"

I will quote my talk with a Maoist from India. He said: “The cultural revolution in China was a class struggle of poor peasants against kulaks.” I asked: “How do you know that?” and he replied: “From Marxist-Leninist theory.” I commented: “Yes, that is what I guessed.” He did not understand, but you do.

This is not enough, however, for, as you know, any properly vague ideology is always able to absorb (meaning: to discard) all facts without giving up any of its ingredients. And the trouble is that most people are not dedicated ideologists. Their shallow minds work in such a way as if they believed that nobody has ever seen capitalism or socialism but only sets of small facts they are incapable of interpreting theoretically. They simply notice that people in some countries are better off than in others, that in some of them production, distribution and services are much more efficient than in others, that here people enjoy civil and human rights and freedom and there they do not. (I should rather say “freedom” in quotation marks, as you do; I do realize that this is a part of the absolutely obligatory Leftist spelling, to use the word “freedom” in quotation marks when applied to Western Europe; what a “freedom”, indeed, enough to burst one’s sides with laughter. And we, people without sense of humour, do not laugh.)

"

Leszek Kolakowski, My Correct Views on Everything (1974)

"As somebody who occasionally calls himself a libertarian, I regret the extent to which the libertarian position is discredited by a kind of reductionism that is simply incompatible with social life."

William F. Buckley, Jr. on The Firing Line (1988)

"Death of a Salesman. A common situation—things said to be ‘critiques of capitalism’ are often just critiques of humanity. Humans vie selfishly and self-deludedly for status. Some succeed, while others fail. The struggle, and the failures, aren’t pretty. Yes, capitalism inherits this ugliness; but then so does any other system with humans."

Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias (2012)

"Politics is just coalitional conflict. A political label puts you, like it or not, on a team in a number of disputes in which there are significant real-world stakes. People therefore tend to see their ideological affiliation as constitutive of their identity in a way their opinion about other matters isn’t. People advertise their politics by putting Che Guevara and Murray Rothbard on t-shirts, but they don’t much advertise their metaethics with Kant gear. I’ve never seen a modal realism button. (If there were a combinatorial fictionalism button, I’d wear it!) Other people are thus likely to see our politics as central to our identity, and to see our attributed identity through the prism of their politics. Self-labeling gives others permission to apply to us the label we apply to ourselves, and who we are is to a large extent a complicated product of our reactions to social expectations."

A nice few sentences on political labels and personal identity in an otherwise weak post from Will Wilkinson.

Something this paragraph misses is that politics is not just coalitional conflict, but very often violently enforced zero-sum conflict with extremely high stakes (you know, everything in life) and significant potential for mutual destruction.

"Money is the ideal representative of a condition of increasing positive awareness of freedom (and thus increasing personal freedom itself) since it makes possible relationships between people that leave them personally undisturbed."

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900)

[Simmel is among the most interesting sociologists I’ve ever read. That money facilitates the growth of  personal autonomy is a real and important aspect of money that is often underappreciated. Impersonal isn’t necessarily bad and is in it’s natural place extremely beneficial. Money allows us to capture the material gains from direct and indirect interaction while being continually selective about who we form and maintain personal relationships with. And this is why for the most part, as Mat Arsonist explained, the prescriptive slogan ‘PEOPLE NOT PROFITS’ is backwards.]

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Representative Democracy, The State, Enlightened Anarchy.

If life becomes so perfect as to become self-regulated, no ‘representation’ becomes necessary. There is then a state of enlightened anarchy. In such a state everyone is his own ruler. He rules himself in such a manner that he is never a hindrance to his neighbor. In the ideal state, therefore, there is no political power because there is no state. But the ideal is never fully realized in life. Hence the classical statement of Thoreau that ‘Government is best which governs the least’.

It is my firm conviction that if the state suppresses capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself and fail to develop non-violence at any time. The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship. — What I would personally prefer would not be centralization of power in the hands of the state, but an extension of the sense of trusteeship, as, in my opinion, the violence of private ownership is less injurious than the violence of the state.

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Gandhi

An effective ‘right’ to healthcare is impossible.

1. Rights imply duties (for example, my right to life implies a duty on everyone else not to kill me).
2. Duties are things that we ought to do.
3. If it is impossible for me to do something, then it cannot be the case that I ought to do it (‘ought’ implies ‘can’).
4. Therefore, from premises 2 and 3, duties cannot conflict (for if they did, I would have a duty to do incompatible things, which would be a duty to do the impossible).
5. Assume there are universal welfare rights, that is, rights to goods and services, such as food, shelter, education, and medical care.
6. Welfare goods and services are scarce, that is, the demand for them is greater than the available resources can satisfy (for example, many countries are too poor for their governments to provide welfare goods or services).
7. Therefore, from premise 6, universal welfare rights will often conflict.
8. Therefore, from propositions 1 and 7, the duties to fulfill universal welfare rights will often conflict.
9. Therefore, from propositions 4, 5, and 8, the assumption that there are universal welfare rights leads to self-contradiction.
10. Therefore, from proposition 9, there cannot be universal welfare rights.

A common response to this argument is to challenge premise 6. Thus, it is often contended that welfare rights concern ‘basic needs’ and that the inability of some governments to meet the ‘basic needs’ of their citizens arises from global inequality or from poverty rather than from scarcity, so that redistribution or greater prosperity would enable all welfare rights to be honoured (Watson, 1977: 35–6). However, this contention seems to be mistaken, for two reasons.

First, increasing wealth multiplies wants. For example, increasing prosperity leads to greater investment in health care, which leads to the development of new drugs, new procedures, and new treatments and cures, so that more diseases or conditions become treatable. Each invention or innovation generates a demand for it, and relief from debilitating, painful, or life-threatening diseases or conditions is what proponents of welfare rights regard as a ‘basic need’, or what philosophers of need regard as ‘vital’, as ‘grave, deeply entrenched and scarcely substitutable’, something without which people’s lives are ‘seriously harmed or vitally impaired’ (Wiggins, 2005: 31–3). Yet all the new treatments consume resources and many of them are expensive, so the ‘basic needs’ that they could satisfy often go unmet even in the richest countries.

(Source: ppe.sagepub.com)

Is freedom valuable only insofar as you must struggle for it? Is libertarian success thus self-defeating but the struggle nevertheless worthwhile?

That is Friedrich Nietzsche’s stated position in the section reproduced below. While the first part of this position (freedom is valuable insofar as it is costly) if taken strictly and exclusively would likely find partial disagreement from most libertarians and most everyone else; the second element (liberal institutions once successful become illiberal) finds agreement from many significant libertarians from Anthony de Jasay to Stephan Molyneux:

Once liberal (i.e. libertarian for Americans) institutions are attained, people become complacent, comfortable, hedonistic, etc. etc. and therefore are likely to care less about freedom as a result. Furthermore, a liberal society with a small state produces enormous prosperity which is increasingly appropriated by the state, thus fueling the growth of that state. It’s a vicious cycle stretching from the Roman empire to modern USA.

Molyneux argues that this problem needs to be solved by affecting popular morality, and in particular raising children more humanely. De Jasay argues that there is no solution to this problem, but rather the cycles will move more and more toward maintaining liberty as the emergent order of markets and technology provides economic incentive to behave in ways that maintain it. I’m more with de Jasay but there is clearly hope in both solutions and they are interrelated.

§38

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of “pleasure.” The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.

How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by “tyrants” are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.

Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1889)

Property and Its Enemies

French-Hungarian economist Anthony de Jasay, in the Cambridge journal Philosophy, considers the question: is ownership a myth? 

This article is enormously helpful for putting concepts and arguments in an understandable light—for clearing up many common confusions and misunderstandings about property. It is highly recommended for libertarians, those who wish to critique libertarianism, those interested in economics, social science in general, legal studies, politics, etc. etc.

I. Exclusion

Ownership is a relation between an owner and the thing owned, such that the owner is at liberty to use it, to concede specific rights in it to others, and to alienate it, as well as to exclude access to it by others except with his consent. Full ownership and these liberties are mutually entailed. Exclusion is inherent in ownership; without separation of the owner from non-owners, property is empty of meaning. Where everybody ‘owns’ a thing, nobody owns it.

The thing owned is normally an asset (and sometimes another’s liability). It may be a tangible or intangible good, or a claim upon a good (e.g. a right to the future delivery of the good, or the right to an income stream). …

The owner may be an individual, a corporation, a public body or a collectivity lacking legal personality. Much confusion surrounds the use of the term ‘private property’. All property is private in the sense that the very concept implies closure, exclusion. To speak of ‘private property’ is analytic in the manner of ‘wet water’. In this essential respect, ‘public’ property is no different. We are not supposed to travel on the state-owned railways without a ticket, nor to borrow the locomotive for the children to play with, even if we are paid-up members of the public in question, though if we are, we have some distant interest in the railways’ profits or losses. Publicly owned goods behave much as so-called private property does, except when they function as ‘public goods’ (e.g. the street, the meteorological service, the crown jewels, the off-patent molecule),—but then they altogether cease to be property. ‘Common ownership’, too, lends itself to confusion, for it may refer either to a relation where each member of a defined group uses as much of the common as intensely as he wishes (e.g. fishing grounds, grazing land), or to one where the share of each is defined (e.g. medieval two-field village agriculture, modern partnerships), and it is best to make clear which is the intended meaning.

Exclusion, that is the denial of access to owned resources except with the owner’s consent, has consequences that are perhaps evident, but it can do no harm to spell them out. Where people’s talents, capacities as well as their preferences differ—as they do in every real society—exclusion engenders exchanges in the first place, production for exchange in the second. …

Atavistic instincts tell us the difference between ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. The practice of respect for one another’s property seems to be as old as human society itself, though it did not always cut across ethnic boundaries. Game theory can show that under plausible assumptions adherence to the practice is a rational ‘best response’ of everyone to everyone else, (i.e. a ‘Nash equilibrium’). However, under incomplete information and poor understanding of the likely long-term outcome, means-to-ends rationality itself may incite revolt against ‘mine’ and `thine’. Getting something for nothing is more attractive than paying for it, and taking a short cut beats scruples over trespass. Exclusion is prima facie a violation of certain, albeit crude and gross notions about freedom, equality and—why not?—justice. Though it is not wholly useless to show that these notions are crude and gross, it will hardly stop them from remaining virulent as crude and gross things are apt to do. 

They are wind in the sails of the sophisticated enemies of property who construct theories in which ethics is enlisted to impregnate ownership with guilt. Some imply that property cannot be legitimate at all (‘property is theft’), most others conclude that it is in society’s gift and its distribution ought to be at the sole discretion of society’s collective choice that some are entitled to impose upon others (‘property is myth’). The resulting advocacy of ceaseless redistribution may run in terms of stocks (wealth) or flows (income), but this is mainly a matter of convenience and does not impinge on the fundamental argument.

The present essay takes a critical look at some typical theories of the enemies of property. Happily, the critique of the enemies also leads us to recall that impeccable standard of reference, the work of Hume – a moment of respite from the usually less lucid reasoning of those in the opposite camp who blithely ignore him.

II. ‘Enough and as good left for others’ [In this section, de Jasay debunks Lockean, Nozickian, and similarly poor arguments sometimes used to justify the legitimacy of property.]

III. ‘The Myth of Ownership’

The root principle that gives ethical coherence to the origins of the rule system governing ownership is ‘finders keepers’, a special case of the more general coordinating principle of ‘first come first served’. Both are conventions in the strict meaning of the term, a fact of some importance to which I will revert presently. As opposed to the Lockean proviso which implies that the finder of a resource deprives the rest of mankind of the opportunity of finding it, and owes a debt to them unless equally good opportunities subsist, ‘finders keepers’ entails that though others might have found the resource, it is the finder who did and he is not, for that reason, under any obligation to the non-finders.

Many ‘enemies of property’ prefer to regard it as a creature of the political authority in society and have little interest in its extrapolitical legitimacy. Some choose to call the belief in such legitimacy a mere ‘myth’.

However, the ‘myth’ is more than just a sense of when it is the case that a thing of value is ‘mine’ or ‘thine’ and what prohibitions and what liberties constitute the meaning of these terms. It is also an explanation, a theory based on rational choice of behaviour ‘strategies’, of why these terms have come to mean what they do. The theory is that of Hume . It identifies the mechanism of conventions as a determinant of group behaviour, and as such anticipates what is today the last word in academic thinking about non-imposed social order. 

Hume dismisses in a footnote (505) Locke’s somewhat futile idea of ‘mixing’ one’s labour with an external resource to appropriate it, and pays no attention to ‘enough and as good left for others’. For him, initial exclusion is a matter of fact, it happens by ‘first occupation’. At that point, society is formed by the ‘first assignment’ to the ‘present possessor’. The morality of these steps is not at issue. 

From then on, voluntary transactions, sale, gift and bequest serve as the instruments of the ‘transference by consent’ and the distribution of property. He makes it very explicit that consent is sufficient warrant: “fitness and suitableness ought never to enter into the distributing of the properties of mankind” (514). Any further testing of the distribution for ethical and efficiency desiderata would be out of place. It suffices that it results from the exercise of the owners’ freedoms. As such, the distribution of property is the expression of justice. 

Hume’s genius and originality come into play from this point onward. For, as he engagingly puts it, ‘social disturbance’ mainly arises from ‘the looseness and easy transition’ of goods people covet (489). How, then, to explain the ‘stability of possession’ and hence of order? The standard answer handed down by Hobbes and repeated ever since, is that the state enforces the law, and this indeed is why it is indispensable. Hume instead finds in this situation the elements that give rise to a spontaneous convention. Behaviour about one another’s property can be coordinated upon several alternative equilibria. One, mutual respect, has prosperity as its payoff, another, mutual disrespect, theft, violence and extortion, produces a ‘solitary and forlorn condition’ (489). Nearly everyone expects nearly everyone else to respect property, hence the superior equilibrium of mutual respect will take hold. Being an equilibrium, it will be self-enforcing. Hume does not explicitly deal with the deterrence of deviation, but it is not inconsistent with his theory of this convention that punishing the deviants is part of the tacitly agreed behaviour. As a matter of empirical fact, this was the case until enforcement by the state gradually crowded out conventional enforcement. With the hindsight of modern game theory, all this is straightforward enough. In the 18th century, it was way ahead of its time and it was and has largely remained ignored. 

From the existence of the convention, Hume deduces that ownership does not depend on the will of the state but, together with the binding force of promises, is logically prior to it. Rules will emerge before there is a special rule-maker and enforcer. In his words that can never be quoted often enough, `…the stability of possession, its translation by consent, and the performance of promises. These are antecedent to government’ (541). 

However, contradicting Hume head-on while betraying no awareness of it, [leftist political authors] Murphy and Nagel state: ‘… there are no property rights antecedent to the tax system’ (74). Their book runs in terms of flows of income rather than stocks of resources, but this does not impinge on essentials. In most respects it is a run-of-the-mill work about ‘distributive’ justice and tax policy, no better and no worse than dozens of similar ones written in the American ‘liberal’ tradition on the unspoken assumption that social choice is not only de facto, but also morally entitled to choose its own scope and everything it chooses within it is chosen justly. In one respect, however, Murphy and Nagel stand out: it is in their curious attempt to turn the concept of convention into a weapon against property, and to interpret convention in such a way that would justify whichever way society, and more directly the legislator, chooses to distribute it. 

The attempt opens with the puzzling declaration that property is a ‘legal convention’ (8): ‘Legal’, whatever else it may be thought to mean, must also mean ‘in accordance with the law’. Law is by definition a product of conscious decisions by duly constituted authority. This is true both for statute law and for the judge-made law which rests on precedent. Since the law is the same for everyone, a single decision by the legislature or the judiciary is decisive throughout the jurisdiction. The decision is enforced by the coercive apparatus of the state. In nearly complete contrast, a convention is by definition a spontaneously emerging behavioural regularity that spreads and solidifies. It is not a matter of any authority’s decision. Nor is it explicit agreement, though some conventions can be interpreted as tacit contracts. Some conventions are self-enforcing in the most straightforward sense, others incorporate their own internal enforcement rules as part of the equilibrium strategy (e.g. ‘punish the deviant, and do not deviate, for you may be punished’). Neither type depends on an external enforcing apparatus maintained by taxation.

A ‘legal convention’, then, is a contradiction in terms unless one or both words are taken in a loose, free-and-easy manner. One wonders whether such usage serves the authors well. Their primary concern seems to be to convey that pre-tax income is just a bookkeeping fiction, it is not anything real; what is really yours is determined by the ‘legal convention’. In plain language, we would just say that there are laws requiring government to protect property from all except from itself, and other laws empowering it to take property (by way of income and other taxation) to finance expenditure that yet other laws direct it to incur. Barring the most improbable fluke, taxation is redistributive in the raising of revenue, in the spending of it, or probably both, and this is true whether redistribution is a deliberate objective or not. It is a truism that post-tax incomes are a function of these laws and of many other things. Indeed, we may add that so are pre-tax incomes as well. Yet it does not follow that income and property would not belong to anyone in particular if these laws did not exist. Nor does it follow that calling the arrangement a ‘legal convention’ establishes its legitimacy.

There is a suggestion throughout that if the tax laws are equitable, properly evaluated and create the right (and not wrong!) balance between freedom, ‘distributive’ justice (a pleonasm?), economic efficiency, equality and anything else, they will be consensual and provide the “framework … all find morally comfortable” (42). 

Lest this moral comfort be troubled by foolish notions of property, the ‘myth of ownership’ must be dispelled. What people have in mind when they say ‘mine’ and ‘thine’; the tacit convention Hume has identified and that makes property ‘antecedent to government’, is an ‘illusion … that arises whenever the conventions governing a practice are so pervasive and so deeply buried that they become invisible … [and] seem natural although we know they are highly arbitrary’ (74). But we know nothing of the sort. 

A little knowledge is often worse than none. There is indeed a class of conventions that are ‘arbitrary’ (though the word is hardly right) in the sense that an alternative convention was potentially available that could have solved the coordination problem on band equally well. ‘All drive on the left’ coordinates traffic no worse than all ‘drive on the right’ would do, and the reason why one establishes itself rather than the other may be called arbitrary, (or more precisely, unrelated to the convention’s merits). But some of the most fundamental spontaneous conventions do not belong to this class. The convention of not killing peaceful strangers has no equivalent in a convention to kill them. The latter is less efficient and has indeed proved to be (evolutionarily) unstable, for it has disappeared in most parts of the world. The same is true of the other conventions against torts. Everywhere, the tort-feasor is a deviant who breaches the established convention. Nowhere and never has such conduct passed for the norm, for a potential alternative. 

Closer to the Humean convention of ‘stable possession’ that we are invited to regard as an illusion, there is nothing ‘arbitrary’ about ‘first come, first served’. ‘Last come, first served’, or some similar behaviour pattern, would be less efficient and could hardly have established itself. ‘Finders share it all round’ could not have taken the place of ‘finders keepers’.

The ‘legal convention’ Murphy and Nagel put forward is not a convention even in a broad, let alone in a technical sense, since it entails fiscal decisions made by some and imposed on others, and its enforcement is not undertaken spontaneously. However it makes little odds what it is. For if ‘mere conventions’ are really arbitrary, then the ‘legal’ one is arbitrary, too, and is no better a source of legitimacy than the Humean one. If conventions; at least those relevant to property, are not arbitrary, then ownership is not a ‘myth’.

—excerpt from Anthony de Jasay, ‘Property and Its Enemies’, Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 307, January 2004.

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I always thought I was a liberal, but I came up terribly surprised when I found I was a ‘right wing conservative extremist’. I have always listened to every human being I’ve ever met about how I should feel. But this so-called, new liberal group… they never listen to your point of view. …

There isn’t a hell of a lot we can do to change human behavior. We keep making laws to try to change human behavior but we can’t do it…You’re being conned into Keynesianism and socialism now, but it isn’t going to stop the selfishness of human behavior. It isn’t going to stop the greed. If you take $20 and give a dollar to every son of a bitch in the room, you come back a year later one of the bastards will have most of the money. It’s just human nature. We’re never gonna whip it with a lot of laws.

As communication gets better and you make people conscious of somebody in trouble, starving or something like that, the average person will help…I think there are people who try to affect a thinking where they know more than some other son of a bitch and try to pull a false impression on what human nature is. We’ve proven we go back to hope at the first opportunity…and bam they’re out there ready to grab it. So we are optimistic; we have to be optimistic. What else would we be if you lose optimism?

"

John Wayne (1975)

How majority-rule politics undermines social tolerance and diversity

Public choice theory has long pointed out that a vote only matters when an election would otherwise be tied. That is to say, never. Since the probability of a tie in a moderately large electorate is infinitesimally small, voters have no incentive to expend resources becoming informed about policy and will rationally remain ignorant. There is, however, a paradox implicit in the rational ignorance argument, since taking the time to vote also takes effort. A rational person would not vote unless the expected benefit of voting was greater than the time and effort of getting to a polling booth. It is difficult to believe that the tiny change in expected political outcomes exceeds the cost in enough cases to explain current levels of voter turnout. There must be something else going on.

That something else has been described by theorists working within the public choice tradition. Apparently-irrational voting can be based on a general rational-choice theory of behaviour. Brennan and Lomasky offer an alternative model of voting focused on its expressive rather than instrumental value.[8] In this view, ideological appeal is more important than pragmatic consequences in determining policy choice, with people voting not to influence policy, but rather to express themselves. Political action is not directed at particular ends, but is an intrinsically valued activity which is ‘much more like cheering at a football match than … purchasing an asset portfolio.’[9]

Bryan Caplan uses standard economic theory to argue that voters are ‘rationally irrational.’ Since a single vote does not generally influence the outcome of an election, irrationality is costless to voters. The act of voting is not causally connected to electoral outcomes from the individual’s point of view. Caplan argues that people have preferences over their own beliefs and in the low-consequence environment of the voting booth will believe and vote for whatever makes them feel good. Irrationality is a normal good and people consume it to the point of satiation when it is free.

Caplan shows that voters have systematically biased and demonstrably false beliefs about economics, despite consistent attempts by experts to correct public opinion. This is not simple ignorance, but irrationality. The existence of policies, such as subsidies, which benefit special interests at the expense of the general public would not be accepted by rational voters. Caplan identifies four distinct voter biases: anti-foreign bias, make-work bias, anti-market bias, and pessimistic bias. It costs voters nothing to indulge these biases in the voting booth, and so they do. Caplan’s argument is broader than that of Brennan and Lomasky. Where Brennan and Lomasky see expressive concerns as counteracting instrumental calculation, Caplan also sees concern for self-image combining with evolved biases to alter perception. People do not rationally choose to express themselves rather than vote for the policies they would truly prefer, but simply do not make rational calculations when there is little at stake. Voters take the path of least resistance.

Caplan provides strong empirical evidence and plausible explanations for the existence of these biases, and they undoubtedly play a role in democracy’s illiberal tendencies. There is also another reason to think that democratic politics will elicit illiberal sentiment, though, which is more in line with Brennan and Lomasky’s theory of expressive voting.

Much human behaviour can be explained by signalling.[10] People act not only to produce results, but to demonstrate their competence, virtue, or allegiance to others. Political behaviour, being of little consequence to the individual and often involving public debates and displays, is a very useful way to signal to others which groups we are loyal to and how we would like the world to work. [11] While signals generally need to be costly in order to be effective, political behaviour provides a smooth gradation of costliness which is publicly observable. The diehard campaigner can dedicate his life to fighting for a particular cause, while one wishing to commit less need only express opinions on political matters when prompted. This publicly knowable commitment gradation provides incentives against free-riding in group membership while allowing the weakly committed to make whatever contribution they desire, much like many non-profit organizations have tiered membership structures. Even the weakest political signalling has some costs in terms of alienating potential allies on the other side of the debate. The expression of political beliefs, though, remains unrelated to the eventual political outcomes from an individual point of view.

This asymmetry between the personal and social cost of political behaviour leads to enormous problems. People may use their political behaviour to signal those things of which they approve and disapprove, rather than what they, on reflection, would think should be subject to state intervention. People may vote for gun control because they wish to be seen by others—or to see themselves—as the sort of person who does not like guns, or for restrictions on consensual sexual behaviour because they wish to express their disapproval of acts they deem immoral. The lack of consequence at the individual level allows people to express how they feel with impunity. These feelings are aggregated and physical force is used to prevent behaviour not in line with voter preferences: idle thoughts are enforced at the point of a gun.

When a hyperactive state has the potential to regulate any sphere of action, neutrality is impossible. A government that prohibits marijuana but permits alcohol can be seen as implicitly condemning the former and condoning the latter. To voters, this means that they cannot simply leave the choice of whether to behave in ways of which they disapprove up to individuals. A popular definition of public policy is ‘whatever governments choose to do or not to do.’[12] Under this definition, silence is no more neutral than voice: to ignore is to condone. As more of life becomes politicized, people are forced to express their feelings through politics. The result is often heavy regulation of unpopular activities and lifestyles.

The impossibility of a government which is both neutral and active is clearly demonstrated by recent controversies over same-sex marriage. Marriage-equality advocates rightly argue that the state should not grant special privileges to heterosexual couples which they deny to homosexual couples. Opponents see state sanction of same-sex marriage as making them complicit in condoning and legitimizing these marriages. Government actions are purportedly based on will of the people. It is impossible to live and let live when it comes to democratic choice, since every choice is a matter of how we, rather I or one, should behave.

In itself, democracy’s penchant for extracting our prejudices does not change the distribution of preferences, but only the means through which they are expressed. The very act of expressing a preference—which in a depoliticized world would often go unarticulated—and deliberating over it, however, will tend to reinforce it. Cass Sunstein has shown that group deliberation tends to strengthen prior opinion and increase bias.[13] The fact that individuals are compelled by politicization to express their views on guns or homosexuality and will tend to discuss these things most often with likeminded folks, then, will not only mean that otherwise latent views will be represented in policy, but also that those views will become stronger and more extreme over time.

—Brad Taylor, ‘Virtue and the Voluntary’ at The Independent Institute (2009), emphases mine

Feynman on the ‘ethics of equality,’ wealth redistribution, capital structure, and pompous fools vs. ordinary fools

There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home. 

The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”

I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries—that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.

The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking! You’ve gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don’t take it so seriously. Back away a minute and look at what it is.” So I thought about the conference, how crazy it was, and it wasn’t so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in something like that again, I’d shy away from it like mad – I mean zero! No! Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.

When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!”

Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge of our group has the nerve to say that since we’ve worked out so much, there won’t be any time for public discussion, so we’ll just tell the public all the things we’ve worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn’t think we had worked out a damn thing!

Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines—our second basic “problem”—I said that I noticed something interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”

Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”

“Uh, well, as a general principle, or…” I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?

There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—that, I cannot stand! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.

—Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Richard Feynman on freedom, communism, Hayekian knowledge problems, and limited governance

The fact that Russia is not free is clear to everyone, and the consequences in the sciences are quite obvious. … To make the thing still more real I give you the example of a Mr. Nakhrosov who traveled in the United States and Italy and went home and wrote what he saw. He was castigated for—I quote the castigator—“A 50-50 approach, for bourgeois objectivism.” Is this a scientific country? Where did we ever get the idea that the Russians were, in some sense, scientific? Because in the early days of their revolution they had different ideas than they have now? But it is not scientific to not adopt a 50-50 approach—that is, to not understand what there is in the world in order to modify things; that is, to be blind in order to maintain ignorance. I cannot help going on with this criticism of Mr. Nakhrosov and to tell you more about it. It was made by a man whose name is Padgovney, who is the first secretary of the Ukranian Communist Party. He said,

You told us here you would only write the truth, the great truth, the real truth, for which you fought in the trenches of Stalingrad.That would be fine. We all advise you to write that way. [I hope he does.] Your speech, and the ideas you continue to support smack of petty bourgeois anarchy. This the party and people cannot and will not tolerate. You, Comrade Nakhrosov, had better think this over very seriously.

… I hope that we can all maintain laughter and ridicule for the people like Mr. Padgovney, and at the same time try to communicate in some way to Mr. Nakhrosov that we admire and respect his courage, because we are here only at the very beginning of time for the human race. There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers. Man has been stopped before by stopping his ideas. Man has been jammed for long periods of time. We will not tolerate this.

I hope for freedom for future generations—freedom to doubt, to develop, to continue the adventure of finding out new ways of doing things, of solving problems. Why do we grapple with problems? We are only in the beginning. We have plenty of time to solve the problems. The only way that we will make a mistake is that in the impetuous youth of humanity we will decide “we know the answer. This is it. No one else can think of anything else.” And we will jam. We will confine man to the limited imagination of today’s human beings.

We are not so smart. We are dumb. We are ignorant. We must maintain an open channel. I believe in limited government. I believe that government should be limited in many ways, and what I am going to emphasize is only an intellectual thing. I don’t want to talk about everything at the same time. Let’s take a small piece, an intellectual thing. No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race. 

—Feynman, The Uncertainty of Values (1963)