Tyler Cowen provides a nice illustration of the Stockholm Syndrome in this post that points out that social democracy is actually just great after all: “We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government.”
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/6380/actually-my-captors-are-very-kind-and-wonderful/
Actually, my captors are very kind and wonderful
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Bryan Caplan provides a great response:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/03/worst_advice_to.html
Lets look at recent threats to liberty around the world and in the USA in particular:
1. Loss of habeus corpus. Hardly a new issue.
2. Giving the president the ability to wage unchecked war. Not new.
3. Terrorism. VERY OLD.. And hardly ever successful unless the terrorized folks react violently against innocent other people.
4. New entitlement programs aka Prescription Drugs for Seniors.
5. Stupid regulations like Sarbanes Oxley.
Geeze these all look like old problems. I guess Liberterians should just quit complaining about these and learn to live with them.
And I guess that after we accepte 1 to 5 above then we should not bother about other new threats to liberty like fighting nuclear proliferation and global warming.
Tyler Cowen is a bit clueless, check out this post on the gold standard:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/03/should_we_retur.html
Tyler Cowen stated: “We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government.”
While I realize that Mr. Cowen makes the distinction between positive and negative liberty, still what Mises said is fundamentally true: “Government is the negation of liberty.” I do not understand how bigger government can lead to more positive liberty. I would ague that the beneficial developments cited by Mr. Cowen have occurred despite the growth of government; they were not caused by an increase in the size and scope of government.
And it seems that a litmus test for left-leaning “libertarians”, or do I mean libertines, is human caused global warming. This is not at all surprising.
Dennis,
You will have more government granted freedom whether you want it or not. Don’t defy us!
A bigger dog can feed more fleas!
capital accumulation means that we can have more stolen from us and wasted on unproductive use without starving in the streets.
In poorer countries, govts that try to be as big as the US govt. destroy the economy and cause serious hardship. (Zimbabwe, Venezuela…)
Ah, what an underwhelming wonderful appeal to mediocrity.
“So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Rev 3:16
I’ve always enjoyed laughing at Cowen. I think he smells some lucrative personal entitlements to come under socialist totalitarianism.
I say give ‘em enough rope.
Vanming, I’m sure you meant to say- “Sell ‘em enough rope”.
The essay in question, is nothing more than an unsuccessful (I hope) attempt to made Libertarianism compatible with the current events in the World. The truth is, that “If it walks like a goose, talks like a goose, looks like a goose…”, I know all of you my libertarian friends can complete that sentence on your own (without any government help)
.
Tyler Cowen said, that back in the ’70 the US was a wreck. Probable hi is right on that, but don’t forget that wreckage is a relative point. Today there is a wreck in the US, the wreck of the family, the wreck of the community, the wreck of morality, etc., and there is a never experienced gathering of secularist on the one side and religious extremist at the other side resulting in unnecessary and unprecedented divide in our society. At the the end, if we consider the current state of the human knowledge and our advances in technology, I am not as sure as Cowen is, that the US isn’t a wreck today at least as it was in the ’70.
The fundamentals of classical liberalism and libertarian thought is liberty, and liberty has only one definition, there is no positive and negative liberty, that is a nonsense. And everything we libertarians ever was, what we are and what we ever will be, is deeply rooted in the philosophy of liberty, and no part of this fundamentals, by the way, we owes to the giants of human history as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Ludwig von Mises and all the rest of them, would ever be able to make any kind of compromise between liberty and power.
Tyler Cowen must understand, that no matter how catchy his words are for the unexperienced young and not well formed libertarians, hi can never ever compromise the fundamentals of liberty, and we must understand, that one essay can’t and must not change millions and millions of pages of liberty inspired literature, we are very fortunate to have in our libraries.
I wish to thank to the authors of those magnificent writings (wherever they are), and I hope all libertarians (sorry for this collectivist concept) will do the same. So enjoy every line of that astonishing corpus of great literature, and don’t let your faith be disturbed or questioned by one little uninspired and quickly fading essay.
Regarding Cowen’s use of the concept of positive vs. negative liberty:
I have only quite recently caught on to the ideas of classical liberalism so I probably lack the conceptual background some others here have but while I do find Cowen’s thesis disturbing I am caught in a conundrum here.
I have never been able to see the real division between negative liberty (i.e. freedom from coercion) vs. positive liberty (freedom to achieve certain goals).
Unfortunately, despite my libertarian leanings, there is one argument that I haven’t been able to counter yet that makes me come down on the side of positive liberty:
Freedom from coercion is only possibly if provided for by the state, that is if the state doesn’t have the monopoly of force there would be anarchy (which, if you have a realistic picture of human nature, is NOT a good thing) and in due course authoritarianism.
So, if already the very core of negative liberty is actually something that requires the state to intervene, on what basis do we draw the line at the state providing security, why should it not also provide education or health care?
Doesn’t this mean that the concept of positive liberty is the universal one because there is no liberty in and of itself which is not provided and secured by someone?
I don’t want to get into a dispute over whatever differences exist with Cowen WRT libertarian in-fighting–got no dog in that fight and, besides, am convinced that the dogs don’t even know what they’re fighting about.
You guys who want gold back are right. But Tyler’s right, too, and both “sides” are, ultimately wrong: neither has the capacity for durability and stability (and I don’t mean of purchasing power). A fiat regime will produce endless fluctuations of boom and bust, no matter how carefully “managed” (and the production of the boom phase is the object of the management in the first place). But gold’s no better–for the minor reason that everyone can see that good paper (and even good digital entries) is more convenient than gold (no matter how much you like “heavy metal”) and for the major reason that it eventually ends up in a fiat regime such as we see now everywhere. The question is: “Is that all there is?”
I believe I have the solution to that problem–in the form of a regime (or “system,” if you like that word better) that should prove as satisfactory and as durable as is possible for humans to attain. For various reasons of my own, I choose not to expose my ideas at the moment but intend to do so at some–hopefully, not too long–time in the future. In the past, I’ve invited posters here to provide their names and e-mail addresses to me at gene.berman@verizon.net–to be on a list for discussion when I’m ready; at this time, I’ll merely repeat the offer for those who haven’t already responded: my list’s only about a dozen names so far.
What I’ll guarantee is, firstly, that my ideas are as novel as possible: that you’ve never heard anything like it before–anywhere. And, secondly, that it’s so absolutely simple that you’ll find yourself wondering why YOU never thought of it.
And, lastly, it’s so doctrinally Misesian and fundamentally libertarian that it’s got the
potential to unite virtually everyone with an ounce of praxeological comprehension.
Florian,
I disagree. The state’s monopoly is entirely dependent on the acquiescence of the population. In other words it only works because most people agree with it (in as much as they view security as a necessary good.). Given this state of affairs, why would private(non-monopolistic)security services work at least as well if not better?
In the current situation the population has little or no say as to what laws are enforced upon them. The result is an ever growing body of laws bringing ever increasing areas of human interaction under violent control. Liberty loses
In a market setting, folks would have complete choice and the firms that best enforce only the laws needed for peaceful interaction would be the most successful. Liberty wins.
Florian, I would recommend this chapter from Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty, which deals with positive and negative liberty:
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/seven.asp
The first half of the chapter discusses voluntary exchange, but the latter half addresses the question of what freedom means (and distinguishes between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’), and shows how only freedom and liberty taken in the negative sense can be made universal.
In my own opinion, Mr. Cowen won’t be known as a great libertarian thinker in 40 years, although it seems to me that he thinks of himself as a bit of a trailblazer. Libertarians will still be principled in 40 years, Mr. Cowen will be some version of a political moderate, and there will be a new opinion-writer that will have taken Mr. Cowen’s current role from him: trying to convince the libertarians once again that their radicalism was all fine and good 40 years ago, but doesn’t apply now in the 2050′s. . .
Dan
Thanks, I will take a a look.
rob:
As I said, I probably still have a lot of reading to do in that respect, but I just can’t see how private law enforcement or security services let alone non-monopolistic courts could avoid the inevitable move to a darwinian system of survival of the strongest and/or richest.
Yes, there are elements of that in our current system already, but I do not want them to become even worse.
And if someone wants to argue that wealth should entitle you to “better” protection or “better” laws than the poor have then I am afraid we have no common ground left to argue on – I find this idea an abomination.
Florian, a few points on your “abomination”:
In what other contexts would you consider it an abomination that you get what you pay for? Is it abominable that the rich have better food than the poor? Then why so for protection?
The rich, in fact, “need” more protection than the poor, and given the choice, would spend not only more money, but also a higher proportion of their money, on protection. Why? Because they have lots of stuff to protect, and people want to get it from them. Who would prefer to rob the poor given the choice? The rich are more attractive targets.
Protection is not a good in its own category, it is simply an economic good like any other. The only reason we tend to see it otherwise is because we have accepted that the state should provide it, and we believe that those things provided by the state should be provided equally. Reduce it to a smaller level. Suppose I am being attacked, and you are nearby. Have I a right to demand your help? I’m not talking about a moral claim to your help, which I might have – I’m talking about me using force against you to force you to help me. Right or wrong? If it’s wrong, why is state provision of protection ok? If it’s right, why isn’t use of force against you to force you to give me your cd player?
I may have been imprecise in my terminology. “Protection” is something you can buy, certainly. If you are rich, you can have 10 or more bodyguards around you at all times, if you feel the need for it.
The crucial point, however, is the LAW. I don’t see how there can be a peaceful and free society where not everyone is equal before the law – the SAME law.
If you use your private security forces to beat up someone because he looked at you the wrong way and he – apart from being unable to defend himself against your well-paid goons – doesn’t even have recourse to a universal and monopolist system of justice backed by a state police force because your “law-syndicate” or whatever name this entity may have is stronger and more powerful than anything he has access to then how is that NOT a dog-eat-dog survival of the richest anarchy?
(no, I not talking about the utopian pie-in-the-sky anarchy where everyone just gets along: that’s as unrealistic – if not more so – as the communist ideal where everyone works for the common good)
@Joshua:
Your argument is not only logically inconsistent but typical for arguments that turn people away from libertarianism:
No, I have no right to force you to do anything, let alone defend me against some attacker. The same is true for you and everyone else in our society.
However, this means that unless there is some state controlled police force that we pay for through taxes and which protects EVERYONE against unlawful harm to life, liberty and property, society will disintegrate into tribalist mutual protection pacts – based either on friend- and kinship or on economic and military power (mercenaries) – that will fight each other for supremacy.
This is the ONLY realistic outcome in a society without equal protection for all. If anyone feels that this is equivalent to being “forced” to pay taxes then I suggest they go to some lawless hellhole Ãn Africa or the Middle East and compare their experiences – if they survive.
Florian said
“If you use your private security forces to beat up someone because he looked at you the wrong way and he – apart from being unable to defend himself against your well-paid goons – doesn’t even have recourse to a universal and monopolist system of justice…”
What you have described is an aggression, a use of force without provocation. This would merit a criminal case being brought against your rich aggressor for his actions, using whatever of the private court systems that the free-market should provide us (with numerous examples outlined in the literature contained in this site). Sure, corrupt protection and law firms will appear from time to time, but market forces will tend to bankrupt them, as people realize that they can’t be trusted.
Ready for next objection.
Of course I am describing an act of aggression – one of the main purposes of a system of law must be to protect the citizens from fraud and physical aggression!
This can only work if “the law” i.e. the police has a monopoly on the use of force. I just don’t get all these marketplace references here. Do you people realize what “competition” means when applied to a system of law?
Contrary to what some utopians believe it is unrealistic in the extreme to assume that competition between rival “court systems” – such a nice, innocent name – can remain restricted to the “market”.
I am usually for the market when I discuss politics with people but the anarcho-capitalism here is really extreme…
A court system can only work when it is backed up by the use of force. Therefore the competition between court system will inevitably include the use of force. If that’s the kind of competition you want, fine.
But anyone denying this reality has no clear picture of human histoy and human nature.
Anarchism is something I find extremely disturbing – doesn’t matter whether it comes from the left or the right, anarcho-capitalists or anarcho-syndicalism or whatever else there is as fancy name go…
The problem is these people claim to put the freedom of the individual above all else – and often even believe what they are saying – but fail to see the inevitable decline into authoritarianism that always follows anarchy.
Sorry for the rant, but as someone who considers himself a (classical) liberal in the original sense of the word I am against all threats to individual liberty, also the (by some) unforeseen consequences of the lack of public order: it necessarily entails loss of individual liberty.
Tyler Cowen is not a libertarian, he’s not even a classical liberal, he’s a statist, whether in a conservative line of thought or not.
The “pragmatist” men are “always tribal” line of his arguments are misguided if not completely irrelevant altogether.
One thing the man fails to understand – literally just doesn’t seem to comprehend – is that state and group are NOT synonymous. Let me repeat that, group and state are NOT synonymous.
There are plenty of examples of a “tribe” acting non-coercively, especially in concern with the more primal societies. We recently had a great article about customary law and it’s relation to a relatively large Western African tribe.
Tyler Cowen, vaffanculu.
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