Better Arguments

for libertarians, among others

One reason not to use bad arguments is that while persuasive bad arguments may persuade people who cannot see through them to accept their conclusion they will persuade those who can to reject it — and smarter people are more worth convincing. The more fundamental reason is that if there are good arguments for your conclusion you can use them instead and if there are no good arguments for it you should not be defending it.

Here is a list of bad arguments used to defend libertarian positions and good arguments to replace them with.¹

Market Failure

The bad argument is the claim that markets never fail. The result of libertarians claiming that a laissez-faire market always produces the best possible outcome is to convince economists that libertarians should not be taken seriouisly.

The better argument is to observe that the government is not a benevolent, all wise, all powerful social planner who can be trusted to command us for our own good. Government action is the outcome of a political market, a group of self-interested individuals interacting, that can be analyzed with the same tools we use to analyze the private market. Doing so demonstrates that the circumstances that produce market failure, individuals not bearing the net cost of their actions, are the exception on the private market, the rule on the political market, hence that shifting decisions to the political market is more likely to create market failure than to eliminate it.

Utilitarianism and Redistribution

Declining marginal utility is a utilitarian argument for transferring money from rich, for whom a dollar is of little value, to poor, to whom it is of greater value. One common way of avoiding that conclusion is to deny the possibility of interpersonal utility comparisons.

In fact, we not only can make interpersonal utility comparisons we routinely do make them, even if not very well. A parent making decisions that affect his children is implicitly asking himself whether doing something one child wants to do and the other doesn't will increase the former's happiness more than it decreases the latter’s. Someone deciding which friend to give a gift to is doing it in part on which he thinks will be made happier by it. I signal my feelings, including preferences, in facial expressions, voice tones, and the like. Others do the same, giving me some idea of the strength as well as the ordering of their preferences and how it compares to the strength of mine. I cannot know another person’s preferences with certainty but I have no serious doubt that the disutility to a random stranger of being tortured to death is greater than the disutility to me of stubbing my toe.

Better to argue that institutions to redistribute income do not reliably transfer from rich to poor, are costly for both incentive and rent seeking reasons, and to point out that the enormous reduction in world poverty over the past century was due not to redistribution but to increased productivity due in part to the shift towards private property rules, with China after Mao the most striking example.

Rights as Trump Cards: The NAP

Libertarians often base their arguments on the NAP, the Non-aggression Principle, which holds that it is always wrong to initiate force. One problem with this is that we have no way of showing someone that he should believe in the NAP. A second problem is that we don’t believe in it ourselves, as can be demonstrated by considering hard cases instead of easy ones.

My favorite is due to the late Bill Bradford, editor of Liberty Magazine. You carelessly fall off the balcony of your tenth story apartment. Fortunately you catch hold of the flagpole of the balcony of the ninth floor apartment and are working your way hand over hand to the balcony when the owner of the ninth floor apartment comes out and tells you that you do not have his permission to use his flag pole. Do you let go?

This is an implausible example but illustrates a real problem. Your excuse for violating his property right to his flagpole will probably be that too much is at stake — your life — to worry about the rights violation. But the non-libertarian who you want to convince of the immorality of taxes believes that if the government cannot collect taxes the society will collapse, and with that much at stake … .² To answer that you need to show that the society will not collapse, indeed will flourish, without a government that can collect taxes. If you can persuade him of that, you don’t need to invoke the NAP.

The right argument for that is a little long for a Substack post. See part III of The Machinery of Freedom.

Property Rights in Land

Libertarians are fond of invoking property rights to justify their views. One problem is the dubious basis for property rights in land. It was not created by human action and in many, perhaps most, cases current title can be traced back to a seizure by force. And even if we accept the legitimacy of my ownership of my land, it is far from clear what that ownership consists of. Do I have a right to forbid airplanes crossing over, oil drillers pumping oil from under my land, my next-door neighbor from digging a hole in his land that my house will slide into? What rights do I have with regard to my land and why?

Better to abandon claims of moral rights and instead argue that treating land as property has enormous advantages over treating it as commons, referring arguments over the details to writings in the economic analysis of law such as my Law’s Order (Chapter 10).

Tariffs

There is a straightforward economic argument to show that a tariff makes the country that imposes it worse off, reduces economic efficiency. It is tempting to stop there, especially tempting given that most arguments for tariffs are offered by people who are arguing, and thinking, in terms of a view of trade that has been known to be mistaken, indeed incoherent, for more than two hundred years.

But there are better arguments for tariffs, arguments that do not depend on getting the economics wrong, some of which I sketch in a recent post, some in an earlier one. To deal with those you have to evaluate the factual claims they depend on and the implicit assumptions about how politicians with the power to impose tariffs are likely to find it in their political interest to use it.

Climate Change

Quite a lot of people who want to challenge policies justified as preventing climate change try to argue that it is not happening or not due to human action. The former claim is hard to defend given observed trends in temperature and sea level. Climate is a complicated system and we do not know how much of the change is due to increased CO₂ concentration from human action but the mechanism is straightforward and fits what has happened over the past century.

The better argument is to target the weak part of the current orthodoxy, the claim that increased CO₂ and the resulting warming can be expected to have large net negative effects on humanity. That claim depends on emphasizing negative effects, ignoring positive. For my arguments against it see my posts here on climate. In another few months I expect to have them assembled into a short book.

---

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

1. Some have been the subject of past posts. Also a talk.

2. Alternatively, you might argue that violating his rights is legitimate if you are willing to compensate him — thus justifying a forced sale at a price not acceptable to the seller, the private equivalent to the state seizing land under eminent domain.