When Libertarians Start Achieving Electoral and Policy Success...

I hope that libertarians start to influence policy soon, and I see signs that they are beginning to affect some elections. But I have this nagging feeling that the recent election cycle really brought home to me. Attack ads against Republicans often feature some minor piece of legislation that slightly altered how our massive welfare state functions. Maybe a slight reduction in transfer payments or Medicaid. This gets tagged as "casting thousands of families into dire poverty" or causing "millions to lose their health-care," often without any substantive empirics on any actual harm done.

Uh oh. I favor cuts to the welfare state far deeper than anything any Republican has proposed. I think these programs tend to be counter-productive, or they tend to enrich the government employees who administer them without actually helping poor people very much. But nuts to my "sophisticated" argument to this effect. Any such proposal to cut government is going to be demagogued as "Heartless libertarians want to cast millions into Dickensian poverty!"

My nagging gut feeling is that shitty, simple-minded populism is going to kill libertarian chances of policy success. Unless we can really change the conversation, unless we can institute some sort of social sanction for this kind of overheated rhetoric, these cheap tricks are going to keep winning. (Someone apparently thinks so, according to the numerous campaign fliers that came to my house in recent weeks.)

I wrote about this a while ago. I'm trying (along with many other libertarians who write about policy) to preempt this kind of nasty partisan bickering. The case has been laid out on the table. It's there now for all to see. If there are any objections, raise them now while tempers are cool. Fat chance of that, though. Critics will ignore these arguments until they are within striking distance of an actual policy change, and then react with feigned surprise and outrage.

Ugh. Sorry to be such a downer. What is there to do about this? Learn your topics really, really well. Be prepared to confront this kind of rhetoric, and calmly, and without any bullet-biting. ("No, I did not just advocate murdering all children. Let's try this one more time...") If nothing else, you'll come off looking polished and the insult-slinging demagogue will come off looking foolish.

Terrible Arguments That (Apparently) Only Apply To Healthcare

Imagine someone were to say, "Homes are very expensive to purchase. That's why we need insurance to make the purchase of a home affordable." It would be a remarkably silly statement, because there are plenty of non-insurance ways to finance very expensive things. In fact most listeners would probably immediately think about how the average  home buyer does some combination of saving for the down payment and borrowing to cover the remainder. Insurance is great if your house burns to the ground or otherwise is in need of expensive repairs that would break the bank. The unexpected house fire is a good case for insurance. But "paying for my first house" is emphatically not an "insurable risk." It is something that is perfectly predictable from the point of view of the home buyer. (Traditionally, insurable risks have to be "fortuitous from the point of view of the insured", which means they don't decide when the "risk" is coming.) Most of medicine is predictable in the same sense as buying a home is predictable. Routine check-ups, the occasional illness, and the more intense utilization of medicine in old age are predictable costs, even if these things are expensive. Insurance doesn't make these things any more affordable. Whatever you think your insurer is "paying for" is in effect making your premiums more expensive. So at best it's a wash. (In reality, it's expensive to have someone handle your money and then go through a claims adjustment process when you need some of it back. Financing via insurance makes routine, expected medicine, the kind that the average person can expect to consume over the course of a typical life, less affordable.) Insurance is great if you have a (temporarily) debilitating but treatable disease or injury. That would be roughly analogous to the house fire mentioned above. But expected medicine (say, the amount of medicine consumed by the median individual) would be better financed through savings and perhaps even borrowing. (I'd love to have the option of saving on my insurance premiums if I could purchase a "medical line of credit", rather than making the insurer promise to pay outright for my treatment.) The "insurance makes healthcare more affordable for typical patients" argument is silly on its face. It seems like we recognize the silliness in any other context.

Or suppose someone said, "Information technology keeps improving rapidly. That's why computers keep getting more and more expensive." This would be another silly statement, because a unit of computing power has been getting cheaper at an exponential rate. Even if someone takes "a computer" to mean "the unit that a consumer purchases, as in a single laptop or desktop", the purchase price has fallen (or at least has not been rising). Improvements in technology bring costs down, not up. On the other hand, if Dell came out with the fastest possible laptop it could build and everyone wanted one as soon as it came to market, you might see an "increasing cost". Unconstrained demand for the very top of the line would tend to drive costs up. I think that's more analogous to what we're seeing in medicine. The new drug comes out that it slightly better than the next best alternative. Since the patient generally isn't the one paying, and since almost no one in the chain of decision making is sensitive to costs, almost everyone gets the new drug. In one sense, the cost of "achieving the cancer-fighting effectiveness of Latest Generation Chemo Drug " has come down. It used to be infinity, because there was nothing on the market that was as good. In another sense, patients (or insurers or governments) are spending exorbitant sums and society at large is sinking tremendous resources to eke out a tiny gain in medical outcomes. The casual observation that "medicine is getting more expensive because of advancing technology" is a half-truth. The cost of buying "the medicine we would have bought taking last year's technology as a given" is going down. The cost of buying "top of the line medicine for all ailments without any constraints on demand" is probably going up. It seems like there is a useful way of phrasing this and a misleading way of phrasing this, and I usually hear the latter. Maybe when people say this, there is an implicit "...and of course once new technology comes out, it is obligatory that everyone has access to it." My usual response to this is to say that of course cybernetic organs are a basic human right. Of course, a trip to the lunar health spa, which has been shown to improve life expectancy by an average of ten weeks, is a basic human right. It's fine to be soft-hearted and think we have an obligation to help people who have trouble affording healthcare. But when it leads to logical absurdities or spiraling costs, it's time to rethink how we're doing it.

Given That X Exists, Where Should You Put It?

I try to resist reaching for the cynical explanation for something when there’s a more reasonable one handy. It’s terribly tempting to see cynical motives everywhere, even though basic economics and a little common sense reasoning offer a far more plausible explanation.

Those “impulse purchases” at the check-out counter are a prime example. Supposedly these are placed so as to tempt shoppers with poor impulse control waiting to ring up their shopping cart. I think it’s far more reasonable to ask, “Suppose the store wants to offer the service of selling loose candy bars. Where should you place them?” Do they belong in the candy aisle with the packaged/bulk candy? So you’d throw it in your shopping cart and hope that you’ll keep track of it when all your groceries are bagged up? Probably not. If you’re buying a single candy bar, most likely it’s for immediate consumption. You don’t want to have it bagged up and have to search all your groceries for it. It probably makes sense to place those items at the check-out counter, so you have it in hand after you buy it. Also, look at the other “impulse buys”. Nail clippers and files. Lighters. Batteries. Mints and gum. Are these impulse items? As in people just can’t help themselves and chomp down an entire tin of mints? Or are they conveniently placed for 1) items you’d like to carry on your person and 2) items you need but always forget about? It seems “convenience” is the better explanation for where these items are located.

Here’s a very different example. Suppose there is someone who moderates disputes in drug markets. They tell rival drug dealers where their territory lies, settle “differences of opinion” between rival gangs, and reallocate territory when one dealer can’t maintain a drug supply in their currently assigned neighborhood. Fighting is costly, so dealers would likely want such a service, even knowing it will sometimes rule contrary to their interests. (The occasional adverse ruling is probably cheaper than constant gang warfare.) But who is going to provide it? Being such a moderator would make you an accomplice to a “crime” that has severe mandatory minimum sentences. If you go so far as to charge a fee for your service, it will be even easier to convict you.

Enter David Skarbek’s excellent book on prison gangs, The Social Order of the Underworld. Prison gangs (necessarily comprised of people already in prison) often mediate these disputes and in fact charge a “tax” on the proceeds of drug sales. Gangs that attempt to sell without paying their “taxes” are “green-lighted”, meaning they are open game for other drug dealers. Skarbek tells the story of one gang that refused to pay its taxes to the prison gangs, proudly calling itself The Greenlight Gang. Violent conflicts with other gangs eventually made their business unprofitable (despite their savings on “taxes”), and the gang disbanded.

To an outsider, or even to a drug dealer, this arrangement looks totally crooked, perhaps even nonsensical. Prison gangs are shaking down drug dealers to pay them “taxes”? Why would drug dealers, who are not yet imprisoned, bother to comply? The people making demands of them are safely tucked away in prison. One answer is that drug dealers who are currently outside of prison recon on the high probability that they will one day be inside prison, where they will be vulnerable to prison gangs. Prison gangs have very good intelligence on new prisoners. They know about associates and prior crimes, so they'll probably know you were a "tax dodger". Your life in prison will be miserable, and probably short. 

Another perfectly serviceable explanation presents itself when you ask: If there is going to be an underworld government that regulates and taxes the drug trade, where would you put it? And: Wouldn’t drug dealers want such a government, so as to minimize conflict? (Or should I say “optimize conflict”?)

What else? Are there other behaviors or institutions that look absurd or cynical or crooked at first, but look more reasonable when you ask, "Assuming there was such a thing, where would it be located?"

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Here is an Econtalk with David Skarbek on his book. Recommended listening. 

Pindyck on Two Kinds of Discount Rates

I recently finished Tyler Cowen's new book Stubborn Attachments. I enjoyed it and I appreciated the message. The book is mostly about how important economic growth is. As societies get wealthier, other problems tend to solve themselves. Richer populations tend to demand cleaner environments, lower rates of crime, and solutions to other social problems. Expanded wealth gives these populations the means to tackle these problems. So, the thinking goes, if we can keep our eye on the growth ball, other problems simply dissolve. Given the logic of compounding growth, it becomes extremely important over long timelines to maximize the rate of growth. Adding a mere 1% to the rate of economic growth means the economy will be 2.5x larger in 100 years. If we care about future generations, it seems like this should be a serious consideration.

It reminded me of a topic that was discussed in this episode of Econtalk with Robert Pindyck. About 10 minutes in, there is a discussion of what interest rate should be used to discount the future. A thousand dollars today is worth more than a thousand dollars a year from now, or ten years from now, or 100 years from now. So if we're talking about solving problems today versus passing those problems on to our children or grandchildren, we need to think about how we compare costs today versus costs in the future.

In a distinction I have never heard made anywhere else (and I've read quite a lot on economics), Pindyck makes a distinction between two kinds of interest rates: a utility discount and a financial discount. The "utility" discount is the "I'd rather have it now" effect. Given pleasure today or pleasure 100 years from now, I'd rather have it now. If you want someone to forego pleasure they could have today and instead take it decades from now, you'll have to compensate them (even assuming it's the same quantity of "pleasure", however you'd measure that, and even assuming there is a 100% guarantee they'll get it later). Some people argue, I think reasonably enough, that this discount rate should be zero. There's no moral reason that we should prefer ourselves to other people, whether they live in another country or another century. As Russ Roberts puts it in the podcast, their blood is just as red as mine.

The other component of the interest rate is the financial discount rate. This rate should not be set to zero, even if we care for future generations just as much as we care for ourselves. The reason isn't too hard to understand. A future generation values $1,000 in cash the same as $1,000 worth of climate abatement (by definition). We should pass to them whichever option is cheaper. Resources we spend today on climate abatement (or environmental cleanup or violence reduction) are resources we can't pass on to our grandchildren. A meager-sounding 3% interest rate causes savings to grow by a factor of 19 in 100 years. At 4% it's a factor of 50. At 5% it's a factor of 130. This is a big deal. Trying to solve a future generation's problem incurs a serious opportunity cost.

(I'm not sure whether to use the market rate of return here or the rate of economic growth. I can stow away money today in financial assets today and it might grow at a stellar 7%, which means growing by a factor of 870 in 100 years. But maybe social investments are different from financial investments. The social rate of return might be smaller than the private rate of return. Foregone consumption today may only compound at 2% or 3%, something more like the rate of economic growth. These are very different propositions: "Society as a whole foregoes consumption on $1,000 worth of economic resources so that future generations can use those resources." versus "I personally set aside $1,000 in an investment account to make my great-great-grandchildren filthy rich." Society's investment in the future probably grows more slowly than my personal investment. But if future generations have better technology and better institutions, the resources we bequeath to them will be used more efficiently. So the foregone $1,000 of consumption today compounds at something like the economic growth rate.)

Pindyck claims that when economists say that "the rate of discounting should be zero" they are only talking about the utility discount rate, not the financial discount rate. I think he may be giving a little too much credit to his fellow policy analysts, some of whom aren't quite so nuanced, some of whom fail to communicate this point clearly. But I take his point.

I kept expecting Stubborn Attachments to make this point explicitly. The book spends a lot of time discussing the "utility discount" (though not using Pindyck's terminology). It basically lands on: we shouldn't discount the future at all. We should treat the interests of future generations as equivalent to the interests of people living today. Maybe I missed it, or maybe it's so implicit to the books message that it didn't need to be said, but I had this expectation that Cowen would spell out the two kinds of discount rates and explain why only one is relevant for calculating costs or benefits to future generations. This comes out clearly in the Pindyck and Roberts discussion. They say that if we can grow the economy in a way such that future generations enjoy the fruits of that growth, those future generations would like us to do that. Anything else we'd like to give them has to be traded off against the economic growth we could otherwise bequeath to them.

There's another reason not to use a discount rate of zero, even if we care dearly about future generations. Existential risk. To take an extreme example, if there were a 1% chance each year of a civilization-ending asteroid strike or nuclear war or super-volcano, then it would make very little sense to care much about climate-related harms that take 100 years to manifest. Giving next century's generation, say, $1 trillion worth of climate change abatement isn't very useful if they only have a 37% chance of enjoying it (0.99 raised to the power 100). Even supposing that climate change itself is an existential risk, it may need to be traded off against other existential risks. Maybe shutting down fossil fuels slows the economic rate of growth such that future societies aren't prosperous enough to build an asteroid defense system or space travel. Maybe the wrong emissions reduction policy costs us a century of economic growth, which is the margin between being able to solve some other existential risk and not being able to do so. Like any other set of costs, existential risks need to be traded off against each other. There's no simple answer here, and there's everything at stake. It's a hard problem. But I think Cowen's "maximize growth" principle in Stubborn Attachments is a good place to start.

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Listen to the Econtalk episode, all the way to the end. It's kind of funny. Russ Roberts is something of a luke-warmer, and Pindyck is the "warmist" in this discussion (that's not to say an alarmist). Roberts brings up the worst-case-scenario for global warming, and Pindyck has to cool him back down. Roberts discusses the possibility of civilization ending and human extinction. Pindyck responds with:

I think you are going a little overboard. There's the worst case scenario; and there's the worst worst-case scenario. And I think you're on the worst, worst, worst case scenario. I don't think that--when we talked about a 5% chance or even a 1% chance, I don't think it's that bad. I think we're looking at something catastrophic, but not that terrible. It would be something that would impose pretty big costs on the world economy, maybe reduce the effective capital stock by 10% or even 20%. That's pretty bad.

A 10-20% reduction in the capital stock would be pretty terrible. It's a bland way of stating things; maybe "reduction in the capital stock" is a euphemism for building falling down or random cities falling into the ocean. But it makes me think some of the worst scare-stories over global warming are oversold.

What To Share?

I’m interested in the problem of trying to influence public opinion. I’d like to marshal the best arguments using the most credible data sources and convince a listener that Policy A is better than Policy B. Where to start?

A fundamental constraint here is that human attention is limited. Nobody is going to read your 7,000 page piece on, say, optimal healthcare policy unless they are already sympathetic to the conclusion. The argument that’s actually long enough to convince someone and address all of their objections is so long that it will never be read. But try to be any shorter and you risk leaving someone with the impression that they have an unanswered objection. Maybe you did have an answer, but you made an editorial decision to exclude it, along with several dozen other answers, because they made the length of your piece too long and the prose too clunky. Someone has to have the patience to read your original piece and also engage you with their objections. Few people have such a dedication to free inquiry. And even if they did, why would they read your piece over the thousands of others they come across in their news-feed?

Suppose you adopt a policy of sharing persuasive links on social media. What is the optimal sharing behavior? Share too much, and you come across as an impulsive loud-mouth who can’t keep is finger off the “Share” button. Share too little, and you miss the opportunity to spread good ideas to reasonable people. There are a lot of people potentially reading your social media feeds. Some are unreachable. They’ll block or unfollow you if you share arguments they don’t approve of, no matter how thoughtfully you do it. Or they’ll comment with the same bilge every time without apparently learning from these exchanges. (I’ve seen both behaviors.) It doesn’t matter that you have a good argument, all that matters is that you’re “one of those wrong-thinking people”.

So what about the more reasonable ones, the ones who are capable of changing their minds? Sharing too promiscuously ruins your credibility. I’ve had this reaction to people who share too often. After the dozenth political post in a single day, it just starts looking like your brain-stem is connected to your itchy “Share-button” finger without any mediation from the thinking parts of your brain.  But how often is too often? Once a day? Once a week? Is it more credible if you add some of your own commentary when you link to something, showing that you’ve thought about it and thought through the obvious objections? Should you hold back, knowing that even thoughtful readers will only have time to read, say, one long-ish article or blog post every day? Is even that asking too much? There's a "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes" aspect to this question. There is an optimization problem here, but I don't even know where to start. 

I’m not quite ready to give up on social media as a platform for reasonable political discussion. Some blogs have managed to curate an excellent community of commenters. Steven Landsburg’s blog The Big Questions, Scott Alexander’s blog Slate Star Codex, and Less Wrong are the best examples of this. I think this is possible on other more personalized kinds of social media (Twitter, Facebook), but it’s difficult. After all, you’re dealing with what is possibly the scarcest resource of all: human attention. That’s definitely something you don’t want to waste.

You Shouldn’t Have To Do the Thing That Totally Solves the Problem!

A meme I saw on Facebook recently really struck me as odd. Something to the tune of "You shouldn't have to go to Go Fund Me to pay your medical bills." It was some kind of cheap rhetorical argument for universal healthcare or something like that.

My reaction was: Doesn't that kind of work? When someone gets sick, isn't there an outpouring of community support? Whenever someone at my workplace got seriously ill, there was some kind of benefit event for them, presumably to offset the costs of medical care and loss of income for the family. I've seen several fliers on bulletin boards over the years for people who had some kind of sudden medical problem (cancer and ALS to name two examples regarding people I know personally).

Maybe someone can argue that the money from these benefits isn't enough. The sick person gets some random amount, which may or may not be enough to cover their expenses, which may in fact be totally uncorrelated with their actual expenses. Same deal with a Go Fund Me campaign, the argument goes. I don't think that's right. I think someone with a more severe illness elicits a stronger outpouring of community support. Charitable supply rises to meet the demand.

Maybe, or maybe not. But what struck me about the meme was the dismissal of a private solution to an unmet need. The assumption behind the meme is that government provided healthcare is a moral necessity. If the government solution isn't adequate and people are meeting their needs via other means, it implies that the government solution just didn't go far enough.

Suppose Go Fund Me solves the problem, and everyone who needs expensive medicine can basically raise the funds they need. Maybe some people need to scrimp a little and opt for their second or third best option rather than their first. They might not get treatment from the very best doctor at the very best hospital. (That's a problem under any system, though. Even the most thoroughly socialized medical system can't send every patient in the nation to the single best doctor.) But that's probably better than making an open-ended promise to give everyone 100% of the medicine they ask for and paying for it out of general tax revenues.

I wrote about this topic a while ago, but to reiterate there are many private means of getting healthcare to people who "can't afford" it. (Charity, price discrimination in favor of the poor, tax write-offs by hospitals and clinics for the free care given.) You're free to think those solutions are inadequate for some reason, but it's silly to observe a solution to a problem, actually working in the real world, and declare that "nobody should have to" do the thing that's actually fixing the problem.

Inevitable Government and Unnecessary Government

I remember having a discussion with someone about the ideal rules for society. The argument they made went something like this: rules should be simple, obvious, and easy to remember. Do you want to be governed by the Bill of Rights? Or the Code of Hammurabi? (Or did he say "the Ten Commandments?")

Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Libertarians (like me) sometimes fantasize about dismantling the state, tearing down the edifice of the police and regulatory state, and clearing out the underbrush of countless laws and regulation that stifle human activity. We'd be left with a few simple, easily enforceable rules, the thinking goes. If you buy the libertarian worldview, that all sounds great. Until you remember that the Code of Hammurabi was not a set of edicts. It wasn't a series of commands invented by a king acting arbitrarily on his own whim. It was the codification of the already existing laws of that society. Disputes arise in any society, and someone somehow has to adjudicate those disputes. Thus a common law arises. The obvious, simple rules emerge from this process. "Don't kill anyone, or we'll come after you. Don't steal, or we'll come after you." But what exactly is the punishment for these offenses? It can't be totally arbitrary, where one murderer gets tortured to death and the next murderer pays a fine of ten camels to the victims family and goes on with his life. We have to adjudicate these disputes with some kind of consistency, which looks an awful lot like legislation.

And where is the cut-off between theft and fraud and not-even-a-crime? If I own a golden urn and you steal my urn, that's obviously theft. If I pay you 50 shekels for a golden urn and you don't make with the urn, then it's pretty clear you've defrauded me. But what if we have different expectations that we both think are reasonable? To me, of course a golden urn has the following dimensions, and is solid gold straight through. To you, of course a golden urn has these different dimensions, and can be hollow between the interior and exterior walls, or the interior can be made of some other metal and coated in gold. Whose expectation of what "a golden urn" means are correct here? Have you defrauded me? Am I being unreasonable? The obvious solution is to specify in the contract exactly what I mean by "golden urn." But all the interesting problems occur when the specifications of the contract aren't clear, which happens all the time. The urn-buyer and the urn-maker might have to go before a judge or some other moderator, who decides that some prevailing cultural expectation about the size of an urn is this, and the price paid for the urn implies such-and-such a proportion of gold versus other metals.

Simple rules my butt! The rules of society might include obscure and arcane rules about urn-making, house-building, food safety, marriage, divorce, child-care, tithing, parking-your-boat-on-the-fucking-street, and all sorts of things that obstruct our commercial and personal intercourse. This edifice of stifling regulation can emerge organically from case law, just as surely as it can from an over-zealous legislature. Sure, we can try to get around the case law by specifying contractually "This piece of case law does not apply. Transacting parties both agree to this stipulation!" But if someone (some company) tries to do this too much, perhaps an unsatisfied customer can argue that "Nobody reads all that garbage, and besides this provision is totally unreasonable." And perhaps a sympathetic judge can invalidate that part of the contract.

So how much government is inevitable and how much of it is unnecessary? I have opinions about this, but I'm not terribly sure of anything. I think some regulations are clearly invented, created by pure fiat, and would not exist in a free marketplace. I'm thinking in particular about ridiculous regulations in California that force companies to warn consumers about non-existent risks. But what about food safety? Surely you are defrauding me if I think I'm buying food but you deliberately poison me. Surely you're also defrauding me if you sell me food but poison me by failing to exercise the due standard of care (failed to refrigerate, or failed to keep pests out of the food during storage). But what is "the due standard of care"? If it's a "standard" of care, that sounds a lot like a regulation, even if it's one implied by common law rather than being imposed by a legislature. What if you sell a food with known dangers? Like sushi, or raw milk, or something that's fermented? You can always sell it with the disclaimer, "Eat this at your own risk," but there is still some reasonable expectation that you made the food as safely as you could. There could still be grounds for suing if the preparer of food didn't exercise due caution. What is the "non-standard standard" of care?

What about drug policy? I think that a free-market, anarcho-capitalist society would not have drug prohibition. A large proportion of society would certainly disapprove of drug use, but it would not be worth the costs and inconveniences to try to stop it. But, oh, there are issues. There would still be some people getting so high they become belligerent and hard to control. (I think this is a massively overblown problem, but no doubt it happens.) Some cities are littered with dirty, discarded syringes, which is a public health hazard. Intoxicated driving would presumably still be a problem. And some people will be so intoxicated and consumed by their habit that they fail to care for their children. As I've argued before, these problems can be targeted with laws and rules that specifically target the problem behavior but don't target drug use in general. But it's possible that some kind of mild prohibition emerges, even without being imposed by a legislature. I don't have a crystal ball that lets me peer into the world as it would be under anarcho-capitalism, but if I did I wouldn't be too surprised to find something that disappoints my drug-policy-libertarianism.

What about minimum wage and other labor regulations? Would there be some kind of judicially imposed expectation about what to pay someone? Or that a low hourly wage somehow implies other perks and accommodations?

I think it's a facile brand of libertarianism that says we'd have almost none of these stifling rules if the government disappeared (or shrank to a minimalist night-watchman state). It's possible that this brand of libertarianism actually requires government, a government that actively identifies and eliminates annoying "regulations" imposed by the common law. None of this is to defend or justify the existing system of government or the massive regulatory/welfare/police state. I think that's a horrible system that bends to easily to the whims of the 51%. Most days, I'm still an anarcho-capitalist. I still think the world would be far less horrible if the government shrank or disappeared. I think we'd have far more opportunities to escape the tyranny of shitty, simple-minded populism. But I sometimes imagine looking into that crystal ball, and in that fantasy I am always bracing myself for disappointment.

I'm trying to explore and identify the limits of my libertarianism. These are the thoughts that bother me, because I don't have good answers for anything. I'm not the only one in this space, either. There are many thoughtful libertarians exploring this question. I remember David Friedman raising the question, "Is an anarcho-capitalist society even libertarian?" As in, does every community impose stifling restrictions on it's people? Does anarcho-capitalism create the kinds of societies that libertarians approve of or not? Read The Machinery of Freedom for a decent treatment of this. (Alex Tabarrok makes a similar argument in a post that I can't find at the moment.)

I don't know what spurred this post. I'm re-reading Albion's Seed, which discusses colonial America and the four dominant British cultures that colonized it. This was a small-government world, with most disputes being resolved within the community. This world still had incredibly restrictive rules and horrifying criminal punishment for minor offenses. And it was enforced not by an over-reaching outside government, but within the community. Neighbors flogging neighbors, sometimes over superstitious offenses. In one story, a merchant gets corporal punishment for...making too much profit! This punishment, once again, is imposed by a small community, not by a runaway regulatory state. (Paging Deirdre McCloskey. I sometimes wonder if that passage is what sparked her recent work on economic history.)  It's a good reminder of just how bad things can be.