O Seasteaders!

The tetrahedral floating city of Triton, designed by Buckminster Fuller for Tokyo BayAdmittedly, I subscribe to the Seasteading Institute newsletter. Patri Friedman is an interesting dude, to say the least, and I am a futurist. The Seasteading Institute has some of the brightest minds in the world behind its cause. Today's newsletter read thusly: 

Greetings Friends of The Seasteading Institute,

As protests spread across the USA, Congress approval ratings hit all-time lows, and the European Union contemplates dissolution, interest in seasteading is higher than ever. There's never been a greater need for an alternative to today's inadequate governments.

It's unfortunate that such gloomy news fuels our project, but the future is bright. The whole world will benefit when seasteading societies pioneer new forms of government, new policies, and new institutions. It is finally time for humanity to discover what government always should have been - innovative, effective, responsive, diverse, and benevolent.

With your support, The Seasteading Institute is enabling the next generation of government technology. We thank you, and thank the entrepreneurs, investors, volunteers and others who work on this cause all over the world.

Sincerely,

Michael Keenan

President of The Seasteading Institute

They've kind of got a point, don't they? Has government ever been less effective? And less reviled? And has an effective alternative ever been less quioxotic than it is now, in the age of information technologies and mass cooperation?

Rejoinders to a New Political Dialectic

I posted some rejoinders to my original piece "A New Political Dialectic" in the comments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  I have reproduced them below:

1.  A possible litmus test for what constitutes “positivist New Atheism” is that they tend to make the argument that religion is unfalsifiable as if that is an indictment of religion.  Really, religion does not hold itself to the same standards as science (why should it?).  The two work best when kept separate.  Just like I can be a scientist who enjoys art or a scientist who enjoys nature, I can also be a scientist who enjoys religion.

Again, this doesn’t speak to the question of whether or not God exists, (which I made explicit above) and I was hoping not to get into that since it’s been hashed out billions of times and no one has made any progress.  But, since people seem to want to talk about that, from my own personal journey, I know that “Does God exist?” is a difficult question to define precisely.  I’ve settled into a sort of noncognitivist/Spinozan outlook on the divine that places me closer to both a Sufi mystic and a Nietzschean atheist than one who believes I’ve been “saved” by a personal Jesus or the group of people that make vast amounts of money antagonizing believers in personal Jesuses (Jesi?) because their beliefs are not based on the scientific method.

2.  To be honest, I’m really disappointed that comments tended towards an old-fashioned Internet atheist debate, but I fault myself for putting so much about Harris and his positivist atheism at the beginning of the piece.  Burt Likko’s comment is one here that actually engages my argument, which is that political debate should be driven by a dialectical relationship between libertarianism and socialism; I was hoping that more comments would address this contention.

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A New Political Dialectic

<cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

Jackson Lears has a riveting piece up at the Nation which soundly routs the new parapositivism taking the popular and newspaper science cultures by storm.  The piece is called "Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris".  It's a takedown of Harris couched within a takedown of the New Atheist conceptual framework couched within a takedown of a positivism which oversteps its bounds.  Freddie deBoer recently praised the piece:

I think that absolutely everyone should read this profoundly necessary evisceration of Sam Harris, the Moe of the New Atheist Three Stooges, written by Jackson Lears and published by the Nation. It may be my favorite essay published this year; it goes well beyond the usual stalking horses of New Atheism and speaks to some of the fundamental analytical and ethical issues confronting our species, particularly when it comes to progress and the limits of knowledge. Read the whole thing, seriously.

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Modern Visionaries Part I - Daniel Quinn

But such simple answers aren’t enough to reassure the people of your culture nowadays. Everyone is looking down, and it is obvious that the ground is rushing up towards, you-and rushing up faster every year. - Daniel QuinnIn a world where a pedigree in academia has been the de facto standard of acceptance for information provided to the world, a few remarkable un-credentialed people have come to the forefront of our social collective to provide earthshaking philosophical, technological, sociological, and just plain humanistic revelations that could very well have a major impact on the future of mankind.  

These people often come from backgrounds that have nothing to do with the insights and predictions for which they are well-known.  These people have been incredibly accurate in their predictions and in the application of many of their theories. They have been disregarded by their academic counterparts and brushed off as fantastical by much of academia.

One of these people is Daniel Quinn.  For this post, I would like to investigate the question: Is Daniel Quinn a sociologist?

Sociology is defined as:

the science of society, social institutions, and social relationships; specifically: the systematic study of the development, structure, interaction, and collective behavior of organized groups of human beings.

A person who is in the academic discipline of sociology is referred to as a sociologist or often a “social scientist”. Princeton’s online definition search provides this description for a social scientist:

someone who is an expert in the study of human society and its personal relationships.  

Concerning the non-academic Daniel Quinn, digging deeper into what really defines a sociologist becomes a little more complex than a simple yes or no answer

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On Talking Past Each Other and World Trade

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen has been hosting a labor roundtable, which has emerged as a combination of spontaneity and directed planning in the way that the blogosphere especially tends to foster.  Participants have included many of my favorite bloggers: E.D. Kain, Jason Kuznicki, Kevin Carson, Mark Thompson, Freddie deBoer, and James Hanley, among others.  At stake is the entire system of American capitalism.  For anyone with a spare afternoon or so, it's worth visiting that London coffee house.

I’ve read through all the articles and comment threads in this labor roundtable thus far, and it seems to me that there are three general issues which have been largely or systematically taken for granted or underserved in the discussion.  I've brought these issues up in comments, but few people seem interested in exploring them, which (being a libertarian) I can't really fault anyone for.  These issues are: (1) libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement; (2) distortions in the ways we usually measure wealth that confuse the debate; and (3) the role of American corporations in globalization.

As for topic (1) - libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement - no one has acknowledged that libertarianism more or less grew out of the union movement in Europe as that faction which proposed a return to the principles of classical liberalism (Adam Smith) in opposition to the coercively entrenched interests of state/capital at the turn of the twentieth century.  Many libertarians shifted focus after the New Deal because the Roosevelt government seemed to represent a greater threat to liberty at that time than corporate regulatory capture; but the base of the movement remains as principally an opposition to the pernicious cartel of that two-headed monster of the wealthy and powerful.

If libertarianism has been effectively subverted to corporate interests in the United States, which is the contention of Noam Chomsky and other anarchist theorists whose intellectual roots lie in the Gilded Age milieu of thoughtful bourgeois discussion, this must be because either: (a) self-described libertarian institutions have been captured by corporate special interests; (b) echoes of the New Deal excesses of central government still seem like a more serious threat to liberty than corporate power; or (c) having strong, collective labor counterbalance strong, unitary capital is no longer considered a necessary evil (due perhaps to the existence of a strong middle class).

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Cutting the Gordian Knot Between Socialism and Libertarianism

Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot

It is popular within the libertarian blogosphere to label pejoratively any recommendation of the use of state power to achieve liberty as "statist", as if any policy suggesting the use of the state apparatus to solve problems of insufficient liberty is objectively evil and destined to lead us all down the road to totalitarianism.  Not only is this tantamount to mindless orthodox hackery, but it is also quite absurd.  

In a liberal regime, state power is best understood as what ultimately (I use this term in the sense of "finally" and not "fundamentally" as I generally support vigorous primary social restraint on undesirable behavior, i.e. shunning or boycotting) prevents the war of all against all.  Indeed, the present scope of state power can be best understood as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.  In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

(In a democracy) no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness. 

Of course, state power has tended to excess, and it must be controlled by the collective balancing forces of a bottom-up, democratically-conscious populace (which explains why democracy-building seldom works) and liberal, private institutions, but there are elements of state power which all citizens can (and have) agreed are for the best at least in principle if not in practice: proscriptions against murder for instance, the national defense, the police, even anti-trust regulations to prevent private institutions from subtracting from the general aggregate welfare (or challenging the government power monopoly).

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Synthesis of Austrian and Distributist Economics via Information Science

From Timothy B. Lee's September Cato Unbound essay on Hayek:

Hayek’s point is not that the price system is superior to other decentralized social institutions. Rather, he’s pointing out that all successful large-scale cooperative efforts involve standardization, which necessarily means discarding some potentially relevant knowledge in the process of codifying other knowledge deemed more important. The important question is not whether to standardize in this way, it’s deciding how, and how much to standardize. Too little standardization means missing out on opportunities for economies of scale and the division of labor. Too much standardization means discarding information that consumers actually care about, leading to the infamous rubber tomatoes of standardized agriculture. And the wrong kind of standardization—discarding important information while preserving trivial information—is doomed regardless of the degree of standardization.

What makes decentralized economic institutions powerful isn’t standardization but the possibility for competition among alternative standardization schemes. Rubber tomatoes create an entrepreneurial opportunity for firms to establish a more exacting tomato standard and deliver tastier tomatoes to their customers. In real markets, you see competition not only among individual firms but among groups of firms using alternative standards. Markets gradually converge on the standards that are best at transmitting relevant information and discarding irrelevant information. In contrast, when standards are set by the state, or by private firms who have been granted de facto standard-setting authority by government regulations, there is no opportunity for this kind of decentralized experimentation. Then the market is likely to be permanently stunted by the use of a standard that does a poor job of transmitting the information consumers care about most. (emphasis mine)

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A Last Word on Liberaltarianism

The debate on "liberaltarianism" all over the Internets has made me realize what really is the main thing separating libertarians such as myself from Joe and his progressive liberal brethren.  A comment from Katherine at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen summarizes how most liberals feel about libertarians, a perception likely to proliferate as libertarianism faces increasingly intense scrutiny from the mainstream, liberal press and the liberal cheap seats crowd starts hurling D batteries in our direction:

I don’t think libertarians believe people exist to serve institutions (that’s more like something libertarians would accuse their opponents of believing). However, they do seem to believe that a certain way of doing things (minimal regulation, minimal government action, maximally free markets) is ideal regardless of whether it makes people better or worse off materially.

In short, liberals and left-wingers tend to see improving people’s lives as the goal and try to find policies that will achieve that, while libertarians have an ideological goal that, for them, takes precedence over whether people are actually better off.

NO!  For the last time NO!  My response to Katherine:

In my opinion, the reason why this portrayal doesn’t really hold up is that liberals never seem to perceive the full extent of the consequences of their direct, goal-oriented policy. A policy may succeed in lowering a particular measured unemployment rate from 10% to 9%, but what is not discussed is how that policy did so. It may be that in some cases, the sum total of energy redirected to a particular cause outweighs the merits of that particular cause. Unanticipated negative effects of policy are always a strong possibility. A liberalism unconstrained by the knowledge that error rates exist is dangerous.

I realized Joe and I have been going back and forth on this topic for as long as we've had the blog.

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A Response to Jane Mayer

typical libertariansI read all of Jane Mayer's New Yorker epic takedown of the American libertarian movement.  "Covert Operations: the Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama" is about the Brothers Koch a.k.a. "The Kochtopus", two - or four, depending on which brothers one considers part of the Koch inner-circle - shady oil billionaires behind the curtain of the libertarian movement from the Cato Institute to the Tea Party.  It's creepy to think there's one devious, eight-armed creature pulling all those levers of influence, like "The Company" from Prison Break.  But Mayer's propagandistic assessment is underhanded, full of political bias, and based on fallacious logic.  And before you suspect me also of being on the Koch's payroll (I live below the poverty line.), I go on the record as saying that I think we should use as little fossil fuels as possible, that big business is obstructionist and has unduly influenced policy-making in Washington, and that oil is the devil.

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"The Million Moron March"

Image courtesy of Mario PiperniRiffing off John Batchelor's column ("The Festival of Fools") and John Avlon's column ("I Have a Nightmare"), both for the Daily Beast, I too came up with a pithy title for this post on the most recent Tea Party event (because that's really what Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" march on the Washington Mall is.  The demographic is exactly the same.)  I generally agree with Batchelor that this particular march is a non-issue:

The celebrity Glenn Beck has organized a festive and apparently harmless public event for the Washington Mall that he calls “Restoring Honor.” This theme is so deeply bland that it invites us partisans to look for inner meaning, such as the fact that August 28 is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s revolutionary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or such as Beck’s Fox News Channel seeking a low-budget reality show to sell for the dog days of summer programming.

The trick here may be that Beck’s event, which will feature the celebrity Sarah Palin, is not about anything at all. It is a farce of an event in the way the bookish Karl Marx meant it, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

However, I disagree with Batchelor's contention that we should take Beck's idiocy at face value: and I have a few general qualifications for the "Tea Baggers are morons" crowd.

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Thowing Free Market Elbows

Free Parking as Always! - by netanIn a column in this week's New York Times, Tyler Cowen, perhaps the internet's most erudite libertarian, endorsed the "free parking isn't free" theory that has gained a lot of traction in liberal circles.  Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking, lays out the case that minimum parking restrictions are actually a subsidy for drivers that makes biking and walking more difficult and thus: "Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist."  Cowen's solution is twofold, remove minimum parking requirements from zoning laws and, whenever appropriate, charge for parking.  Seems like a slam dunk for libertarians: remove market distorting government requirements and charge a free-market price for a service that has costly societal side-effects.  Naturally, Randall O'Toole at Cato Online immediately posted a rebuttal.  Why can't libertarians get behind a good idea that should have come from their neck of the policy woods?

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It's Perfect Because it Doesn't Exist

by Image EditorCarr asks "Why Should I have to defend Libertarianism?"  Well, because the leading libertarian politician in the country just brought up some ideas that most of the country find pretty abhorrent.  If libertarians want to be taken seriously, then they need to be willing to defend their controversial ideas, not just their good ones (end the drug war already!).  

It's notable that Carr spends most of his post on lead in toys, and completely avoids talking about the issue at hand, the Civil Rights Act.  Lead in toys is a red herring that distracts from the harder to swallow parts of libertarianism.  I can find you lots of examples of areas where libertarianism works, probably even a few where conservatism worked and plenty more where liberalism did the trick, including the Civil Rights Act.  That's how a big messy country works, no one has a monopoly on winning an argument or two.  The problem with Rand Paul, and every doctrinaire ideologue of any stripe, is the insistence that his philosophy is right all of the time.  Because libertarians never get to run the country (or really any country) and make lots of compromises, they have the least counterexamples.

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Why Should I Have to Defend Libertarianism?

This symbol of libertarianism represents an entirely consequentialist morality.Blogging is the rock 'n' roll of the information generation, and Ezra Klein is its Bob Dylan.  In a May 21st post, Three types of arguments over policy, Klein soberly reins in and classifies the noise of a drunken and whirling Washington:

Washington is home to two -- actually, three -- different types of policy debates. The first one, the one that we're used to, asks whether a policy will work. That's the one where I say health-care reform is likely to achieve its goals and cut costs and David Brooks says it won't do either thing and we both try to marshal empirical evidence in service of our points. In theory, whoever's evidence is stronger wins.

Then there's the second one, which is the one that (Rand) Paul is giving voice to, which asks whether a policy is philosophically acceptable. Paul isn't arguing that the Civil Rights Act was ineffective at desegregating Woolworth lunch counters. He's arguing that government shouldn't tell private businesses what to do, and when they do, that's not legitimate even if it achieves its stated policy goals. Or, more prosaically, a Republican argues that we shouldn't have more government involvement in health care because government involvement is bad, and that's true whether or not it's proved efficient in other countries. In theory, whoever's philosophy is more appealing wins.

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A Victory for Heterodoxy in Kentucky

Image courtesy of dailypaul.comRand Paul, son of Texas Congressman, Ron Paul, is the very probable winner of the Kentucky Republican Primary Senate election, and liberals should be thrilled.  Of course, the Media has latched onto this thing and milked it for all the ratings its worth.  The imposed narrative structure is that Paul has been elevated by the "Tea Partiers" (or "Tea Baggers", depending on which party the reader hacks for.), and of course Paul has run with it:

I have a message, a message from the Tea Party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: we've come to take our government back.  We've come to take the government back from the special interests who think that our government is their own personal ATM..

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Going There - Part II

An intractable disagreement? A friend of mine observed that the abortion debate mirrors the fundamental differences between the left and the right.  In his words: "the left is often vague for fear of being too restrictive, or to provide flexibility. the right seems more comfortable with absolutes. left = life begins at some point...not sure when to exactly define it, but the mother's health and choice in the matter is important. the right = life begins at conception...don't kill babies."  I agree with his analysis of the issue.  

What we call the "left" and the "right" have very different positions on abortion, but even more revealing is the fact that we pay attention to these positions and discuss the issue of abortion in terms of these positions, which each define themselves as victims of the evil actions of the other side.

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