Of Malice and Straw Men
Another empty attack.
We libertarians must be onto something. Why else would critics work so hard to construct straw men to demolish rather than contending with our actual arguments?
Right from the top you could tell that Stephen Metcalf’s recent blast in Slate would be no different. (This is nothing new for Slate.) “Liberty Scam” featured this teaser: “Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired.” That sentence contains two assertions — both wrong. I mean to take nothing away from Nozick when I point out that he was not the philosophical father of libertarianism. We can debate who might deserve that title, but I can say firsthand that he, she, or they helped give birth to libertarianism before 1974, when Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia. (I discovered libertarianism in 1967-68.)
As for the second half of that sentence, I don’t know what Nozick thought about the “movement,” but it is wrong to say he gave up on libertarianism. Metcalf makes much of Nozick’s writing, “The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate…” and “There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion” — but is this truly a renunciation of libertarianism? (A fuller quotation is here.)
Those in fact were not Nozick’s last words on the matter before his premature death in January 2002 at age 63. In an interview with Julian Sanchez six month earlier, the following exchange took place:
JS: In The Examined Life, you reported that you had come to see the libertarian position that you’d advanced in Anarchy, State and Utopia as “seriously inadequate.” But there are several places in Invariances where you seem to suggest that you consider the view advanced there, broadly speaking, at least, a libertarian one. Would you now, again, self-apply the L-word?
RN:Yes. But I never stopped self-applying. What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book [Invariances] makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the “Core Principle of Ethics.”
The Wilt Chamberlain Example
It gets worse for Metcalf. He spends most of his article on Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment, but misses the point. In critiquing “patterned,” or “end-state,” principles of justice, Nozick imagines that everyone has the amount of wealth necessary to satisfy some posited ideal pattern. It so happens that the people in this society love basketball and one of their members, Chamberlain, is a great player whom many are eager to watch. They each pay him a sum of money every time they attend a game. As a result of this series of exchanges, Chamberlain has more money than the others. This raises a question: Is the initial “distributional” pattern to be preserved by force or is free exchange to be allowed to change the pattern? As Nozick stated:
The general point … is that no end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives. Any favored pattern would be transformed into one unfavored by the principle, by people choosing to act in various ways; for example, by people exchanging goods and services with other people, or giving things to other people, things the transferrers are entitled to under the favored distributional pattern.
For Nozick, if constant interference with free exchange — let’s call it what it is: violence or the threat thereof — is required to preserve a given pattern, perhaps justice cannot lie in any preconceived pattern at all, for without liberty what becomes of autonomy and the moral injunction against treating others merely as means? He opted instead for an “entitlement theory of justice in distribution,” which poses a historical test: “whether a distribution is just depends upon how it came about.”
Metcalf is in a panic now, because if Wilt Chamberlain is entitled to a bigger income than his fellow human beings when it results from voluntary exchange, it must follow that others are too. Metcalf doesn’t want to face that issue, so he creates a distraction:
Anarchy[, State, and Utopia] not only purports to be a defense of capitalism, but a proud defense of capitalism. And yet if Anarchy would defend capitalism unashamedly, why does its most famous argument include almost none of the defining features of capitalism — i.e., no risk capital, no capital markets, no financier? Why does it feature a basketball player and not, say, a captain of industry, a CEO, a visionary entrepreneur?
It’s true that Nozick ultimately wants to defend free exchange (what he called “capitalist acts between consenting adults”), but in order to set the foundation, he needed to show that accepting a patterned conception of justice means giving up freedom.
The Price Is Right
Metcalf prefers to have a different argument: How do we know the price Chamberlain receives is appropriate? “To a libertarian,” he says mockingly, “price is, in effect, the conscience of society finding its highest expression in every swipe of the debit card…. [A]ssuming a world in which labor and management arrive at gentleman’s agreements — and in which those agreements capture the precise value, down to the penny, of labor’s marginal product — tells us very little about justice.”
But what Nozick established with his Chamberlain story need not assume those things without additional theoretical argument. It is surely reasonable to ask if historical capitalism has faithfully mirrored the principle of free, voluntary exchange. In fact it did not. But this is no objection to Nozick, who was doing political philosophy, not economic history.
Metcalf gets a little carried away in searching for points to score on Nozick. Consider this:
The connivance is thus hidden in plain sight. “Wilt Chamberlain” is an African-American whose talents are unique, scarce, perspicuous (points, rebounds, assists), and in high demand. We feel powerfully the man should be paid, and not to do so—to expect a black athlete to perform for (largely) white audiences without adequate compensation—raises the specter of the plantation. But being a star athlete isn’t the only way to make money. In addition to earning a wage, one can garnish a wage, collect a fee, levy a toll, cash in a dividend, take a kickback, collect a monopoly rent, hit the superfecta, inherit Tara, insider trade, or stumble on Texas tea. For each way of conceiving wealth, there is at least one way of moralizing its distribution. The Wilt Chamberlain example is designed to corner us — quite cynically, in my view — into moralizing all of them as if they were recompense for a unique talent that gives pleasure; and to tax each of them, and regulate each of them, according to the same principle of radical noninterference suggested by a black ballplayer finally getting his due.
Monopoly Rents?
I can almost hear the heavy breathing. But Nozick’s Chamberlain principle obligates no one to defend the garnishing of wages and the collecting of tolls and monopoly rents, which require government privilege, or the profits of crooks like Bernie Madoff. It refers only to nonviolent, nonfraudulent sources of wealth. Metcalf implies that Nozick’s book is an apology for the corporate state, but in fact Nozick’s principles — consistently adhered to — rule out the statist devices that produce much “supernormal compensation,” including patents, eminent domain and other land-use privileges, the banking cartel, subsidies, and trade manipulation. Corporate power flows from the State — it’s the most dangerous derivative.
Then there’s this howler:
To my critique of the Chamberlain example, a libertarian might respond: Given frictionless markets, rational self-maximizers, and perfect information, the market price for Wilt’s services could not stay separable from the market price to see Wilt play.
What libertarian invokes frictionless markets, rational self-maximizers, and perfect information to justify price in a freed market? Certainly not those inspired by Mises and Hayek, whom Metcalf acknowledges as leading libertarian lights. He confuses blackboards at the University of Chicago with the libertarian movement.
Corporate State
I will give Metcalf half a point. Some free-marketeers are willing to defend profits attributable to corporate-state intervention as though they were earned under laissez faire. He stumbles onto a fact when he writes:
The idea that supernormal compensation is fit reward for supernormal talent is the ideological superglue of neoliberalism, holding firm since the 1980s. It’s no wonder that in the aftermath of the housing bust, with the glue showing signs of decay — with Madoff and “Government Sachs” displacing Jobs and Buffett in the headlines – “liberty” made its comeback. When the facts go against you, resort to “values.” When values go against you, resort to the mother of all values. When the mother of all values swoons, reach deep into the public purse with one hand, and with the other beat the public senseless with your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged….
Large-scale, speculative risk, undertaken by already grossly overcompensated bankers, is now officially part of the framework, in the form of too-big-to-fail guarantees made, implicitly and explicitly, by the Federal Reserve.
But this criticism applies not to libertarianism per se but only to self-styled “free market” advocates who fail to appreciate how far the American corporatist system falls short of libertarianism. Does Metcalf seriously think the housing bust, Madoff, “Government Sachs,” and Federal Reserve guarantees are creatures of laissez faire? (Since it is Metcalf who has fun with Goldman Sachs’s name, you’d expect him to know the answer.)
Metcalf ends on a naïve note:
Another way to put it — and here lies the legacy of Keynes — is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality?
…[T]he “libertarian” right moves to take the risks of unemployment, disease, and, yes, accidents of birth, and devolve them entirely onto the responsibility of the individual. It is not just sad; it is repugnant.
As if the welfare state historically has been much more than a cover for the corporatist privilege that harms the most vulnerable; and as if free individuals, looking out for one another in peaceful ways such as mutual-aid associations and contract, would be incapable of hedging against the risks of life.
When Metcalf writes that libertarians “take a faith in the individual as an irreducible unit of moral worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation” and “naked self-interest … is libertarianism” (associating Sarah Palin with the movement!!!), he confesses how inadequately he has done his homework — or how maliciously contemptuous of the truth he wishes to be.
Comment by Sheldon Richman on 24 June 2011:
Some links readers might want to check out:
Steven Horwitz
Matt Welch
Will Wilkinson
David Boaz
Conor Friedersdorf
E. D. Kain
Jason Kuznicki
Follow the links within.
And more:
Julian Sanchez 1
Julian Sanchez 2
Comment by George Leef on 24 June 2011:
I also read Metcalf’s smarmy and ill-informed hit piece on libertarianism and am delighted to see Sheldon and so many other writers handing him his head.
Metcalf calls liberty a “scam.” But of course, he loves his own liberty to write foolish articles and would react vehemently if someone prevented him from writing. He wants the liberty to do many other things — liberty that some people regard as harmful and want to see eliminated. Undoubtedly he is against coercion when it comes to his own choices in life, but can’t see the merit in a consistent stance against coercion, which is what libertarianism boils down to.
Pingback by Refuting a smarmy hit on libertarian philosophy | The Locker Room on 24 June 2011:
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Comment by Gus S. Calabrese on 24 June 2011:
I was struck by this snippet………..
the statist devices that produce much “supernormal compensation,” including patents, eminent domain and other land-use privileges, the banking cartel, subsidies, and trade manipulation. Corporate power flows from the State — it’s the most dangerous derivative.
Sheldon …. what do think of patents and copyrights ?
99guspuppet
Comment by Sheldon Richman on 24 June 2011:
Gus, I’ve written at length about IP on this site, the most recent just a few weeks ago. I’m against them.
Comment by Bullseye on 24 June 2011:
“We libertarians must be onto something. Why else would critics work so hard to construct straw men to demolish rather than contending with our actual arguments?”
The main reason is that we know what our ideas are and we state them clearly.
Ayn Rand used to point out that most of our enemies can’t or won’t articulate their ideas. The carry around this muddy muck of Orwellian contradictions in their heads. Because they don’t know and/or can’t articulate their ideas, it’s difficult to attack their arguments. This philosophical ambiguity and our philosophical precision gives them an advantage. They can attack us, but we find it difficult to attack them. And we end up constantly on the defensive, like Sheldon here.
Despite this advantage, their strength isn’t reason. It’s ours.
Hence the strawmen.
Great article, by the way, as usual.
Comment by Dr. T on 24 June 2011:
Modern liberals (also known as progressives and left-wingers) correctly believe that most adults are too ignorant, lazy, unintelligent, careless, criminally-inclined, weak, dependent, and/or misguided to function independently in modern society. The difference between modern liberals and libertarians is that the former believe that people cannot improve, and therefore a powerful, paternalistic government (by the liberal elite) is needed to care for them. Many libertarians believe that removing a powerful, paternalistic government will allow adults to shed their dependencies and become responsible, informed, ethical, and self-reliant citizens.
Unfortunately, I believe that such libertarians are wrong. If we formed a libertarian government and society, too few people would react appropriately, and the society would fail. Libertarianism will not work for a broad cross-section of the population. There has to be a selection process for libertarianism to succeed. People need different diets, different sleep patterns, different medicines, and different cultures. It’s hardly surprising that different people will do better with different types of governments. The problem is that we lack the needed variety of government types and the freedom and mobility to choose among them.
Comment by Doc on 25 June 2011:
Robert Nozick. Who??
Comment by Novista on 26 June 2011:
Dr. T
How did you form such a poor opinion of your fellow man? I’m assuming you would thrive with a libertarian government and so many others would fail.
One would think the original concept of a union of states would have offered options, that is, a republic of limited centralized power, wrt the 10th amendment.
F’rinstance, would any libertarian think Roe vs. Wade was any business of the federal government? It’s unlikely all states would be pro-life, but if that were the case in a libertarian system, there would be no impediment to going elsewhere.
Comment by Dr. T on 26 June 2011:
“How did you form such a poor opinion of your fellow man?”
I’ve kept my eyes and ears open. How can you look at elected government today and believe that we are a nation of intelligent, informed, ethical, responsible. and self-reliant persons? Our co-citizens put criminals, scoundrels, money-grubbers, and power-seekers into political offices based on their looks, speaking abilities, transparent false promises, or ability to provide pork projects to the locals and more “entitlements” all. Could such people be compatible with a libertarian society? Absolutely not.
Comment by RickC on 27 June 2011:
Sadly, I have to agree with Dr. T, Novista. It’s why I feel like a liberty loving dinosaur. I’m always amazed at how so few folks have taken the time to even work out a consistant world view or philosophy. Example: I recently was helping build a little house for my Dad who is in his mid-70s and is an embodiment of the populists views on most subjects.
As I was painting some trim my Dad and his brother were in the next room swapping stories of real world local corruption (some of which was massive) they had witnessed in the city council, among the county commissioners, the local electrical co-op board, the sheriff’s office and city police force, the judiciary etc.; pretty much at every level of local government. Once they had tired of that subject they turned to the price of gas and how it was all a big rip off. Their ire ended up being focused on wholesalers/distributers who also owned retail establishments (something about them jacking up the price). At one point my Dad and uncle both agreed that distributors shouldn’t be allowed to own retail gas stations. I, having been down that road with my Dad before, resisted the urge to ask them which of the corrupt branches of government they were decrying 15 minutes earlier would they give the power to of deciding who gets to own gas stations.
Just one little example. I have hundreds from my daily interactions with people.
Comment by Harold on 29 June 2011:
The opening joke is delightful, a straw man built of the claimed straw men of others. Wonderful pseudo-intellectual basket weaving.
Comment by Matt N on 29 June 2011:
Dr. T and RickC, your logic is flawed. Government officials are also people, and are also presumably just as flawed as the rest. How does granting power to people somehow make them less fallible than if they don’t have power?
I just never will understand the argument that ‘people [in general] are flawed so we should willingly hand over our own rights to, and live under the dictates of, people [in government].’ It just isn’t logically tenable. I guess if you live under the delusion that you’ll miraculously end up with people in government that aren’t as (or more) stupid and psychotic than people in general, then it makes sense. But… that’s a delusion.
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