Showing posts with label libertarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label libertarianism. Show all posts

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Ken's Genius on Display

Ken has written many amazing posts, but this one takes the cake:

http://www.popehat.com/2010/10/28/trust-in-the-devil/

Giving the government the power to do things we like tends to give the government the power to do things we don’t like. In a perfect world, conservatives would see that reposing uncritical trust in prosecutors and cops ultimately promotes the government’s power to regulate their businesses and their health care. Liberals would see that trusting regulators and bureaucrats increases the government’s power to jail citizens upon flimsy evidence.

Maybe one day more people will meet in the middle and recognize that the appropriate stance of an informed citizen towards all elements of the government is vigilance, skepticism, and firm support of individual rights against the state. Perhaps more people will agree that the correct response to any government attempt to control the individual is to question: “What evidence do you have to support this? Is it really believable? Can it be trusted? Is it enough?”

Oh, the lucidity.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Thought Experiment: Utilitarianism

I am borrowing the following hypothetical from Slawek W.:

John invents a cure for cancer. It is a pill, very easily made, in fact, one could make it with ingredients found in every household. He successfully demonstrates the effectiveness of this cure on several volunteers, after which he announces to the world that he has no intention of ever releasing any information about this cure. He further announces that the instructions to produce this cure have been implanted somewhere in his body in a soluble capsule which will completely dissolve in a week along with the instructions.

Let's suppose that a surgical search for this implant would end John's life.

Let's further suppose that there is absolutely no way that you can reason with John to change his mind, and you cannot reverse engineer the cure by studying the cured patients.

Now, the general population is asked what the best course of action is in this situation. John has the knowledge to eradicate cancer forever but he has no intention of sharing this information for whatever reason. Also, there is no way to forcefully retrieve this information without causing John's death in the process.

What would you propose should be done and why? Would it matter if John was your 16 years old son?

__________

My exchange with Slawek is below:

Me: I am going to assume your scenario refers to all cancers, not just one strain of cancer. Why am I getting visions of Howard Roark and his architecture plans? Actually, that's the problem with your scenario: we're not talking about architecture--we're talking about someone unreasonably withholding vital information that we know will save millions of lives. Again, the key tipping point is the fact that we know that John has the cure for cancer. Thus, this isn't like torture, where we must question the validity of the information or whether the source has the information. Here, we know the cure for cancer exists within this man and will save millions of lives. At some point, shouldn't individual liberty give way to assured benefits for all of humankind--assuming all other avenues have been exhausted completely? Your situation is extremely complex because we are taking a human life, so we are not discussing liberty per se, but a man's life. My answer? I don't know.

Slawek: You needlessly see a dilemma here. Let me simplify this for you: John is your 16 year old son. Are you still unsure of what course of action is to be taken?

Me: Yes, because I cannot envision a scenario where my son would withhold life-sustaining medicine from the public when threatened with death. The more likely scenario is that I would represent him and demand billions of dollars in exchange for the cure. Private property is not always sacred--that's why we allow condemnation proceedings, as long as the government pays proper compensation.

Your hypothetical is complex because we're not talking about property, but about guaranteed results affecting human lives. Your scenario is an offshoot of the age-old question of whether you would shoot one person to save a thousand. When I first saw that question, I thought two things: 1) I wouldn't personally shoot anyone; 2) it wouldn't matter anyway, because someone cruel enough to offer that kind of Catch-22 choice would probably kill everyone regardless of my decision. So, what's my answer to your hypothetical? There is no good answer. That's my answer.

Slawek:
Let me further constrain this scenario: nobody cruel or crazy can do anything to John. Whatever you decide will be done. What do you decide should be done?

If you have a solid foundation of morals and virtues, which is applied to every single individual in the same way then the answer is simple: nothing should be done. You cannot decide to deprive a man of his life (his property) for another man's benefit, unless you agree that another man can deprive you of yours. To agree to this is to reject your life.

If you cannot decide what you would do in this situation then your moral foundation is convoluted and contradictory. The test of your morality is the ability to apply it to every situation without making concessions or creating exceptions for certain situations. Whatever applies to another man, applies in the same way to you.

What if the subject in question would be me? The answer is clear unless you lack the basic instinct of the will to live.

Me:
It isn't that simple, because under your scenario, all options lead to at least one guaranteed death. Overall, I do believe a person may act so unreasonably as to forfeit his right to live; however, your scenario is complex, because John isn't interfering in another person's life. He's holding back progress, but that's not interference per se--it's unreasonable unselfishness. Thus, the simplified question is whether unreasonable unselfishness may result in a justified loss of life. I will give you the lawyer's answer: "It depends."

Slawek:
Your analysis is wrong. One option leads to murder, the other option leaves everything unchanged. The scenario is anything but complex. It poses simple questions: would you have your son killed to help millions of people? would you want people to kill you to help millions of people?

My answer is simple: no. I would not have anyone killed for the benefit of another man. no exceptions.

I could have also thrown in that your other son is dying of cancer which would really have made for an awkward scenario. The right answer in that case would have been the same: you don't take one man's property (life) to benefit another.

Me: Do you agree that not doing something may result in death? Here, not sharing the cure will result in either a) the guaranteed deaths of millions of people; or b) the guaranteed death of one person. Again, there is no dispute that all options lead to at least one death where action or inaction is the proximate cause of the death(s). Thus, to label one option"murder" and another "the refusal to sustain life" is splitting hairs. Overall, the question is whether unreasonable selfishness may cause a man to forfeit his right to life when his death will save millions of lives.

Let me throw the question back to you: would you shoot Hitler if you had the chance?

Slawek: Doing nothing does not result in anyone's death, it leaves the situation unchanged. Not helping someone is not the same thing as hurting them. It is not hair splitting, these are entirely different things.

The intentional murder of a person is an entirely different affair from not helping someone. You prosecute a man for murder, you don't prosecute a doctor who was on vacation when a man died of a heart attack.

Also, are you metaphorically comparing Hitler, a man who directed the murder of millions of innocent people, to John who did absolutely nothing?"

You can only decide to kill John for the benefit of other if you accept the premise that his life does not belong to him. By accepting this, you must also accept that your life does not belong to you. There cannot be a functioning society based on this premise.

Me: There is a difference between someone who lacks the power to save lives and someone who voluntarily refuses to save lives based on irrational and unreasonable selfishness.

In any case, if you wanted to prove a point about universal healthcare, you've used an ineffective hypothetical. The real issues with universal healthcare are cost control and levels of coverage, not a mad scientist's unreasonable refusal to save lives.

Slawek: Irrational and unreasonable? We'll never come to a conclusion if you start injecting subjectivity into this. Don't you find it irrational and unreasonably selfish for a heart surgeon to go on a 6 month vacation? He could be saving lives instead. How irrational and unreasonably selfish of him.

This has got nothing to do with universal health care. Not a single thing. I wanted for people who care to read it to realize that their moral framework is flawed and weak. It is in fact so weak that everyone that read this note would refuse to answer. Not give the wrong answer, mind you, but simply refuse to answer. You were intrigued enough to try to find flaws in the scenario, but still, you didn't answer. You've done every single thing not to answer so far.

You won't decide what to do in John's case because you'd see a contradiction in your actions. You don't want to kill John, but you do want millions of people to be saved from a terminal disease. But why do you just not say: kill John?

Bonus: more thought-provoking questions here.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead

I recently watched Ayn Rand's film, The Fountainhead. Overall, the film was excellent. To get a view of Ms. Rand's philosophy, you can read Howard Roark's closing argument to the jury here.

I liked the film, but disliked Ms. Rand's character, Dominique Francon. Ms. Francon seems sexually and emotionally repressed, mostly because her existence seems geared towards achieving an absence of emotional attachment or passion. For example, she destroys a statute she enjoys, and she marries a man she does not love. Gary Cooper, on the other hand, does a fantastic job playing Rand's ideal man, Howard Roark. Part of this may be individualism's bias towards men. Men, more so than women, do well under an individualist philosophy. After all, most women, because of biology, have to think of children. Unsurprisingly, Rand never had children:

It was a responsibility that she was not interested in assuming. When she was writing Atlas [Shrugged], she would sometimes say that she was "with book." The only children she wanted were her books.

And therein we see the problem with too much individualism. Child-rearing is fundamentally a self-less act. It is true that many parents wish to live second lives through their children or have them for other selfish reasons, but at least for the first six years, there is a tremendous amount of sacrifice inherent in being a parent. Thus, when you factor child-bearing and child-rearing, Rand's philosophy doesn't translate well to a growing population or to one where mothers are given additional support.

Yet, it is true that most inventions and advancements have come from a few people. Without Galileo, Marie Curie, Einstein, and other famous scientists, it is unclear how advanced humankind would be at this point. Due to its rigor, science--like writing and other productive enterprises--requires a level of introversion that overwhelms a desire subjugate one's selfish enterprise to others' desires. We can look to the term, "mad scientist," to understand that scientists are generally misunderstood, because most people prefer to spend time with people, not abstract concepts. Indeed, almost every film about scientists depicts them as crazy or eccentric. So Ayn's basic point is true--scientists need to shut out the world and be intellectually independent to achieve results. Societies that protect the scientist and/or the independent intellectual's work create better opportunities for overall advancement (for example, attitudes towards stem cell research may be used as a test study of a society's willingness to allow scientific progress). It is unclear, however, whether selfishness and intellectual independence and progress are necessarily intertwined.

Regardless of the answer to whether selfishness is the sine qua non of progress, there is a balance that must be achieved, and Rand does not seem to know how to achieve it. In fact, there is no greater argument against pure individualism than Dominique Francon, who is made up to look like Rand herself in the film. To see Francon's internal writhing on her own forced island, torn between complete independence and submission to her desires, is to understand that Rand's philosophy is a recipe for unhappiness.

It is possible to have a society that protects mothers, that views child-rearing and child-bearing as honorable acts, and one that also respects the intellectual solitude/selfishness of the scientist or entrepreneur. It is also possible to argue that altruism has an important place in society and is not superfluous. Intelligent libertarians, for example, do not argue that no laws are necessary to protect selfish or independent behavior--just that the least number of laws necessary to achieve stability is desirable. In other words, society needs to establish a balance between selfishness and societal obligation by the least coercive mechanisms possible.

Rand's philosophy of pure selfishness doesn't do much for balancing generally desirable traits, such as altruism, with other desirable goals, such as freedom. As a result, Rand makes it difficult for reasonable people to support her absolutist views.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

David Boaz, Libertarian

David Boaz, Executive VP of the Cato Institute, spoke at the Commonwealth Club recently. His speech was reproduced in The Commonwealth Magazine, September 2008 edition. I haven't been able to find a free online link, but it's a wonderful speech, and you should make the effort to find the speech. Here is an audio file of the speech:

http://search.everyzing.com/viewMedia.jsp?res=0&dedupe=1&index=117&col=en-all-public-ep&sort=rel&e=20501629&channelTitle=Ron+Paul&num=16&start=112&ci=43&expand=true&match=none&channel=236&bc=90&filter=1

Boaz's best line is about Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and how libertarianism has the same simple rules:

Don't hit other people, don't take their stuff, and keep your promises...if you apply those rules, you get civilization and freedom.

Here's another great line:

Always love your country, but never trust your government.

Boaz makes the great point that while we may feel less free today because of excessive government intervention and power, we are certainly more free when compared to a distant past involving slavery, 70 percent income tax rates (1977), fascism, feudalism, and communism. Boaz reminds us, "We had a monopoly phone company, strict regulations on interest and investing, sodomy laws in most states, and, at least briefly, generalized wage and price controls."

Boaz also takes on the question of how to define liberty and arrives at three factors: one, widespread wealth; two, an open society (less racism, no signs stating "No Blacks Need Apply"); and three, actual political and economic liberty (no more military conscription, no Jim Crow laws). He boldly states, "On balance, Americans today are more free than any people in history." He also says we should still be wary of those who seek to curtail our freedoms, suggesting,

Just speak up when somebody says there ought to be a law. There's no magic bullet. There's never been a golden age of liberty and there never will be.

Wise words from a man who strikes the perfect balance between optimism and fear. For more from David Boaz, check out the following link:

http://www.libertarianism.org/reader.html

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Government's Role

A friend sent me a postcard that reminded her of me--it was very kind of her, and absolutely up my alley:

It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. -- Justice Robert Jackson (Nuremberg Trial Judge)

The key point here is good governance is a two-way street. Citizens should be wary of government attempts to solve problems, because in the absence of omnipotence, unintended consequences will arise from government intervention. One recent example occurred around 1992, when Bill Clinton promised to limit CEO pay by placing a cap on salary deductions. Although it sought to limit CEO pay, Congress's one million dollar cap on the tax deductibility of salaries ended up with corporate boards increasing CEO pay to just under a million dollars. The result was that the middle class got their taxes hiked while the executives got more stock options.

Also, rarely does Congress pass a law with a view towards long term consequences. Such consequences could include the creation of a new enforcement agency (e.g. Homeland Security), more taxes diverted or raised to support the agency, and a broadening of power. Given this natural predilection to increase rather than decrease jurisdiction and scope, most laws ought to have sunset provisions that subject them to more debate down the line about whether they are still necessary. The way Congress currently passes most laws and regulations, they stay on the books forever and spawn new enforcement measures, whether they are necessary or not.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Ronald Reagan on Libertarianism

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy.

From Interview with President Reagan, published in Reason July 1975

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan

One of the American public's worst misconceptions is that libertarianism calls for no laws. As I explained in my review of Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, Mr. Friedman himself stated the need for government: "The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the 'rules of the game' and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on." See

http://willworkforjustice.blogspot.com/2007/08/capitalism-and-freedom-by-milton.html

Thus, anyone who states that libertarianism means anarchy or no laws is incorrect. Libertarianism merely means that you agree that interference with your ability to lead your life as you see fit--assuming your actions do not interfere with others' freedom--should be reduced as much possible.

More on government debt and the money we pay to the government: Richard Carmona, former U.S. Surgeon General (2002-2008), says that "75 cents of every tax dollar that you contribute [to health care] is spent on chronic disease, much of which is preventable" (The Commonwealth magazine, June 2008, page 44). Mr. Carmona singles out smoking and obesity as two of the largest scourges of health. One issue with having universal health care is how we regulate chronic disease--does an obese man get a free gastric bypass, or a free diet book? I wish I knew the answer.

One way to reduce the burden on any proposed national healthcare system is to have government workers use the premium + pay-as-you-go system (similar to Kaiser's HMO), while non-government workers use a separate, heavily subsidized health care system (similar to Britain's NHS). With most government workers not being "at-will" and therefore harder to terminate, they are best positioned to budget and pay monthly premiums. This type of carve-out is not unprecedented--postal and other federal workers, for example, do not get the same federal retirement benefits private citizens do because federal workers don't pay certain taxes. With more than 1.8 million civilian employees, the federal government, excluding the Postal Service, is the Nation’s largest employer. If you add in local and state government workers, you would have enough members to incorporate into a "closed system" of medical care (similar to Kaiser's HMO). In fact, you could probably leave the current HMO/PPO system intact, and then work with existing hospitals to provide heavily subsidized health care to private citizens while also investing in new hospitals. (There's no reason Thailand should have more hospitals than America per capita.) The out-of-pocket and insurance reimbursement system would shift to government members rather than private citizens, private citizens, especially blue collar workers, being the ones most required to be healthy so that they can be productive and pay taxes to sustain the government.

[Note: this post has been updated from its original content.] 

Friday, August 31, 2007

Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom packs so much wisdom in such concise language, I felt like my IQ rose 50 points after just four hours of reading. Mr. Friedman is a polarizing figure. His views on some subjects, such as eliminating Social Security and legalizing drugs and prostitution, are radical; however, Friedman makes the underlying rationale behind these proposals seem bulletproof when he explains their libertarian foundation. Some passages show the inherent reasonableness of his arguments:

"Freedom to advocate unpopular causes does not require that such advocacy be without cost. On the contrary, no society could be stable if advocacy of radical change were costless, much less subsidized...Indeed, it is important to preserve freedom only to people who are willing to practice self-denial, for otherwise freedom degenerates into license and irresponsibility... Freedom is a tenable objective only for responsible individuals."

Friedman's main motif is that freedom requires self-evaluation and self-policing, which is preferable to government interference. The alternative, state-sanctioned coercion, necessarily leads to less freedom--a theme Friedman patiently hammers into the reader.

If there is a flaw in Friedman's analysis, it is the missing link of how to prevent citizens with less self-control or citizens who are more susceptible to temptation from interfering with other, more reasonable citizens. Friedman may answer that this is where government is useful. He writes, "The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the 'rules of the game' and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on."

Although government is a necessity, Mr. Friedman wants readers to ask, "How much government is necessary," and "What form should government take"?:

"Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated--a system of checks and balances."

Thus, Friedman escapes any contradiction by making the point that while government is necessary, it is necessary only in the most minimalist form possible. Friedman also promulgates several broad principles to support his philosophical framework, namely,

1. The scope of government must be limited.
2. Government power must be dispersed.
3. "The power to do good is also the power to harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm."

The last principle is stunning in its beautiful, simple logic, and there are gems like this on almost every page.

Friedman's other point is that the "great advances of civilization...have never come from centralized government. " FDR's New Deal is one counterargument, but Friedman indirectly addresses this potential hole by stating that the Depression was a unique instance in history that could have and should have been avoided: "The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system[,] is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men [i.e., the Federal Reserve] when they wield vast power over the monetary system of a country." Friedman says that had the Fed provided money to the banking system through its discount window, the Great Depression might have been avoided. (It is interesting to note that Bernanke, in the face of widespread economic fear, recently opened the discount window to banks, which is an interesting development, because he is known in academic circles as favoring inflation targeting.)

Perhaps Friedman's most salient point is that we forget the short history of mankind's relative affluence. He states, "Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery." In other words, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and freedom is a goal worth striving for.

I will leave you with an interesting passage that is relevant to the recent subprime mortgage mess in the markets and the lack of financial liquidity:

"The result [of the banks lending money and keeping only 15 to 20 cents of each dollar deposit] is that for every dollar of cash owned by banks, they owe several dollars of deposits. [Thus,] any widespread attempt on the part of depositors to 'get their money' must therefore mean a decline in the total amount of money unless there is some way in which additional cash can be created and some way for banks to get it. Otherwise, one bank, in trying to satisfy its depositors, will put pressure on other banks by calling loans or selling investments or withdrawing its deposits and these other banks in turn will put pressure on still others. This vicious cycle, if allowed to proceed, grows on itself as the attempt of banks to get cash forces down the prices of securities, renders banks insolvent that would otherwise been entirely sound, shakes the confidence of depositors, and starts the cycle over again."

It looks like Bernanke made the right decision, at least in the short term, by opening the discount window. If, however, he lowers interest rates in September, his reputation as an inflation targeter may not be deserved.

In any case, read Capitalism and Freedom. It's an incredible education to be had, and in just 202 pages. I recommend the 40th Anniversary edition, with the year 2002 introduction by Friedman.

Note: the picture above is of Mr. Friedman's son and myself at Santa Clara Law School.