Study their behaviors. Observe their territorial boundaries. Leave their habitat as you found it. Report any signs of intelligence.

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Saturday, December 08, 2007

Varieties of Principled Libertarianism

It remains a mistake for Libertarian Party reformers and incrementalists to concede that Zero-Aggression ZAPsolutism is the purest or most principled brand of libertarianism -- as opposed to most simplistic. I realize there are some asymptotic anarchists who nevertheless believe that incrementalism is the best thing a political party could do to move toward their anarchotopian asymptote. That may or may not be true, but I won't try to talk them out of it. :-) If I were an asymptotic anarchist, my top priority for electoral politics would be neither to build cadre nor promote incrementalism . Rather, I would advocate radical federalism, so that some locality somewhere would eventually try something close to anarchism and prove that it actually has a hope in hell of working.

Luckily, I'm not a ZAPsolutist or asymptotic anarchist, and in fact consider minarchism based on modern economics (see below) to be the most principled brand of libertarianism. Why? Because I believe that it does the best job of minimizing the real-world role and incidence of aggression in society. I consider ZAPsolutists to be suboptimal libertarians, because as deontologists instead of consequentialists they explicitly value clean hands over the real-world minimization of the incidence of aggression. (Either that, or they indulge in some magical thinking in order to believe that, for our species of primate on this particular planet, it just so happens that 100% absolute aggression abstinence is always the optimal strategy for minimizing the net incidence of aggression, and that no investment in force-initiation could ever lead to a net reduction in overall force-initiation.) However, I don't insist that the Platform endorse my brand of libertarianism as the most principled. We can have that fight when we're done repealing the nanny state. For now we just need to agree as comrades that there is a range of equally-principled libertarian worldviews and that it is not a sellout to try to get all less-archists together on a Freedom Train heading straight north in Nolan Space.

Multiple principled and self-consistent libertarian worldviews can be assembled from combinations of elements like

Endless variations on those principled and self-consistent libertarian worldviews can be derived by changing the dials on the many free variables in libertarian theory, such as:
  • Enfranchisement variables
    • rights of animals and species
    • rights of the unborn
    • rights of children
    • rights of the mentally disabled
    • rights of the comatose, the cryonically suspended, etc
    • rights of the dead (e.g. to bind the living with a covenant)
    • rights of inheritance
    • rights of corporate persons
    • rights of persons to alienate their rights e.g. through contractual slavery
  • Property variables
    • rights in natural (i.e. non-excludable) resources e.g. atmosphere, water, non-solid minerals, spectrum, orbits
    • rights in excludable resources e.g. land, solid minerals
    • rights in intellectual property e.g. copyright, patents
    • justness of original property acquisition
    • status of stolen property
  • Aggression variables
    • whether blackmail is aggression
    • forms of allowable judicial punishment
    • rules for allowable extra-judicial defense and retaliation
    • thresholds for reckless endangerment
    • extent to which unequal associations are coercive
Thus those who believed Rothbard when he told them that the non-aggression principle is "the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory" have been sold a bill of goods. Rothbard may as well have been chanting "There is no god but God". Libertarians weaned on Rothbard or Rand seem unaware of the innovations in political economy that have occurred since their prophets closed the paleolibertarian canon in the late 1940s:
For example, Rothbard's For a New Liberty (1973) and Ethics of Liberty (1982) make no mention of public goods or externalities or free riding. And anyone learning their economics only from Rand will have even less hope of awareness of these ideas.

The cumulative revolution in the theory of political economy that took place in the 1950s and 1960s is very recent by historical standards. Students of biology and anatomy long ago stopped reading Aristotle's 2300-year-old treatises, with his theories that head-first birth in animals is caused by weight asymmetry around the umbilical cord, and that the brain's function is just to cool the blood. But progress in the theory of political economy has been so slow that after two millennia, Aristotle's political theories are still required reading. It was only 50 years ago that economists formulated the theoretical foundations of what is now the textbook economic analysis of the optimal scope of government. That analysis is profoundly libertarian, and it's just bizarre that a party calling itself "Libertarian" hasn't embraced it. The reason for this is a historical accident, in that the ideology of the LP was dictated in the 1970s by someone (Murray Rothbard) who froze his own anarcholibertarian dogma a decade or so before the cumulative revolution in the 1950s and 1960s in the areas of modern welfare economics, public choice theory, behavioral economics, and information economics.

A pioneer of string theory said in the 1970s that it is "a part of twenty-first-century physics that fell by chance into the twentieth century". Unlike physics, economics has not often had to wait on (or invent) new mathematics in order to make progress. I sometimes get the feeling that much of twentieth-century economics was in retrospect somewhat obvious and should have been already been developed before 1900. It would have been nice if the insights of modern economics had been available as the libertarian movement became self-conscious in the early decades of this century, but it was not to be. Oh well, at least we'll have front-row seats as the insights of modern economics continue to seep into our culture's political consciousness. The question of why the LP disputed those insights instead of championed them will make for an interesting footnote in future history books.

3 comments:

Starchild said...

Brian,

After reading your lengthy "history lesson" here, if I weren't a vegetarian I would be asking "Where's the beef?" Where is the real proof that the Non-Aggression Principle isn't the heart and soul of libertarianism?

You can wax on about property variables, enfranchisement variables, etc., all you want, but that doesn't change the fundamental centrality of non-aggression in libertarian thought.

You yourself advocate that the Libertarian Party's mission should be to minimize the role of aggression in society! Even I, as a non-anarchist who totally rejects your claim that there are lots of other "schools of libertarianism" which deserve to be placed on some kind of equal footing with the Non-Aggression Principle, can go along with that -- I simply happen to believe that championing the N.A.P. *is* the most effective way to minimize aggression in society!

I do find it a bit curious though, that you don't appear to be concerned that an LP focus on minimizing aggression would leave those other "schools" outside the tent. Is your lack of concern for alienating their followers simply a recognition of the fact that they barely *have* any followers? Is it a recognition of the fact that most of the people who believe in various combinations of the "variables" you discuss -- including myself! -- probably don't recognize those beliefs as forming any kind of "school" of thought that is at odds with the Non-Aggression Principle?

I think it's safe to say that many if not most Libertarians *do* believe that allowing some legal aggression is practically unavoidable if we want to avoid risking much worse. However if you take any random ten Libertarians, you will probably get about ten different lists of the circumstances in which they believe government aggression is justified.

Therefore I think the best solution is to separate our personal beliefs from what the Libertarian Party advocates. Most of us recognize that libertarianism has to do with limiting aggression, even if we don't think limiting aggression is practical 100% of the time. So instead of each of us fighting to have the LP reflect our own personal mix of libertarian and non-libertarian beliefs, when we will never agree on on what that mix should be, we ought to simply agree to let the party consistently stand for non-aggression 100% of the time. That way each of us will be free to make it clear that we don't personally favor allowing X, Y, and Z, so long as we don't misrepresent the party platform or libertarianism.

Starchild said...

Brian,

After reading your lengthy "history lesson" here, if I weren't a vegetarian I would be asking "Where's the beef?" Where is the real proof that the Non-Aggression Principle isn't the heart and soul of libertarianism?

You can wax on about property variables, enfranchisement variables, etc., all you want, but that doesn't change the fundamental centrality of non-aggression in libertarian thought.

You yourself advocate that the Libertarian Party's mission should be to minimize the role of aggression in society! Even I, as a non-anarchist who totally rejects your claim that there are lots of other "schools of libertarianism" which deserve to be placed on some kind of equal footing with the Non-Aggression Principle, can go along with that -- I simply happen to believe that championing the N.A.P. *is* the most effective way to minimize aggression in society!

I do find it a bit curious though, that you don't appear to be concerned that an LP focus on minimizing aggression would leave those other "schools" outside the tent. Is your lack of concern for alienating their followers simply a recognition of the fact that they barely *have* any followers? Is it a recognition of the fact that most of the people who believe in various combinations of the "variables" you discuss -- including myself! -- probably don't recognize those beliefs as forming any kind of "school" of thought that is at odds with the Non-Aggression Principle?

I think it's safe to say that many if not most Libertarians *do* believe that allowing some legal aggression is practically unavoidable if we want to avoid risking much worse. However if you take any random ten Libertarians, you will probably get about ten different lists of the circumstances in which they believe government aggression is justified.

Therefore I think the best solution is to separate our personal beliefs from what the Libertarian Party advocates. Most of us recognize that libertarianism has to do with limiting aggression, even if we don't think limiting aggression is practical 100% of the time. So instead of each of us fighting to have the LP reflect our own personal mix of libertarian and non-libertarian beliefs, when we will never agree on on what that mix should be, we ought to simply agree to let the party consistently stand for non-aggression 100% of the time. That way each of us will be free to make it clear that we don't personally favor allowing X, Y, and Z, so long as we don't misrepresent the party platform or libertarianism.

Starchild said...

Brian,

After reading your lengthy "history lesson" here, if I weren't a vegetarian I would be asking "Where's the beef?" Where is the real proof that the Non-Aggression Principle isn't the heart and soul of libertarianism?

You can wax on about property variables, enfranchisement variables, etc., all you want, but that doesn't change the fundamental centrality of non-aggression in libertarian thought.

You yourself advocate that the Libertarian Party's mission should be to minimize the role of aggression in society! Even I, as a non-anarchist who totally rejects your claim that there are lots of other "schools of libertarianism" which deserve to be placed on some kind of equal footing with the Non-Aggression Principle, can go along with that -- I simply happen to believe that championing the N.A.P. *is* the most effective way to minimize aggression in society!

I do find it a bit curious though, that you don't appear to be concerned that an LP focus on minimizing aggression would leave those other "schools" outside the tent. Is your lack of concern for alienating their followers simply a recognition of the fact that they barely *have* any followers? Is it a recognition of the fact that most of the people who believe in various combinations of the "variables" you discuss -- including myself! -- probably don't recognize those beliefs as forming any kind of "school" of thought that is at odds with the Non-Aggression Principle?

I think it's safe to say that many if not most Libertarians *do* believe that allowing some legal aggression is practically unavoidable if we want to avoid risking much worse. However if you take any random ten Libertarians, you will probably get about ten different lists of the circumstances in which they believe government aggression is justified.

Therefore I think the best solution is to separate our personal beliefs from what the Libertarian Party advocates. Most of us recognize that libertarianism has to do with limiting aggression, even if we don't think limiting aggression is practical 100% of the time. So instead of each of us fighting to have the LP reflect our own personal mix of libertarian and non-libertarian beliefs, when we will never agree on on what that mix should be, we ought to simply agree to let the party consistently stand for non-aggression 100% of the time. That way each of us will be free to make it clear that we don't personally favor allowing X, Y, and Z, so long as we don't misrepresent the party platform or libertarianism.