Libertarians and Social Justice: A Sticking Point

Libertarians and the social justice left quite often come to the same policy conclusions. So why are they so often at each other’s throats?*

To take an example, most libertarians and most people who identify with the social justice left believe in gay marriage. If we were transported back to an era where interracial marriage was an issue, you’d see the same sort of agreement on policy. I think the problem is that both tribes arrive at pro-gay-marriage position from different kinds of arguments. Libertarians believe in equality under the law and an untrammeled right to free association. “Gay Marriage” isn’t a specific item; it’s a subset of a larger right of adults to freely associate with one another. The social justice left arrives at their pro-gay-marriage position through a different sort of argument, one that certainly doesn’t embrace a general right of free association. I'd probably fail to exactly articulate this line of reasoning, but it surely has something to do with certain classes of victims being historically oppressed and deserving a special consideration to counterbalance this history. Nevertheless, we have agreement on a large collection of policies, so there *should* be a viable coalition here.

I think this is the rub. Libertarians want the social justice folks to explain what principle underlies "the right to gay marriage," because such a principle entail many other rights, some of which the left is hostile to. Social justice folks bristle at this, because the struggle for gay marriage is an important fight by an oppressed minority. They might react with, "How dare you bring up something so trite as property rights? How dare you compare the right of a couple to marry to the right of a business owner to discriminate against unwanted patrons?" Both tribes are fishing for some sign that the other can be trusted. If only the social justice warrior would affirm a much more general right of free association and free transaction between consenting adults, the libertarian could trust him not to support a bunch of illiberal policies, justified with back-fit ad hoc reasoning. If only the libertarian would signal his unwavering support for this oppressed minority group, the social justice warrior could trust him not to betray the cause when high-minded principles get in the way of the next fight.

To take another example, the left often couches its criminal justice policy positions in terms of disparate impacts to minorities. To a libertarian, an injustice is an injustice regardless of how disparate the impact is. If you tell me a million people are unduly or unlawfully harassed by police, with some fraction of those unjustly arrested and a few dozen beaten or shot, I shouldn't care any more or less when you tell me the races of the victims. To the social justice warrior the root cause is racism or some other kind of bigotry, so they see it as obtuse or evasive when someone fails to clearly proclaim that this is the problem. In this view, fix the bigotry and the bad policies will go away. To the libertarian, things like the war on drugs and stop-and-frisk are unjust in and of themselves. If you got rid of this underlying policy the racial disparity in their application would obviously go away. In this view, it's obtuse to talk about the racial impact of an unjust policing when the policy fix is so obvious, and it's demeaning to imply that a non-minority victim's suffering at the hands of police should count less.

I don't know what it would take to get a functioning political coalition of libertarians and social justice types. If you read my blog, it's fairly obvious I come down on the libertarian side of this split. I don't want to give a self-flattering answer like "The solution is for lefties to become libertarians." Nor do I want to offer a lame split-the-difference compromise. My main purpose in this post is to articulate the reason why an otherwise obvious alliance doesn't form. I don't think it's a fatal disagreement, though, because all political coalitions contain subgroups that distrust or hate each other while sometimes arriving at specific policy agreements. Perhaps my explanation above proves too much. In that case, what's really going on here?

*A mild disclaimer. I don't mean to imply that there aren't any social justice libertarians, nor do I mean to imply that no social justice leftists have libertarian leanings. Clearly there's some overlap between both groups. I'm tying to highlight an area of discord, so forgive me if my discussion above treated two overlapping classes as purer than they really are. 

Good Comments

What is a “good” comment anyway?

I wrote a post a while ago listing all the bad commenting habits that I dislike the most. Around the same time, a blogger who I know on Facebook said (writing on FB, not on his blog) that he’s been disappointed with the quality of comments on his blog. I think this is probably a common problem. A select few blogs seem to garner very good comments. Steven Landburg’s blog The Big Questions has the very highest quality comments section of any blog I read. Scott Alexander’s blog Slate Star Codex also has a great comments section. I don’t go to Less Wrong very often, but it’s about as high-quality as Slate Star Codex. Econlog is also near the top of the list, which I believe is due to some thorough (sometimes overzealous) moderating. Marginal Revolution would benefit from more active moderating, but it does manage to attract a lot of good comments (if you can perform the task of filtering out the bad ones yourself). But even in these stand-out comment sections, the average comment is still pretty bad and probably not worth reading, let alone responding to. There are always people veering a little too far off topic, or behaving rudely to the other commenters, or making bad arguments, or carelessly misreading the original post.

So I got to thinking: You’re posting controversial ideas on the internet and inviting anonymous readers to comment? What could possibly go right? I thought it would be helpful to write a companion piece to my Bad Comments list. These are the ways that a comment thread can actually go right.

1)      Correcting a material fact in someone’s argument. Be careful about this one. The correction should be an unambiguous *correction*. If there are dueling studies or conflicting data sources or something, it’s not helpful to say, “You’re wrong, replace your facts with my facts and you’ll be right.” Also, tame the urge to think that facts somehow speak for themselves. All facts require some kind of interpretation in the form of an argument. But if someone is unambiguously mistaken on a point of fact, they might actually appreciate and thank you for the correction. It sounds crazy, but I’ve seen it happen. 

2)      Filling in some important but neglected background. This is similar to 1), but far more ambiguous. If someone, say, quotes the wrong number for annual gun deaths in the US, it’s trivial to look that up and correct it. It’s slightly more of a judgment call to say, “…but really we’re talking about homicides and accidents, not suicides. Also, the recent trends are relevant here…” Sometimes people get their facts right but the context wrong, so if you can fill in the relevant context that can be useful for the other denizens of the comments section. Judgment is obviously necessary here. Someone might take “filling in context” as a carte blanc to expound upon an alternative worldview for several paragraphs. Don’t be that guy.

3)      Pointing out a logical flaw in someone’s argument. By this I mean literally, pedantically correcting a logical error and nothing more. Like, “Whoops, you misused modus ponens. Your argument appears to be ‘If A then B. B. Therefore A.’” Don’t add any snark or berate the author. These things happen. You do them, too. Just make a quick correction and move on. You might even politely suggest that the conclusion is still true, just for reasons other than the argument offered. Try, when you can, to *directly* address the argument given. Many comments ignore the argument offered while supplying some orthogonal argument for why the conclusion can’t be right. Whenever possible, directly address the argument offered. (Here is a good example of what I'm talking about.)

4)      Identify the locus of your disagreement and fixate on that. I have seen far too many comment threads escalate into full-blown flame wars without anyone even specifying what they were claiming. The very good comment threads are the ones in which the commenters stay focused on a particular point of disagreement.

5)      Praise should be specific. No “F***-yeah!”s or “F***-ing A man!” I don’t think anyone wants a bunch of cheerleaders in their comments section. Excessive fist-pumping and high-fiving in the comments section can deter skeptical commenters, exactly the kind that the blogger needs to hear from. Say specifically what you liked and what you thought was a new or useful idea. Try to give the author good fodder for another post. If possible, suggest ways to make a strong post even stronger. If a post has you thinking "F*** yeah! Preach it!" then you should be actively looking for something wrong with it, because it's possible your emotions have gotten the better of you. 

6)      “You might want to read this…” If you have similar interests, it might be useful to suggest reading materials. Books, articles, movies, etc. Of course a quick article is more likely to actually be read than a book. Your recommendation might be appreciated. The standard is going to be much higher for suggesting literature critical or contrary to someone’s worldview. If I’m an anarcho-capitalist who reads a lot of economic arguments for anarcho-capitalism (David Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Pete Leeson), I may want to know if there’s an obscure author I have missed (Bruce Benson for example). On the other hand, such a person won’t voraciously read works written by socialists hoping to stumble on a rare nugget of truth. In the second case, if you can identify the best argued, best articulated short-ish work for a skeptic to read, your knowledge may be appreciated.

There are so many ways for comments to go wrong and so few ways for them to go right. Basically, if you’re going to leave an approving comment do so without “piling on” or excessive fist-pumping. And if you’re leaving a critical comment stay on topic, state your criticism clearly and succinctly. Don’t be a dick about it, don’t veer off topic, and don’t impugn the motives of the person you are “correcting.” I have wasted countless hours arguing with people who exhibit poor comment hygiene. It hasn’t all been a complete waste and I did learn some important lessons from some of these exchanges. But many of them could have and should have been completely avoided.

Another thought occurred to me while writing this. Most of what happens on the internet doesn’t get captured in the comments section. Most of it happens in our minds without leaving a visible trace. If there is a well-written, thoughtful article, most of its readers will simply absorb its content without commentary, perhaps stowing it away in their heads for future reference, or perhaps forgetting about the post itself while still absorbing its lesson. If we’re talking about a blog post, most of the push-back will be from unthoughtful people who simply can’t swallow the conclusion. Maybe my blogger-friend was mistaken to be disappointed by his comments section. The loudest, most impulsive, least reflective individuals are the ones most likely to fire off a comment, so the comments section is a very biased sample of reactions to any given post. (Ever see a comment start with "long time lurker, first time commenter"? Just realize that most of your readers are forever lurkers, but the quality of their thoughts is probably as high as or higher than that of your average commenter.) If you could somehow sample the very private thoughts of your readers, it just might restore your faith in humanity. 

The Animatronic President Show Everybody Wants to See

I want to own a museum that does a robot presidents show. This already exists, but here’s my addition. Animatronic Lincoln gets up when it’s his turn to speak and says, “Hi, boys and girls! I’m Abraham Lincoln, and I've just won the Civil War!” All the other presidents hit the deck. Lincoln looks behind him over one shoulder, then the other, then shrugs. “Anyway, it looks like it’s clear sailing from here, for me AND the blacks. I think I'll celebrate by taking in a show with the Mrs.”

Your imagination can take it from there. Perhaps an animatronic John Wilkes Booth could make an appearance.

Quote from To Serve and Protect by Bruce Benson

The Justice Department recently announced that it would stop using "private" prisons. Scare quotes because nothing that the government pays for is truly private. It reminded me of the following passage:

Some people argue that only the government should have police powers and the power to punish, since such powers in private hands will tend to be abused. In other words, the government must be the monopoly producer of police services, prosecution, and punishment. The fact is, however, that “the government” never actually produces anything. Everything that the government allegedly produces is actually produced by contracting with private entities working under contract. They are not owned by the government. They contract to provide their services because they expect to be better off than they would be in an alternative job. The benefits of the bureaucratic job may take many forms, including any pleasure received from helping to produce what a bureaucrat perceives to be in the public interest, a good living to support a family and/or an attractive life style, job security, perhaps pleasure from being in a position of power and authority, and so on. An individual police officer, then, is a private citizen who has been given a tremendous amount of power and discretion, and he is in a position to abuse the power that he is given. After all, since he is part of an organization with virtual monopoly power over the right to coerce, there is relatively little to constrain is tendencies to abuse his position, Not surprisingly, many types of abuse (corruption, physical abuse, falsification of evidence, etc.) occur in great numbers…

In light of this discussion, the normative view that government must be the only organization with police and punishment powers, for the fear that private entities might abuse such powers, really does not make that much sense. The fact that the idea of government production is a fiction actually implies that it makes more sense to have competitive options in order to constrain the ability of individuals to abuse power… In the context of the present discussion, however, this implies that contracting out must occur at some level.

This is an excerpt from the 2nd chapter of Bruce Benson's "To Serve and Protect." This is an important point. "Privatization" is not a yes or no question; all government services are ultimately supplied by private individuals. The question remains: should you have the option to deny the police your business if they fail to serve you, or should you be unconditionally subjected to their rules (and be forced to pay for their services even though you don't want them)? Should problem officers be difficult to fire (as public employees invariably are), or should the be easy to fire (as private employees typically are)?

There is nothing special about government provision that allows us to specify the outcome and achieve that outcome with any certainty. This is a point that libertarians like myself understand; perhaps we're bad at communicating it. Public provision and private provision are both subject to uncertainty. Either has the potential to harm the consumer. The real question is which system can be expected to perform better.

Anyway, I was sort of scratching my head at all the celebration over the Justice Department's announcement. It will still be the case that the federal government decides that certain people should be detained in prisons, and it's still the case that the federal government will pay certain other people to detain those prisoners. I don't really buy the framing that this is a categorically different way of doing things. 

Your Ideological Opponents are Idiots, says SCIENCE!

Now we get to a finding that sounds more tendentious than it is; smarter people are more liberal. The statement will make conservatives see red, not just because it seems to impugn their intelligence but because they can legitimately complain that many social scientists (who are overwhelmingly liberal or leftist) use their research to take cheap shots at the right, studying conservatism as if it were a mental defect.

This is from “The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker. He clarifies in the next paragraph that he means *classical* liberalism, which is more like libertarianism than American-style liberalism. (Modern American “liberalism” is often quite illiberal.) I thought this passage was funny because I probably see a nasty article on my Facebook feed once a week or so claiming that “conservatives” (or perhaps some other group singled out for opprobrium) are less intelligent, or more impulsive, or (insert major character flaw here). We proved it! Using SCIENCE! There may be a nugget of truth or some real but small correlation underlying these stories. But I think it shows really bad faith to frame your political/cultural opponents as some sort of pathology that can be uncovered with a brain scan or treated with vitamins or something.

Seriously, stop doing this, people. If you are imputing wicked motives or mental disorders to everyone you disagree with, you probably aren’t thinking very clearly. The person across from you is probably making a fair point, perhaps imperfectly, perhaps inarticulately. But somewhere underlying everything there is a point, and you would profit from understanding it. 

Word Clouds as GOTCHA!s

Word clouds are fun. It’s the most obvious kind of “analysis” you can do with unstructured text data. But I don’t like how they are sometimes used as a “gotcha!” As in “Ha! You use this word way too much!” Or “Ha! By using these words a lot and not using these words as much, we can see that your priorities are all screwed up!” Sheer word-counting is easy enough to do, but it’s not very insightful. 

What To Blog About?

I’m running out of interesting topics. A lot of my posts from last year were about the economics of drug prohibition and recent trends in drug poisoning deaths (or “drug poisoning” deaths if, like me, you don’t believe these are all classified correctly). I want to maintain this blog and keep it interesting, but I have a strong impulse to quash any idea if it doesn’t pan out into a highly original post. Thus the lower frequency of blogging recently. I have several options and they have various trade-offs.

1.  Write a lot more posts on whatever is on my mind that day, even if it’s something I’ve talked about at length before. Perhaps I have ten or so heavily overlapping posts on income inequality, but if some new study or politician’s speech happens to be on the news, I’ll reiterate those points just because it’s bothering me right now.
2.   Link to other stories and blogs with minimal commentary just because I found something interesting.
3. Accept that I have nothing new to say and say exactly that.

For 1) and 2), I usually just go to Facebook and fire off a quick share with minimal commentary. So I'm getting the utility of this elsewhere. Also, I risk being extremely repetitive. But maybe that’s necessary if the same old fallacies keep coming up in my news feed. If these are being recycled with some regular frequency, then perhaps a periodic debunking is necessary. Some arguments become “tired” because nobody answers them. With 3) I risk long dry-spells, which risks falling completely out of the habit of blogging and stopping altogether.

I read a lot of books, and often do so with the intention of reviewing some of the books I’m reading. But for some reason I rarely do written reviews of any of the books I read. For one thing, I do a lot of my “reading” on audiobook, so I don’t have the text handy when I want to excerpt something (unless I can find the passage on Amazon’s preview or in Google Books or somewhere else online where someone happened to quote the exact same passage). I’ll try to share a little more of what I’ve been reading without feeling the need to do an in-depth book review.

Any topic requests from my readers? Don’t interpret my asking as a promise to blog about any topic, but if there’s something interesting that’s worth discussing I can at least be thinking about it.