Right Reason

Thoughts on the Minimum Wage

 

In The New York Times, Arindrajit Dube, a celebrated expert on the economics of the minimum wage, has commentated on the recent study from the University of Washington on the effects of Seattle’s increased minimum wage. In short, Mr. Dube argues that the study’s conclusion that there were big job loses is much more opaque than public commentary would have one believe. I agree with his general sentiments: Empirical claims about something as complex as the minimum wage can only be evaluated at the level of the overall literature, not a single study. By itself, the UW study proves nothing. One study can never prove a broad empirical point. Only a broad population of studies can do so.

 

However, it is not Mr. Dube’s general argument that draw my interest, but his conclusion:

 

"Putting all of those together, along with our evidence from past increases, will give a much more complete picture of how high the minimum wage should go to improve the lives of people at the bottom of the wage scale without throwing lots of people out of work."

To me, this is quite the startling admission: That the minimum wage will throw some people out of work. After all, “throwing lots of people out of work” implies that “throwing few people out of work” is a marginal improvement that is acceptable for public policy. I entirely disagree. Let me quickly go through my reasoning:

We can be reasonable confident that among those people who can no longer find jobs will be among the least advantaged in society. For instance, the people who are going to be priced out of the markets are not the children of the rich who can afford to be sent to unpaid internships to build their resumés. Instead, they are going to be the children of the poor who have no way to build their resumés, as there are very, very few unpaid internships for, say, being a clerk or plumber. There may even be a few poor people of working age whose skills simply do not add enough at the margins to be employable at the minimum wage. Whatever the scenario, I think that it is very unlikely that the marginal effects of increasing the minimum wage do adversely affect some of the most vulnerable in society, for among the most vulnerable will be people whose skills cannot add a lot of value to a business at the margins. They will be at the chopping block first, in the name of economic efficiency.

Moreover, the economic profession have not been able to agree about how much benefit is accrued to society as a result of minimum-wage policies. It is telling that the economics profession has not been able to agree about the effects of an increase in the minimum wage in its literature.I don’t think we should blame this problem of measurement on politics. Instead, I think that we should see the labor market as being so complex and so adaptive that any attempt at measuring the effects of this variable are fraught with difficulty and are also going to reflect local circumstances that will frequently vary from local to local. So, the average effects of the minimum wage are uncertain and we should expect them to always be uncertain, given the limits of measuring complex systems.

 

To me, combining these two considerations lead to the crux of the minimum-wage debate: The minimum wage harms some of the least advantaged people in society for uncertain benefits to others who are more advantaged. How can we pretend that's just? Economic policy is not only a matter of average effects, but also of justice and of who pays the costs at the margins. Contra Mr. Dube, I don’t believe throwing a few people out of work is good enough. Those people also deserve the right to sell their labor and thereby improve their lives by virtue of a natural right to self-preservation. A just minimum-wage policy throws nobody, let alone some of the least advantaged, out of work; hence justice calls for a $0.0 minimum wage.

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.

Of Dignified Authority and Efficient Utility

 

One of the perennial questions brought up by a philosophical approach to politics is the question of “Why do people obey and show, frequently self-destructive, loyalty to their nation’s customs and officials?” More succinctly: “Why do people obey the law?” The answer, like all human affairs, must involve both an animal instinct to obey and a higher capability to reason. Homo sapiens is neither purely an animal of instinct nor a disembodied calculator.

This is an aspect of politics that I think has been lost in recent discussions, especially those pertinent to Donald Trump. Politics cannot be distilled into questions about facts. There is the entire Quine-Duhem thesis aspect at play that political ideologies cannot be tested against the facts directly, but instead rely on background assumptions that are frequently incommensurable across political divides.

However, more important, I think, is that one needs to consider why people follow some focal points and the motivations for doing so. Ideas and politicians alike can only command people when they can coordinate them. Coordination, in turn, requires the existence of focal points that people both follow and find mutual sympathy in other people who follow them. Der Führer and the Declaration of Independence were both significant focal points for the Third Reich and the United States of America respectively.

 

In his 1766 set of lectures on jurisprudence, Adam Smith argues for a taxonomy of two principles upholding a society pertinent to these thoughts: Authority and utility. He lectures:

There are two principles which induce men to enter into civil society, which we shall call the principles of authority and utility. At the head of every small society or association of men we find a person of superiour abilities; in a warlike society he is a man of superiour strength, and in a polished one of superior mental capacity. Age and a long possession of power have laso the tendencey to strength authority. Age is naturaly in our imagination connected with wisdom and experience; and a continuance in power bestows a kind of right to the exercise of it. But superior wealth still more than any of these qualities contributes to conferr authority… This principle is fully explained in the Theory of moral Sentiments, where it is shewn that it arises from our sympathy with our superiours being greater than that with our equals or inferiors: we admire their happy situation, enter into it with pleasure, and endeavour to promote it.
…
The second principle which induces men to obey the civil magistrate is utility. Every one is sensible of the necessity of this principle to preserve justice and peace in the society. By civil institutions, the poorest may get redress of injuries from the wealthiest and most powerfull, and tho’ there may be some irregularities in particular cases, as undoubtedly there are, yet we submit to them to avoid greater evils. It is the sense of public utility, more than of private, which influences men to obedience. (Smith 1978: 401-2).

One of the noteworthy aspects of Smith’s discussion here is that nowhere does he imply that contract is one of the reason that people obey the laws and their magistrates. Indeed, he goes on to mock the idea of an original contract in the very same lecture.

Reducing society to a contract only obfuscates the problem at hand, it does not shed much light onto it. The fact is that there are certain aspects of our lives where we are governed by contracts, but that itself is an artifact (in the wider sense of the word à la David Hume’s “Letter from a gentleman to his friend in Edinburgh” and Herbert Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial) of society. Contracts, as used in our peculiarly modern society, are part of the explicandum.

Almost a century later, Walter Bagehot would have a very similar taxonomy in The English Constitution when he distinguished the ‘dignified’ parts of that constitution from its ‘efficient’ parts:

No one can approach to an understanding of the English institutions, or of others which being the growth of many centuries exercise a wide sway over mixed populations, unless he divid them into two classes. In such constitutions, unless he divide them into two classes. In such constitutions there are two parts (not indeed separable with microscopic accuracy, for the genius of great affairs abhors nicety of division): first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population,—the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and next, the efficient parts,—those by which it, in fact, works and rules. There are two great objects which every constitution must attain to be successful, which every old and celebrated one must have wonderfully achieved:—every constitution must first gain authority, and then use authority; it must first win the loyalty and confidence of mankind, and then employ that homage in the work of government.

There are indeed practical men who reject the dignified parts of government. They say, we want only to attain results, to do business; a constitution is a collection of political means to political ends; and if you admit any part of a constitution does no business, or that a simpler machine would do equally well what it does, you admit that this part of the constitution, however dignified or awful it may be, is nevertheless in truth useless. And other reasoners, who distrust this bare philosophy, have propounded subtle arguments to prove that these dignified parts of old governments are cardinal components of the essential apparatus, great pivots of substantial utility; and so manufactured fallacies which the plainer school have well exposed. But both schools are in error. The dignified parts of government are those which bring it force,—which attract its motive power. The efficient parts only employ that power. The comely parts of a government have need, for they are those upon which its vital strength depends. They may not do anything definite that a simpler polity would not do better; but they are the preliminaries, the needful pre-requisites of all work. They raise the army, though they do not win the battle. (Bagehot 2001 : 7)

In Bagehot’s description, there is a very keen emphasis on the dignified part of the constitution, on the authority that people wield based on people’s awe of them, as motivating people’s decisions to follow certain focal points. I think that’s a wise place of emphasis, and one that deserves to be meditated on.

 

Bibliography:
Bagehot, Walter. 2001. The English Constitutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Adam. 1978. The Lectures of Jurisprudence. Ed. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Amour-Propre: Free to Choose?

 

The good man is an Athlete who delights in fighting naked: He despises all those vile ornaments which would hinder his use of his strength, and most of which were invited only to conceal some deformity.

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

 

 

Despite his influence on the generations that followed him, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had little interest in battling his contemporaries who disagreed with his ideas. Whether it was the Frenchman Voltaire or the Scotsman David Hume, few contemporary readers sympathized with Rousseau’s ideas. Immanuel Kant, whose sole painting in his spartan home was one of Rousseau, was almost unique in that regard. Rousseau, though, didn’t much care for that lack of appreciation. 

“The majority of my Readers,” he wrote in The Preface of a Second Letter to Bordes “must often have found my discourses poorly structured and almost entirely disjointed, for want of perceiving the trunk of which I showed them only the branches” (OC III: 106). Unlike the vast majority of writers who decry commentators not getting the main thrust of their words, Rousseau has a point. A brilliant rhetorician, Rousseau is, all too often able to rouse the sentiments towards whatever end he wants—it was the singular compliment paid to him by Adam Smith in the pages of the Edinburgh Review—yet the end result of such elocution is all too often the precise line of the argument getting away from Rousseau. But the arguments are certainly there and, for those who care about Rousseau’s influence, worth piecing together.  

 

One of the main trunks of Rousseau’s thought that is manifest from the very beginning, in The Discourse on the Sciences, is the notion that society does genuine damage to our human nature by fettering our free will. That man is free is close to a tautology for Rousseau. Insofar, as someone is not free to choose, Rousseau would argue, he is less of a human being. 

The natural state of man was suited to  “that original freedom for which he seems to be born” (OC III: 7), but such a state cannot last long with the cultivation of society and the demands of social existence:

Need raised up Thrones; the Sciences and Arts have made them strong. Earthly powers, love talents and protect those who cultivate them! Civilized peoples, cultivate them: Happy slaves, you owe them the delicate and refined taste on which you pride yourselves; the sweet character and urbane morals which make for such engaging and easy relations among you; in a word, the appearances of all the virtues without having a single one. (Ibid)

 Once civilized, Rousseau argued, man cannot be entirely who he really is; rather, he shall always be a puppet to forces beyond his will, be they market forces or monarchical edicts. In a natural state, “men found their security in how easily they saw through one another” (OC III: 8), but that is not so in a refined society. Virtue is therefore foreign to civilized man because he never lives his life by his own free will. Civilized man will always have to appear to be different things to different people. It wouldn’t be until The Social Contract that Rousseau would proclaim that man was born free, but everywhere in chains; nevertheless, the idea that civilized society puts man in such a state of serviitude is clearly present to his thought as early as The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

 

In that discourse, Rousseau tackles the question: “Has the restoration of the Sciences and Arts contributed to the purification of Morals, or to their corruption?” (OC III: 5). For Rousseau, that there has been a decay in the virtue of the human race is obvious and he sees the cause as being in the advancement of the arts and sciences: “Where there is no effect, no cause need be sought: but here the effect is certain, the depravation real, and our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced toward perfection” (OC III: 9). Amour-propre, that part of our esteem which depends on the approval of others, is principally to blame for the corruption of human souls. “Every Artist wants to be applauded. His contemporaries’ praise is the most precious portion of his reward” (OC III: 21). 

With the refinement of society, people are ever more vulnerable to the arousal of their amour-propre. Life becomes ever less about our own self-love—our amour de soi as Rousseau calls it—as it becomes about people appeasing their vain appetite for praise. No longer do people look to themselves and their own virtue and for their meaning. Now they look to the approval of their fellow herd:

Before Art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak in ready-made terms, our morals were rustic but natural; and differences in conduct conveyed differences of character at first glance. Human nature was, at bottom, no better; but men found their security in how easily they saw through one another, and this advantage, to the value of which we are no longer sensible spared them a good many vices. (OC III: 8)

When we consider that this theme will motivate Rousseau’s writing through The Discourse on Inequality to The Social Contract, just how well-developed the theme that civilization dehumanizes its constituents by supplying them with ready-made roles, whether those roles be as senators, fathers, farmers, merchants, men, priests, women et cetera, is so early in the The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences is shocking. 

Once society, along with the arts and sciences, has advanced, that civilized man has to deal with the demands put on him by social existence. “One no longer dares to appear what one is; and under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up the hard that is called society will, when placed in similar circumstances, all act in similar ways unless more powerful motives incline them differently” (OC III: 8). In a very real way, then, amour-proper binds us to society and to becoming one with the herd. If it weren’t for the society around us, then we would free to pursue virtue and would be free to fully be ourselves. 

Rousseau therefore argues that, outside of man’s natural state, people are not free to choose. Amour-propre enslaves us. Rousseau makes a none too subtle reference to the arts and sciences as the fetters of men in the first part of The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences: “While the Government and the Laws see to the safety and the well-being of men assembled, the Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden…” (OC III: 6-7; italics added). Here we see the corruption of the notion of corruption that has affected modern academia, but I get ahead of myself here. 

 

Society corrupts the human soul because it reduces its scope of free will. In the context of society, people are free to be themselves; rather, they have to be what they need to be to get by. They become cogs in a greater machine; rather than seeing Jacques the free agent, we see Jacques the accountant. To the eyes of someone else in a refined society Jacques is less an end in and of himself as he is a means towards their own ends. The demands of social cooperation can therefore be seen in the light of The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences as dehumanizing. As Rousseau laments: “The ancient politicians forever spoke of morals and of virtue; ours speak only of commerce and of money” (OC III: 19)

Rousseau’s celebration of natural man makes sense in the context of his views on amour-propre. Natural man knows little of amour-propre. He knows not the applause of the a greater society; instead, only knows of himself as the sole spectator to his behavior. He is mainly motivated by self-love, by amour de soi, which inclines him towards both to self-preservation and, when augmented by reason, to virtue. For natural man, since each man follows the beat of his own drum, “differences in conduct conveyed differences of character at first glance” (OC III: 8). 

 

The theme that amour de soi is identified with natural man and with the development of virtue will be made more apparent in Rousseau’s later, more political, works, yet it’s still manifest in The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. Natural man in his natural society, people get their just deserts. But in a refined society, “Rewards are lavished upon wits, and virtue remains without honors” (OC III: 25), which leads to Rousseau becoming one of the leading critics of the refined society. Back to nature! Exorcise amour-propre and return to rustic virtue, which doesn’t rely on the approbation of those around us.   

In the end, amour-propre is one of the main trunks of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thought that unites his entire corpus into an intelligible whole. Once human beings started to congregate in society, amour-propre fettered people to predetermined roles and thereby alienated people from their humanity, “that original freedom for which they seemed born” (OC III: 7). Insofar as the sciences provided opportunities for amour-proper to be our primary motivation, the sciences corrupt our humanity for that man is a free agent is pretty much a tautology for Rousseau. Amour-propre chains us to the opinions of others. It puts us in positions where we are not free to choose. 

Turning to contemporary politics, a lot of radical left’s curious positions, especially among college radicals, about society can be understood as them taking the view that amour-propre is coercive. Insofar as we don’t give somebody the respect they think they deserve, whether they’re a member of the LGBT community or a Muslim, then we are coercing them to follow another path in life. It doesn’t take much of an intellectual lead to go from here to the talk of micro-aggressions polluting campuses today. The pursuit of virtue in Rousseau’s thought can be identified as the pursuit of self-expression mindlessly praised in college campuses across the nation. 

The idea that amour-propre drives us to abandon our own self-expression and to adopt a false courtesy to others is a trunk of Rousseau’s thought that deserves attention, if only for the damage it has done to a proper understanding of coercion. In The Fatal Conceit, Friedrich Hayek targeted Rousseau in particular for corrupting the notion of coercion:

It was Rousseau who—declaring in the opening statement of The Social Contract that `man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains', and wanting to free men from all `artificial' restraints—made what had been called the savage the virtual hero of progressive intellectuals, urged people to shake off the very restraints to which they owed their productivity and numbers, and produced a conception of liberty that became the greatest obstacle to its attainment.

When a lefty shrill decries the patriarchy’s coercion, she is apart of an illiberal tradition with roots in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences in identifying the demands of living socially with coercion. Rousseau isn’t an advocate of a free and open society where one can do as one pleases within the rule of law; rather, he is an advocate of a society where one can never be exactly free to make one’s own identity. 

Liberalism Need Not Be Based In Consent

We may become the makers of our fate once we have ceased to be its prophets.

-Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

 

In “Classical Liberalism: Contemporary Voices,” Patrick J Deenan stumbles upon one of my political pet peeves: The insistence that liberalism need be rooted in consent. He argues:

The affinity between liberalism and democracy is found most fundamentally in liberalism’s insistence upon consent as the only basis for legitimate power and authority. While in theory liberalism can accept any form of government, including a constitutional monarchy, from the very beginning, the architects of classical liberal regimes decided that periodic consent was the best means of ensuring ongoing legitimation. While John Locke speaks of the theoretical possibility of “tacit consent” as an ongoing basis on which to ground claims of legitimacy, as a practical matter, it is difficult for people simply to pull up stakes or foment a revolution when they decide that their tacit consent no longer suffices. Elections solve a practical problem, and liberalism became wed to democracy.

 

Especially when Mr. Deenan is advertising the rather lengthy and rambling essay to be a seminar about liberalism, to ignore the streams of liberal thought that have no relation to the idea that legitimate government is based on consent. The mistake is a compounded conclusion of a similar mistake about identifying the authors from whom the liberal tradition flows. Most important is whom he fails to consider.  

In his earlier article, “Liberalism Sources and Themes,” Mr. Deenan had boxed himself into that erroneous conclusion by arguing that that Locke and Paine are the fonts of classical liberalism. But what of David Hume and Adam Smith? David Hume had provided a timeless criticism of theories of government based on consent in “On the Original Contract.” The Scotsman even went so far as to write: “When we assert,that all lawful government arises from the consent of the people, we certainly do them a great deal more honour than they deserve, or even expect and desire from us.” 

Hume is certainly one of the font heads of liberal thought, so where does he fit in Mr. Deenan’s narrative. Short answer, he doesn’t and Mr. Deenan’s narrative therefore doesn’t capture the breadth of liberal thought.

 

The idea that any government, legitimate or not, is based on the consent of the governed is a laughably absurd idea and deserves to be shamed as such. As Hume writes in “On the Original Contract”:

The face of the earth is continually changing, by the encrease of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes. Is there any thing discoverable in all these events, but force and violence. Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of? 

Liberalism deserves to be taken seriously. By couching it in social-contract talk, we, almost by definition, fail to take it seriously. The social contract is an intellectual fraud. It fails to take into account that governments have a focal nature to them which, when legitimate, can properly demand the obedience of those in its jurisdiction. It doesn’t ask, it forces. 

Liberalism seeks to minimize that superior-inferior relationship that governments introduce into society, and to seriously go about that practice liberals cannot think that people have agreed to take the inferior role. Instead, they are there largely as a consequence of historical accident. Historical accident and fortunate violence, not consent, are what have formed the political institutions today. Any stream of political thought that contends otherwise doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously for the same reason that any biologist who believes that Genesis is the factual creation story doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously: Neither are true, neither conform to their given objects.     

Conventions Are the Causes of Political Authority

 

 

 

Like so many political philosophers, Michael Huemer fails to consider that all political authority occurs within a cultural context. Political authority isn't something that is created out of a void, nor is it something that people sit around and agree to; rather, political authority — the actual political authority that we are all witness to on a daily basis — evolves across history driven by processes so complicated even Francis Fukuyama's two massive volumes on the subject only do so much justice explaining.

Political authority cannot be removed from the context in which it is exercised. Nevertheless, Mr. Huemer divorces his remarks from any historical context by the repeated use of the word 'agent' whereas a proper noun would've been more fitting. One cannot understand Maximilien de Robespierre's authority in launching the Reign of Terror without understanding the context in which Robespierre's commands were carried out just as one cannot understand the legitimacy of Caesar's assassins without almost drowning in the historical detail of the end of the Roman Republic. They were all political decisions made whose decision makers, be they Robespierre or Brutus, thought that their actions carried along with them a just demand for obedience. Whether that was actually the case, though, cannot be examined from a purely formal point of view because obedience necessarily involves material considerations: Who is giving the command? What are they commanding? 

 

Mr. Huemer mistakenly treats what he calls "the problem of political authority" from the point of view of everybody in society as equals, yet any historical point of view will recognize that certain people have the authority to commit acts that would have been viewed as unquestionably reprehensible if done by another. It did matter that Brutus and a band of senators, rather than Ioannes Doeus and his friends, stabbed Caesar to death. What separates an act of tyrannicide from an act of murder can actually just be the context. 

Consequently Mr. Huemer's problem of political authority is only a problem because it doesn't open its eyes to the political reality that not everyone is equal in society. The state's decision makers can extract money from its subjects and not have it called theft because the state has a conventional authority to do such things whereas a private citizen does not have such an authority. Yes, the authority is conventional, but as Edmund Burke remarked in Reflections on the Revolution in France:

If society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executive power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its existence?

And yet, that's exactly what Mr. Huemer is assuming: Political authority without the social context that provide the causes of that authority. It's just a nonsensical way of actually understanding human society (and I hope that political philosophy actually aims to understand human society rather than build castles in the sky). It is an ancient principle that to understand something, we must understand its causes, and the same is true with political authority. To treat of political authority without treating of the conventions which give it force, as Mr. Huemer does, is simply the abuse of any metaphysical doctrine of right.

 

Perhaps those conventions which motivate political legitimacy are just bestial. Perhaps human society, by its very nature, isn't just, and isn't worthy of our better nature. St. Augustine came close to that statement when he compared Rome to a band of thieves in The City of God. St. Augustine recognized, though, that the vicious conventions, if I may speak of conventions as 'vicious', were a product of this world, and that to expect them to change for the better was naïve. Instead, St. Augustine argued that we should fix our eyes onto Heaven and care not for the political rubble around us.

Mr. Huemer offers no such consideration. If he wants to condemn modern human society — keeping in mind that the nation-state is part-and-parcel of our commercial society — as unbefitting to the human soul, then he is free to do so, but I doubt he'll follow St. Augustine's exhortation that the only society that matters is a spiritual one, unsoiled by the sordid realities of Homo sapiens politics.

The European Union and The Consent of the Governed

 

 

 

Is the European Union a nation in and of itself? Guy Verhofstadt seems to believe so.

As an American familiar with American federal institutions, I can certainly say that what Mr. Verhofstadt and his ilk desire is a United States of Europe. Any talk otherwise betrays their unfamiliarity with what a federal union demands: That people ultimately identify with the top of the political pyramid.

 There can never be a United States of Europe because, unlike the United States, there is no single European identity. I doubt that a majority of Europeans will identify the European Union as their ultimate political group. An American in California can consider themselves to be the member of the same policy as an American in New York; they both speak the same language, they both roughly have the same political ideals, and they both identify with the same political symbols. The same cannot be said about a European in Athens and a European in London.

There was certainly a gradual evolution in American identity over the course of the 19^th century. One can easily cite Robert E. Lee's decision to fight for Virginia rather than for the federal Union as evidence for that, but it was nevertheless a difficult decision for him to make. Would it be similarly difficult for a German, Frenchman or Englishman to make a similar decision? I doubt it.

Democracy is a means of finding some shared opinion constituting the consent of the governed within the clamor and energy within a nation. It seeks to find some solution to the problems of governance which will be satisfactory to most. Whether those policies are found is often more a question of shared identity and shared symbols than actual persuasion. There need to be focal institutions and ideals which can unite people around political institutions, and where they don’t exist nor will the fiction of a consent of the governed. 

Democracy cannot work everywhere, and there needs to be some shared sense of identity for people to be willing to continually exist within a democratic nation with their geographic neighbors. Such identity exists in the United States, but it simply doesn’t across the European Union.  

Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc: Victory for the Freedom of Association

 

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

- Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness 

 

Finally, the commotion and excitement over the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate has reach its end. On June 30^th, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc that companies could refuse to give their employees contraceptive coverage without facing a fine from the Federal government. The scandal that this issue has caused, both now and when it was added to the list of preventative services addressed by the Affordable Care Act after the legislation was passed has been a circus. The very notion that a subset of the population may have a little more freedom to follow their own beliefs has caused out-of-proportion outrage. 

As usual, the politics of the case aren’t about policy, but rather identity. The practical considerations of the suitability of paying for contraception with insurance or the consideration of whether the free market has already provided contraception to its demanders have been thrown aside, replaced by slogans like “get your rosaries off of my ovaries” and  “birth control: not my bosses business.” At Bloomberg View, Megan McArdle reveals the absurdity of the identity politics wrapped up with the Supreme Court’s ruling in “Hobby Lobby Hobbyhorses” by showing just how contradictory those slogans really are: 

After reading the Twitter reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case, I began researching a post on what women could do now that corporations have exactly the same rights people do, including playing power forward for the Miami Heat, and now that contraception has been outlawed throughout these great United States. Then I read the decision and, to my surprise, found that it didn’t quite say any of that.

So what does it say? The court found that owners of closely held corporations have the same rights as sole proprietors under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. They cannot be forced to violate their religious beliefs unless the government can genuinely find no other way to achieve a compelling public purpose.

But that sounds so boring compared to War on Women! And so that’s the narrative the Internet chose. Here’s a representative tweet from my feed this morning:

So let's all deny women birth control & get closer to harass them when they're going in for repro health services. BECAUSE FREEDOM.

Logically, this is incoherent, unless you actually believe that it is impossible to buy birth control without a side payment from your employer. (If you are under this tragic misimpression, then be of good cheer! Generic birth control pills are available from the drugstore for about $25 a month.)

The Hobby-Lobby case is simply a victory for the freedom of association. The battles to make contraception legal and available on the market have already been one. Moreover, if someone wants access to contraception, she need only to get a prescription, and to pay for it. There is simply no need for the Federal government to interfere with the freedom of association as long as the good in question can be adequately provided by free association. Women can decide to purchase their own contraception if it pleases them, but they shouldn’t be able to force anyone with that aim. Isn’t that how a free society should operate?

As long as employers were forced to provide contraceptive drugs to their employees, they didn’t have the freedom to associate with people as they desired. The mandate fails the Kant test, and fails it spectacularly. Rather than employers being respected as ends in of themselves, employers are treated as means for employees to use for their own desires without consideration to the employers own. Employees should be free to buy contraception (and also free to buy it over the counter without a prescription, but I digress), but employers should be free to refuse to associate with employees who demand that contraception be directly paid for. The contraceptive mandate is based on that servile ideology that someone else owes oneself something rather than the liberal ideology that one has to give value for value. Whether its to form a labor union or a joint-stock company, people should free to unite for whatever purpose so long it that doesn’t harm others. Pointing out that other policies violate the freedom of association, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did in a piece dissenting Burwell v Hobby Lobby, Inc, is a red herring. 

 

The contraceptive mandate is evidence for just how illiberal the American left can be. If contraception is, as the many of the placards outside of the Supreme Court suggested, “not my bosses business”, employers should be free to not make it their business; however, the contraceptive mandate makes it their business. With such a command in place, it was very much the business of employers to pay for their employees contraception, at no additional cost to the employee. If women really want to make contraception “not my bosses’ business”, they should buy it themselves, not make it the business of their bosses. The slogan “get your theology off my biology” only works when one is not forcing one’s biological issues on another person. As thinkers like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard have pointed out, rights can only be violated by those initiating the coercion, not those fighting to rid themselves of it.

 

The entire affair should be a reasons for liberals to rejoice. After all the freedom of association is a fundamental pillar of any properly civilized society. Nevertheless, the American left gladly trampled over it to achieve their desired aims despite their supposed liberalism which leads at least myself to wonder (for the nth time): What happened to liberalism? In “The Trouble Isn’t the Liberals, It’s the Progressives”, Charles Murray finds the source of this illiberal side of the American left in the old Progressive movement:

 

(P)hilosophically, the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century had roots in German philosophy (Hegel and Nietzsche were big favorites) and German public administration (Woodrow Wilson's open reverence for Bismarck was typical among progressives). To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong unifying leader. They were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective. They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded.

That's not a description that Woodrow Wilson or the other leading progressive intellectuals would have argued with. They openly said it themselves.

It is that core philosophy extolling the urge to mold society that still animates progressives today—a mind-set that produces the shutdown of debate and growing intolerance that we are witnessing in today's America. Such thinking on the left also is behind the rationales for indulging President Obama in his anti-Constitutional use of executive power. If you want substantiation for what I'm saying, read Jonah Goldberg's 2008 book "Liberal Fascism," an erudite and closely argued exposition of American progressivism and its subsequent effects on liberalism. The title is all too accurate.

As much as one may want to make light of Mr. Goldberg’s choice of title, Liberal Fascism well encapsulates the attitude behind the contraceptive mandate. Though perhaps the book would have been better titled Progressive Fascism - though that title would have been trivially true in many senses - and yes it would be absurd to argue that Wilson and Mussolini were cut from the same cloth, Mr. Goldberg is right that progressives tend to make everything the state’s business. 

 

Progressivism tends to want to shrink the sphere of private association to the trivial, a point Mr. Goldberg makes in his own column about Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc, “Liberal’s Hobby Lobby Doublethink”: 

This gets us to why I think the ruling’s majority essentially agreed with the protesters. If I like to dress up as a character from Game of Thrones on weekends, pretending to fight snow zombies and treating my mutt like she’s a mystical direwolf, that’s none of my employer’s business. But if I ask my employer to pay for my trip to a Game of Thrones fan convention, I am asking him to make it his business. If my employer refuses, that may or may not be unfair, but it’s his right. If, in response, I go to the convention and have the government force my employer to pay for my travel, that only makes things worse. It not only makes my private pursuits my boss’s business, it makes them the business of taxpayers and a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington.

At the heart of this, and so many other recent controversies, is an honest disagreement about how society should be organized. For liberals (and far too many Republicans), businesses should be de facto, if not de jure, extensions of government. If something is desirable, businesses should be forced to impose it. The fact that the owner disagrees or that it is not in the business’s economic interest is immaterial. And it’s not just businesses. Recall that the Obama administration has tried to force explicitly religious groups to betray their beliefs as well.

Obviously, there’s room for nuance here. Few people think that we should scrap minimal workplace-safety rules, for instance. No one thinks the Church of Satan should be permitted ritual human sacrifice. But when in doubt, the government should err on the side of laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui-même.

Not everything is your boss’s business, or anybody else’s.

Rev. Sirico on Pope Francis

 

From Rev. Robert A. Sirico’s “Pope Francis, Without the Politics”: 

If one wants to understand Francis’ thinking about the poor, it would be good to look objectively at his much talked about, but little-read Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel.” It soon becomes apparent that much of this Exhortation is an extension of a keen insight that Jorge Bergoglio had when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires:

We cannot respond with truth to the challenge of eradicating exclusion and poverty if the poor continue to be objects, targets of the action of the state and other organizations in a paternalistic and aid-based sense, instead of subjects, where the state and society create social conditions that promote and safeguard their rights and allow them to be builders of their own destiny.

As one who has promoted a free economy as a normative way to assisting people out of poverty, I find two innovative challenges in these words which could go a long way to depoliticizing the debate about wealth and poverty.

Imagine if all of those presently engaged in the debate on these matters began to ask questions such as, “What excludes the poor from the process of prosperity?” or “What would a society look like that no longer considers the poor as objects of paternalistic aid but rather as potential shapers of their own destiny?”

The particular details of policy prescriptions are not the heart and soul of Francis’ incredible attraction on the part of people throughout the world. It is not his political motivation that moves us as we witness his embrace by — and of — frail human life. 

More than worth reading in full. The topic of non-overlapping magisteria is just as true for the Catholic Church and biological evolution as it is for the Catholic Church and economics. What ought to be emphasized from Pope Francis’ teachings is therefore not a discussion of the cause-and-effect explanation of current poverty, but how we morally view the person within that cause-and-effect explanation. Pope Francis cannot teach us whether cutting the corporate tax rate would be a good thing for, say, the American economy, but he can teach us about how we can appreciate dignity of a human being, and how institutions should respect that. The point of Catholic social teaching is not to provide technocratic advice for accomplishing political goals, but to provide a witness for the Gospel within the context of human interactions within society at large. 

Liberty and the Anglosphere: Reflections on Hannan's _Inventing Liberty_

 

 

The nations, not so blest as thee,

Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

 

In his recent book, Inventing Liberty: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, MEP Daniel Hannan discusses how the ideas of a liberal society emerged within the British isles over a course of hundreds of years, and how their proliferation across the world happened within a distinctly English-speaking context. Hannan argues that it has been the ascendency of the Anglosphere in the past three hundred years, including nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, which has made possible the similar ascendency of liberal values over that same time period. Hannan argues that it was the culture of common law, of Magna Carta, and of representative government, not intellectual arguments, which made the free and open society possible. As intellectuals discussed (and eventually en masse rejected) the values which cultivated such a society, they were transported to and flowered in British colonies the world over,  even amongst the prisoners shipped to Australia.  

 

The main question, at least for me, which Inventing Liberty brings up is the question of how culture has made liberalism possible. A constant problem facing any order at the level of society at large is: How do people participate within them? As every angsty teenager has recognized, sometimes society can be an impersonal machine in which people can be but cogs, used as means rather than as ends in and of themselves. As Shakespeare wrote: All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely players. What guides those players, and forms their collective patterns of behavior into what we know as as society are the institutions and norms of the societies which people find themselves surrounded by. The way that people participate in the social orders they live in is thus often merely a product of the culture they are surrounded by. 

Of course, we all know (and for the most part appreciate) that institutions matter. But there is something quite different between the argument which Hannan is making, and the arguments which many institution-matter theorists make is that Hannan argues, implicitly though, that we cannot simply replicate the institutions of the Anglosphere to non-Anglosphere countries. The necessary jump between Hannan’s main point in Inventing Liberty and an institutions-matter theorist like James Buchanan’s throughout his corpus is that Hannan’s vision is very much historically fatalistic whereas Buchahan looks at the problem from the point of view of social contract theory. For Buchahan, the question what can be done is a very real one, though in Hannan, what can be done is largely just a matter of preserving what is already there. In Hannan's history, institutions are determined by culture, and if a nation does not have the culture to support good institutions, then it is by and large doomed to go without them.

The British character of liberalism and of the commercial society it animates is corroborated by common language. When people are speaking about the core tenet of a liberal market, competition, people, especially in Continental Europe, often speak of “Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” The view that it is that British variety which encourages “dog-eat-dog” competition whereas their more “cooperative” approach cultivated more moral outcomes. The use of such language is so wide that it has gotten its own page of Wikipedia: “The Anglo-Saxon Model.” The culturally English-speaking nature of the modern commercial society is thereby displayed by its identification with a certain cultural group, that of Great Britiain.

 

The question which I am naturally lead to is then: Why Britain? Why did the English-speaking population become the cradle of liberal ideas rather than, say the populations of Holland or Italy? The Dutch certainly went a long way towards the development of liberal ideas, and during the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam was a shining light in the world. There, the first modern stock market was established there by the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Levels of religious toleration were high compared to the rest of Europe, especially towards the Jews (though the Catholics suffered due to perceived political loyalties to the Habsburg empire that the Dutch Republic had succeeded from). Daniel Hannan even celebrates Dutch society in “I realised why I like the Dutch so much,” and claims that what he loves about Dutch society is found in the bourgeois values that the Dutch and British both share: “Only recently, though, was I able to put my finger on what I liked so much. It’s this: for centuries, the Dutch made the honest pursuit of self-betterment a supreme virtue.” The bourgeois virtues which Deirdre McCloskey celebrates in her aptly named book, The Bourgeois Virtues, were quickly coming to fruition within Amsterdam, and the Dutch Republic could therefore have seemed to be a viable candidate to be the cradle of liberalism for the Western world. 

That was not to be, though. One of the main reasons was that the Dutch Republic did not have Great Britain’s fortunate geography. Unlike Great Britain, which is an island separated from the Continent, the Netherlands is a low-lying plain, much of it reclaimed from the sea, close to the center of Europe. As such, the influenced of the bourgeois virtues in the Netherlands was vulnerable of being snuffed out by conquest, and that is one of the events which happened following the Dutch Golden Age. Whereas the British were able to survive and compete against the Continental powers by outdoing them on the seas, the Dutch Republic never had such an option, and like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was unable to assert its independence forever against the encroachments of illberal states very adept at waging war. Unlike those two, Great Britain was in the fateful position of being separated by the sea from the many wars which were waged on the Continent in the early modern period, and was thereby separated from the need of winning those wars, at the cost of its liberal values, in order to ensure its survival.

 

In the end, liberalism wasn’t discovered by the great powers of human reason; rather, it was cultivated in culture until finally being recognized by the mind. It is not a necessary outcome of progress. Rather, it is a historical accident. The ascendency of liberalism is thus not a matter, as it often is depicted to be, of the triumph of human reason over bigotry and superstition. Instead, the ascendency of liberalism is a matter of a historically contingent sequence of unique events in unique places; of infectous habits rather than explicit ideas. The lesson to be appreciated from Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Liberty is that the free and open society is a consequence not of human ideas, but of human history.