Irish Liberty Forum

Ever taken a statistics course? Most stats lecturers devote a special moment to highlight how statistics can be misused. For instance my tutor once showed us a graph like this:

Coincidence?

We can clearly see that there’s a correlation between ice-cream consumption and deaths by drowning. But what can we infer from this? It’s possible that eating ice-cream causes drowning (due to stomach cramps while swimming). It’s also vaguely possible that drowning deaths cause increased ice-cream consumption (mourning relatives might go for an ice-cream to cheer themselves up). However the most sensible explanation is that both ice-cream consumption and drowning deaths increase is due to another factor: the weather. People eat more ice-cream and go swimming more often in summer.

However, such a straightforward explanation is hardly ever seen in economics. The empirical approach often remains unquestioned. Consider this syllogism: in the past, taxes were low. Today, taxes are high. We were poor in the past but now we are rich. Therefore, increasing taxes causes prosperity. Such a view is completely ridiculous, yet almost completely unquestioned.

Or take the suggestion in the graph below. Income inequality sharply increased before two major recessions. Therefore it’s fair to assume that one causes the other.

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Anyone who wants a free copy of Robert Nozick’s philosophical work can get a pdf copy here.

Don’t forget the comma before the “and” in the title!

Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose was one of the first books on libertarian political philosophy and market economics that I ever read. It’s an excellent chronicling of the economic and social decline of the United States (which has unsurprisingly run parallel to its embracing of ever more socialist policies).  Here are two videos doing the rounds at the moment that go into some basic Friedmanite concepts.

There are a number of ways to make blog traffic statistics more impressive. On a slow day I often logout of my WordPress account, access the Liberty Forum homepage and click “refresh” over and over again to beef up the numbers.

I didn’t have to do that today. My post Trolling For Statism: How Not To Argue With Libertarians was featured on strike-the-root.com. Also featured on that excellent website were the posts Which Party Causes All The Wars? and False and True Connections Between Libertarianism and Conservatism.

I’m also happy to announce that the Irish Liberty Forum passed 20,000 blog views today. Keep it up guys!

I can’t be everywhere at once. This means I can’t refute every fallacious argument out there in cyberspace. But once in a while, one person manages to collate several spurious arguments and create a video out of them. Consider amhemsley‘s “Don’t want to pay taxes? Then stop stealing from those who do”.

The video is little more than a tissue of trite arguments; tax resisters are thieves, the government provides us with services, if you don’t love it you can leave it, and so on. Here’s a brief discussion of why the guy in the video is wrong.

State = Society?

One common tool used by the anti-capitalists is the equivocation of fairly distinct and unambiguous terms. State, society, law, order, protection and peace are all mixed together. In amhemsley’s mind, anyone who is against the State is against society, and subsequetly for lawlessness, poverty and chaos.

It is important to challenge this simpleminded view. Stateless socities have existed in the past, even for centuries. Parallel to the history of State-made legislation runs the history of private law provision. Society is nothing more than the lose web of interaction among people who share a common heritage. The State is a territorial monopolist of lawmaking and taxation. Society typically uses ostracism and exclusion to punish those who engage in unlawful or distasteful activities. But society will find it difficult to legitimately use force against you, which is precisely the point of the State.

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A post at Peter Rollins unmasks Batman as the ultimate capitalist superhero. I disagree with the heart and soul of his thesis, namely that

Batman is unable to see that the subjective crime he fights on a nightly basis is the direct manifestation of the objective crime he perpetrates on a daily basis. The street crime is the explosion of violence that results from greedy, large industries obsessed with the increase of abstract capital at the expense of all else.

I consider the exact opposite to be the case. Bruce Wayne perpitrates no crime by day; he violates no property rights nor does he have a State-granted monopoly over his industry. His workers and customers are free to associate with other businesses. From this it follows that Wayne can only satisfy his greed from creating products that satisfy his consumers needs and by offering his workers decent working conditions.

This is precisely the reason that socities built on private property ownership were historically regarded as the most altruistic and charitable. In addition to providing really cheap kerosene to Americans, John D. Rockefeller  was a prominant philanthropist. Socities where forced altruism is the norm result in cultures of entitlement, violence and contempt for property and fellow humans.

There is however one obvious reason why Batman is the ultimate capitalist superhero.  The buraucrats of Gotham city preside over a monopolised judicial and domestic defence system. All monopolies are bad from the point of view of the consumer as such arrangements will tend to raise the price and diminish the quality of the service provided. Gotham is constantly under threat from thieves, drug-dealers and murders. However Gotham’s residents cannot choose an alternative defence provider, nor will they receive compensation from the city if it fails in its defensive duty.

Quite simply, Batman is the challenger to Gotham city’s self-sanctioned monopoly over justice and protection from coercion.  He circumvents the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence and acts as a privately-provided “public” good as an alternative to a poorly maintained, currupt State-run monopoly.

Perhaps this is why Batman is Ron Paul’s favourite superhero!

I sometimes feel like I’m living in some kind of bizarro world. Eichengreen and O’Rourke have done an excellent job at tracking the Second Great Depression. Here is the link for those of you who’ve been living in a cave. After showing us excellent graphs of falling industrial output, they graph the overall policy responses of governments and central banks in 1929 and 2009. Take a look:

Interest rates: how low can you go?

Budget deficits (7 country average)

Now the conclusion to draw from this surely is: “world governments and central banks are doing exactly the same as what they were doing in 1929 only on a bigger scale”. And yet, this is not the conclusion that E-O draw: “The good news, of course, is that the policy response is very different.” Bizarre, no?

Hat tip to feargach for linking to this piece. Apparently it’s a guide on how to argue using only logical fallacy.

But in all seriousness, let’s take a look at a few points the author makes against libertarianism:

The first fallacy [of libertarianism] is one I call the Fallacy of Revolution. It can be found in any movement that seeks to radically revise the underpinnings of society, whether by abolishing money, imposing a theocracy, eliminating undesirable ethnic groups, repealing all law, organizing everyone’s diet according to principles of macrobiotics, or whatever other secret of a perfect society any group comes up with… The fallacy can be expressed more or less as follows:

By making these radical changes, we are removing the root cause of all the failures and evils of society as it presently stands. This will eliminate all of the existing problems, and since we have no knowledge of what new problems might arise, we can assume there will be none. Everything will work right, because there are no foreseeable things that can go wrong.

Let’s set aside the association of libertarianism with communism, nihilism and ethnic cleansing for the moment. Does this carry any weight? Yes, and no. While a libertarian might claim that removing the root cause of many problems [government] will lead to overall betterment, it is a massive non sequitor to suggest that everything will work out right, and a perfect society will be achieved. I know of few libertarians who reason this way. A libertarian might point to a government price control as the cause of a shortage of good x, but by no means will the removal of the price control lead to a utopian society where everyone can possess good x.

The author continues:

The second fallacy is one that I personally refer to as the Libertarian Fallacy…It can be expressed as the idea that freedom is measured by absence of laws.  Another way of stating it is that only the government can restrict your rights.  (Some Libertarians strongly support this wording, saying that a law removes or restricts your rights, but a private entity can only infringe on your rights without changing them.)  To me, this is an artificial double standard, which labels a restraint on your freedom by one outfit in a completely different way than the same restraint by a different outfit, because one has the label of “government” and the other does not.  Indeed, much of the fabric of reasoning in Libertarianism is based on presuming that the government is uniquely unlike any other entity, and therefore must be judged by entirely different standards from how anything else is appraised.

Firstly, a government is a unique entity. It is at the helm of a territorial monopoly of coercion and ultimate-decision making. It unilaterally decides the price of its “services”. It is the final arbiter in all disputes, including disputes involving itself. You cannot legitimately refuse to participate in “trade” with the government. The libertarians appear to have a point. No private entity has these qualities, despite the Public Choice School’s attempts to portray the government as just another market firm.

It is also incorrect to suggest that libertarians claim that only governments can restrict your rights. After all, libertarians acknowledge the existence of private murderers, rapists, thieves and con-artists too. However these private actors don’t claim to be legitimate thieves, murderers and con-artists, whereas the government maintains the status of the sole legitimate rights violator, hence libertarians focus fervently on its removal.

Finally,

To me, the question is how much power others have over you and how constrained your choice of actions is, not whether the constraint is by public action rather than private action.  In the viewpoint of those who hold this fallacy, what matters is how free you are on paper, not how free you are in what choices are actually open to you right now in real life.  According to this view, a destitute person with no public support is more free than one who gets some kind of pension or welfare, despite the fact that the latter is the one who can do many things that are closed off to the former.

The above paragraph appears to be putting words in the mouths of all libertarians. For example, I doubt that a libertarian would claim that one person can be more free than another. Both the destitute person and the welfare recipient can be free [absent of institutionalised coercion], or they could both be unfree. There’s no way of telling with the information given.

I’ve encountered the “free to starve” argument before, so I think I’ll leave the final knockdown blow to Rothbard:

…the “freedom-to-starve” argument rests on a basic confusion of “freedom” with “abundance of exchangeable goods.” The two must be kept conceptually distinct. Freedom is meaning fully definable only as absence of interpersonal restrictions. Robinson Crusoe on the desert island is absolutely free, since there is no other person to hinder him. But he is not necessarily living an abundant life; indeed, he is likely to be constantly on the verge of starvation. Whether or not man lives at the level of poverty or abundance depends upon the success that he and his ancestors have had in grappling with nature and in transforming naturally given resources into capital goods and consumers’ goods. The two problems, therefore, are logically separate. Crusoe is absolutely free, yet starving, while it is certainly possible, though not likely, for a given person at a given instant to be a slave while being kept in riches by his master.

This goes to show that we can assume that all critiques of libertarianism are a priori strawmen.

Here is Joe Salerno’s excellent summary of the Economic Calculation Debate.

The sniping remarks about the utopian socialists are pure gold. Salerno also mentions Charles Fourier, the man who argued that not only would socialism be more productive than capitalism but that under socialism:

• the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean
• the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade
• the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although “these are approximate estimates”

The reality turns out to be very different.

The first 10 people to click this link win a pdf of David Friedman’s “The Machinery of Freedom”.

Those who missed out can find a copy here.