July 16, 2004
A Vote for the FMA is a Vote for Your Demise
It's a sad, sad day when the Republicans move me to link approvingly to a Move On fundraiser. This one's to support Democrat opponents of vulnerable Republicans who voted for the FMA. To my mind, voting to write narrowly illiberal convictions into a liberal constitution is sufficient grounds for losing office. I know nothing about the candidates Move On is fighting against other than that they deserve to lose, but that's enough.
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
July 15, 2004
Libertarians for Crippled Prisoners!
From Bill Bradford's entertaining account of the weird weird world that is the Libertarian Party Convention:
The nomination process was over. LP delegates had chosen as their standard-bearer a man who had willfully refused to file his federal tax return for years, refused to get a driver's license but continued to drive his car despite having been ticketed so many times that he couldn't recall the exact number, proposed to blow up the United Nations building, wanted to force criminals in prisons to stay in bed until their muscles atrophied, and planned to force Congress to take a "special version" of his class on the Constitution. And the overwhelming majority of delegates didn't know any of this about their nominee.
This is, I believe, all the reason I could possibly need to enthusiastically support Badnarik in November. Go LP!
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Blogorama Next
Comrade Sanchez has posted the announcement. It's next Thursday, July 29th at the Rendezvouz Lounge. Pass it on.
[Update: Note that the date is now the 29th. For some reason that has not been revealed to me, but which is apparently Lane's fault, Blogorama has been pushed back a week. Sorry for any inconvenience.]
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
July 14, 2004
I Hate Giant
I encourage everyone not to patronize the Giant Foods at 9th and O St NW. It is a horrible establishment.
I don't believe I've ever waited less than five minutes in line. I have waited more than twenty on several occasions. The ratio of surly to pleasant among the cashiers is about 15 to 1. And they labor with the swiftness of the heavily sedated. Sure, it's cheaper than my other local grocery, Whole Foods (libertarian-owned, I'm told), but I think I may be willing to add $10 to each bill in order to save myself the aggravation of standing in line while the check-out lady makes yet another historic attempt to break all known records in lethargy (while the manager, a creature rarely seen, camps in the fetid back room listening to "The Rest of the Story" on Paul Harvey News and Comment.) Whole Foods is often packed, yet I rarely wait more than five minutes. Did I mention that Giant is ugly, and that the produce is bad.
You know, Giant has been petitioning Montgomery County against allowing the construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Wegman's, pathetically citing concern for the "environmental impact" of these stores. Well, I suppose the impact on Giant's environment is that they will be unable to compete with well-managed businesses that offer better value to their customers. May the big boxes crush the complacent, mediocre, rent-seeking incumbent!
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:03 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)
July 13, 2004
"Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism . . ."
Crispin Sartwell's LA Times op-ed in praise of political nihilism is simply wonderful. I have seen nothing that so aptly captures my feelings about the contemporary political scene. Here excerpted are my favorite pithy planks of the nihilist platform:
Abortion — We are the only party that dares to oppose both life and choice. Life is an infestation, choice an illusion.
Drugs — A great nihilist heroine, Nancy Reagan, once said "Just Say No." No.
And one more link for you, just because.
[Link via Justin Logan.]
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Fashion Forward Future Farmers
Where do you suppose I can get one of these jackets?
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 11:55 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
July 12, 2004
Sunstein on Rights
I attended a little lunch discussion at Cato Friday on Cass Sunstein's new book, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever.
Among Sunstein's claims is that FDR effectively effaced the distinction between positive and negative rights. The argument is that even "negative" rights, such as the right to property, depend on an "active, well-funded, and often coercive" state to define property in the law and to protect it. Sunstein argued that the idea that he has property rights in Hyde Park would be nothing but a meaningless aspiration without the slapping hand of the state.
I address this idea below, and it continues to puzzle me. At one point Sunstein mentioned that Cato had just given an award to DeSoto, and implied that DeSoto's work is really just about the need for the state to better define legal rights and enforceable instruments in LDCs. It is about that, but that's not the same as Sunstein's idea, which is that there ARE no rights in the absence of the state. DeSoto's argument rests squarely on the notion that the poor around the world define and defend property rights extralegally, and often in direct opposition to the laws of the state.
Continue reading "Sunstein on Rights"
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Keep it Coolidge
Every time I wear my "Keep it Coolidge" t-shirt, admirers of Silent Cal implore me to reveal where I purchased such a fine wearable testament to one of our greatest presidents. It's Urban Outfitters, who have a somewhat questionable grasp of the idea of a "Founding Father."
I wore "Keep it Coolidge" to the beach on Independence Day, because the colors was representing. Little did I know that it was also Cal's birthday! I hope, unlike me, you reserved a moment of silence to honor our perhaps least loquacious and meddlesome President.
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
New Look
Do you hate it?
You can find the old blog through the Blogger Archive link over on the right.
You'll be happy to know that the banner image is bits of the blackboard from this famous picture of Wittgenstein.
I'm sure I'll be tinkering with this a fair bit, so your comments and suggestions are welcome.
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:05 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
July 08, 2004
Fetters and Fairness
When will the left stop saying dumb things like this?
The U.S. economic-policy debate is in fact dominated by the assumption that unfettered markets work best, a view that's applied to our domestic economy and to that of other countries through international financial institutions that the United States controls. John Kerry's recent statement that he is "not a redistributionist" indicates how dominant this view has become.
That's Lawrence Mishel in TAP.
If the economic-policy debate is in fact dominated by the assumption that "unfettered" markets work best, then why don't we see fewer fetters? Bush's shrimp tariff surely indicates how dominant this view has become. No? Or the US's continued attempts to stonewall the WTO on US free trade violations in order to protect inefficient domestic interests? Kerry's statement is just a lie, and, in any case, not being a redistributionist doesn't imply support for unfettered markets. One might be against redistribution but want fetters on the market in order to slow the rate of growth for ecological reasons, say.
Mishel's concern, however, is redistribution. He's worried about inequality. The top 1% of families earned 19.6% of all income. That sort of thing. Yet that sort of thing tells us almost nothing interesting at all. But Mishel leaps forward:
Because of the inequality in the United States, even though our per-capita income is higher than many countries, our low-income families are not better off than those in other places where per-capita income is lower.
This is a confused sentence. He seems to imply that the fact that the income of American low-income families is lower than the income of low-income families in some other countries has some logical connection to inequality. But there is no logical connection. (If one guy, Rick, discovered a trillion dollars of unobtanium in a hole, it would skew the inequality figures, but wouldn't have anything to do with explaining why the least well-off have what they do.) And if Mishel's actually making sense, as opposed to positing dubious causal power to inequality, all he's saying is that given two sets of numbers, one set's having a higher average doesn't imply also having a higher lowest element, which is so trivial there's no point in mentioning it.
More:
The social class a person belongs to really matters -- it determines your health, how long you live, where you live, your exposure to crime, your success in school, and the likely success of your children.
This is a bit much. Your class determines none of these things. It influences them. And "class" here just means something like "income bracket." Mishel is correctly saying that your health, longevity, lifestyle, safety and success will be improved by having more money. No doubt! Will the the folks at the bottom (and, ahem, that's me!), do better if we put more fetters on the market? It seems unlikely.
It strikes me that Mishel is confusing matters of regulation with matters of distribution. Now, it happens that economic regulations are very often implemented in order to bias distribution in favor of certain interests over others. (Shrimp!) But suppose we had a clean slate and committed to restricting regulation to only those that are generally efficiency enhancing. This would mean wiping out almost all trade restrictions and huge swathes of the government bureaucracy. Such a system would surely count as "unfettered" in Mishel's terms. Now, suppose we set a tax rate sufficient to guarantee a minimum income sufficient to provide the means to develop human capital to a certain critical level. Now, this may or may not cause a reduction in the overall rate of growth, although some slowdown strikes me as likely. But, notably, this kind of guaranteed minimum within the context of a relatively minimal state does not seem to entail especially fettered markets. We haven't added any regulations on the market other than those needed for the purposes of our very streamlined tax system.
This is in fact my big beef with economic egalitarians. Most of the time they aren't really talking about equality at all. They're talking about the poor getting enough. A society in which the top 1% has 50% of the stuff, but where the poorest person has a million dollars looks pretty great to me. A million dollars is enough. Who cares if someone else has a house made of diamonds?
When the left starts wanting to actually help the poor, then maybe they'll start arguing for the de-fettering of the market in order to enable a truly efficient and effective redistributive welfare state.
Mishel concludes:
I daresay that there's no reason to believe that unfettered markets provide us with the type of society our faiths guide us to have in terms of the lives of the poor, the treatment of workers, and the solidarity of our communities.
Well, I double-dog daresay that markets much more unfettered than ours would better serve the kind of welfare state Mishel professes to want.
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 07, 2004
GPI Field Dispatches
I mentioned the Mercatus Center Global Prosperity Initiative Journalism Fellows a while back. GPI has now posted dispatches from the field from the intrepid fellows. Matt Welch in Romania. Melinda Ammann in Botswana. Mark Hemingway in Philippines. These aren't formal articles. They're dispatches. So they're breezy and chatty, which to my mind makes them even better reading.
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)
Tragedy of the Bunnies
Try this cute little game/economics lesson from IHS.
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2004
Negative and Positive Rights
I started this long post a month or so ago when there was a bunch of talk about positive and negative liberty, etc. I found much of the discussion confused. I never finished this post, which ended up getting me confused, but I thought I would share what I had in any case. Comments welcome.
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First, I don't think there are natural rights of any kind. Rights are conventional. If they are justified it is because they enable or otherwise contribute to a general system of mutually beneficial cooperation.
Rights are a kind of action-guiding moral relation between persons. Negative rights and positive rights are different because they are different kinds of relations. All moral rights have a dual entitlement/obligation structure. A negative right is, from one side, an obligation to constrain one's own actions in certain ways, and, from the other side, an entitlement to constraint from others. Negative rights are negative not because they include no element of entitlement -- all rights do -- but because one is entitled simply to a sort of forebearance from others. One is owed a pattern of constraint, a series of omissions, the absence of certain kinds of action. A positive right is, from one side, an entitlement that certain actions be performed, and, from the other side, an obligation to perform them.
Suppose there is a negative moral right to property. This means only that one is entitled to have one's property go unstolen (or not used without permission) by others, and that others are obligated to satisfy this entitlement. (Don't confuse the entitlement to constraint from other with respect to some things one has with an entitlement to those things. One may have a morally binding property right to something that one is not entitled to, in some senses of 'entitle'. But the fact that I am in possession of something I do not morally deserve does not imply that it is thus fair game for others. The system of useful constraints that defines our negative rights may tell us that that the best policy is to leave people with things that have fallen into their laps in certain ways, and so they are entitled to constraint from others with respect to those things, even if they are not in some sense entitled to them.) The negative right to property does not in itself imply a positive right to the provision of the enforcement of property rights. This would be a confusion. One is entitled simply to constraint from others, who are obligated to provide it. Or one might think. (As I am sometimes tempted to think.)
If we do not meet our obligations, and there is consequently a general problem of predation, then we might think that this is an extra problem that will need to be addressed. Notice that if everyone voluntarily, by force of conscience, met their obligations of constraint, then there is no problem of providing a service or positively contributing to the provision of a good. Conceptually speaking, a negative right asks us nothing but forebearance. No labor. No money. No goods. No services. Just constraint.
But this really is a simplification. Because individual reasons in contexts of collective action are to some extent interdependent, it may be that I do not have a reason (and thus obligation) to constrain my behavior unless others will. In which case, there is no right to property, say, independent of a context of general compliance. If most of us constrain ourselves voluntarily, then all of us have a reason to do so as well. But if enough of us won't constrain ourselves, then none of are obligated to. In such cases, the pattern of constraint we are aiming at may require a coercive element, and the existence of a coercive framework may be a necessary condition for our rights-defining entitlements and obligations.
What's going on here? One might say that whether property rights are negative or positive depends on the mechanism of compliance and assurance. If compliance with principles of constraint can be generated internally, by sympathy, psychological sanctions, and other moral emotions (or at least through non-coercive social sanctions), then property rights are negative. If compliance must be generated externally through a system of publicly financed law enforcement, then property rights are positve.
But I'm not sure that this is the right way to think of it.
I think even under a system of coercive enforcement, we should want to say that property rights are negative rights. An interesting thing about the use of coercion to enable coordination is that the coercion, per se, does not provide most of us with our motivating reason for action. We need coercion to motivate people who wouldn't otherwise be motivated, and to publicly assure us that others are so motivated. Given this assurance, knowing that others will comply, we will have a reason to likewise comply. Our reason will be grounded in the expected advantages of cooperation, and this may move us totally independently from an expectation of coercive sanctions for non-compliance. So the coercion is creating a context in which we can be entitled to constraint from others and obligated to constrain ourselves. The right to property, as such, is negative. But, barring voluntary compliance, the right exists only when coercion solves the assurance problem.
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 05, 2004
Self-Promo
-- My review essay on Brookhiser's and Adams's recent biographies of Gouverneur Morris are now online at Reason.
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 01, 2004
An Incredulous Stare
-- Matt Yglesias says:
"It strikes me as a tautology to say that coercion in the pursuit of the common good is justified, and, indeed, necessary, though as I say people disagree and I don't know how one could possibly resolve such a disagreement."
Resolution might be forthcoming (some day, not soon) if Matt would take care to start making sense. It's strikes me as a tautology that a tautology just says the same thing twice. "X is coercion in the pursuit of the common good" and "X is justified" somehow do not strike me as redundant. Suppose I (or "we") believe that I will serve that common good by cutting off Matt's head on TV. Maybe it's me, but I'm not sure this gets me far toward justification.
Maybe by "in the pursuit of the common good" Matt means something like "taking the necessary means to an objectively good end that everyone would endorse were we all fully rational and in posession of full information" or something like that, in which case justification may not seem wildly ridiculous. But of course, the counterfactuals leave us ignorant of exactly what would be justified, although we may be fairly sure that it differs from Matt's notion of the pursuit of the common good.
I think that there are cases where coercion in pursuit of the common good is justified. But it is a very small class of cases. There are many cases in which coercion in the pursuit of the common good WOULD be justified if the consequence of applying coercion in pursuit of the common good was the common good. But very often, the consequence is the common bad, for coercion is often abused, despite the fact that we drift to sleep each night wishing, hoping, praying that men always do good and refrain always from evil.
Whatever Nozick didn't exactly say to you, Matt, he was right. Don't be proud.
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)
June 29, 2004
Puking
-- Right now, as I write, there is a man in his mid thirties bent over puking on the sidewalk across the street from my window and desk. It's 4:30 in the afternoon. Evidence that gentrification is by no means complete.
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)
June 28, 2004
Back from C'ville
-- Hi everybody! I'm back from Charlottesville. The Social Change Workshop was I think a big success. Great students. Great faculty. Great week. So many people I want to keep in touch with. And the Mercatus manuscript discussion of John Nye's forthcoming this past weekend was outstanding. Chilled by the pool and played tennis with Brian, Frederic Sautet (who should have a Mercatus bio page by now... cough) and Courtney. It was fun to hear about the Copenhagen Consensus from Doug North. And I had an especially nice conversation with Barry Weingast Saturday night about endogenous preferences.
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2004
Gmail Sweepstake
-- OK. The great gmail giveaway continues. Can't seem to get rid of these things. I've got six accounts to give away. If you want one, you got it. Email me willwilkinson at gmail dot, you know, com.
[UPDATE: All gone! Thanks for playing.]
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students
-- You'll have noticed that I've been rather lax with the blog. Well, I've been busy organizing this year's IHS Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students. I'll be driving down to Charlottesville tomorrow to set things up, and then running the Workshop all next week. Check out the list of lectures, and seminar and workshop sessions. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a more intellectually stimulating week anywhere. This is where it's happenin', folks.
After that, I'll be sitting in on a Mercatus Center Social Change Project discussion of John Nye's long-awaited manuscript on the War, Wine, and Taxes and the emergence of free-trade in the 19th century (it turns out that France is a better than you think, and England is worse). It has been one of the great luxuries of my short intellectual life to have the opportunity to hang out with Doug North, Barry Weingast, Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr and their ilk at these Mercatus workshops. I'll return in a little over week exhausted, but very, very intellectually satisfied.
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2004
Alternative History
-- Reading about the 10 plane al Qaeda plot, I wonder what would have happened had AQ had their shit together. Imagine if the dome of the US Capitol had been imploded by a jetliner! I think this would have been the single most rousing target. The Capitol represents the American democracy, and hence the American people, far more vividly than, say, the White House (or the Pentagon or the WTC). I shudder to think of the vengeance we might have blindly wrought had the terrorists struck such a main nerve. Can you IMAGINE the truculence of Congress? Can you imagine what would have got in to the Patriot Act? Would Aghanistan exist?
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2004
GPI Journalism Fellows
-- The Mercatus Center's Global Prosperity Initiative Journalism Fellows are a great bunch. Matt Welch, Mark Hemingway, and Melinda Ammann are some of my favorite people. Somehow, I've never managed to meet Matt, but we emailed back and forth when this blogging thing was starting (his wife said I was cute!), and I can't imagine not actually liking him. Matt's off to Romania with Mercatus's Dragos Aligica (also one of my favorite people!) and some Mason grad students. Mark is headed back to the Philippines for a second summer with Steve Daley, an Australian number-crunching machine from Mason, to get the human angle on microfinance and entrepreneurhsip in the slums of Manila. Mark is a great writer, a great talker, and, well, a decent drinker. And I knew Melinda back before there was an internet. I remember her talking about becoming a journalist her freshman year at Iowa, and I'm happy she's doing it (philosophy detour notwithstanding), especially in league with a program I helped get going. She'll be great in Botswana.
Now that I've been away from Mercatus for half a year, and have a little more perspective, I find, rather modestly, that I'm pretty impressed with what we started and were doing with GPI. Read about this summer's field studies here. And check out GPI's public interest comment on the Millenium Challenge Account.
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2004
Reagan and Confirmation Bias
-- I am fairly nauseated by the Reagan retrospectives, left and right. It's dispiriting to see that it apparently next-to-impossible for human beings to go beyond their ideological commitments and make a more or less objective assessment of a man's accomplishments. We see all the usual mechanisms of ideological insulation. Any good during Reagan's reign would have happened anyway. Reagan's scandals are justified by his larger visionary struggle against unfreedom. All our ills are directly traceable to Reagan's malign influence. All good is directly traceable to Reagan's forward-thinking moral clarity. It's really just too, too much. Why do we not see that there is no need to make devils or gods of men?
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2004
Klebold, Free-Will, and Responsibility
-- In his column on the Klebolds, parents of Columbine killer Dylan, David Brooks writes:
My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them. Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior.
Brian Leiter rather uncharitably decides to read Brooks's comment as either an espousal of incompatibilist libertarian free will (nothing to do with political libertarianism), or an expression of ignorance. Regarding the latter option, Leiter sort of goes off his nut:
Or maybe, just maybe, he hasn't thought about the issue at all, couldn't make a coherent argument on the subject if his life depended on it, but knows this is what his stinking right-wing sanctimony requires?
He goes on to spout some Nietzsche psychology about our sad, sad motivation for believing in free-will.
But what did Brooks do to deserve Leiter's tirade? There is no reason to read "self-initiating" as making any sort of strong metaphysical claim. It seems clear to me that Brooks means to say that Klebold was not being coerced, had not been brainwashed, or some such thing, that the influence of his school and parents was not sufficient to explain his behavior, and that he was in control of himself in the relevant sense of control for ascribing responsibility. How this is "stinking right-wing sanctimony" is totally beyond me. Some--I daresay MANY--left-wing folks think that persons can deserve praise and condemnation in virtue of their choices relating to their actions in the right sort of way. Is it "stinking left-wing sanctimony" to argue that, say, people who contribute their labor to the production of some valuable good or service deserve a fair portion of the value created? Who knows?
It seems Leiter thinks it's misguided (or pathological, or insufficiently ubermensch, or something) to hold people responsible AT ALL! Here's Nietzsche:
"Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work...: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wants to impute guilt...Men were considered 'free' so that they might be judged and punished--so they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within consciousness...."
Maybe Nietzsche's right about this. Maybe the practice of holding others responsible is based on an illusion about some kind of mysterious, deep freedom, which we link in our minds to the idea of guilt. But you can give up on the metaphysical illusion and still see that our categories of agency, responsibility, desert, retribution, condemnation, etc. are part of a general scheme of concepts and behavioral dispositions that has developed to enable humans to coordinate our behavior to our mutual benefit. The "instinct to judge and punish" exists precisely because our existence as the kind of social being we are depends upon it.
Dylan Klebold did make his choices and should be condemned for them. There were, of course, other important contributing causes of Klebold's actions. And we should try to understand them. If Brooks is saying that we shouldn't try to understand them, and should instead use our idea of responsibility as an excuse to ignore other contributing causes while we shake our fingers at the perps, then he's wrong. But he certainly didn't seem to ME to be saying that. And it's totally unclear to me how Leiter's argument counts as a blow against right-wing sanctimony, rather than as a blow against the idea of any sort of viable moral community.
Bonus question: Is peaceful mutually advantageous coordination possible "beyond good and evil" (acknowledging that the relevant notion of "advantage" will be rather different)?
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Posted by Will Wilkinson at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)
