The Bit Bucket

The New Puritans

I can't think of a mainstream worldview less inspirational than the dreary outlook of folks like Dale Kunkel, who spoke at a recent Cato Policy Forum, Kids, Cartoons, and Cookies. "Should We Restrict the Marketing of Food to Children," the panel asked? Kunkel's answer was yes, and his arguments made me wonder if he's got blood in his veins.

Kunkel is a "public health" advocate. He argued, in essence, that parents are powerless in the face of nagging from their kids, and therefore, in "fairness" to kids' limited mental abilities, we need to ban any advertising that targets them, so they don't nag their automoton parents into feeding them Oreos three meals a day.

In the world of "public health" experts, people are not individuals with desires and goals who make choices and suffer consequences. They are simply masses to be desribed by statistics, and it's the job of the "public health" policymaker to maximize those statistics at all costs. Any policy that gets people to eat less triple fudge ice cream, smoke fewer cigarettes, or exercize more is presumptively good, whether the actual people involved like it or not.

Here's the problem: Some of us like triple fudge ice cream, cigarettes, and watching TV. Some of us like to play sports that pose risks of serious injury. A few of us even like to have sex despite the very real risks of STDs and unplanned pregnancies. I don't know a single person whose sole goal in life is to maximize his life expectancy. This is social science run amock.

What bothers me most about this attitude is its absolute humorlessness. When you make the above argument to someone like Kunkel, all you get in reply is a blank stare, or at most a half-hearted concession that individuals have the right to take risks if they choose. But it's clear they don't really care. They pay no attention to any quality-of-life factors that seem frivolous or that can't be captured with a statistic. The social value of a bowl of triple-fudge ice cream is assumed to be zero, no matter how much the person eating it might enjoy it.

The corollary of this attitude is that personal responsibility is a bourgoise fiction, because if people persist in liking triple-fudge ice cream despite the obvious public health evidence that it's bad for you, then people must be irrational. If they were rational, they'd know that triple fudge ice cream makes you fat, and being fat makes you get a heart attack, and heart attacks are bad, and therefore, no one should eat triple-fudge ice cream. And if people are acting irrational, it must be the evil corporations' fault, and the government needs to step in and save them from themselves.

At its root, this is a form of puritan intolerance every bit as close-minded as religious fundamentalism. "Public health" has replaced God's will as the overriding value to be promoted. The old puritans wanted us to leave boring lives so we can be with God in the next life, but the new puritans want us to lead boring lives so we can live as long as possible in this life. The temptations of Satan have been replaced with the temptations of evil corporations. But the basic attitudes are identical: both sets of puritans acknowledge that it's ultimately up to the sinner to change his ways, but they don't care what the sinner actually wants, and they certainly don't see anything wrong with a little coercion to help the process of repentance along.

iLust

I have a serious wireless fetish, so maybe I'm not an objective observer, but this has got to be Apple's coolest new product since the iPod: a tiny WiFi base station that allows you to play music to a stereo and print to a USB printer wirelessly. And it's $129. $129!

In strictly technical terms, this isn't that amazing of a product: wireless cards, remote USB printing, and audio out ports are all off-the-shelf technology. The integration with iTunes is clever, but it's hardly rocket science.

What makes this product so cool is that Apple took these standard components, glued them together with a little software magic, and created a product that's going to be a natural extension of normal peoples' lives; it fills a hole in competitors' product lines so naturally that in retrospect it seems obvious that someone should have introduced it sooner. And if it works as advertised (and I intend to buy one and find out very soon) it requires no technical knowledge whatsoever to operate. Plus, $129! Given that wireless card by itself costs around $50, $129 is a pretty amazing price.

I feel like this thing was designed specifically with me in mind: in my bedroom, I don't have room for a desk, so I've got an inkjet printer and a stereo on a shelf. If I wanted to print, I had to set the laptop on the floor next to the printer. Now, I'll be able to plug both into an Airport Express so I can play music from iTunes to my stereo speakers and print stuff, all while I'm sitting on my bed across the room.

R.I.P. Ronald Reagan

The nation lost a great American today.

Politics is often a cynical business, and libertarians' attitude toward politicians is especially cynical. A political philosophy grounded in a suspicion of political power is naturally hostile to those who wield it. For me personally, I'm just too young to have a strong opinion of Mr. Reagan's policies. I came of age politically early in Clinton's term, and by that time the conventional wisdom about Reagan had gelled and begun to go stale.

From watching this afternoon's coverage of Reagan's death, however, it's apparent that Reagan stands head-and-shoulders above other modern presidents as an orator. Reagan managed to project both dignity and a common touch in a way that no other modern president has managed to match. More important, from my perspective at least, is that he is the only modern president to consistently and compellingly articulate libertarian themes. This was brought home to me when I was watching his farewell speech to the nation, originally delivered on January 11, 1989. This is among the finest articulations of what makes America great that I've ever read:

The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

And how stand the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after two hundred years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

"If there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here." I think Ronald Reagan understood that this is a defining attribute of America: we're the descendents of people who had "the will and the heart to get here." This fact largely determines our national character. We're ambitious, restless, and suspicious of authority. We welcome immigrants to our shores but we expect them to pull their weight. We're intolerant of social hierarchies.

We're a nation dedicated not to an ethnicity, religion, or homeland, but to the ideals of liberty and opportunity. I fear we're losing that heritage. Time and luxury have made us increasingly comfortable with paternalism, and September 11 persuaded many Americans that we couldn't afford to have doors in our walls. Being "American" is increasingly defined as having a American flag in your yard and not criticizing our foreign policy too much. And while our politicians still pay lip service to liberty, when's the last time you heard "it's a free country" end a political argument? I'm too young to remember it, but I'm told that, not too long ago, that was a common occurance.

I think Reagan, whatever the merits of his policies, should be remembered as the man who reminded America of what makes us exceptional-- not our wealth, not our lmilitary strength, certainly not our cultural or racial makeup, but the fact that we're a nation founded on the promise of giving liberty and opportunity to everyone with the will and the heart to get here.

In Which I Defend my Language from the Barbarians

The English Language is full of expressions that reference common activities from past eras that are no longer a part of daily life for most English speakers. Yet the expressions persist because they've taken on a life of their own. The problem is that most people never think about where those expressions came from, and so they mangle them in ways that make them non-sensical, but nevertheless sound roughly like the original expression.

I've been noticing these sorts of mistakes a lot lately, so, as a public service, here's The Bit Bucket Guide to Commonly Misused Expressions, or "Pedantic Eye for the Semi-literate Guy":

"Reign in": This is a horse-riding expression-- to "rein in" a horse is to pull on the reins to get it to slow down or stop. The "g" is superfluous. This expression seems to get misused more than it's used correctly.

"Tow the Line": This could be some kind of boating reference, I suppose, but the original reference is to a foot race: to toe the line is to keep your foot behind the starting line until the race starts. This should be "toe the line."

"Tough Road to Hoe: I'm not sure how (or why) you'd hoe a road. You can, however, hoe a row of crops on a farm. This should be "Tough row to hoe."

"Neck in Neck: This is a horse-racing expression. I have no idea what it means for two horses to be "neck in neck," but when two horses are "neck and neck," their necks are exactly even with each other, indicating a close race.

"Beg the question": This isn't in the same category as the others, since it's a misuse of a correctly spelled expression rather than a misspelling of a common phrase, but it annoys me enough that I'm gonna stick it in here anyway. "Begging the question" is a logical fallacy that involves assuming the conclusion you're trying to prove. It is wrong to use the phrase "that begs the question" to mean "that leads me to ask the question." Frankly, this is misused so commonly that it's probably best to stop using it at all unless you're writing a paper for a logic class.

In Which I Shake my Head in Disbelief

So the Libertarian Party has chosen its 2004 presidential candidate. Their choice is more than a little embarrassing. They passed over a polished, well-organized second-rate talk show host and a charismatic, well-organized second-rate movie producer for a random guy off the street who styles himself a "constitutional scholar" despite the fact that he has no formal legal training, a guy whose web site still--close to a week after the nomination--states that it's "Being Updated" and has next to no content.

This is a new low for a party that's had more than its share of low points. I was never crazy about Harry Browne, but he was a moderately successful author, and his campaign was professional, well-organized, and moderately media-savvy. I always took comfort in the fact that-- no matter how lackluster the Party's candidates for lower office might be--I could count on not being too embarrassed by the guy at the top of the LP ticket. Well, no longer. Here's the first interview I've read of Badnarik:

The IRS didn't come into existence the day the Constitution was ratified in 1789. The 16th Amendment and the IRS didn't come into our lives until 1913—over 100 years later. How did the United States government exist until then without the income tax? The most important part of that answer is that the federal government was extremely small, as outlined by Article I, Section 8. Since the government was so small, the founding fathers arranged for it to be funded by excise taxes on foreign imports so that American citizens wouldn't have to bear the burden. Contrary to what most people think, the money collected by the IRS is less than 15% of the government's annual revenue, and most of that goes towards paying the INTEREST on the national debt. (The debt continues to grow because Congress always operates at a deficit.) If we eliminated the IRS, the government would not come to a grinding halt, as is generally believed. So to finally answer your question, I am opposed to ANY individual taxes until we eliminate all of the unconstitutional agencies, and I suspect we wouldn't need a tax after that.

There are so many problems with this I don't know where to start. The IRS collectsover a trillion dollars in individual income taxes each year, around half of the total revenues. Throw in corporate income tax and payroll taxes, and this number rises to about $1.8T in a $2T budget. I have no idea where the 15% figure comes from, but it's apparent he doesn't know what he's talking about. Secondly, the idea that the founders wanted to only tax foreigners is absurd. The Constitution authorises duties (tariffs) and excises, the latter being taxes on domestic products like whiskey. And President Washington certainly seemed to believe domestic excise taxes were constitutional when he led the army against the Whiskey Rebellion. Thirdly, as anyone who knows anything about economics will tell you, a tariff on imports hurts domestic consumers just as much as foriegn producers. Congress also does not "always operate at a deficit." (it had a surplus in 1999 and 2000)

But more important than these glaring factual errors is the fact that Badnarik sounds out of touch with reality and completely unprepared to be president. He doesn't bother to mention any specifics about which agencies would be cut, he doesn't cite specific numbers as to how much cutting would be necessary, he certainly hasn't drafted a budget proposal. He's a half-assed armchair pundit who thinks it would be really neat to run for president.

It gets worse. Here's his plan for his first day in office:

a) Declare that all four national emergencies are immediately terminated, as well as the presumption of Emergency War Powers. Senate Report 93-549 has found that the "national emergencies" announced by FDR in 1933 because of the Great Depression, by Truman because of the Korean War, and two initiated by Nixon because of the Vietnam War, are still in effect today. (Skeptical readers can search the internet for this report and read it for themselves.)

b) Declare that all 20,000+ gun control laws in the United States are unconstitutional and unenforceable. I would also issue a valid executive order to the BATF and other pseudo police agencies informing them that any agent who confiscates a weapon of any kind, from someone who is not currently engaged in a murder or robbery, will not only be terminated from their position, but they will also be prosecuted for violating the unalienable rights of the citizens they have sworn to protect.

c) Issue another valid executive order to my subordinates executives working for the IRS. That order would instruct them to come to work, make a pot of coffee, and begin working on their resumes' pending a federal grand jury investigation as to the legitimacy of the Sixteenth Amendment and the Internal Revenue Code. High ranking officials from that department would be closely monitored as flight risks, pending indictments for fraud in the event that evidence proves that they knew that no statute exists that requires Americans to fill out a 1040 form and relinquish a significant percentage of their hard earned money to an unconstitutional government that refuses to operate within a budget.

d) Declare the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to be unconstitutional, and prohibit that organization from printing even one more dollar of fiat currency. I would immediate appoint Bernard Von Nothaus, Monetary Architect for the Liberty Dollar, to be my Secretary of the Treasury, placing the stability of our economy in his capable hands.

e) I would announce a special one-week session of Congress where all 535 members would be required to sit through a special version of my Constitution class. Once I was convinced that every member of Congress understood my interpretation of their very limited powers, I would insist that they restate their oath of office while being videotaped. Those videos could then be used as future evidence should they ever vote to violate the rights of Americans again.

f) I would take a short break for lunch.

So if he gets elected, large swaths of the federal government will have cause to fear not only for their jobs, but for their liberty as well. Point (c) comes dangerously close to crazy tax protestor talk. Point (d) shows no understanding of how the Federal Reserve System works, and no appreciation of the importance of maintaining a stable money supply. The markets would go into a tailspin if he were to get elected on fears of inept monetary policy screwing up the economy. He seems to be unaware that cabinet secretaries are nominated and must be confirmed by the Senate, they aren't just "appointed." Point (e) demonstrates a complete lack of appreciation for the separation of powers. Presidents can't force Congress to convene, force them to listen to his lecture, and they sure as hell can't force them to take oaths on videotape.

This is pretty standard stuff for rank-and-file libertarians. Any fringe political movement has its share of crazies. The LP is full of losers who get a kick out of pretending they're part of a real political party, but who wouldn't have the first clue what to do if they actually got elected. What's remarkable and depressing is that for the first time, one of those crazies is the standard-bearer for the national party. For the first time, the LP has nominated a candidate who is completely unqualified to be president.

I left the LP more than a year ago, so I have no great stake in who they nominate except that, unfortunately, the LP is the first organization most people think about when I mention that I'm a libertarian. With this nomination the LP may have gone from being an annoying irrelevance to being a serious embarrassment to the broader libertarian movement. To the extent that they get any media attention at all, they will reflect poorly on those of us who do know something about policy, and are trying to advance libertarian ideas in an intellectual serious way.

In which I Ride a Favorite Hobby-Horse

A new service called DidTheyReadIt.com (I'm not going to link to them because they're sleazy) offers to let you spy on the email-reading habits of those you send messages to. Ars has the lowdown:

For $50 a year, you send all of your e-mail messages as normal, but you tag .didtheyreadit.com to the end of every address. This forwards your mail through their servers, and then on to the recipient. It involves embedding a very small image into your e-mail, and then it relies on the recipient's e-mail client to try and "load" that image, giving you the time it was viewed, an IP with which you can try and geo-locate (horribly inaccurate), and a refresh setting which will try to measure how long the message was open for. The end result is that this will not work in any text e-mail client, any e-mail client set to not display HTML email, and any client (such as Outlook 2003) set to not display non-embedded images by default.

As the Ars article points out, notwithstanding the breathless coverage in the mainstream press, this is neither particularly new or innovative. Nor is it likely to work very well. I read my email using two different programs at different times: a text-based client called Pine, and Apple's Mail client for Mac OS X. The former can't display images at all, and the latter I have set not to load images by default. That means that this "service" will fail completely if anyone tries to use it on me.

This is, however, yet another argument against one of the great evils of modern times: HTML-formatted email. As far as I'm concerned, there are almost no good reasons to embed graphics and formatted text in email messages. Email is designed to be a low-overhead, text-based medium. Sending in HTML format wastes bandwidth, increases the complexity of mail clients, and makes it more likely that messages will display differently on different email clients.

The fundamental problem with HTML-formatted email though, aside from annoying tricks like DidTheReadIt, is that it reduces the signal-to-noise ratio of email messages. Graphics are eye-catching, so if they are available, there's a competitive advantage for those who use them. Many non-geeky people will perceive them as "more professional." (My own employer has succumbed to this pressure.) On the other hand, embedded images and text formatting almost never add any useful information to the text of an email message. In this case, a picture is not worth a thousand words. So HTML-formatting makes email as a medium less useful overall, but a competitive equilibrium is for lots of people to use it. (I should clarify that sending pictures as attachments isn't necessarily evil. I'm talking about the increasingly common practice of adding decorative graphical elements to make email messages look like web pages.)

So: if you need to send formatted text, send it as an attachment, or put it on the web and send the URL to your recipient. Set your email client to send messages in plain text. (I'll be happy to tell you how to do this if you can't figure it out) 99.9% of the time, if you can't say it in plain text, the problem is with your writing skills, not the lack of pretty pictures.

And for God's sake, if you use a real email client (as opposed to a web-based email service like HotMail) set it to not load images by default. It's a standard feature of all good email clients. Not only will you waste a lot less bandwidth downloading porn spam pictures and thwart sleazy tracking services, but you'll help drive the equilibrium back in the direction of efficient communication. There was a time when sending HTML-formatted email was the mark of a clueless internet newbie. I'm doing what I can to help make that norm return.

In Which I Pretend to Be an Economist

Tyler Cowen is puzzled about oil prices. At the risk of proving (as Tyler puts it) that I " don't know what is going on," I don't think his quandary is that puzzling. He quotes Arnold Kling:

In forecasting oil prices, I tend to defer to the efficient markets hypothesis. In some sense, oil in the ground has to compete with bonds and other interest-bearing assets. So, a reasonable approximation is that oil prices should be expected to go up at the interest rate. So, if the interest rate is 5 percent, then oil prices should go up at 5 percent, plus something for storage cost. If people thought oil prices were going to rise faster than that, they would keep the oil in the ground. If they thought that oil prices were going to rise more slowly than 5 percent (if that is the interest rate), then they would sell oil and buy bonds.

Tyler says this is called the Hotelling rule. The problem is that this hypothesis appears to only specify a minimum for the price, not a maximum: if the price of oil falls below the point where speculators expect the price at some point in the future to be higher than the current price plus the going interest rate (plus storage costs), they will buy oil and hold it in expectation of being able to sell it at a profit. Hence, today's oil price will never fall below the expected price a year from now, minus a year's worth of interest and storage costs.

But this lower bound is completely irrelevant if the price of oil is already above it. For example, this value might very well be above the medium-run price of finding and extracting new oil out of the ground. If the minimum described above sets a price floor of $25/barrel, but if it costs the marginal producer $28 to get a barrel of oil, then oil will cost $28/barrel, not $25. And in that case the Hotelling rule's limit is irrelevant.

So the answer to this "puzzle" seems pretty simple to me: the Hotelling rule imposes a floor on the price of oil (or equivalently a ceiling on the expected return), and right now the price of oil is above that floor. It doesn't impose a ceiling on the price, (or equivalently a floor on the expected return) and so it's not at all mysterious if returns on oil is lower than the returns on bonds.

Am I missing something?

Simple Models in a Complex World

Amanda's comment in the gay marriage thread got me thinking about the strengths and limitations of simple models...

A few hundred years ago, Kepler, Newton, and a handful of other scientists sparked a revolution in physics by proposing a simple, elegant model for the behavior of the universe. It was stunning in its generality and its applicability to a wide variety of different settings, from the motions of the planets to the behavior of apples dropped from trees. It was simpler and less cumbersome than the system epicycles that it supplanted, as well as achieving more accurate results.

Yet the Newtonian model wasn't perfect. It rested on some basic assumptions that don't always hold-- objects are larger than subatomic particles, for example, and are not traveling close to the speed of light. The Newtonian model produces incorrect results at extremely high speeds and on extremely small scales, where the corrections of special relativity and quantum mechanics need to be applied. Likewise, there are some realms-- solid state physics, for example-- that the Newtonian model simply doesn't address.

Not long after Newton did his work, a group of political philosophers began crafting another simple model-- this one of human societies. In the liberal model first devised by John Locke and Adam Smith, people are free and independent actors who deal with each other by cooperation using the simple mechanisms of property and contract. The function of the state is to protect property and enforce contracts, and otherwise stay out of the way. This model was a vast improvement over the feudal and mercantilist models of the economy that it surplanted.

And like Newton's model, it had some basic assumptions: that people are free and independent actors, that relationships are freely chosen, that the government is stable and honest enough to protect property and contract reasonably well, etc. Also, like the Newtonian model, the classical liberal model doesn't work so well when its assumptions are violated. Will has written persuasively about one way the assumptions of the liberal model can be violated: liberalism doesn't work too well when the government is too corrupt or incompetent to protect individual rights properly, and generally an honest an competent government requires a populace committed to liberal ideas. Building the institutions of liberalism in a society that lacks a commitment to liberal values is a recipe for disaster, as we seem to be learning in Iraq right now. The liberal model also breaks down when it comes to difficult cases like abortion and euthansia, where basic definitions like "person" are at the heart of the debate.

Another realm where the liberal model breaks down is when it comes to families. Liberalism strongly emphasizes the rights of individuals, and implicitly assumes that all relationships are governed by (explicit or implied) contracts freely chosen by the parties. But this model has little relevance within families. We can't choose our parents, our siblings, or our children. And relationships between family members are more complex and more ambiguous than, say, business partnerships or church memberships. Property is held jointly between spouses, for example, but each spouse often has sentimental attachments to certain items.

The liberal model is even more clearly unsuitable to the relationship between parent and child-- there are elements of parternalism, dependency, and coercion that would never arise between mentally competent adults outside of families. Parents have a presumptive right to make decisions on behalf of their children, but children have legal recourse in cases of abuse or neglect. The simple model of person A contracting with person B to mutual benefit simply doesn't apply.

Libertarians (not to mention economists and policymakers more generally) tend to deal with this by treating "households" rather than "individuals" as the unit of analysis whereever possible. Relationships within the family are assumed to be private and consensual, and generally not the business of the state. Members of the household are assumed to have harmonious interests, and to work out differences among themselves. This allows liberal theorists to treat "households" as self-sufficient, mentally competent, adult institutions that own property and enter into contracts with other households and firms. Rarely does the state need to pull back the veil and examine the intimate relationships that exist inside the family.

Unfortunately, that's not always true. Divorce is the ugliest case, but there are others as well. Medical decisions, inheritence, domestic violence, child custody, alimony and child support, child abuse and neglect, and tax policy are all areas where the state must pull back the veil and try to untangle the complex relationships and disputes that lie within. With some of them (like taxes and child support) it would be possible to eliminate state involvement by changing government policies. But for the most part, that's not possible.

Which brings us to marriage. My boss has argued that the solution is to start treating marriage like any other contract. Couples seeking to get married would be free to seek the blessing of a church, and to write a wedding contract with any terms the two parties desire. The only role of the state would be to enforce its terms.

The problem is that marriage isn't like a business partnership. The relationship between spouses is fundamentally different from those of business partners or other contractual relationships.

A poorly written marriage contract can cause a great deal of misery to both partners, but more importantly it can create considerable externalities to the state. Interpreting each and every marriage contract would waste a great deal of the court's time. More importantly, a failed marriage can be harmful to children, the innocent third party in every non-childless family. And it would probably be impossible to specify every possible outcome in advance in the terms of the contract-- that's why there's centuries of common law precedent and statutory law defining and governing marriage. And in practice, many of the agreements within a family are implicit, governed by culture and tradition rather than contract. Getting them all down on paper would not be easy, and it's not at all clear to me that it would be helpful.

Finally, marriages have legal properties that are simply not available in any other type of contract. And some of them, I think, are quite useful. Spouses generally have a legal claim to each others' property. Spouses have special privileges in medical decisions and inheritance. They have legal protection against incriminating each other in court. Ex-spouses have different rules in custody disputes than co-habiting couples, whether same- or opposite-sex. I'm sure if I knew more about family law I could cite numerous more specific examples.

The state, then, cannot be completely neutral with respect to marriage. To the extent that the state must make legal decisions about intimate details of family life, (and I think this is almost inevitable) state consideration of marriage is indispensible to making them fairly.

So I think this is one case where the liberal model just doesn't fit very well. Spouses are not self-interested actors acting at arms length by means of contract. Children are neither competent adults nor the property of their parents. Trying to apply a naive liberal model to the family is akin to trying to desribe the structure of the atom using Kepler's laws. A compelling case for reducing state involvement in marriage would require a nuanced understanding of the family and a plan for how the state could effectively deal with domestic disputes without becoming embroiled in their details. I think it's a more complicated problem than most libertarians recognize.

Rauch on Gay Marriage

Here are the headlines of the Washington Post and the Washington Times this morning:

Homosexuals 'marry' in Massachusetts

Gay Couples Marry in Massachusetts

Guess which paper had the scare quotes?

I went to a fantastic event at Cato yesterday featuring Jonathan Rauch and Genevieve Wood from the Family Research Council. It wasn't pretty. Rauch is an incredibly thoughtful commentator on the issue of gay marriage, and makes a persuasive case that gay marriage would be a way of strengthening marriage by universalizing it. In contrast to some activists who view it as fundamentally a civil rights issue of formal equality, he makes a positive argument that marriage that included gays would be a better institution than marriage that excluded them.

If Wood is the best the right has to offer on this issue, they might as well surrender now. The most telling tactic was her constant harping on the definition of marriage. We can't have gay marriage, she said, because that would be changing the definition of marriage! When you're reduced to citing Websters over and over again, you know you've lost the argument. Sure, it would be a change in the definition. So what? She never explains. This was particularly sad when she was forced into claiming that no-fault divorce and interracial marriage were not redefinitions of marriage, as though "till death do us part" was just heart-warming rhetoric, not a fundamental part of the institution. There are lots of legitimate differences between those cases, to be sure, but splitting hairs over which aspects of marriage are part of "the" definition is not terribly persuasive.

As one of my colleagues put it, though, no one really talked much about liberty. The most libertarian solution would be to pritatize marriage, and get the state out of the marriage business entirely. I'm not sure I actually support that-- mostly because I don't think it's possible. Marriage is deeply entwined with the state. There are many issues-- child custody, inheritance, medical visitation, etc, that would require almost complete re-writing if the state withdrew the special privilege of marriage and allowed couples to form any mix-and-match relationship they wanted. Even if it were possible to enact change on such a massive scale, I'm not persuaded it would actually have beneficial effects. I think an institution as fundamental and enduring as marriage should be tinkered with carefully and incrementally.

In the real world, where full-out privatization isn't going to happen overnight, the important choice is between the status quo, domestic partnerships for gay couples, or full-blown gay marriage. In that arena, I think the most persuasive arguments are consequentialist rather than rights-oriented. It's true that the status quo discriminates against gay couples, but given marriage's long pedigree and the extraordinary importance of the values that marriage is designed to promote, the civil rights approach provides at best a weak rationale for redefining marriage to include gay couples. As I've argued before, there are plausible (not necessarily right, but plausible) justifications for the state to distinguish between gay and straight couples. That's in contrast to anti-miscegenation laws, which have no plausible basis other than racism.

So I'm not sure I'm a libertarian on this issue. I think marriage might be one of the few institutions in society that are so fundamentally intertwined with our history and culture that they cannot be full privatized. Conservatives (and Rauch) emphasize that marriage is not merely a private contract between two parties, but a compact among the two parties and their community. I think that migh be right. And if so, it might not be possible to fully privatize it without doing irreparable damage.

Regardless, I think Rauch's argument is fantastic, and I'm looking forward to reading his book, which I purchased and got him to sign.

Anarchist Word Games

There's something really aggravating about anarchist arguments. Consider this paper by John Hasnas, who I met in 2001 at an IHS seminar. He argues that the "minimal state" posited by Nozick is not, in fact, minimal-- that in fact it's possible to imagine an even-more-minimal state. Under this state, which he terms the "remedial state," all adjudicative and protection services would be provided by private actors. The only function of the state itself would be to monitor the "market for protective services and adjudication" for the formation of cartels or the underproduction of the public good of consistent law, and intervene as necessary to ensure that this market works properly. Therefore, Hasnas argues, the minimal state isn't really minimal, and minarchist arguments about needing a full-blown state to protect liberty are wrong.

My initial reaction to this argument is "who cares?" The interesting philosophical argument is whether a state is needed at all. A "remedial state" with the power to tax (which you'd need to support an army) and an army that coercively maintains its military superiority (which would be needed to ensure orders of the government can be enforced against armed protection agencies) would, in all morally relevant respects, be a state. While in some superficial sense this state is "smaller" than a Nozickian minimal state, it's not clear to me how this is philosophically relevant.

But what makes the paper particularly aggravating is that it appears to sweep all the hard, worthwhile questions under the rug. Hasnas describes the mechanics of his remedial state in considerable detail-- describing the branches, their functions, and the constitutional limits on their power. What he doesn't do, however, is describe how the "regulation" of the "private protection agencies" would work. What would be considered collusion? How do you ensure the integrity of the regulators given the likelihood of regulatory capture? Are there any basic rights that the remedial state would presumptively defend against incursions by protection agencies, or would all rights be subject to the whim of "the market?"

Now, certainly he could sketch out answers to all of those questions. His answers might even be persuasive. But if he did, I think a strange thing would happen. Suddenly, he wouldn't really be talking about a "free market in protection services." He'd be talking about constitutional design for an ultra-limited state. He'd have to think about, the influences of competing factions, the potential for corruption, the need for checks and balances, etc. Each of the objections anarchists level against the minimal state, would apply with nearly equal force to the institutional arrangements of his remedial state.

In the end, Hasnas the "anarchist" would end up having to devise institutions that look suspiciously like those that exist in a garden variety minarchist state. Of course, he wouldn't call it a state, but the difference is little more than semantics. There would still be a single political entity with a geographic monopoly on coercive power. It would have the power to tax, a standing army, and an elected legislature.

I think that ultimately, this is true of all serious "anarchist" proposals. Anarchist proposals (at least those that aren't simply incoherent or out of touch with reality) invariably consist of re-labeling de facto states as something other than a state, and then insisting that this not-state is morally superior to the boring old states anarchists defend. Whether it's a remedial state or a cartel of "private" protection agencies, the fact is that there will inevitably be some institution in society that's more capable of wielding coercive power than any other. Such an institution is a state by definition, and "market forces" alone will never be sufficient to prevent it from doing evil.

(Hat Tip to Dingel)