Libertarians and Abundance Liberals

My previous post was on a subject of interest to me and, judging by the size of the comment thread, to many of my readers, so I decided to do another. In this one I will try to do two things. The first is to provide evidence to readers, especially libertarians, for my claim that the Abundance Liberals are both more liberal and closer to libertarians than either Progressives or Maga Republicans, where by Maga Republicans I mean people in general agreement with Trump’s views and policies. The second is to describe the policy differences between libertarians and left liberals and argue that the libertarian position on those differences is defensible in terms of the values left liberals support.

Not As Bad As You Think

First, two quotes from Yglesias:

… the basic principles about the positive-sum nature of market exchange and the tendency of regulatory systems to become cesspools of rent seeking are quite general.

…

It is hopefully not too late to pull back from the brink and restore a sane liberal center to American politics. That should mean progressives learning more from libertarians about economics, but it should also mean libertarians learning about the theory and practice of democratic politics.

Then a quote from the post by Ilya Somin that Yglesias was responding to:

The issues where they support major movement towards freer markets - most notably housing, trade, immigration, and nuclear power - are extremely important ones. They have enormous effects on the life, liberty, and happiness of tens of millions of people. (Two Cheers for Abundance Liberalism)

And finally, from Kelsey Piper, possibly the most libertarian of the Abundance faction:

in 1996, Californians voted 55 to 45 for Proposition 209, which, among other things, barred public colleges and universities from considering race or ethnicity in admissions.

Twenty-four years later, Californians voted on whether to repeal the proposition. …

By a margin of 57 to 43, Californians again voted against permitting public institutions to discriminate or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.

I think that the state’s voters got this right in 1996 and again in 2020. (Can a liberal society do affirmative action right?}

How We Differ From You And Why We Might Be Right

Libertarians differ from left liberals, including Abundance liberals, in their view of rights, positive or negative, but I want to argue policy instead. Most libertarians accept the existence of a government that provides courts, law enforcement, and national defense and collects taxes to pay for them. The policy difference between the generic libertarian and the generic left liberal is what the latter adds to that: a welfare state and government regulation of the economy viewed as a correction to market failures and to the failure of individuals to correctly see their own interest and act on it.

Market failures exist and individuals are not perfectly wise, so it is easy to show that there are things a government could do that would produce what most of us would see as benefits. Most people expect a poor person to benefit more by what he can buy with a hundred dollars than a rich person, remember money being of more value to them when they had less of it. Those are arguments, arguments that many, perhaps most, people find convincing, for expanding government beyond the minimum state.

I want to argue policy and I want to argue it in terms of values that left liberals share, since they are the people I am trying to convince. The first step is to recognize that “what should the government do” is the wrong question. The right question is “what powers and responsibilities should the government have.” If we start instead with a list of things we want the government to do, there may be no way of constructing a government that will do those and only those things.

A government with the power to redistribute income by transfers or subsidies could use that power to help the poor. It could also use it to benefit the politically powerful or reward supporters, buy votes. Regulations could be used to correct market failures, could also be gamed by interest groups to benefit themselves, “the tendency of regulatory systems to become cesspools of rent seeking.” To argue for giving government powers, you need reasons to believe that it will be in the interest of the individuals whose choices determine what the government does to act in ways that on net do good. If the market gets things mostly right, as I think abundance liberals would mostly concede, the amount of good the government can produce by fixing its errors is much more limited than the amount of damage it can do.

Consider the biofuels mandate. It was originally created on the theory that turning maize into alcohol to replace gasoline would reduce CO₂ output and slow climate change. It turned out that it didn’t, that when all the steps were considered producing alcohol produced as much CO₂ as the fuel it replaced. We still have the mandate because, although it does nothing to slow climate change, it does raise the price of maize, and farmers vote. It is not a small effect; we are converting about fifteen percent of the world supply of maize to alcohol. Maize is the staple food for some 300 million people in Africa, mostly poor. Think of it as our contribution to world hunger.

That is one example of the amount of damage a government with the powers left liberals want it to have can do. There are others that libertarians can point out, some that left liberals, at least in the abundance faction, are already aware of. Whether the net damage done is more than the good, judged by left liberal values, is an empirical question.

Whether it can be expected to be is a theoretical question. In my previous post I sketched the argument for the libertarian conclusion, that giving the government the powers left liberals want it to have makes us on net worse off. It is an argument not a proof, but combined with examples it should be enough to convince left liberals that it is not obvious that giving government the powers they want makes the world better by their values, that they might be wrong.

One more example of the general point …

Open Borders Or a Welfare State: Pick One

The economic arguments for free trade, the arguments that imply that American tariffs make Americans worse off, apply to immigration as well. They depend, however, on immigrants interacting with members of the existing population only by voluntary exchange. If poor immigrants have the option of coming to America and being supported by transfer payments there is the potential for immigration to make existing residents worse off.

The problem could be solved by a two class society, with immigrants ineligible for welfare for long enough to make immigration unattractive for those not willing to support themselves; that solution is unlikely to be acceptable to left liberals. It could be solved by welfare levels low enough to make work, even unskilled labor, more attractive than welfare; those might be lower than what left liberals in a rich society consider acceptable.

Or the problem might not be soluble, in which case voters in a democratic welfare state will keep out the poor.

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