Arguments I Picked with Bryan Caplan

There are some libertarians who think the following:

Politics is dirty, dishonest, and downright wicked. I'll take no part in it. Picking the least-bad of two awful people feels sleazy. And I have no interest in the petty political intrigues involved in actual governing. 

There is this attempt to swear off politics. It comes in two forms: declining to vote as a citizen and declining to governing as an elected official or bureaucrat. I think prominent libertarians need to step up and get their hands dirty. Bryan Caplan expressed his distaste for voting here and his distaste for politics here. In his post about voting, he says,

I spend my time on many quixotic missions, like promoting open borders. So why not vote?

I respond:

Thank you for pointing out the inconsistency. There are a few economics bloggers who spill a lot of ink explaining why they don’t vote and giving the economic reasons for not doing so, the same ones you start your post with. I always think, “Gee, you spend an awful lot of time and energy trying to change people’s minds with clever arguments. If you were as selfish as your argument implies, you wouldn’t bother with all that. Maybe you can take your un-selfishness one step further and vote.”
 I think you should swallow your pride and vote. I know a lot of economically literate, libertarian-inclined people who don’t vote. I imagine I’m in a room with them all and I’m saying, “If we all vote, we’ll be a meaningful voting block and get more libertarian policies.” And each person says to me, “Yeah, it would be nice if we all voted. But see all these other people? I can only decide if *I* vote, I can’t stop them from shirking. Since my vote is such a small piece of the electorate, it doesn’t matter if I vote or not.” Each one responds to me with this “shirking” argument, and I keep trying to say, “No, I’m talking to all of you at once. And if we all vote at once, we’ll be a meaningful voting block.” It’s like being in a firm where we can’t get people to work because everyone realizes their own shirking won’t affect the final outcome, even though everyone recognizes they’d like the result if everyone else stopped shirking. We don’t have the tools available to a firm (like punishing, firing, or rewarding certain “workers”), but we have moral suasion. We can tell these non-voting libertarians they should vote because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t know how you think policy will tilt in the libertarian direction if you and people like you refuse to vote. As a prominent libertarian, your example might persuade a lot of people. A single vote might not make much difference, but if you persuade 100 others with similar politics to vote, that can be significant at the state, county, or city level.
 That’s the great thing about being economically literate. You can spot market failures but still decide to do the right thing anyway. Economics might teach you that it’s rational to be lazy/selfish and not vote, but it also teaches you that policy analysis and informed voting are public goods (since voting is like a common pool resource). We should try to learn the second part of that lesson a little better.

I make another comment later:

Suppose that by not voting you’re setting a bad example for your audience. A number of young, impressionable people see your talks or read your blog and are convinced by your arguments. But they are then put off by your refusal to vote. Some of them remain fully convinced of your arguments, but you persuade them not to vote. And some decide that you’re just not serious if you’re not putting forth the tiny effort required to vote, so you lose them completely. I want to ask how many such people would there need to be to convince you to vote? Is there a number? A single vote is small, but a room full of voters could sway an election, particularly at the local and state level.
 In this same vein, consider “Don’t vote but tell people you do” as an irrelevant third option, one of those tricks from behavioral economics where nobody really wants the third option but it makes the chooser flip their selection. (The other options being “vote and tell people you vote” or “don’t vote and tell people you don’t vote.”) You’d nudge policy in the libertarian direction if your “example” convinced a few hundred libertarians to vote, but I suspect your conscience would nag you. I think you’d like to have the example-setting benefits of voting along with the “trauma”-sparing benefits of not voting, but your conscience wouldn’t allow you to be that dishonest.
 If you’re an influential opinion leader, voting isn’t just about your single vote. It’s about setting an example.

Apparently this was one of my better ideas, because Caplan's co-blogger at Econlog David Henderson picked it up and made it the topic of a blog post, quoting my comment in full. Henderson had also responded to Caplan in another post.

I don't really care if Bryan Caplan votes or not, but I don't think prominent libertarians should go around telling the world that they don't vote. It's like announcing loudly to the major political parties, "Hey, go ahead and ignore this constituency. I'm probably representative of my tribe, and even if I'm not many will hear my case against voting and follow my lead." If the goal is to nudge policy in the libertarian direction, making public arguments about how much voting sucks is a pretty bad way of going about it. Another prominent libertarian blogger who I will not name chimed in at the time. I felt I had a good counter-argument, but that other blogger can be kind of a stubborn blowhard. My best case scenario was that this other blogger (not Caplan) would write another post explaining loudly why he was too good to waste his time voting, and how dare I even suggest he do so? (The Virtue of Silence is really hard.) Not wanting to bring on another public proclamation that libertarians are electorally irrelevant, I ignored him.

Caplan's other post was about disliking politics. For sure, politics is ugly. The dishonesty, the stupidity, the hypocrisy, all the anti-virtues required for effective coalition-building and policy-making are beneath him. I'm thinking, what if you get the anarchocapitalist world that you and I both want? Who is going to chair the various neighborhood associations, the community security agencies, the boards of private governance that replace public governance? Even if we get rid of all the things government currently does but shouldn't be doing, there will still be some legitimate "government" functions left for private governance to solve. Property disputes. Dealing with criminals. What is the libertarian playbook for this? What's the libertarian playbook for local government? Say, at the city or county level? Surely it's not a lame "Zero government!" stance. Some public goods problems are city-sized. The city government is the appropriate body for deciding these issues. If we started with anarchy on a city-sized population, they would eventually hit upon the idea of convening some council of representative decision-makers to solve city-wide problems. I make this comment on Caplan's post:

It’s a little bit uncomfortable to hold all these policy views without giving much thought as to how to actually govern, isn’t it? I’ve thought about this: suppose I were to get active in my small local government. What’s the libertarian playbook for that? Tear down city hall? I don’t think so. There are real collective action problems and externalities at the town or county level, so someone has to govern. The libertarian solution to government, “privatize everything,” just shifts the problem to some other city-sized entity. I’m all in favor of privatizing the things that government has no business doing, and I think this means not having large national or state-level governments (except for nation- or state-sized externality problems, possibly not even then). But at smaller levels, *someone* has to govern, be it an actual government or a private manager.
 I’m imagining a meeting of a neighborhood association trying to set the ground-rules for, say, parking a trailer on the street. And the libertarian in the group says, “Don’t worry! We don’t actually need to adjudicate this problem. Coase showed that the disputants will come to mutually agreeable terms regardless of how the problem is adjudicated.” And he doesn’t realize that he’s actually in that conversation between disputants. Politics, even the politics of a private organization, is sometimes dirty, but someone has to sit down at the table and hammer these things out. The free market doesn’t do it for us. All that said, I personally share your distaste for politics. It’s just that sometimes these argument slip into a facile “the world optimizes itself” mode when the person making that argument actually needs to do something...

There are clear-cut cases, but then there are also some borderline cases. Imagine a zoning dispute in a small town. Someone wants to build a business, but the residents say it would destroy property value and cause unsafe traffic around where children ride their bikes. Is this just pure NIMBY-ism? Or do the residents have a legitimate grievance? We could say, “Let them build their business and let the residents sue if they want,” but that’s a dodge. The local government might be the best positioned, with the most relevant local knowledge, to resolve the conflict at the lowest cost. Another one: Should the small town privatize the roads? Or should the local government see itself as a public trust set up to manage a common property? For a large enough city, privatizing might make sense. But for a small enough town, it makes more sense for city hall to actually manage the property. Which invariably leads to all the nasty political behaviors Caplan discusses above.
 I very much like the idea of moving things from public to private governance, but even if we do that it ultimately falls on *someone* to actually govern. 

I'm not one to talk. I apparently can't be bothered to attend my neighborhood association's monthly meetings. (That's partly a function of having three small and demanding children, but I'd make some sacrifices and attend if it became worth my while.) But libertarians should probably take some of these questions a little more seriously. There are a few "Tear down all power structures!" libertarians who find anything that looks like a government intolerable, but I think these libertarians are not very intellectually serious. Someone's going to have to govern. Someone's going to have to do the sucky job of adjudicating disputes between bickering neighbors. Libertarians need to give this problem more thought. (Read Governing the Commons, or anything else by Elinor Ostrom, on the question of private governance and the management of common pool resources.) Some of them may actually need to join existing governments to make any relevant progress. Maybe not me. Maybe not Caplan. But we can't all just put out our hands and say "Not me!" and then expect the world to stop trying to "govern" us. There's  no elegant way to opt out of this. You may not take an interest in politics, but politics takes an interest in you!

__________________________________________

It's weird to have disagreements with someone like Caplan, with whom I 99% agree with on policy. (Note there is a 1% margin of error in this estimate.) I feel like there are a few points of philosophy where I profoundly disagree with him, but no real disagreement regarding what official government policy should be. On another note, I picked up his latest book The Case Against Education and will be devouring it over the next few days and weeks. On another another note, I wish Caplan would respond to his readers in the comments. I feel like I had a good argument with respect to voting, a feeling confirmed by his co-blogger David Henderson piling on. It would have been nice to have an official, "Meh, I dismiss this out of hand" or "That's a good point, I'll think about it" or "Okay, I'll actually start voting now." Instead, crickets. I'm nit-picking here, but this is one way Caplan's excellent blogging could improve.