Cass Sunstein's New Book

Cass Sunstein has a new book coming out called Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America. This is precious. A while ago, he wrote a piece in Bloomberg called How to Spot a Paranoid Libertarian. Arnold Kling linked to it at the time and I read it. I can't seem to open it now because it's behind Bloomberg's paywall. But I commented on it and quoted pieces of it. Quotes surround excerpts from Sunstein's Bloomberg piece, the rest is my commentary on it.

“ In practice, of course, the risk might be real. But paranoid libertarians are convinced of its reality whether or not they have good reason for their conviction.”
 I thought Cass Sunstein was supposed to understand the notion of “risk,” but reading this passage and the rest of his essay I get the sense that he doesn’t at all. A risk doesn’t have to manifest itself as a bad outcome to be real. Risk is about the possibility of bad outcomes, some of which are realized and some of which are not. At what point is there a “good reason for their conviction?” By the time something terrible has already happened? Libertarians argue for a very good risk management strategy: don’t create the levers of power in the first place if they may be abused.
 “The fourth characteristic is an indifference to trade-offs — a belief that liberty, as paranoid libertarians understand it, is the overriding if not the only value…”
 This passage also irritated me. Statists have a very hard time justifying their favorite government programs with any kind of cost-benefit analysis, even the ones who consider themselves part of the scientific enlightenment. It’s generally libertarians who want to do this kind of analysis. Doing so tends to lead to libertarian conclusions. Very few government programs survive an honest cost-benefit analysis; they persist in spite of failing utterly to justify their own costs. To be charitable, maybe he’s specifically criticizing a very specific sub-sect of libertarianism. But my overall impression is that he’s casting libertarianism as a mental defect. His readers will come away with the impression “libertarians are paranoid,” even if his intention is to say something more subtle.

That's my full comment, but only the first half is relevant to this post. I just thought the casting of libertarianism as "paranoid" was off the mark, especially for someone who studies risk (and perceptions of risk and irrational risk and so on). Libertarianism is, in one sense, a safeguard against really bad possible outcomes that don't usually manifest themselves. We wish to constrain government knowing that really bad outcomes might happen. You don't give the government more power and more control just because, ad hoc and one-day-at-a-time, it appears to pass a cost-benefit test. (Well...the very tilted kind of cost-benefit test that always seems to favor the government, according to the government's own accounting by government-employed economists and policy analysts.) For example, requiring blogs to link to contrary viewpoints (do read the link to the end; Sunstein changed his mind on this one, to his credit).

I haven't read the book yet. (It's actually a collection of essays, one of which is written by him.) Maybe he gives a "No" answer, so there's no contradiction or hypocrisy here. And I can't re-read the Bloomberg piece right now; maybe it's more nuanced than I remember and I'm being totally unfair. But if he's suddenly saying that authoritarianism is a huge threat, I think that makes his past smear of libertarian "paranoia" extremely hypocritical. If I get a chance to read his contribution to this book, I'll report back.