Alliances
My previous three posts dealt with the possibility of an alliance between libertarians and Abundance liberals. Neither is a political party, a nation, even an organization; in what sense can they ally?
One could imagine a political alliance in which leading members of both groups advise their followers to vote for the same candidate or ballot measure, but that is not what I am talking about. What I am imagining is for members of both groups to treat each other as part of the same intellectual community, read, listen to, comment on and think about each other’s writing, teach and learn from each other, perhaps coauthor books or articles. For that to happen productively there have to be issues on which the participants in the conversation believe that their views could be improved by ideas from the other side. My previous post was an attempt to see if there were.
Responses, almost all from libertarians, mostly consisted of stating and defending their (libertarian) answers to my questions, not surprising but not what I was looking for. There were only a few that qualified their answers in a ways implying that they were open to arguments for modifications of the strict libertarian position. My attempt to get answers from the other side by invitations in suitable places online was an almost total failure; the only self-identified Abundance liberal gave answers implying that the commenter was already a libertarian. The most encouraging response was from someone who described himself “with a foot in both camps” and seemed inclined to see libertarian arguments as relevant to achieving Abundance goals, consequentialist arguments to modifying libertarian conclusions.
Almost everyone claims to be open minded but most, left or right, are open only to views close to those they already have, view interaction outside their faction as useful only for converting people to their — obviously correct — position. Substantive argument is mostly intra-faction, libertarians arguing with other libertarians over anarchy vs minarchy or intellectual property, left liberals with left liberals over nimby vs yimby or how to take back Congress. There are, however, exceptions, productive interactions between people from very different parts of the political spectrum. Here are two examples from my experience.
Back when I was a faculty fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, I coauthored an article with Steve Schulhofer. He was one of the furthest left members of the faculty, I was one of the furthest (libertarian) right members. The article dealt with a problem of particular interest to him, a way of solving it of particular interest to me.
The problem was felony defendants who could not afford a lawyer. The existing solution was, still is, a lawyer chosen and paid for by the state, either a public defender or a private attorney appointed to the case. The result is that in a majority of felony trials the prosecution attorney and the defense attorney are working for (different branches of) the same employer.
That struck Steve as a very risky situation. I agreed; neither of us, from right or left, trusted the state. The solution he proposed was a voucher system: Whatever amount the state is willing to spend on a lawyer for an indigent defendant, give the defendant the option of spending it on a lawyer of his choice, working for him. Worrying about the poor is mostly a left wing thing, market solutions mostly a right libertarian thing, but libertarians disapprove of the state mistreating people, including poor people, and leftists want solutions to their problems.1 We had a law school workshop on the idea and I got to hear Steve Schulhofer lecture Judge Posner on the virtues of the free market.
That may have been my first experience of working out ideas jointly with someone from a very different part of the political spectrum. He knew things I didn’t about problems with the legal system, I knew things he didn’t about market economics, and we jointly produced a better article than either could have written alone.
My second example is my interaction with Scott Alexander, largely on his blog Slate Star Codex which was, while it lasted, the best conversation on the Internet. I responded to his webbed criticism of libertarianism and he stopped making some of its arguments, improved others. He wrote friendly but critical reviews of two of my books.2 I am reasonably certain that some of the ideas now in his intellectual toolkit he got from me and he has provided me with ideas and insights on a range of issues along with criticisms of my ideas from someone who understands them.
Both of those cases involved interactions with someone to my left — Scott is hard to classify politically but regards himself as more nearly left than right, even if critical of much of the current left — who was more familiar with libertarian ideas than most. The intellectual alliance I am describing is between individuals not movements, does not have to involve all or even many of the individual adherents. If Scott absorbs an idea from me he can transmit it to people who read him and don’t read me, and similarly in the other direction.
The Other Kind of Alliance
If enough of what I am describing happens, the result might be the two groups allying politically on issues where they find a common cause, as elements of left and right allied on drug policy or as libertarians and traditionalists allied in the fusionist coalition that was the intellectual core of the conservative movement sixty years ago. That would be a political alliance, not what I am describing or what is of most interest to me but one of its possible consequences.
My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else
Past posts, sorted by topic
A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing
A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.
School vouchers, the same solution to a different problem, are now thought of as a right wing program, in part because the teacher’s unions that are their chief opponents are also one of the chief supports of the Democratic party. In the early years they were supported by left wing intellectuals such as Sociologist Christopher Jencks, a Harvard progressive, and Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society.
I feel dumb for not having thought of the possible alliances you named. Of course you're right, there are some abundance liberals who might agree to vouchers in some cases. It's just that they're so hostile to school vouchers that I didn't think of it. And we all know that liberarians and leftists are aligned on drug and social issues. But your examples pointed at the thorniest differences between us, temporarily blinding me.
I sometimes think there's a great emotional difference between the two positions. But I agree with John Stuart Mill, that one should pursue an answer no matter where it leads you, no matter how uncomfortable the solution. Are abundance liberals (of the garden variety, not the intellectuals you know) more adverse to new ideas than libertarians?
My brother, for example, said he "couldn't read Milton Friedman's Free to Choose" because of the tone. And a close friend had the same reaction to David Henderson's "The Joy of Freedom." What tone, I wondered? To me, both are full of plain common sense. But for these people, asking them to read those books was like asking them to eat a dish with a repugnant smell.
I often feel that abundance liberals are so bound up in emotional reasons for favoring the poor that they can't open their eyes for one second to solutions that would help the poor a lot more. In the 1980s, when I was interviewing my favorite free market economist thinkers over the phone, including David Friedman, Milton Friedman, Judge Posner and about ten others, I often noticed that many had humble roots. I think there's something about being born upper class that tends to make one either rigidly conservative or socialistic to prove that they care.
I've been squarely in the left abundance camp. Libertarians have been super helpful in flagging opportunities to help the poor that I think can make for really impactful alliances:
- Scope of practice laws make it so that nurses and lower-level medical providers can't diagnose or treat patients, which is a huge access issue in health care.
- Occupational licensing has a big impact on prices of everyday goods, which will particularly hit the lower classes harder.
- The fact that so much occupational licensing has a good moral character clauses means that people with criminal records can't work.
This feels a lot to me like what building an abundance agenda is: picking and choosing things that libertarians have been pointing at, perhaps for other reasons like market deregulation, but elevating the ones with big impacts on the social good.