Right Reason

Open Immigration and Firearms: Equivalent Rights?

Will Wilkinson poses the question:

 

 

Let me hazard a response:

The difference between the right of owning a weapon and migrating to another society is that the latter is based on the natural impetus for self-preservation while the latter involves wanting to enter into a society that may have grown prosperous based on entirely different culture. The difference ultimately lies in distinctive notions of the bona vita, of the good life, that are not in play about discussions about the right to self-defense, which the right to bear arms is anchored on.

My moral point of view is idiosyncratic from a modern point of view, so I should explain myself a bit and I shall do so through the lens of two authors: Larry Arnhart and Hugo Grotius.

Mr. Arnhart provides a persuasive interpretation of natural right as being those conditions necessary to achieve human flourishing in human societies. As Mr. Arnhart points out in Darwinian Natural Right: “The moral opinions that drive political controversies are ultimate opinions about the best way of life for human beings, about how human beings must live to satisfy their natural desires” (p. 1). Natural rights are therefore those faculties that people tend to need, by virtue of the principles of human nature, to acquire a good life. Unlike the right to self-defense, whence philosophers and jurists have derived the right to own a firearm, the capability to migrate from one society to another is not an essential precondition for human flourishing across all cultural contexts and can therefore not be reasonable considered a right transcending all those cultural contexts.

Grotius then provides an understanding of rights as flowing from human sociability and from the fact that human beings are creatures who derive almost all their advantages from social intercourse. In The Rights of War and Peace, Grotius argues that all rights derive from sociability: “This Sociability… or this Care of maintaining Society in a manner conformable to the Light of human understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s, and the Restitution of what we have of another’s, or of the Profit we have made by it, the Obligation of fulfilling Promises, the Reparation of a Damage done through our own Default, and the Merit of Punishment among Men” (pp. 85-6). Here, Grotius properly identifies human rights largely with commutative justice and abuses of rights as the taking of what is properly another’s. He makes that connection again in The Rights of War and Peace when he writes that “Justice… consists wholly in abstaining from that which is another Man’s” (p.120). Unlike the case of denying ownership of firearms, denying a would-be immigrant access to a nation is not a violation of commutative justice, and so can reasonably be said to not be a violation of right.

 

Let me dwell more on these themes: The most basic of all conditions for human flourishing is self-preservation. A dead or gravely wounded animal cannot be a flourishing one, and so it is reasonable, by any animal’s very nature, that they tend towards actions that preserve themselves. Self-preservation takes a significant role in Grotius’ system of jurisprudence. He described it as being “that Instinct whereby every Animal seeks its own Preservation, and loves its Condition, and whatever tends to maintain it” (p. 180). In order to guarantee that people are free to pursue virtue and the good life, laws must principally guarantee self-preservation; hence, across history, it is seen as the utmost of tyranny for rulers to arbitrarily deny people their self-preservation by unlawfully killing or imprisoning them. Grotius also testifies to the right of self-preservation as being antecedent to all other rights: “’tis the first Duty of every one to preserve himself in his nature State” (Ibid).

It is impossible to entirely separate the gun-ownership from concerns of self-preservation: Firearms, especially handguns, are great equalizers. Even at a great physical and training disadvantage, one human beings can still pose a mortal threat to another human being. The right to bear arms emerges out of a right to protect one’s property. George Orwell’s article “Don't let Colonel Blimp ruin the Home Guard” is most celebrated by gun-lovers for his observation that “that rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy.” However, I think he makes an even more worthwhile observation in “You and the atomic bomb,” when he observed that firearms are an inherently democratic weapon that give power to the people, so to speak:

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, thanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it—gives claws to the weak.
The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day.

One may not agree with citizens having the right to own assault rifles or other military-grade firearms. Nevertheless, I think that it is unreasonable to argue that firearms have nothing to do with the impetus for self-preservation in society. After all, those who might not be able to fend of an attacker can have their minds put at ease by owning a pistol. Moreover, the right to own a pistol is essentially related to concerns of commutative justice: The question is whether a citizen can claim an object, in this case a firearm, as his own, and so the legal question is a question of right.

However one decides the issue of whether it is a right to bear arms, it is certainly a right that is directly related to the most animal, and therefore most fundamental, principle of human nature: The instinct for self-preservation.

 

This is not the case with immigration. While self-defense is natural to our animal nature, emigration derives from a desire to live in complex societies that have evolved through artificial means, including the civilizing process, and which take their character from the ideas of those that inhabit them. Nobody is migrating these days in order to go live in an otherwise uninhabited patch of land. Instead, immigrants are generally attracted to the opportunities that different societies can offer them. Those societies are organized entities that have, over generations, accumulated variations deriving from the ideas of those inhabitants. They are ultimately the products of human artifice and it is not unreasonable to assume that such artifice might include excluding outsiders. People’s desire to immigrate may be entirely natural and praiseworthy; however, that desire does not imply they can justly immigrate wherever they like because of the concern for preserving the ideas that have made a society so prosperous to begin with.

The reason is that it is entirely plausible for some people to think that any person’s pursuit of happiness might harm the general welfare of a society based on entirely different ideas. As Garett Jones has argued in “Do immigrants import their economic destinies?”: “Government policies don’t radiate from subterranean mineral deposits: they are in large part the product of its voting citizens. And in the long run, new citizens lead to new policies.” I would go even further and argue that the very customs, let alone government-policies, that make any society possible are the product of living citizens perpetuating the customs that previous citizens established. Edmund Burke eloquently expressed this idea when he wrote that society was a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born.” Introducing new people with radically different ideas might lead to unintended consequences to that partnership that cannot be adequately foreseen and so policy-makers can be reasonable in a moderate desire to limit the introduction, via immigration, of ideas that might undermine that partnership.

 

A tragic aspect of the conversation about immigration is that so many people decide to leave their country because their own nations are no longer conducive to their own flourishing. However, I believe that most refugee-policy is a matter of beneficence, not justice.

After all, there is no violation of commutative justice that happens when one nation erects a wall against another, however unseemly that wall might be. No citizen of one nation can say that they own citizenship in another nation—and it needs to be emphasized ad nauseum that citizenship is an artificial construction of social evolution, not a universal impetus in human nature. Citizens in one nation can say, probably unreasonably in most situations but reasonably in some, to those wanting access to their own nation: Heal thy own nation. That is certainly a harsh statement, maybe unreasonably so from a beneficent point of view, but that is certainly not an unjust statement. After all, there is no violation of commutative justice going on, just a denial of access.

 

Ultimately, I think that the open-immigration debate terribly frames the practical question at hand by conjuring up a right and crying out: Justitia fiat, et pereat mundus! However, policy is never a binary; rather, it is a matter of decisions at the margins. Modern nations do not face the question of letting in everybody or nobody; instead, they let some people in and exclude others. The practical question is on the margins and deciding the marginal person who should be excluded. Should, say, Great Britain exclude known Wahhabists? I would say that it should. Should it exclude Christians, and for that matter many Muslims, fleeing persecution in Syria? I would say not.

Enshrining open immigration as a human right ex nihilo is a form of rational constructivism that we have reason to think might harm social order. Rather than treat the social partnerships we have inherited as carte blanche to remake in our own image, we should be happy, as the stewards of those partnerships, to improve policy at the margins.

 

 

Bibliography
Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
Grotius. Hugo. 2005. The Rights of War and Peace. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Comparative Advantage at 200

 

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by rewarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most effectively and most economically: while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together, by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.

-David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation

 

April 19th marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, and therefore of also his principle of comparative advantage.

 

In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises rechristened Ricardo’s principle as the ‘Ricardian Law of Association’ and enshrined it as one of the fundamental principles for understanding how material progress is possible through social cooperation: “The law of association makes us comprehend the tendencies which resulted in the progressive intensification of human cooperation” (Mises 1998: 159). In the History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter never seemed all that much impressed with Ricardo’s accomplishments; on the topic of comparative advantage, which he never explicitly mentions, Schumpeter notes that Robert Torrens “baptized the theorem, [Ricardo] elaborated it and fought for it victoriously” (Schumpeter 1994: 607). Schumpeter’s unenthusiastic sentiment towards Ricardo is explained elsewhere in his History when he asserts that it was “neither his advocacy of winning policies per se, not his theory per se, that, to this day, makes of [Ricardo], in the eyes of some, the first economist of his time, but a felicitous combination of both” (Ibid: 473). Paul Samuelson was much more enthusiastic towards Ricardo and his exposition of economic theory. He is said (I must confess I cannot find the citation online) to have said that Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage was an idea in economics that was simultaneously both universally true and not obvious.

However, I do think that a problem can be had with that principle and that, from the side of probability, that problem can be universally true and not obvious to the economic way of thinking, as it manifests in classrooms the world over. Whenever economists teach the lessons of comparative advantage, they do so in realized numbers alone. They write out the context of comparative advantage as if the comparative advantage of each individual element of their system is entirely known and can be pin-pointed to a single number. Although such an elucidation of international trade may be aided by the use of single numbers, the use of those numbers alone suppress the second-order effects of the variability in prices and their nature as random variables in the real-world.

 

The brilliance of the principle of comparative advantage is the way that it disentangles opportunity-costs from nominal costs. The economic way of thinking properly educates us that individuals, as well as nations, should look at the opportunity costs to the patterns of specialization and trade they participate in, not their nominal costs.

In The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ricardo introduces comparative advantage by introducing the celebrated example of exchanging corn and wine:

The quantity of wine which [Portugal] shall give in exchange for the cloth of England, is not determined by the respective quantities of labour devoted to the production of each, as it would be, if both commodities were manufactured in England, or both in Portugal.

England may be so circumstanced, that to produce the cloth may require the labour of 100 men for one year; and if she attempted to make the wine, it might require the labour of 120 men for the same time. England would therefore find it her interest to import wine, and to purchase it by the exportation of cloth.

To produce the wine in Portugal, might require only the labour of 80 men for one year, and to produce the cloth in the same country, might require the labour of 90 men for the same time. It would therefore be advantageous for her to export wine in exchange for cloth. This exchange might even take place, notwithstanding that the commodity imported by Portugal could be produced there with less labour than in England. Though she could make the cloth with the labour of 90 men, she would import it from a country where it required the labour of 100 men to produce it, because it would be advantageous to her rather to employ her capital in the production of wine, for which she would obtain more cloth from England, than she could produce by diverting a portion of her capital from the cultivation of vines to the manufacture of cloth.

Thus England would give the produce of the labour of 100 men, for the produce of the labour of 80. Such an exchange could not take place between the individuals of the same country. The labour of 100 Englishmen cannot be given for that of 80 Englishmen, but the produce of the labour of 100 Englishmen may be given for the produce of the labour of 80 Portuguese, 60 Russians, or 120 East Indians. The difference in this respect, between a single country and many, is easily accounted for, by considering the difficulty with which capital moves from one country to another, to seek a more profitable employment, and the activity with which it invariably passes from one province to another in the same country.

Through free trade, both nations can consume both more corn and wine through nations specializing in their comparative advantage and then obtaining commodities they desire to consumption through exchange. For England, international trade becomes a miraculous technology for transmuting corn into wine. For Portugal, it becomes a miraculous technology for transmuting wine into corn.

 

In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter provides an exposition of comparative advantage more familiar to students who have sat through an Econ 101 class:

Take two countries, England and Portugal, and two commodities, wine and cloth. Portugal, being the more efficient than England in both lines of production, can produce a certain quantity of wine by the labor of 80 men and a certain quantity of cloth by the labor of 90 men, whereas in England the production of the same quantities of wine and cloth takes, respectively, the labor of 120 and 100 men. Under these circumstances, Portugal will advantageously ‘specialize’ in wine and import cloth, while England will ‘specialize’ in cloth and import wine provided, of course, that wine and cloth exchange on terms between the limits of one unit of English cloth for 9/8 of a unit of Portuguese wine and one unit of English cloth for 5/6 units of Portuguese wine. In the former case, all the advantage goes to England, and Portugal is no better off than she would be without trade; in the latter case all advantage goes to Portugal, and England is no better off than she would be without trade. So far as this goes, any intermediate exchange ratio is possible with advantage to both countries, and if traders in both countries acted as monopolists, the exchange ration would be indeterminate between those limits. (Schumpeter 1994: 607).

A problem with this elucidation of comparative advantage is that it simplifies prices as a single realization, rather than treating them as random-variables. Surely, prices may be a matter of trucking, bartering, and exchanging in this hypothetical case, but Schumpeter still assumes that the prices is going to be fixed, largely relegated to the position of institutional data in the economist’s reasoning.

 

However, prices are variable. That variability is a second-order phenomena that largely gets entirely neglected in the economist’s reasoning. Especially along the time-frame we speak of when speaking of comparative advantage in international trade, prices are probably best treated as being variable and their manifestations at any moment of time as being a realization of a probability-distribution.

When economists’ treat of comparative advantage as simply being matter of, to quote Samuelson, “four magic numbers”, they erase that ubiquitous element of all human action from their narrative: Uncertainty. If the prices of corn and wine are both measured by distributions with fat tails, then there is the chance of a tail-event wreaking havoc on a pattern of specialization and trade, maybe even proving it unsustainable in the long run. To continue with Ricardo’s bucolic theme, nations are very rarely monocultural: When they specialize in only a single crop, let alone a single variation of a crop, then bad harvests and other sun-spot events can be lethal, see the Irish Potato Famine for an example. Some ‘inefficiency’ in the system from the point of view of the realization of prices at any one moment may actually prove to be integral for maintaining a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade.

 

This probabilistic view of comparative advantage does not undercut the significance of comparative advantage per se. This view reminds us that comparative advantage is a phenomenon that emerges from the free interactions of individuals and nations alike. Comparative advantage is generated by people tinkering with different patterns of specialization and exchange and by people being free to fail when their experiments do not work out. Through those free interactions, people gain knowledge about the probability-distributions of the goods and services being exchanges so as to efficiently factors of production to their most urgent uses. Out of each person's pursuit of economy in his own affairs, Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage emerges, not as a product of the human intellect, but out of the actions of a population of producers and consumers alike.

Ultimately, Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage is a product of human action, not of human design. Yes, for the purposes of black-board economics, it is useful to teach the principle through a mathematical presentation using real numbers for the sake of simplicity. Although Mises is correct in asserting that the wider Ricardian law of association is a fundamental principle of all social philosophy, let alone social science, I do think that Schumpeter is also correct in asserting that we cannot divorce Ricardo’s principle from the free-trading politics he sought to advance.

 

James Buchanan once quipped that order is defined by the process of its emergence. In this fashion, the welfare consequences of Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage cannot be divorced from the liberal system of natural liberty that Adam Smith advocated in The Wealth of Nations. They are generated by individual-level bricolage, not by national central-planning.

 

 

Sources

Mises, Ludwig von. 1998. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1994. History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

What Is Liberalism's Triumph?

 

This sociability… or this Care of maintaining Society in a Manner conformable to the Light of human reason Understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s…
-Hugo Grotius, On the Rights of War and Peace

 

The Economist has recently had a double book-review of Roger Scruton’s On Human Nature and Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. Both books deal with the problems that, say, a reader of Fr. Z’s WDTPRS have with the modern world we live in. In the book review, The Economist characterizes liberalism’s ascendancy as follows:

It was a liberal achievement to push faith and private morality out of politics. Cultural conservatism would put them back. These two books suggest how hard that is to bring off in a liberal society. Liberals can raise one cheer, not more. On Human Nature shows the difficulties of matching political camps with those of faith and morality.

I think that this statement isn’t exactly right. Talking merely about “faith and private morality” makes it all too easy for a modernist to believe that liberalism is simply an anti-clerical creed and that, once a nation had done away with Christian private morality, that the state can finally start to look after, for a lack of a better term, public morality. From this point of view, it is wrong for a state to take measures to preach Christianity, but right for the state to take measures to fight inequality. After all, whereas Christianity is a matter of faith and private morality, inequality is a public evil that the state can legitimately fight against. Ditto for it being wrong for the state to ban contraception as a matter of faith and private morality, but right for the state to subsidize it in order to promote women’s flourishing.

To avoid these errors, I think it is better to look at liberalism as arguing that the coercive powers of the state should only be applied towards man’s lower nature. Here, we can trace the history of liberalism from the proto-liberal ideas of Hugo Grotius in Mare Liberum, to the Scottish Enlightenment thought of David Hume and Adam Smith, to John Stuart Mill, onto Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek et certera. (I pray readers will forgive me for not mentioning their own favorite thinkers decorating the tree of liberal thought!)

Liberalism’s victory is a victory of placing the higher ideals of human nature in a private sphere in which people are free to pursue those ideals, but they cannot arrogate for themselves the authority to impose those ideals upon other people. The difference isn’t between ‘private morality’ and some other thing, but between the animal nature we all need to sustain in order to live and then the higher ideals we seek in our pursuit of virtue and human flourishing. To borrow a metaphor from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, the rule of law defines the grammar by which people can pursue the higher ideals of human nature, but it cannot tell people what ideals to compose with their lives.

This is essentially John Stuart Mill’s line of argument in On Liberty: Let the state exercise it’s powers of coercion only where it is necessary to prevent harm to another. ‘Harm’ here is clearly understood in terms of the animal properties of another human being, not in terms of the higher properties. It is not defined by another blaspheming or by posting sexist memes, both activities that might offend somebody’s higher ideals, that one person harms another, it is by striking him or by imposing laws that might impede his liberty through the threat of violence.

Some Remarks About Constitutional Conservatives...

 

 

 

If there is one benefit that the Trump Administration has brought to the United States, it has been the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. For better and for worse, Mr. Gorsuch’s nomination has provided the opportunity for commentators to discuss the late Supreme-Court justice’s judicial philosophy of originalism. Over at Vox, Sean Illing has argued that Scalia’s originalism was less a purely judicial philosophy and more a wider political ideology:

Scalia’s philosophy is hard to square with the reality of the constitutional debate. The implication is that the meaning and intent of the framers is perfectly clear, and that judges should adhere rigidly to that.

Mr. Illing goes on to quote Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope’s discussion of this aspect of legal philosophy:

Anyone like Justice Scalia, looking to resolve our modern constitutional dispute through strict construction, has one big problem: The founders themselves disagreed profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece. Before the ink on the constitutional parchment was dry, arguments had erupted not just about minor provisions, but about first principles; not just between peripheral figures, but within the revolution’s very core.

I must admit that I find it difficult to charitably reproduce the argument that, because there was disagreement when a law was written, that something was agreed to when the ink was put to paper, that the written law therefore does not contain some resolution or synthesis of that disagreement.

 

 

As a Catholic, I am reminded here of canon law. Canon law is the internal ecclesiastical law that governs the Roman Catholic Church, derived from Roman law, and it is the longest continually legal system in all of Western civilization. Canon law states (749§2) that: “The college of bishops also possesses infallibility in teaching when the bishops gathered together in an ecumenical council exercise the magisterium as teachers and judges of faith and morals who declare for the universal Church that a doctrine of faith or morals is to be held definitively…” However, anybody who has a bit of knowledge about the Catholic Church knows that ecumenical councils, although they promulgated written dogma, scarcely ever settled conflict in the generation in which those debates raged. One need only examine how long, say, the Arian controversy lasted after the Council of Nicaea lasted to see that written dogmas frequently failed to content partisans at odds with those controversies.

However, no canon lawyer would argue that, because there was disagreement about the Arian controversy after the Council of Nicaea, that the Nicaean creed is a “living creed” that may be adapted to the arbitrary opinions of subsequent bishops. Instead, the Nicaean creed said something. Even if contemporary Arians might not have been persuaded, it was the responsibility of future canon lawyers and theologians to exactly figure out the meaning of those words and enforce them. Fast forwarding to the 20th century, for this reason, the Second Vatican Council won’t be fully appreciated until long after the death of its partisans so that canon-law jurists may impartially read and interpret the documents that Vatican II produced without having to worry about the debates that generated those documents (and which those documents resolve) still being a matter of living memory.

When one takes a historical view of legal systems, that people disagree with what a law says within the generation in which that law was put to ink is to be expected. That disagreement certainly does not imply that the written law has no meaning, it only means that jurists of subsequent generations need to be cautious about how they interpret that law. Partisans may disagree about what words say, but that does not absolve jurists of their duty to pin down what the written words of law mean and imply. Ultimately, I don’t think that disagreement does not give warrant to the introduction of a jurists’ arbitrary views into those words.

 

In another article at Vox, Ezra Klein has argued that Mr. Gorsuch is “is an extremely conservative judge at a moment when an extremely conservative judge makes a mockery of the popular will.” However, the popular will is not an element of law and should have no place in a jurists’ reading of the law. Popular will has other places to express itself in the political system, from voluntary associations to the election of Congress. Indeed, that the House of Representatives, which is probably that portion of the federal government that best reflects the popular will of the American people, is overwhelmingly Republican is evidence that the popular will desire a Supreme-Court nominee who, in Mr. Klein reckoning, is “extremely conservative”! Of course, we needn’t forget that Mr. Klein had written, back in October, that “Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump in the most effective series of debate performances in modern political history.” So maybe Mr. Klein should be taking a hiatus about talking about the popular will of the American people during the Trump Administration.

 

 

As far as I can see, constitutional conservatives might be the closest things to true liberals in American politics today and best vehicle for advancing the general welfare. They understand the rule of law and the primacy of the abstract. They are well-read in the intellectual fonts that influenced the American Founders, including John Locke, Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, and whose wisdom still provides the intellectual foundation for any free society today. I have once been skeptically of many of their views on the powers of the presidency, which at time seem quasi-monarchical, but I have since been convinced by Eric Nelson’s book, The Royalist Revolution, that those views are in-line with the Founders’ ideas for the executive branch.

Those intellectual fonts, as well as the American Founders, had a confidence that, once broken free from monarchical privilege, that the wisdom of common people could secure the felicity of their society. However, they also understood that liberty cannot exist outside of the rule of law. Thankfully, breaking free of monarchical privilege does not imply the breaking of the rule of law, and constitutional conservatives are aware of that. In a world where only the dose makes the poison, constitutional conservatives have a proper skepticism of experts granted privilege that has turned into an excessive populism in the Western world today.

 

Sundry Meditations on Neoliberalism

Yesterday, the Adam Smith Institute declared that it is no longer a libertarian think-tank. Instead, it is a neoliberal think-tank:

Although I would have much preferred them to call themselves a ‘liberal’ think-tank and to thereby rededicate themselves to advocating Adam Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” I don’t think that much emphasis should be put on their choice of adjective. ‘Libertarian,’ ‘neoliberal,’ and ‘liberal’ mean too many things to too many people to have a definite preference for one. Whatever adjective helps the Adam Smith Institute advance liberty the most effectively is the adjective they should use. (That being said, ‘neoliberal’ has too much of a whiff of the class of people that Nassim Taleb titles the ‘intellectual but idiot’ for me to go anywhere near the adjective for my own description.)

In the coming out piece, “I’m a neoliberal. Maybe you are too,” Sam Bowman enumerates a canon of beliefs for a would-be neoliberal. The list is worth reading and comparing to one’s own belief. Here, I shall focus on one particular profession, that of being ‘a liberal consequentialist.’ Mr. Bowman writes:

A system is justified if it is the one that best allows people to live the lives that they want to live, or makes them happiest or more satisfied than any other. There are no inherent rights that override this. People’s wellbeing is all that matters, and generally individuals are best at defining what is best for themselves.

I’m very sympathetic to the idea that the notion of ‘right’ in modern thought is best abandoned. Not only have the list of rights, which were once safely limited to life, liberty and property, been expanded to include everything from a $15.00 per hour wage and high-speed internet, but the modern world has entirely lost the plot context of early-modern rights talk. Without a notion of a creating Deity who bestowed rights from without the system, people now think of themselves as being the authors of their own rights within the system and that confusion has lead to the unnecessary multiplication of rights. Myself, I would much prefer that we talk about virtues and which institutional ecosystems best promote human flourishing.

 

The troubling thing is that Mr. Bowmen has made no such aretaic turn. Instead, he swears by the mushy word that is ‘wellbeing.’ Although ‘wellbeing’ lends itself well to quantitative studies, it is a notion of human flourishing that can muddle the very aspect of human nature that makes liberty worthwhile: Individuality. A life spent lying on a couch being pumped full of soma, although it may measure highly in wellbeing, is not worth living and can scarcely be given the dignity of being human. As John Stuart Mill persuasively argued in On Liberty, individuality is a necessary factor for human flourishing and that any system that squashes individualism, even if it does so for the wellbeing of society, is despotism. By providing each person with a private sphere to pursue his own vision of the good life, liberty protects individualism from any would-be despots. The language of rights, however much it may be muddled and confused, still provides a persuasive rhetorical focal point for defending the private sphere as integral for virtue.

Asserting that “generally individuals are best at defining what is best for themselves” is not a robust substitute for that rhetoric of rights. Here, I must pursue the obvious question: To what degree does ‘generally’ hold? Is it 90% of the time? 99% 50% Surely an exact estimation is impossible, but I would like to know just how confident the author is. I simply don’t think that ‘generally’ establishes a robust presumption of liberty. Instead, I think that it provides a very easy standard to vault over. “Generally people choose well for themselves, but in not in the case of sugary drips of more than 16 oz.” “Generally people choose well for themselves, but not in the case of pornography or marijuana.” With a legion of Harvard-grad IYI’s, any regulatory agency can make easy work of proving that people can’t choose well for themselves in the particular case in question. When decoupled with the rhetorical focal point of rights, ‘generally’ provides but a fig-leaf of protection to individual liberty.

 

How do I think we defend liberty? I think it’s by advocating, as a matter of principle corroborated by historical experience, that Adam Smith’s natural system of liberty is the best way of ordering society and that it orders society for everyone’s benefit. Following John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, liberals should assert as a matter of principle that: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” Maybe we mean it only 99% of the time, but that categorical statement provides a far more robust defense of liberty that a probabilistic one.

JS Mill's Significance in an Age of Trumpism

 

 

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

 

The idea of liberty is difficult to pin down with a single system. Whenever we try, many of liberty’s salient aspects inevitably slip from our account, however well-formulated it may have been. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, liberty is large, it contains multitudes.

Liberty must therefore be appreciated and studied from many perspectives, such as a birthright that must be defended against encroachment or as the rule giving rise to the division of labor benefiting all of humanity. But none of those perspectives alone can suffice. To defend liberty, we must be catholic in how we approach the idea of liberty, fitting our perspective to the challenges we face. In the midst of Donald Trump’s ascendance in the Republican primary, inebriated on a dangerous cocktail of nativism and economic nationalism spiked with blind anger, we can advance liberty in our day best through the perspective of John Stuart Mill.

 

Unlike many other philosophers of liberty, Mill was never satisfied with characterizing liberty simply as a force for circumscribing the power of the state. In On Liberty, he emphatically argued that there was a wider role for liberty than constraining leviathan. He singled out individuality as an essential ingredient to human flourishing and reasoned that liberty must serve as a force that promotes the individuality each person in society. After all, to be able to make one’s own opinions about the good life and to act upon them was a part of a life worth living.

Liberty, Mill contended, must justify the right of each person to cultivate their own individuality and provide them with a social space for doing so. It is more than a bulwark against the political class, it is also a bulwark against prevailing opinion and the tyranny of the majority. If it is to truly contribute to human flourishing, liberty must safeguard experiments in living against whomever would aggressively interfere with them.

 

Trumpism is an explicit rejection of Mill’s philosophy of liberty. Donald Trump’s successful coup of the Republican party demonstrates why a robust defense of liberty must extend beyond ideas of limiting the political class and that it must also extend to protect people against prevailing opinion. One of the greatest advantages that Trump has had so far in that endeavor has been that his brand directly appeals to the white-identity politics with the party that most other Republicans only flirt with. Rather than validating the dignity of people at the margins of prevailing opinion, Trump belittles them in order to raise the prestige of the prevailing white identity.

A sizable fraction of his voters believe that they—the white, Christian, non-college educated portion of the American population—are the ones under threat and need protection from the government—protection that Trump is selling. The American National Election Studies’ The 2016 Pilot Study attests that independent and Republican voters who esteem their white racial identity as important are 30 points more likely to support Trump than those who do not similarly esteem it. These are the people who believe that they have been left behind as they watch both manufacturing jobs go overseas and their status in their status in society be diminished.

 

In his campaign, Trump has gleefully exploited their fears and apprehensions. His appeal transcends matters of policy and revolves around an unapologetic affirmation of his supporters white identities. Trumpism isn’t a collection of ideas, it is a force for white identity consolidated under the cult of personality of its leader: The Donald, who with his WWE appearances and his hard-constructed aura of capitalistic success, immediately appeals to disaffected whites within the Republican party.

‘Make America great again’ can be translated as ‘make the white identity prestigious again.’ Whether it’s bringing back jobs from China, negotiating with Iran or passing a new health-care plan, Trump is simply going to make his followers important again in the world. He is going to ensure that they should be respect, and feared, the world over. How is Trump going to do this? If what he has said is to be believed, he’s going to triumph because he’s the winniest winner who has ever won. Being the consummate alpha male, the strength of Trump’s will shall simply overwhelm all who oppose him.

Suiting the style of identity politics, Trump’s rhetoric has demonized those who do not neatly fit into Trumpism’s notion of whiteness. Muslim refugees are branded as terrorists. Mexican immigrants are reviled as drug-mules and rapists. Of course, when Trump was confronted with a question about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, he had to do some research before repudiating them, later rationalizing the entire incident as being caused by a faulty earpiece, even though he had repeated Duke’s name to the reporter. All in all, Trumpism seeks to retreat Americans back behind the walls of a secure white identity and to raise the drawbridge up behind them.

 

John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty is a useful, and much needed, palliative against Trumpism and its prejudiced emphasis on white identity as being the sole identity to be esteemed in society. Mill’s philosophy teaches how a drawbridge-down approach to the world is how we come to learn more about ourselves and the world around us. Against Trumpism’s confidence in the superiority of a single identity, On Liberty reveals how openness to the wider world, not hostility towards it, is how we achieve virtue and flourishing. Even Pope Francis has expressed a similar opinion when said that no one who only thinks of building walls, rather than bridges, could be a Christian.

Liberty also wasn’t an academic curiosity to Mill. During his life, he championed the individuality and dignity of the people at the margins of his own society, including women, slaves and religious nonconformists. As a Member of Parliament, he advocated women’s suffrage and the legalization of contraceptives. Today, he would certainly be writing about how black lives matter, speaking out against those disparaging Mexican immigrants and advocating the cause of Muslim refugees. Against Trumpism, Mill would defend a robust drawbridge-down stance as a force that benefits and enriches the societies that adopt it.

 

Liberty flourishes in an environment in which people are free to cultivate their own individuality. Trumpism, with its unmitigated glorification of white identity at the expense of those at the margins, represents a threat to that environment. To palliate Trumpism, those who love liberty need to inject some of the themes of Mill’s On Liberty into their political discourse. We need to emphasize that theme in Mill’s On Liberty that liberty is about more than just constraining the state, that it is also about justifying those at the margins of prevailing opinion, whether they be Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees or just those who do not conform to the white identity at the heart of Trumpism.

Suiting the style of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty, all lovers of liberty, whatever political labels they may take, need to condemn those who would raise the drawbridge behind a single comfortable identity, even if it may be their own. To once again quote Walt Whitman, they must take seriously that “whoever degrades another degrades me.”

It's About Institutions, Not Rulers

 

Evonomics. Need I say more?

With its motto of "the next evolution in economics", Evonomics is proof that evolution need not always lead to improvements.  Each day there seems to be another snarky article on the website attacking one of the fundamental principles of our civilization: Liberty. There does not seem to be a floor to how base the discourse over there can be. This time it's: "Stop crying about the size of government. Start caring about who controls it."

 

The titles says it all. Since Evonomics is David Sloan Wilson's baby, I'm much less willing to believe that the title was slapped on by an editor with no contact with the author, as is so Keeping with the Evonomics' track record, the title is trolling par excellence. It is a glib attempt to sell superiority to Evonomics' readers than to actually try to understand the liberal critique of state-power on its own terms.

Ultimately, Wilson's entire attempt at 'updating' Hayek is, root and stem, an attempt to justify the policies he likes, principally his notion that his arbitrary design principles are the secret sauce for national prosperity. Despite his accomplishments in evolutionary biology, he is a demagogue who poses as a man of science.

 

Here, I can speak from personal experience. I was at the seminar at George Mason that Wilson referred to in the beginning of the article. During the Q&A of that seminar, when Wilson was addressed with the point that basic measures of property rights, à la the Frasier Index, are robustly correlated with a nation's prosperity, Wilson seemed dumbfounded. Yes, he had harped on about the need to get good 'design principles' for states, choosing for his example the curious example of the Nordic petrostate Norway, rather than, say, Sweden next-door (because as you certainly know Sweden is a rather liberal nation). However, that property rights could be that basic design principle was a queer idea to him. The thought seemed to have never crossed his mind!

To think, a man who clearly does not appreciate the clear and vivid link between liberty and prosperity thinks so highly of himself to lecture economists on his website. So much for "the next evolution of economics". 

Daron Acelmogu, who was interviewed in the article, helped to give material for the circus:

It is also the case, and this is something we emphasize a lot throughout Why Nations Fail, that most states throughout history and even today serve the interests of the political elite and are part of their economic problems, not their solution. But this is not because the state is unnecessary or evil, but because of who controls it and what capacities it has invested in and developed.

 

The question that political thinkers should consider is not who should rule but what laws should rule. As understood by David Hume and John Adams, a nation is only as good as its worst ruler. In "That politics may be reduced to a science", Hume wrote: "A constitution is only so far good, as it provides a remedy again mal-administration..." He goes on to assert that: "Is our constitution so excellent? Then a change of ministry can be no such dreadful event; since it is essential to such a constitution, in every ministry, both to preserve itself from violation, and to prevent all enormities in the administration." John Adams stated, and later help enshrine in the Massachusetts Constitution, that principle that a good government was a "government of law, not of man." 

Wilson's shtick is aimed against that sacred principle. The rule of law, after all, would not allow for a government to enact his beloved design principles. And so Wilson seeks to re-orientate the question of constitutional politics around who should rule. But that's a re-orientation that leads straight to tyranny. And that's not just my accusation. It is a microcosm for the salient thesis of Karl Popper's The Open Society and It's Enemies: 

But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any political problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question 'Who should rule?' is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato's admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently 'good' or 'wise' (we need not worry about the precise meanings of these terms), and that it is not all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problems of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage? (Popper 1966: 120-121)

That's an approach to political questions that is embraced to the fullest at George Mason University and makes it one of the best economics department on earth. 

 

All too related to this topic is Tyler Cowen's "The criticism of Trump which few will utter":

It is sad to see so many people, including those on the Left or in the Democratic Party, criticize the idea of a Trump presidency without ever uttering the phrase: “No man or woman should have so much political power over others.”  I agree with many of the moral criticisms of Trump as a leader, but don’t let them distract you from this broader truth.

...

The good news, if that is what one should call it, is that the best criticisms of Trump involve the concept of individual liberty and freedom from arbitrary legal authority and pure presidential discretion.  The bad news is that so few intellectuals have the relevant ideological vocabulary in that regard.

 

Against the Helicopter Paternalists

In “The Right Food Fight,” Kenneth Rogoff provides yet another argument that governments should do more to fight the prevalence of obesity in rich societies around the world. Alleviating the problems of obesity, Mr. Rogoff argues “poses much more difficult challenges than the kind of successful public-health interventions of the last century, including near-universal vaccination, fluoridation of drinking water, and motor-vehicle safety rules.” Due to the prevalence of large corporations creating incentives for people to consume ever large quantities of unhealthy and often extremely sugary food, Mr. Rogoff argues that education will not be sufficient to curtail the excessive consumption causing the obesity epidemic. 

Praising Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to limit the sale of sugary beverages in the article, Mr. Rogoff calls for public policy to impose measures to counteract the incentives toward consumption created by Big Food. Alas, Mr. Rogoff’s commentary suffers from a misdiagnosis of the problems of obesity from the point of view of public policy. For one thing, obesity isn’t a public-health concern proper, since obesity lacks the externalities characteristic of other public-health concerns, such as ebola and MERS. Furthermore, although obesity may be a problem, it is a problem that comes from the choices of individuals who are fully informed about the consequences of their actions. Like most other paternalists, Mr. Rogoff simply assumes that governments would just in imposing the needed incentives on their citizens and ignore that a presumption of liberty should hold in matters such as what a person decides to eat or drink. 

 

Although it is all too common for commentators and politicians alike to refer to obesity as a public-health issue, obesity really isn’t a public-health concern, properly understood. Language matters, especially when language has been shaped in order to precisely describe an array of phenomena. Technical terms should be respected lest we lose the ability to speak to each other in the light of the disciplines that birthed them. ‘Public’ is one such word. Using it to describe any phenomena we see important to the general welfare, much as people use the adjective ‘social,’ would be to drain the word of its very specific meaning that economics has given it. As a technical term, it tells us that the costs and benefits of an action aren’t restricted to the person who decided to take that action. ‘Public’ signals the existence of externalities and preferably of significant externalities. 

After all, there are very few actions that perfectly restrain the costs and benefits to its originator. There does have to be some prudence to the identification of certain externalities as matters of political concern. The wardrobe decisions that Ryan Gosling made any day have certain had external effects to women and fashion commentators the world over, yet it would certainly be curious to refer to those decisions as aa ‘public-wardrobe concern.’ 

The threats to public health are those contagious diseases that can spread between people. Someone afflicted with such a disease can spread it with interaction with other people. We only need to look at the outbreak of MERS in South Korea or the devastating Ebola epidemic in West Africa to recognize the danger that contagious diseases can pose. When people live together in as close proximity as they do in modern urban environments, conditions can be perfect for contagious disease. Without an organized effort, such diseases can kill thousands before they finally burn themselves out.  That the government is concerned with the containment of MERS and ebola makes sense due to the nature of those diseases. 

 

However, it doesn’t make sense in the case of obesity. No one will get fat by sitting next to an obese person. Nor will sitting in the theatre next to someone indulging in an extravagantly large slurp. Thankfully, the only person in control of whether any capable adult gets fat is the person in question. In the case of children, that responsibility is shifted to their parents. Although the responsibility is shifted it retains its private form. Yes, children may be all too willing to eat whatever junk food is available to them; nevertheless, their primary diet will be determined by their parents’ choices.   

“But food is so addictive, and the environment so skewed toward unhealthy outcomes, that it is time to think about broader government intervention.” At first it was alcohol and heroin, now it’s root beer. Why is the government concerned with one person’s gluttony and not another’s addiction to pornography or addiction to video games? Surely those addictions are both widespread and have hurt people’s lives. Maybe they haven’t had as much of an impact in mortality figures, but man does’t live on bread, or for that matter Big Macs, alone. 

Yet if a person isn’t allowed to eat the bread of their own choosing, why should they be confident that they can live their lives as they see fit? Although the helicopter paternalists may hide behind the thin veil of science, in truth they are making decisions about virtue and vice, even if they are unwilling to use such a moral language. The phenomena in question aren’t a matter of individual choice, but of deterministic relations. Instead, of discussing each person’s decision to diet and exercise, Mr. Rogoff hides behind about unsettled science: “The causes of obesity are complex, the science of understanding human behavior is embryonic…” 

 

Really, though, the causes of obesity aren’t all that unsettled nor are new scientific discoveries needed for people to live healthier lives. The age-old wisdom of eating well and exercising would alleviate the problem for the vast majority. The simple practice of cutting out refined sugar from one’s diet and to exercise a couple hours already has sufficient corroboration. We don’t need cutting-edge science to figure that out. The thing is, though, is such practices are a matter of choice and the fact is a good fraction of the population doesn’t want to give up soda or to commit themselves to an exercise regimen, especially when their lives are already as busy as it is.  

Just like so much else in human society, the obesity epidemic can’t be separated from the individual-level choices that have made it possible. To understand the causes of the epidemic, we have to understand it in terms of the choices that people make. For policy, that makes a difference, since it makes us understand the causes of obesity in terms of what people do rather than what is done to them. Mr. Rogoff argues against the critics of Michael Bloomberg’s bad on large sugary drinks: “Many commentators, even those sympathetic to Bloomberg’s goal, argued that it was wrong to try to legislate consumer behavior so bluntly. Yet, when one considers other successful efforts to improve public health over the last five decades – for example, smoking bans, seat-belt laws, and speed limits – one finds that legislation typically supplemented education.” 

 

At the center of the helicopter paternalists’ case against sugar drinks is a vision of human life. Obesity itself is a neutral fact of the world. It’s only obesity’s interaction with human flourishing that makes it good or bad, but morality is no where to be found in their case. Instead, people are treated as pieces on a chess board that move according to how the external world moves them. A moral language reveals that the nudgers are just paternalists who had abrogated for themselves a position to tell others to live as the nudgers see it. 

People do make informed decisions, it's just that their decisions just aren’t what the helicopter paternalists want them to be. So instead of accepting this difference in lifestyle, they blame Big Food and a consumeristic society, as if Big Food is shoving unhealthy food down unwilling throats. But if one goes to a 7-Eleven, one sees people willingly filling up a Big Gulp with soda and if one goes to a McDonald’s, one sees people willingly waiting in line for the food offered there. Even if Mr. Rogoff and the other paternalists may not understand such a desire, the evidence is that people really do think what 7-Eleven and McDonald’s offers them improves their lives. 

 

The paternalists then talk about addiction, but when we cut to the heart of the matter, anything that’s enjoyable is addictive. That’s just how the human mind operates. People will develop inordinate habits around all of the pleasures of life, whether it be food, sex, partying or video games. Given the fact that, in the case of food, those decisions primarily affect the person who makes them, the government should leave those questions alone and leave each person alone. The obesity epidemic simply isn’t a threat to somebody who has a good diet and exercise regimen. Rather than treating people as particles to be moved this way and that, governments should trust their citizens as the people who know best how to achieve their own welfare. 

In the case of obesity, there is no grave threat to the general interest that overcomes the presumption of liberty that should inform public policy. Paternalists have no business hovering about people like helicopter parents. If somebody wants to eat a sugary donut, the Leviathan really have no good reason to interfere with that decision. 

When Removing Government Requires Government

 

Whatever you think of them, reform happens at the margins of politics.

 

Free trade has always been a tenet of libertarianism. After all, the unimpeded movement of goods across borders may be a paradigmatic example of the libertarian maxim of ‘Anything peaceful.’ It is then with trepidation that many libertarians have looked on at the debate surrounding free trade today. For them, the Trans-Pacific Partnership doesn’t look anything like free trade. Instead, it looks like just another arrangement between governments bestowing benefits upon their favored cronies at the expense of the rest of society. Yet, for whatever its controversy, if it is passed, the Trans-Pacific Partnership would be America’s largest trade agreement in effect and would thereby represent a marginal liberalization of trade across the region.

 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, then, is an example for a central irony to libertarianism: Although libertarianism advocates anything peaceful, it is often in need for politicians to advance its agenda. Very frequently the very act of de-governmentalization itself requires government. What a government erects can very often only be demolished by a government. Although, many new technologies have and will emerge that can disrupt regulations and thereby increase the overall liberty of society by creating a space that has yet to be interpreted with, such disruption isn’t always possible. In the case of trade, new technologies may make certain tariffs and quotas irrelevant to the lives of consumers, many more will remain and, in some way, harm consumers.

 

No Uber-like company will emerge that can allow American consumers to find a way around the United States’ protection of domestic sugar producers. Doing that would require government. However iron-clad the arguments for free trade may be, to actually get free trade requires a government eliminating its own obstructions, just as the peaceful enjoyment of alcohol required it to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. Bargaining, interviews, negotiations and speeches are all necessary parts of the process. Without political acumen, trade reform would go nowhere. Free trade needs crafty politicians who are aware of when the political stars align and who can seize the initiative to advance liberty-enhancing reforms at the margins.

 

Libertarians worry about whether the Trans-Pacific Partnership would advance crony capitalism, not free markets. Cronies have certainly taken an interest in the treaty. That much is indisputable. As The Guardian reports, for ever ‘yea’ vote tallied in the Senate to give the White House fast-track authority, the US Business Coalition for TPP gave an average of $17,676.48 to it. That negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is being kept secret, contrary to standard operating protocol, only compounds those suspicions.

 

Although President Obama has said that there is nothing to worry about with the secret negotiations, certainly the president is not unaware of how ironic it is for him to assert that while still keeping the supposedly innocuous records out of the public eye. The old quip, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, looms large. Combined with the amount of money that businesses have spent, the secrecy surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership is bound to pique the suspicion of many libertarians. Those opponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership are, then, right enough since there certainly is plenty of crony capitalism in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

 

Nevertheless, a sober assessment of the treaty and particularly its impact at the political margins of liberty should inform us that these are acceptable costs to a policy that will lead to an improvement of the overall liberty of all involved. It’s true that the Trans-Pacific Partnership wouldn’t lead to a system of perfectly free trade and, in doing so, would plenty of room for each nation’s particular cronies to prosper. But we don’t live in a world where such a system of perfectly free trade is attainable. We live in a world where the treaty is on;y an improvement at the margins and where those improvements are going to have to be made in a way that placates each nation’s many cronies. The Trans-Pacific Partnership promises just that: marginally freer trade, with all the benefits that marginally freer trade would have. The Brookings Institute estimates that the global gains that marginally freer trade would be in the vicinity of at around $295 billion each year.

 

By being self-aware that any liberalization of trade would require government action, libertarians can be very open about the costs of the treaty while at the same time confident that it will have a beneficial overall effect. To remove the barriers to trade that exist across the Pacific requires an act of government. That alone would introduce some cronyism to the reform. Worse, it requires an act of many governments, all with their own particular faults. Nevertheless, that any progress towards liberalization in trade is possible is itself a miracle. A miracle that is only possible because of crafty politicians in government today. It’s not everyday that their actions would have a liberty-enhancing outcome and so the opportunity shouldn’t be squandered by comparing our imperfect world to a libertarian utopia.

 

Overall, the Trans-Pacific Partnership reveals an irony in any hope of libertarian reform today: However much libertarians may properly distrust politicians, free-trade reform will only happen if the politicians in power are able to negotiate the restraints away. On this issue, the cause of liberty, therefore, is in the precarious and inextricable position of relying on government to remove government. Maybe they shouldn’t stop worrying, but libertarians should start to give the Trans-Pacific Partnership the modest love it deserves.

Defining Liberty