Libertarian Party

Don't expect me to do anything McG. I quit/am in the process of quitting.

In the near future I expect to have very little to do with A2K except for technical work.

lol

Lemme guess. All the negative stuff goes in the "reading too much" category right?

Let me put this another way.

Civility is a fine ideal, but as you demonstrate people can take just about anything as a personal insult.

You decided to take a comment that was not directed at you as a "personal insult".

Personal insults are not permitted here, but that doesn't mean nobody can criticize anything just because some will inevitably take offense to it.

There's a difference between saying:

"Your position is absurd"

and

"You are an idiot"

Attacking positions, ideology, parties etc is part of intellectual exchange.

When peeple decide to take anything negative stated about positions they happen to share as an insult and paint it as an issue of civility they are undermining intellectual exchange because of their inordinate sensitivity.

You're not going to quit posting are you?

I suspect we may have a definitional problem arising here, Thomas. I am, by and large, talking about "libertarians" in the political sense: i.e. those persons in the US who identify either with the Libertarian Party or its principles. After all, the thread started out talking about the Libertarian Party.

Thomas wrote:

My point is that among the people most qualified to asses information costs and their consequences, the share of libertarians is much larger than in the general population. Your theory would seem to predict it is smaller, so I see this as pretty strong evidence against your position. But I admit it is evidence short of proof.

I wouldn't say that it's evidence short of proof, since I wouldn't call it evidence at all. What you've identified is, at best, an interesting bit of trivia. At worst, it is the result of a rather obvious pair of sampling errors.

Thomas wrote:

One possibility is idealism -- nobody says that incentives have to be pecuniary to be economically significant.

Quite true. Donors can be motivated not only by ideals but by prestige, honor, shame, envy, and faith. But when we're dealing with monetary transactions (even if the transaction involves donating the money), I think that pecuniary considerations are particularly relevant.

Thomas wrote:

I don't follow that. A charity that plays straight has an incentive to signal its willingness to do so to potential donors. One of those signals could be the generous disclosure of internal information, just like credit card owners do.

But why would the potential donors trust the information disclosed by the charity? After all, Enron showed its books to investors too. The only difference is that, in a libertarian economy, there would be no counterpart to the SEC.

Are we in sync now?

Let's get strictly logical for a moment. If you state: "All libertarians ignore information costs", and I show you one libertarian who doesn't ignore information costs, I have proved your statement wrong.

In reality, you have made a somewhat weaker claim, and I have showed you at least three libertarians who have won Nobel Prizes for doing the opposite of ignoring information costs. Because your claim was weaker, my response is only evidence, not a conclusive proof that your statement was wrong. But your answer that you wouldn't call it evidence at all seems rather disingenious to me.

I don't see the big difference. When I spend $500 on a new dishwasher, I'm willing to read the relevant copy of "Consumer Report" to make sure I get my choice right. So when I donate $500 to charity, why wouldn't I read the relevant copy of "Charity Report" to get the choice right? Both transactions matter about equally to me, judging by my willingness to spend the same amount of money on both. So why do you expect the hypothetical "Charity Report" magazine to be unprofitable when the real "Consumer Report" manifestly is profitable?

Why not? Indeed, why wouldn't there be several competing counterparts to the SEC? True, people wouldn't trust the charity. They would trust whatever private SEC equivalent they believe to be most trustworthy. By the way, in the process of doing a little research for a different thread, I discovered a rather primitive, but nevertheless real, private SEC for charities. It's called Charity Navigator, and I see no compelling reason why it couldn't grow into an SEC-substituting shape in a more libertarian world.

Delightful dialogue between Joe from Chicago & Thomas concerning libertarianism, the limits of free markets and government. Both viewpoints are stimulating and refreshing, -- though I like Joe's avatar much more than Thomas'.

I believe that in the areas you are disputing (if that is the right word) we are approaching the limits of what is practically knowable. I have learned through experience in managing organizations that life is a good deal more complex than our theories and models permit, and human beings, in pursuit of their self interests as they perceive them, a good deal more inventive than both the designers of organizations & government and the philosophers who attempt to model their behavior. Repeatedly I have encountered organizational structures, designed well to deal with salient operational factors, run down and corrupted by the accumulated evasions, and workarounds of people at all levels. Moreover there is usually as much that is foolish and risky in these evasions as that which contributes to the intended goal of the organization or corporation. The invisible hand does indeed operate in the sum of all these independent actions, but not enough to avoid trouble in particular instances. Given enough time, the inintended side effects will dominate. (My thumbrule now in taking over a new organization is - if it has been centralized for five years, decentralize it: if it has been decentralized for five years, centralize it.)

That may be the rub. We live and deal with particular lives and particular situations - not the ensemble averages of all such things. Politics is always about the particular.


.

In sum, I'll just say that your premises are questionable, and they certainly do not support your conclusion that libertarians (big L or little L) are, in general, better at assessing information costs than non-libertarians (of whatever variety).

The problem, as I have noted before, is that you would have no reason to trust the information in the "Charity Report" magazine. After all, there is no mechanism for verifying the information in the magazine, apart from the market mechanism that is supposed to drive out unreliable magazines and reward reliable ones.

Moreover, while the difference between a "good" dishwasher and a "bad" dishwasher is more susceptible to quantification (I can estimate a discounted value based on my definitions of "good" and "bad"), such quantification is inherently more problematic in terms of charitable contributions

As to the conclusion, the only conclusion I intended to reach is that being a libertarian doesn't necessarily reflect a failure to account for information costs. I understood you to have made this claim...

I agree this is a problem, and I agree that the market mechanism is imperfect. But the same problem exists if "Charity Report" is a government agency.

I hear the government watchdogs have done a pretty bad job on Enron, WorldCom, and California's electricity producers themselves. The difference is, a private Charity Report has to convince me that it is the most trustworthy watchdog for my purposes. Otherwise it won't get my business. But the SEC, the FERC, and all their friends have to convince neither me nor any other citizen that they'll do a good job at what we pay them to do. They simply put themselves in charge by virtue of being the government.

The option to put yourself in charge by decree, rather than persuading your customers you'll do a good job, is valuable for agencies without persuasive arguments going for them.

It is much less valuable for agencies who have such arguments. Therefore, I don't trust private agencies blindly, but I trust them more than government agencies. This is reason enough to reach a libertarian conclusion. I don't have to establish that the market solution works perfect, only that it can be reasonably expected to work better than the government solution.

I don't see how 'there is no way to calculate it' leads to 'I can't make a good decision about it'.

You can't calculate (most of) the benefits of your wife or girlfriend to you either, but that doesn't keep you from making competent decisions about the costs of getting a good one. (how many parties to attend to look around, how many candle light dinners to have before making your move, and all these other costs, pecuniar and non-pecuniar.) You would never demand that matches be made by government agencies, on the grounds that the benefits of a good match can't be quantified easily. Why do you think this line of argument is any better for other non-quantifiable decisions such as contributing to charity?

Again, I'm not a libertarian because I think voluntary coordination always works perfectly. I'm a libertarian because I think it works less bad than involuntary coordination by government -- with very few exceptions. These exceptions include national defense, law making, law enforcement, municipal utilites, and maybe the printing of money. The list is longer, but not much longer.

I believe that in the areas you are disputing (if that is the right word) we are approaching the limits of what is practically knowable. I have learned through experience in managing organizations that life is a good deal more complex than our theories and models permit, and human beings, in pursuit of their self interests as they perceive them, a good deal more inventive than both the designers of organizations & government and the philosophers who attempt to model their behavior.

Repeatedly I have encountered organizational structures, designed well to deal with salient operational factors, run down and corrupted by the accumulated evasions, and workarounds of people at all levels. Moreover there is usually as much that is foolish and risky in these evasions as that which contributes to the intended goal of the organization or corporation. The invisible hand does indeed operate in the sum of all these independent actions, but not enough to avoid trouble in particular instances. Given enough time, the inintended side effects will dominate. (My thumbrule now in taking over a new organization is - if it has been centralized for five years, decentralize it: if it has been decentralized for five years, centralize it.)

That may be the rub. We live and deal with particular lives and particular situations - not the ensemble averages of all such things. Politics is always about the particular.

Thomas wrote:

Again, I'm not a libertarian because I think voluntary coordination always works perfectly. I'm a libertarian because I think it works less bad than involuntary coordination by government -- with very few exceptions. These exceptions include national defense, law making, law enforcement, municipal utilites, and maybe the printing of money. The list is longer, but not much longer.

I think you need one other assumption in order to accept libertarianism: a belief in the inherent goodness and reasonableness of mankind in general.

I don't believe in the inherent goodness and reasonableness of mankind in general. I just recognize that government is nothing more than a bunch of humans itself. If the problem is that humans are often evil and stupid, I don't see how giving some humans coercive power over other humans contributes to a solution. The way to address human stupidity and evilness is checks and balances, not coercion. And I see many more and much better checks and balances within the marketplace and in voluntary associations than within the government.

I think your position depends on a worldview that implicitly treats governments like philosopher kings who act fundamentally smarter and better than private people.

But they are really self serving, bullying associations of humans who are just as evil and stupid as the humans in the private sector. I think libertarianism accounts for the nature of government better than competing ideologies.

I have noted your other points, but I suspect this one is the core of our disagreement.

What to do? A common dilemma. We simply place one grossly imperfect system (government) properly in opposition to another slightly imperfect one (markets). The virtue of the particular combination is not so much a result of the perfection of its parts, as it is the absence of many common defects between them. The price we pay is the limitation of some of the optimizations markets can produce. The benefit is a floor on the losses of market losers and, hopefully, the elimination of most of the chaotic excursions to which real markets can be subject. Like Thomas, I generally prefer market solutions to government ones if they can work.

Are you suggesting that a truly libertarian society would dispense with coercion? That, I submit, is absolutely inconceivable.

Thomas wrote:

I think your position depends on a worldview that implicitly treats governments like philosopher kings who act fundamentally smarter and better than private people.

As with your previous assumptions about my position, you are wrong.

The common assumption is that free market capitalism cannot exist without democracy, and democracy cannot exist without free market capitalism.

And if libertarians think they can create a democratic society on the basis of free market capitalism, they are engaged in a futile effort to square the circle.

Not quite. I am suggesting that an ideal libertarian society would dispense with [associations of] people who can legitimately excercise higher amounts of coercion than other [associations of] people can. David Friedman, a professor of law and economics at Santa Clara University, has laid out how such a society could be stable, and gives good reasons why he expects it to be attractive. Unlike him, I don't believe this ideal can be achieved. I am not fanatic about trying to achieve full-fledged anarcho-capitalism. But Friedman is not a hack, and I expect that we can, and ought to, come much closer to this ideal than we currently are.

In this case, I would love to be corrected. Where do you see the boundary between the activities best organized by governments and those best organized by voluntary associations? And based on which assumptions do you see it there?

But 19th century history seems to teach us that you can create a democratic society based on dramatically smaller governments -- at least three to five times smaller, if measured by the share of GDP spent by governments. Only a small minority of Libertarians believe the privatization of government can go much further. The minority is even smaller compared to the number of (small-l) libertarians.

So you prefer private economic coercion over public governmental coercion?

It really comes down to the society's values. Where equality is deemed more important than money, government should step in.

Yes, we can go back to 19th century-type governments, as long as we're willing to accept 19th century-type rights, services, and protections.