externalities commonly believed to require government intervention. For example, factory pollution is often adduced to show how a system based on Coase bargaining could not work in large part because you can’t tie particular particles to a particular factory, so can’t argue the factory owner is “trespassing” in your lungs. But suppose so many ppm of the factory’s pollutants are required to have microscopic RFID tags. Air sampling downwind of the factory would test for compliance. You or your doctor would detect the tag, passing the information on to your insurer or other surety organization, which would negotiate with the factory for an acceptable price of polluting your lungs.
The “Big Brother” concerns about RFID seem to have more to do with the possibility of the government spying on and tracking citizens. These fears have less to do with the technology than with the concentrations of power already inherent in our society.
Wind Farms
The New York Times reports on a wind farm controversy in rural Virginia (the Times requires free registration).
Returning for a moment to my earlier post, I mentioned Coase bargaining without explaining it. It refers to the Coase Theorem, which (roughly) says that, were it not for transaction costs, any definition of property rights would be efficient because people would negotiate until externalities are eliminated. One can view externalities simply as a consequence of high transaction costs. These costs prevent the full extent of negotiation that would be needed to reach an efficient outcome.
In the New York Times story, a wind farm, while environmentally attractive, has raised concerns about aesthetics, noise and light pollution (the turbine towers are tall enough that they require beacons to warn aircraft). The solution, per Coase, would be for the wind farm owner to bargain with affected parties to reach a solution that compensates for the nuisance of the turbines. Assuming the wind farm can still be profitable, it can then be constructed. But there may be a lot of people to bargain with; there may be holdouts. It is hard to identify who is really affected, and who is merely claiming to be affected in the hope of a payout.
In my example of factory pollution, the RFID-tagged dust particles emitted by the factory could be traced to a particular factory, and people afflicted by the factory’s pollution would be distinguishable from people with unrelated afflictions. This would greatly aid in reducing transaction costs — all victims do not have to negotiate with all polluters and vice versa.
Noise and light pollution and aesthetics may be trickier because they are more subjective. And there is still the problem of too many parties at the bargaining table.
A class action suit is one possibility, but this seems less than ideal. A tort system is needed when breaches of rights occur, yet the ideal is to have an efficient system of rights in the first place, where lawsuits are the exception, not the norm. It’s better for two farmers to have two clearly defined plots of land where each can grow his preferred crop, rather than share one plot and constantly sue each other when they get in each other’s way.
A better solution is for an intermediary to negotiate with the factory to a mutually acceptable compromise. Government is often proposed as such an intermediary. Government is a monolithic enterprise, not terribly responsive to the varying preferences of different people within its territory. For instance, people will have different tolerances for risk, and different interpretations of harm, as seen in the New York Times article. Perhaps, with the aid of technology, smaller, more responsive organizations could fill the gap between government defining rights for everyone, and individuals having to negotiate all of their rights.
Resonance
One other concept I’ve been kicking around lately is that logic and evidence are given surprisingly little weight in most political commentary. Far more important is the emotional resonance one’s words create in the minds of the target audience and other receivers of the message.
A case in point is recent criticism surrounding Barack Obama’s claim that soldiers’ lives are “wasted” in the Iraq war. This generated criticism from some quarters for being insensitive to military families. Radley Balko chides Obama for caving to after the criticism. Indeed, there was no reason to apologize (or pseudo-apologize), and Obama appeared to simply reword his statement to be more politically correct.
To “waste” means to “use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose.” That definition captures most of the arguments brought forth against the war. More important, the word “waste” implies that which is being wasted is something that has value. What would it mean to oppose the war while believing the soldiers’ lives are not being wasted? It would imply their lives have no value.
Obama’s original phrasing was more forceful, more effective when directed at his target liberal audience, but that same phrasing gives off a bad vibe in the minds of his critics. It is important for them to maintain the narrative that the war is a noble and important struggle, and “waste” rudely disposes of this message, logically applicable as it is to anti-war arguments.
Families of soldiers KIA have good reason to convince themselves that their loss was a noble sacrifice; I’m sure it would be much harder to grieve believing the life was wasted. Yet I also suspect most such families are aware there is a legitimate argument about the war, and that one can question the virtue of the war as a whole without doubting the value of soldiers lost.
Notably Michelle Malkin, in the page I linked to above, does not quote anyone reacting directly to Obama, but simply dug up unrelated quotes of soldiers or family members defending the war, as if she represents what they would think. What they actually think, or what Obama actually meant, does not matter; it’s all about the emotional resonance you can generate.
