How Minds Might Change

libertarians, Abundance liberals, and …

My recent posts dealt with the possibility of libertarians and Abundance liberals learning from each other. For that to happen members of both groups have to either alter their present views or add new ones. For a simple example of the latter, my interaction with Steve Schulhofer, described in my previous post, made me aware of problems with the criminal justice system of which I had been unaware; the two of us then worked out and proposed an approach to dealing with them. For an example in the other direction, a commenter on my post linked to a piece on problems with professional licensing. That is an issue libertarians that are very aware of that should be of interest to Abundance liberals as one of the things they might want to fix.

Sharing issues with people that they were unaware of, as in those examples, and suggesting solutions they have no particular reason to oppose, is the easy part of learning from each other; all it requires is being willing to listen to people different from you and consider their ideas on their merits, treat the interaction as a conversation not a debate. Harder is convincing people that something they know might be wrong. How that can happen, if it can, depends on how they know it, their reason for believing it.

There are, broadly speaking, two possible answers.

One is that they favor certain laws, policies, institutions because they believe they have good consequences. There may be some consequences, such as an increase in the birth rate, that some think good, some bad, but they are the exception, not the rule; there are very few libertarians, Abundance liberals, or for that matter progressives or Trump Republicans, who defend their preferred policies on the grounds that they result in people being poorer, hungrier, sicker, more ignorant. As long as the objective is shared there is room for argument, based on theory or evidence, over what policies best achieve it.

From this standpoint, Abundance liberals may be the best faction on the left for libertarians to argue with:

Abundance Progressives aspire to the same egalitarian, multi-racial democracy [As Movement Progressives]. But Abundance Progressives work backwards from target outcomes, and that leads to distinctly different points of emphasis, both in general and on specific policy issues. (Movement vs. Abundance Progressives)

A different possible basis for political views is the belief that certain rules are right or wrong whatever their consequences: Fiat justitia, ruat caelum, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” For libertarians, deontological rules take the form of the doctrine that one should never initiate coercion, should never violate individual rights. People on the left also talk about rights, with a different list, or equality or exploitation.

Different views about what rules are just, what rights people have, mean that the same law can be seen by one side as enforcing rights, by the other as violating them. A fair employment or fair housing law, for example, is seen by someone on the left as enforcing the right of equal treatment, by a libertarian as violating the right of voluntary association.

That is a potential problem, but it may sometimes be possible to alter a belief based on belief in a rule by showing reasons why that rule does not apply to the particular issue in question.

How To Change the Mind Of

A Consequentialist Libertarian

Being a libertarian, even a libertarian anarchist, does not require one to believe that governments can never do things that have good consequences, even things that violate individual rights. It is sufficient to believe that we cannot create a government with the power to do things with good consequences that will not also do things with larger bad consequences, hence that we are better off with either no government or a government limited in the ways minarchist libertarians support. That does not imply that, if we already have a government with such powers, one should oppose all of the ways they can be used. Economics demonstrates a variety of situations in which the consequences of voluntary interaction could be improved, by criteria libertarians agree with, by government action.

Two examples came up in the comment threads to my recent posts. One involved building codes. Some of the legal requirements for rewiring my house can be defended only on the theory that state agents know my interest better than I do, a claim not likely to be persuasive to a libertarian, but some requirements can be defended without that claim. One possible consequence of sufficiently bad wiring is for my house to catch fire and the fire to spread to neighboring houses, doing damage to my neighbors or their property for which I cannot compensate them; that is an argument for restrictions in what I can do with my own property. One consequence of my using an antibiotic is that diseases become more resistant to it, a cost born almost entirely by other people. That is an argument for restricting the use of antibiotics, an argument that a consequentialist should take seriously. In both cases, whether state action produces good consequences and, if so, what state action is best, depends on the details of the situation, but there is no reason why an Abundance liberal could not call the attention of a libertarian to issues of that sort and provide him evidence and argument that would lead him to support policies he would otherwise have opposed.

A Deontological Libertarian

Those two examples work for him as well. No libertarian, or almost none,¹ would claim that if someone is pointing a gun at you it is a rights violation to grab it. Arguably both rules against wiring your house in ways likely to start a fire and restrictions on the casual use of antibiotics can be justified on the same basis. How convincing that is depends on details of the deontological rules accepted by the libertarian and on factual details, how large and how likely the damage to others from my action is.

A different line of argument is available in the case of the deontological minarchist, since he already accepts some apparent rights violations in the form of taxes to fund police and national defense.² If his grounds for accepting that is that the result of no police protection or national defense would be catastrophic, he is open to the same argument for some other apparent right violation. There are, after all, people who argue that unregulated climate change or, more plausibly, AI development would be catastrophic. Whether they are correct is a factual issue.

An Abundance Consequentialist

This is the easiest and most likely case since what distinguishes Abundance liberals from their allies on the left is their focus on consequences. Libertarians are familiar with lots of arguments for why policies supported by the left are likely to have bad consequences, many of them arguments and evidence in their support that someone whose intellectual interactions are almost entirely with fellow left-wingers is likely to be unfamiliar with.

One problem here is the difficulty of accepting conclusions that everyone on your side opposes, of looking like a traitor to your tribe. There are good economic arguments against minimum wage laws, reasons to think they are likely to hurt the people they are intended to help, but coming out against minimum wage laws, even against raising the minimum wage, marks you as a right winger, a capitalist dupe. Better to focus arguments on issues less clearly ideologically branded, such as professional licensing, zoning, or building codes.

A Deontological Abundance Liberal

The reasons to identify as an Abundance liberal are consequentialist but they are likely to have deontological views as well. As with the deontological libertarian, the approach I think likely to work is targeted not at the rule but its implication.

Many supporters of equal pay for men and women support it on the grounds of a norm of equality. A possible response, although one unlikely to convince many supporters in the current ideological environment, is that many men would be willing to accept lower pay in exchange for a longer life, that since female life expectancy in the US is almost five years longer than male a norm of equality not merely permits but requires unequal pay. An argument more difficult to support factually, although probably correct, but one that is more likely to convince at least a few, is that women and men currently receive equal pay for equal work, that the difference in average income is due to different choices of careers and career paths.

A different approach might be to use public choice arguments and evidence to show that even if the objective is correct the means is not, that the legal or administrative tools they support cannot be trusted to produce the morally required goals and to offer economic arguments for different and better means. An example might be proposing insurance requirements or Pigouvian taxes to replace regulation by a regulatory agency likely to be captured by the industry it regulates.

Yes I Am Oversimplifying

My consequentialist/deontological division treats views as simpler than they are. In practice, most people who believe their system is just also believe it has good consequences, most who defend their system for its consequences also approve of its rules. But the division is a useful way of sorting arguments and those who make them in thinking about what sorts of arguments and evidence might change minds.

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1. Robert Lefevre may have been an exception,

2. Except for Ayn Rand, who proposed a minimal government funded by selling services such as the enforcement of contracts. The problem with that is that in order to fund the services it gives away such as national defense the government requires a monopoly of the services it sells, which violates the right of competing sellers, a point discussed in past posts .