I think it's more mistaken than that. I read it as when these economies mature they shift to a service economy and the manufacturing goes elsewhere. Since the manufacturing jobs tend to be higher wages in a developing economy, this means that (relative to the rest of the economy) high wages are going to a new locations (Japan-> S. Korea -> China) and being replaced by (relative to the rest of the economy) lower wages. That is, manufacturing jobs might pay 4X other available jobs in a developing country, but service jobs pay 1X.
Now, if you look at those service jobs in places like Japan, they are clearly being paid much higher (absolute) rates than the manufacturing jobs in China, which I take to be a great resolution.
I suspect there are some hidden thoughts behind this, tied up with the "Means of Production" requiring production and some notion of service jobs being more menial and not allowing the individuals filling them to be considered high status.
Not everyone can be high status at the same time. I'm fine with that, but apparently there are people who prefer everyone be equal status and low-income rather than some having high status even if all incomes are higher. From a power-dynamic standpoint I guess this makes some sense - it's hard to lord it over other people if you all have the same status. From a practical "can you live a happy and fulfilling life" standpoint, I much prefer that everyone have a higher standard of living, even if Jeff Bezos has a yacht bigger than every house I've ever lived in combined.
I think they aren't wrong, it's that they half wrong. It does matter what side you are on, but it also matters whether you are right or wrong. Good ideas can be used in the service of evil, there are no excaliburs among them. When we look at the accrual of wealth, money is a 'good' but not good. Because of that, accrual of wealth can be an evil, if it is used for evil. The risk of being right but not on the right side (or not caring what side you are on;) is that your ideas get recuperated and used against you.
There is also ultimately no distinction between being on the right side and being right, if you take the notion of God-as-logos seriously; the all-powerful is the source and creator of truth, being on his side (rather than him being on your side) in that case is what matters. One reason to think of most ideology as a bolt-in replacement for the religious impulse (esp. Marxism!)
I think David is trying to get us to think charitably about enemies. This is to make us intellectually stronger, not weaken our resolve against evil. It is charitable to say that Soros believes he is helping to reform the criminal justice system. Whether he is making it worse or better is a different issue.
from a lawful perspective, yes. It's not prosecutors' jobs, at least not since the magistrate and local lord were the same person and also the maker of law, to make law, but to judge based on it. If it is an evil law and has evil consequences, slipping out of them by selectively not enforcing laws is yet another evil, so it's yet another question of "does two wrongs make a right". There are some laws that sit on the books which are objectively bad, but are never removed because they are never enforced and are largely unknown (these are often called 'blue laws'.) The notion that the lawyer or judge should make law has had its phases, and ultimately isn't really about right or wrong but about power - who gets to decide what's right or wrong (in this case, admitting you might believe that the prosecutor's job is to do so.)
In our system prosecutors have discretion in what offenses they will prosecute. Given limited resources, it makes sense to spend them where you think they will do the most good.
One virtue of the civil system is that provides a way of prosecuting offenses that government agents don't want prosecuted.
My belief is that if nobody enforced evil laws, i.e. simply nobody would do the job, the bodies that make laws would be essentially forced to change them.
A fantasy world, I know, where people live by first principles and ethics, but it's a world I'd like to imagine could exist.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is a superb exploration of a lot of themes relevant to this discussion. That's far to the left (and sympathetic to anarchism) comes through clearly -- all the pro-market characters are pretty horrible people, for example, while the anarchists are fun loving people you'd want to hang out with -- but the virtue of that trilogy is that he takes all the ideas seriously and tries to fairly present the conflict of ideas, even if his thumb strays on to the scale from time to time. Since then, however, his writing has gotten pretty boring because he's standing on the scale, holding weights, to tip it in the direction he wants, which is a tedious left wing fantasy world. Red Mars (the first in the trilogy) is particularly good - I've used it as a reading in a Liberty Fund colloquium (on "Mars as the New Utopia") and it provoked excellent conversations.
I've read and enjoyed some of his writing. Picked up the first volume (Red Mars?) expecting it to be at least decent. For whatever reason I just couldn't get into it. It was boring. I don't remember exactly why I disliked it, I just remembered being bored and thinking "This undoubtedly isn't going to get less boring for me" me and giving up. I had to force myself to read that far.
Recently I started a fat trilogy by an author I really like and forced myself to read to the end of the first volume. Now I'm asking myself if there's any reason I need to read the last two volumes. Then I read somewhere that he is "adding" 3 more volumes.
I know it's a money game, but there are very, very few stories worth 1800 pages, let alone double that.
Evidently after Tolkien some authors found they could actually make big money by writing small stories at enormous length. They're welcome to do that, but they'll get little from me. I am not entertained. ;-) And pretending a small story is a big story by having "a cast of thousands" isn't going to fool me. Maybe I'm too old and have read too much SF/F and anticipate too much.
Was it Dr. Samuel Johnson who said, "No one but a fool ever wrote for any reason but money?" True enough I suppose. But I get to pick and choose.
Yes, labeling someone as evil is a convenient way to dismiss them without addressing whether they are right or wrong. An evil person can certainly be right about something, just as a good person can be wrong. Their “moral” qualities do not make them impervious to mistaken notions.
My reaction to this is to suggest that I try to be more like a fox than a hedgehog.
I don't think it's possible to come up with a _single_ philosophical derivation of ethics that solves the problem of telling everyone what is right in a way that will seem obviously right/valid to all. I think people have come up with several, and they all fail in corner cases, if not worse than that.
I also think that going with "which side are you on" is likely to cause more harm - "evil", if you will - than following most reasonable ethical ideals.
Add to that a problem of values. People tend to have many values in common, but some are just plain contradictory. One culture's "rugged individualist" is another culture's dangerous (and probably insane) non-conformist. With others it's "just" a matter of emphasis, but that can in practice create a huge gulf.
Add to this that just about any halfway intelligent human can come up with a rigorous-seeming ethical justification for just about anything they wanted to do in the first place - or for something that someone they really like has been caught doing.
So I want multiple viewpoints on any important decision, not to derive it from any general principle. Government is not always bad. Capitalism is not always bad. Private property is not always bad. But sometimes each of them blows up spectacularly. Sometimes autocracy works at least as well as any available alternative, for more than just the autocrats. etc. etc. Mostly it ought to be a matter of cases and compromise.
This makes me wonder what your definition of government is?
To me, government = the monopoly on the exercise of the initiation of violent force (coecerion) so I *always* define government as evil.
Now, do I think everything a government _DOES_ is evil? No, of course not. So maybe one could argue, "government isn't bad at the moment, considering the alternatives available today," and I'd likely agree.
There is nothing inherently evil with say, self defense or roads, but this is like saying there's nothing inherently wrong with sex, so government rape, as long as it's done under the legislation of an elected body, is totally fine.
If we switch the argument to "practicality" then I think governments are still necessary in the world today, but that doesn't mean I can't call them evil using first principle arguments, i.e. coercion is unethical (with exceptions for stopping violators and making your children brush their teeth).
I do wonder, admittedly, that I do think of what it would be like to live in a principled world without a primary concern being the consquences. Maybe it'd turn out hellish.
"the monopoly on the exercise of the initiation of violent force (coecerion)"
Seems better than the alternatives, and better than the reality on the ground - the reality being that there are areas the cops won't go into, and there is plenty of non-state violence going on.
Having a monopoly means more stability and less violence, having multiple actors means much less stability and more violence, everyone being an actor means no stability and very high amounts of violence.
I can't understand how the monopoly is evil, this seems insane to me. Is the use/threat of violence to comply with taxes the evil here?
Are you hoping for a government that only does policing and a standing army, funded by donations?
I think there might be some work you can read or lectures you can listen to by some guy, um, I think Dave Fryman or something...lol
In all seriousness, you're on a David Friedman post asking this?
Doesn't mean his answer is correct, of course, but it seems a weird question to be asking.
Is the threat of violence to comply with taxes evil? you ask
I say, "Hell, yes, it's the very definition of evil. Do as I say or else!"
Part of the reason I left America.
I live in a Narco-State and it's much safer, more free, less expensive, pretty much everything is better here, even the weather, although I won't credit the cartel for that.
So to be clear - the monopoly on violence isn't evil, it's the use of violence to enforce taxes right?
If the "as I Say" in "Do as I Say or Else" is just Don't Steal, Don't assault, and Don't Kill (or in other words Don't Aggress), is it evil?
Because your comments seem to be saying that your issue is with the monopoly itself, and the use of force by a State, not the content. This would be insane though, so I'm asking for clarification
This Substack is a monopoly controlled by David Friedman. I'm totally fine with that.
What I'm against are monopolies enforced by violence and coercion (whether it's a state or not, doesn't matter).
When American lawmakers decree that any child born on American soil is, without their consent, subject to taxation, that's wrong/unethical/etc in my view.
I don't argue that the narco-state I live in is ethical or good or moral or that there aren't many better alternatives, just to be clear, I only argue that it's a less oppressive system than the US government (and part of the reason I will, barring a major unknown factor, never move back to the USA).
If a group is enforcing peace (stopping violence, etc) I'd probably be fine if it was a monopoly and said monopoly was kept via force, but everything under that umbrella was voluntary, just to be pragmatic, but this is hardly the way this kind of thing works out historically.
As Jesus, the sweet Lamb of God, said, "Bring those unbelievers to me and slaughter them."
It doesn't seem like we can escape the idea that whoever has the biggest gun ends up being the bully.
Thank you for clarifying. I believe the distinction between power (the monopoly on violence itself) and use of power (what that monopoly is used for) is necessary for any real discussion.
Historically, governments (except the USA originally) are not designed so much as they warp organically piecemeal and people work to take power however they can. There is no one with the absolute power necessary to redesign the power structure who is also willing to give it a go, instead of just holding onto power themselves.
If I had to define government, it would be the way some group of humans, generally defined territorially, govern themselves. Noting that "govern themselves" doesn't require that all or most of them have any official say in decisions.
Humans *always* do this. It may be more or less formal. Individual members of the group may all be subject to roughly the same rules, or some may be authorized to consume and/or command a lot more than others. Usually there are official rules, which aren't always followed, and another set that's more or less tacit and/or based on current state of relative power.
Fair enough, but when you make a definition ambiguous, subjective, and in this case very broad (you've defined government as basically everyone who votes) it's meaningless.
Yes, humans have always organized since they left the domain of non-time-based consequential thinking, some hundreds of thousands of years ago....
...but that's not helpful in a discussion of "government."
As Obama once said, "government is the body that has the initiation of force," or, one could say, "they guys with guns and impunity to use them."
"Official rules" can be made by a church, an HoA, a club, lots of things, but the right to initiate force is a monopoly held by the state. That's government. Anything else is not.
I always likened this line of thinking to the Plato/Socrates idea that no person does wrong willingly. The implication being that 'evil' is borne of ignorance, not vice. I always enjoyed those dialogues; I think it's a good lesson.
I spent decades occasionally trying to explain my politics. I suppose anarcho-capitalist leavened by enlightened self-interest trying to foresee outcomes/results 4-5 order effects. Of course that explained little to them, but it generally confused them enough to leave me alone.
I well remember returning to grad school (at age 40+) and being asked by another (young, female) grad student what my "political beliefs" were. I told her the truth. Basically I was/am an anarchist who believes that everyone has a profit motive whether they know it or not. She then asked, "But what about the Free Rider Problem?" I replied that I didn't have a free rider problem, because if I wanted something done, I either convinced enough others of the benefit to themselves and they helped, or I did it myself and didn't worry about who benefited other than me. For instance. Say I'm a farmer in 1820. I need/want a bridge across a deep creek to shorten my walk to the market. No others are willing to help, so I drop a large tree across the creek and thus shorten my walk. Later I find that others are using "my" tree. Are my choices to cut down the tree from across the creek and thus reverting to the old distance, stand guard with a gun and demand payment for anyone using "my" tree, or ignoring the 'trespass' and telling my neighbors I'm glad they appreciate my work? I pick number 3.
In practice in my actual life, I've found that doing things myself and ignoring any "free rider" problem I have received more than the value of my acts in return.
I don't know how that would work over a very large population, but I'd be willing to take a shot at it.
It works incredibly well in the Plain Communities, but they tend to limit the size to around 300 adults, and to 'bud' another community when they reach or exceed that number.
I think I believe (still unsure) that the problem with the Free Rider Problem is that the usual fix requires a large, centralized score-keeping mechanism that is worse than the problem.
The problem with the free rider problem is that it means some things worth doing don't get done. The problem with using government to solve it is that the political market has lots of free rider problems, market failures more generally, so cannot be trusted to do the right thing.
Do you think "things worth doing but not getting done" is a function of lack of resources (in general) or that the people able to do such things are so greedy they simply would rather go without than suffer free loaders?
Neither. The problem is that the summed benefit to all beneficiaries is larger than the cost but the benefit to any individual beneficiaries is less than the cost, so it isn't worth it for an individual to do it. The problem can sometimes be solved by cooperation among beneficiaries, but that is hard to organize if there are thousands of them.
In your bridge case, suppose the cost to you of bridging the creek was much larger than the value to you of the shorter walk but less than the value to all the farmers whose walk would be shortened. If there are a lot of them it may be hard to persuade enough to contribute to make it worth doing.
Volunteer organizations (like a school PTO) have a lot of problems with this type of thing. They all agree that the end result is better for them, but often not worth the individual cost of doing it themselves. So not many people sign up to be president (or other jobs) for no money and 1/X of the benefits, while lots of people are willing to take 1/X of the benefit of someone else running the organization.
Some people do it altruistically, some people see that they themselves benefit and value their own time/effort low enough to make it worth it, and some people find a way to benefit themselves more than others.
One time I was arguing with someone about judging people not by their sides but by their actions, I got told "If you don't take this side you will be easily corrupted by the other side".
You could say "how typical of the closed mind approach" but only to yourself, because it would not be accepted nor appreciated by those who makes such statements about "sides".
This is a very minor tangent. But it always strikes me as interesting that Dr. Friedman is the only one I ever see use the word “webbed” to describe something posted on the internet. I never see anyone else use that term in that way. I’m mildly curious if my circle of usage is unusual or if his usage is.
If you're old enough to have been on the internet in the 90s, it was common terminology. "Web-links" or "webbed links" were both common phrases. I just assumed it was a holdover from the pre-search engine days when it was common to have various websites link to others as the primary means of finding which websites existed and were useful.
The only alternative was to type in the actual website address exactly, with no exceptions. You typed www. and had to have the /specific-website or got an error.
Similar to how David Friedman has linked other Substack blogs and they link to others (and back to David), these website often made chains and could be circular, and adding the term "rings" as in "web rings" was common.
I think I had only seen/heard the word "webbed" in the phrase "webbed feet" before I started reading this blog. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/webbed was the only dictionary I could find that lists this sense of the word. To me it feels like a word from a different age, like "velocipede" or "spectacles".
In my experience, there are people who are sincerely well-intentioned but wrong supporting some political philosophy, but there are also people who support some political philosophy because they have some ulterior motive (which is what I call evil). The latter may well include libertarians and proprietarian anarchists, by the way; these tend to be scammers and frauds, when sincere and "political entrepreneurs" when they are insincere (for instance, I have doubts about Javier Milei of Argentina).
While "evil" people (as per above) always consider those who disagrees with them as either stupid or evil, unfortunately -- as you write -- some well-intentioned people also, regrettably, do it. Even some with whom I agree on most things, except this. Furthermore, I find this attitude of getting angry at one's opponents to be counterproductive in the task of persuasion and spreading the word.
There are, I believe, sound evolutionary reasons why humans tend not to consider the arguments of those whom they consider to be enemies: the enemy might be smarter than us and might successfully deceive us. Therefore, if we want to persuade someone to change their mind, it is important not to trigger their friend-or-foe identification system and paint ourselves as "the enemy", which is often made more difficult by memeplexes that teach that everybody that disagrees with them are enemies as a matter of memetic immune reaction. Getting angry at one's opponents beliefs, implying that they are either evil or stupid to believe what they do is very unhelpful and likely to trip their "enemy" mode even if they would otherwise listen.
I don't feel comfortable lumping together the likes of Wolff (as you describe him), with Rothbard.
While I don't always agree with Rothbard, I think he and his camp score higher on intellectual humility.
(By the way, I think that's one of the reasons the extreme left has more political success, they prioritize intellectual unity within their ranks).
Also, Rothbard tries to develop a deontological ethical system, where consequences play a secondary role, while the emotional left is within the consequential framework (with a lot of confused thinking e.g. Rawls).
This makes the difference between the two camps vivid.
On the one side, the emotional left with its "ends justify the means" running over and over into the wall of disastrous ends followed by "not real communism" cries.
On the other side, the emotional Rothbardians with "ends NEVER justify the means" inadvertently promoting good consequences without even trying too much.
Wolff objected to the connection to Rothbard too. There are a lot of differences. But both of them see the disagreement as fundamentally based on which side you are on, not on a disagreement about which side, or what policies, produce what results.
At the very least, this approach (disagreement based on side) makes more sense for a deontologist. After all, Rothbard is not a consequentialist, for him liberty is a religion (at least that's my reading).
I don't follow his religion, but it's quite benign even when it's wrong.
On the other side, the emotional left is either dangerously religious (communism), or terribly hypocritical (when it is consequentialist, but ignores reality when it's inconvenient).
Another enjoyable and civil foray - muchas gracias. Seems from my low perch that one of the great examples of this kind of problem is exemplified by Rousseau, the seminal inspiration for so much left-leaning discourse. We who survived the Cold War all know about the miserable track record of command economies and the horrors that accompanied them. I grew up dipped in the critiques on offer in my dad’s copies of National Review, and WFB had no qualms about tracing the toxicity of it all back to Rousseau’s doorstep. There is something to that but as arguments go it also suffered from de-contextualization in much the same way leftist advocacy of its own ideals did. (Yes, when Monsieur Rousseau wrote an awful lot of people actually lived in chains, though that evil practice had been much diminished by the late 20th century.) Would it be fair to hold that our vaunted powers of reason, despite our hubris, never succeed in catching-up to our capacity for self-delusion, homicide, etc.? And that the tenacity of this dynamic is reason enough to be wary of whatever comprehensive solutions they think of next? Asking for a friend.
I think there’s an argument for moral realism in here. You seem to be arguing that the real disagreements are not over which outcomes we want, but which institutions produce those outcomes. I think this is true because I think morality is real. Unfortunately, moral realism has become seen, by much of western culture, as morally wrong! This is a recipe for the tribalism you are describing. The moment a person tries to conceptualize morality, they are “committing the sin of moral realism. I think western elites consider moral realism to be wrong because if you DID have the real moral truth, wouldn’t that be an argument for things like empire and crushing freedom of religion and freedom of speech? Since those things are obviously wrong, the implicit logic says, “moral realism must be wrong.”
This is the same reasoning I eventually found; I didn’t know it was called intuitionism. I think it probably _is_ connected with that disagreement with Wolff and Rothbard, but in a roundabout way. The story of Wolff first looking diligently for answer to the question of the true ethics, and then giving up and becoming a communist, is a beautiful parallel to the history of western philosophy over the last ~500 years or so: if searching for the truth doesn’t give us nice and tidy formulae to absolve oursleves from having to consult our moral intuition and reason under uncertainty, there are two possible responses: We can continue to rely on this intuition, and still try to make use of principles and reasoning while giving up on the desire for moral certainty - or we can give up on the reasoning process, in order to hold onto the feeling of moral certainty. You have to pick one or the other: the use of reason or the feeling of being certain that you are on the right side. Wolff and Rothbard want to FEEL right, more so then they want to do good. They are unwilling to accept moral uncertainty, and so revert to a more primitive, animalistic kind of morality.
I wish life were generally as simple as in the time of the old song (Which Side are You On?) about the miners, when you had to be a union man and not a lousy scab. That old song is more meaningful to most people than the metaphysics of morals, not only because Kant is so hard to read but also because people simply know without Kant what's fair and what's not. People also know that they are part of a bargain in which they are willing to trade a certain amount of fairness for other goods, even if it is mere stability, for instance. The fair point Wolff and Rothbard could be making, instead of writing a silly diatribe about the requirement for hating the state, is that human nature does not deal well with purely cosequentislist considerations when profound injustice or evil is being perceived and felt. Human dignity has been upheld through many acts of futility and you will often fail to convince people that surrender to the bully is the most dignified option based on your calculations.
“Purely consequentialist considerations” are a delusion, unless you have the total state of the universe and infinite computing power. Since nobody has that, what we call “consequentialism” is more like, “compute consequences based upon some toy model which is only an approximation of reality.” This raises the question: which aspects of reality has your approximation thrown out?
Which is the same core problem with command economies generally. There are always second, third, fourth-order unintended consequences that were unknown and therefore could not have been measured.
If you want to know if (to pick some controversial topics on purpose) gay marriage or teenage gender transitions are (bad/good/whatever) and you're using consequentialist methods, you would need to know the outcome over the next XX(X?) years, which is obviously not something we would know ahead of time. So instead we all become deontologists at some point and people instead say "Love is Love" and give up on the consequences. Or if they're being disingenuous they use the lack of consequences *prior* to a change to pretend that means there wouldn't be consequences after.
Communists seem really big on that. Assuming the economy stays just the way it is now, but with the proceeds distributed through a command economy to increase equality. There seems to be no a priori reason to think that a major change would have no unintended results, and lots of practical real world examples where it did.
Yes! Communism, being centralized decision making, doesn’t work for strictly computational reasons. It’s like trying to have a single job scheduler for the entire world, rather than relying on local CPUs to make local scheduling decisions. Even if you remove the human element entirely, global consensus only works if it’s extremely energetically intensive and low bandwidth. See also: bitcoin’s onchain throughout. If you want a system that’s live enough to be responsive to human needs, it has to consist of a network of dynamic decision making agents, only very loosely tethered to some global state consensus mechansim.
Divorcing virtue from consequences allows incompetent people to feel virtuous.
I'm totally stealing this. Gonna file off the numbers and claim it for my own.
“Drained dry” of what? Unemployment?
I presume profit opportunities for investors, given the context.
I think it's more mistaken than that. I read it as when these economies mature they shift to a service economy and the manufacturing goes elsewhere. Since the manufacturing jobs tend to be higher wages in a developing economy, this means that (relative to the rest of the economy) high wages are going to a new locations (Japan-> S. Korea -> China) and being replaced by (relative to the rest of the economy) lower wages. That is, manufacturing jobs might pay 4X other available jobs in a developing country, but service jobs pay 1X.
Now, if you look at those service jobs in places like Japan, they are clearly being paid much higher (absolute) rates than the manufacturing jobs in China, which I take to be a great resolution.
I suspect there are some hidden thoughts behind this, tied up with the "Means of Production" requiring production and some notion of service jobs being more menial and not allowing the individuals filling them to be considered high status.
Not everyone can be high status at the same time. I'm fine with that, but apparently there are people who prefer everyone be equal status and low-income rather than some having high status even if all incomes are higher. From a power-dynamic standpoint I guess this makes some sense - it's hard to lord it over other people if you all have the same status. From a practical "can you live a happy and fulfilling life" standpoint, I much prefer that everyone have a higher standard of living, even if Jeff Bezos has a yacht bigger than every house I've ever lived in combined.
I think they aren't wrong, it's that they half wrong. It does matter what side you are on, but it also matters whether you are right or wrong. Good ideas can be used in the service of evil, there are no excaliburs among them. When we look at the accrual of wealth, money is a 'good' but not good. Because of that, accrual of wealth can be an evil, if it is used for evil. The risk of being right but not on the right side (or not caring what side you are on;) is that your ideas get recuperated and used against you.
There is also ultimately no distinction between being on the right side and being right, if you take the notion of God-as-logos seriously; the all-powerful is the source and creator of truth, being on his side (rather than him being on your side) in that case is what matters. One reason to think of most ideology as a bolt-in replacement for the religious impulse (esp. Marxism!)
I would accept George Soros as an example of evil.
What do you believe he thinks are the results of what he does?
Destruction of the current legal system. When prosecutors won't prosecute what sort of 'system' do you have?
I think David is trying to get us to think charitably about enemies. This is to make us intellectually stronger, not weaken our resolve against evil. It is charitable to say that Soros believes he is helping to reform the criminal justice system. Whether he is making it worse or better is a different issue.
Fascinating article on the issue of DAs in CA, they are not required go report their campaign funding sources. Talk about a recipe for corruption. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hessick-rossi-district-attorney-campaign-contributions-20180329-story.html. Soros may be trying to "balance out" pro cop corruption with anti-cop corruption. The ideal would be for a mix of equal funding from both pro and anti-cop sources.
Should prosecutors prosecute evil laws such as runaway slave laws?
from a lawful perspective, yes. It's not prosecutors' jobs, at least not since the magistrate and local lord were the same person and also the maker of law, to make law, but to judge based on it. If it is an evil law and has evil consequences, slipping out of them by selectively not enforcing laws is yet another evil, so it's yet another question of "does two wrongs make a right". There are some laws that sit on the books which are objectively bad, but are never removed because they are never enforced and are largely unknown (these are often called 'blue laws'.) The notion that the lawyer or judge should make law has had its phases, and ultimately isn't really about right or wrong but about power - who gets to decide what's right or wrong (in this case, admitting you might believe that the prosecutor's job is to do so.)
In our system prosecutors have discretion in what offenses they will prosecute. Given limited resources, it makes sense to spend them where you think they will do the most good.
One virtue of the civil system is that provides a way of prosecuting offenses that government agents don't want prosecuted.
My belief is that if nobody enforced evil laws, i.e. simply nobody would do the job, the bodies that make laws would be essentially forced to change them.
A fantasy world, I know, where people live by first principles and ethics, but it's a world I'd like to imagine could exist.
An interesting question is whether Soros is really malevolent or just tortuously mistaken.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is a superb exploration of a lot of themes relevant to this discussion. That's far to the left (and sympathetic to anarchism) comes through clearly -- all the pro-market characters are pretty horrible people, for example, while the anarchists are fun loving people you'd want to hang out with -- but the virtue of that trilogy is that he takes all the ideas seriously and tries to fairly present the conflict of ideas, even if his thumb strays on to the scale from time to time. Since then, however, his writing has gotten pretty boring because he's standing on the scale, holding weights, to tip it in the direction he wants, which is a tedious left wing fantasy world. Red Mars (the first in the trilogy) is particularly good - I've used it as a reading in a Liberty Fund colloquium (on "Mars as the New Utopia") and it provoked excellent conversations.
I tried several times to read the first book. Never even got 1/3 of the way in before I gave up. YMMV
You probably would really dislike the other ones then!
Antarctica is a sort of 1 volume version of the Mars trilogy if you have some desire to read more of his stuff.
I've read and enjoyed some of his writing. Picked up the first volume (Red Mars?) expecting it to be at least decent. For whatever reason I just couldn't get into it. It was boring. I don't remember exactly why I disliked it, I just remembered being bored and thinking "This undoubtedly isn't going to get less boring for me" me and giving up. I had to force myself to read that far.
Recently I started a fat trilogy by an author I really like and forced myself to read to the end of the first volume. Now I'm asking myself if there's any reason I need to read the last two volumes. Then I read somewhere that he is "adding" 3 more volumes.
I know it's a money game, but there are very, very few stories worth 1800 pages, let alone double that.
Evidently after Tolkien some authors found they could actually make big money by writing small stories at enormous length. They're welcome to do that, but they'll get little from me. I am not entertained. ;-) And pretending a small story is a big story by having "a cast of thousands" isn't going to fool me. Maybe I'm too old and have read too much SF/F and anticipate too much.
Was it Dr. Samuel Johnson who said, "No one but a fool ever wrote for any reason but money?" True enough I suppose. But I get to pick and choose.
Yes, labeling someone as evil is a convenient way to dismiss them without addressing whether they are right or wrong. An evil person can certainly be right about something, just as a good person can be wrong. Their “moral” qualities do not make them impervious to mistaken notions.
My reaction to this is to suggest that I try to be more like a fox than a hedgehog.
I don't think it's possible to come up with a _single_ philosophical derivation of ethics that solves the problem of telling everyone what is right in a way that will seem obviously right/valid to all. I think people have come up with several, and they all fail in corner cases, if not worse than that.
I also think that going with "which side are you on" is likely to cause more harm - "evil", if you will - than following most reasonable ethical ideals.
Add to that a problem of values. People tend to have many values in common, but some are just plain contradictory. One culture's "rugged individualist" is another culture's dangerous (and probably insane) non-conformist. With others it's "just" a matter of emphasis, but that can in practice create a huge gulf.
Add to this that just about any halfway intelligent human can come up with a rigorous-seeming ethical justification for just about anything they wanted to do in the first place - or for something that someone they really like has been caught doing.
So I want multiple viewpoints on any important decision, not to derive it from any general principle. Government is not always bad. Capitalism is not always bad. Private property is not always bad. But sometimes each of them blows up spectacularly. Sometimes autocracy works at least as well as any available alternative, for more than just the autocrats. etc. etc. Mostly it ought to be a matter of cases and compromise.
Given human beings, probably anything pushed towards an extreme will turn out bad.
This is a rather stupid thing to say.
Humans can take anything and make it bad, extremism only creates selection effects
Yo Mama
I rest my case
Actually, you made an assertion (or two, really) not a case. Insults are not making a case. I merely responded in kind.
And she wears combat boots.
Fair.
I rest my assertions.
Yo mama
_Government is not always bad._
This makes me wonder what your definition of government is?
To me, government = the monopoly on the exercise of the initiation of violent force (coecerion) so I *always* define government as evil.
Now, do I think everything a government _DOES_ is evil? No, of course not. So maybe one could argue, "government isn't bad at the moment, considering the alternatives available today," and I'd likely agree.
There is nothing inherently evil with say, self defense or roads, but this is like saying there's nothing inherently wrong with sex, so government rape, as long as it's done under the legislation of an elected body, is totally fine.
If we switch the argument to "practicality" then I think governments are still necessary in the world today, but that doesn't mean I can't call them evil using first principle arguments, i.e. coercion is unethical (with exceptions for stopping violators and making your children brush their teeth).
I do wonder, admittedly, that I do think of what it would be like to live in a principled world without a primary concern being the consquences. Maybe it'd turn out hellish.
"the monopoly on the exercise of the initiation of violent force (coecerion)"
Seems better than the alternatives, and better than the reality on the ground - the reality being that there are areas the cops won't go into, and there is plenty of non-state violence going on.
Having a monopoly means more stability and less violence, having multiple actors means much less stability and more violence, everyone being an actor means no stability and very high amounts of violence.
I can't understand how the monopoly is evil, this seems insane to me. Is the use/threat of violence to comply with taxes the evil here?
Are you hoping for a government that only does policing and a standing army, funded by donations?
Naw, read up on private defense companies.
I think there might be some work you can read or lectures you can listen to by some guy, um, I think Dave Fryman or something...lol
In all seriousness, you're on a David Friedman post asking this?
Doesn't mean his answer is correct, of course, but it seems a weird question to be asking.
Is the threat of violence to comply with taxes evil? you ask
I say, "Hell, yes, it's the very definition of evil. Do as I say or else!"
Part of the reason I left America.
I live in a Narco-State and it's much safer, more free, less expensive, pretty much everything is better here, even the weather, although I won't credit the cartel for that.
So to be clear - the monopoly on violence isn't evil, it's the use of violence to enforce taxes right?
If the "as I Say" in "Do as I Say or Else" is just Don't Steal, Don't assault, and Don't Kill (or in other words Don't Aggress), is it evil?
Because your comments seem to be saying that your issue is with the monopoly itself, and the use of force by a State, not the content. This would be insane though, so I'm asking for clarification
Fair enough. Let me do my best to clarify.
I don't have an ethical objection to monopolies.
This Substack is a monopoly controlled by David Friedman. I'm totally fine with that.
What I'm against are monopolies enforced by violence and coercion (whether it's a state or not, doesn't matter).
When American lawmakers decree that any child born on American soil is, without their consent, subject to taxation, that's wrong/unethical/etc in my view.
I don't argue that the narco-state I live in is ethical or good or moral or that there aren't many better alternatives, just to be clear, I only argue that it's a less oppressive system than the US government (and part of the reason I will, barring a major unknown factor, never move back to the USA).
If a group is enforcing peace (stopping violence, etc) I'd probably be fine if it was a monopoly and said monopoly was kept via force, but everything under that umbrella was voluntary, just to be pragmatic, but this is hardly the way this kind of thing works out historically.
As Jesus, the sweet Lamb of God, said, "Bring those unbelievers to me and slaughter them."
It doesn't seem like we can escape the idea that whoever has the biggest gun ends up being the bully.
Thank you for clarifying. I believe the distinction between power (the monopoly on violence itself) and use of power (what that monopoly is used for) is necessary for any real discussion.
Historically, governments (except the USA originally) are not designed so much as they warp organically piecemeal and people work to take power however they can. There is no one with the absolute power necessary to redesign the power structure who is also willing to give it a go, instead of just holding onto power themselves.
If I had to define government, it would be the way some group of humans, generally defined territorially, govern themselves. Noting that "govern themselves" doesn't require that all or most of them have any official say in decisions.
Humans *always* do this. It may be more or less formal. Individual members of the group may all be subject to roughly the same rules, or some may be authorized to consume and/or command a lot more than others. Usually there are official rules, which aren't always followed, and another set that's more or less tacit and/or based on current state of relative power.
Fair enough, but when you make a definition ambiguous, subjective, and in this case very broad (you've defined government as basically everyone who votes) it's meaningless.
Yes, humans have always organized since they left the domain of non-time-based consequential thinking, some hundreds of thousands of years ago....
...but that's not helpful in a discussion of "government."
As Obama once said, "government is the body that has the initiation of force," or, one could say, "they guys with guns and impunity to use them."
"Official rules" can be made by a church, an HoA, a club, lots of things, but the right to initiate force is a monopoly held by the state. That's government. Anything else is not.
I always likened this line of thinking to the Plato/Socrates idea that no person does wrong willingly. The implication being that 'evil' is borne of ignorance, not vice. I always enjoyed those dialogues; I think it's a good lesson.
I spent decades occasionally trying to explain my politics. I suppose anarcho-capitalist leavened by enlightened self-interest trying to foresee outcomes/results 4-5 order effects. Of course that explained little to them, but it generally confused them enough to leave me alone.
I well remember returning to grad school (at age 40+) and being asked by another (young, female) grad student what my "political beliefs" were. I told her the truth. Basically I was/am an anarchist who believes that everyone has a profit motive whether they know it or not. She then asked, "But what about the Free Rider Problem?" I replied that I didn't have a free rider problem, because if I wanted something done, I either convinced enough others of the benefit to themselves and they helped, or I did it myself and didn't worry about who benefited other than me. For instance. Say I'm a farmer in 1820. I need/want a bridge across a deep creek to shorten my walk to the market. No others are willing to help, so I drop a large tree across the creek and thus shorten my walk. Later I find that others are using "my" tree. Are my choices to cut down the tree from across the creek and thus reverting to the old distance, stand guard with a gun and demand payment for anyone using "my" tree, or ignoring the 'trespass' and telling my neighbors I'm glad they appreciate my work? I pick number 3.
In practice in my actual life, I've found that doing things myself and ignoring any "free rider" problem I have received more than the value of my acts in return.
I don't know how that would work over a very large population, but I'd be willing to take a shot at it.
It works incredibly well in the Plain Communities, but they tend to limit the size to around 300 adults, and to 'bud' another community when they reach or exceed that number.
I think I believe (still unsure) that the problem with the Free Rider Problem is that the usual fix requires a large, centralized score-keeping mechanism that is worse than the problem.
The problem with the free rider problem is that it means some things worth doing don't get done. The problem with using government to solve it is that the political market has lots of free rider problems, market failures more generally, so cannot be trusted to do the right thing.
Do you think "things worth doing but not getting done" is a function of lack of resources (in general) or that the people able to do such things are so greedy they simply would rather go without than suffer free loaders?
Neither. The problem is that the summed benefit to all beneficiaries is larger than the cost but the benefit to any individual beneficiaries is less than the cost, so it isn't worth it for an individual to do it. The problem can sometimes be solved by cooperation among beneficiaries, but that is hard to organize if there are thousands of them.
In your bridge case, suppose the cost to you of bridging the creek was much larger than the value to you of the shorter walk but less than the value to all the farmers whose walk would be shortened. If there are a lot of them it may be hard to persuade enough to contribute to make it worth doing.
Volunteer organizations (like a school PTO) have a lot of problems with this type of thing. They all agree that the end result is better for them, but often not worth the individual cost of doing it themselves. So not many people sign up to be president (or other jobs) for no money and 1/X of the benefits, while lots of people are willing to take 1/X of the benefit of someone else running the organization.
Some people do it altruistically, some people see that they themselves benefit and value their own time/effort low enough to make it worth it, and some people find a way to benefit themselves more than others.
One time I was arguing with someone about judging people not by their sides but by their actions, I got told "If you don't take this side you will be easily corrupted by the other side".
What more can I say ?
Take offense, they called you weak
You could say "how typical of the closed mind approach" but only to yourself, because it would not be accepted nor appreciated by those who makes such statements about "sides".
This is a very minor tangent. But it always strikes me as interesting that Dr. Friedman is the only one I ever see use the word “webbed” to describe something posted on the internet. I never see anyone else use that term in that way. I’m mildly curious if my circle of usage is unusual or if his usage is.
Judging by a quick google I'm not the only person to use the term that way. For example: Webbed Footnotes: Collaborative Annotation on the Web: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/webbed-footnotes-collaborative-annotation-on-the-web/
If you're old enough to have been on the internet in the 90s, it was common terminology. "Web-links" or "webbed links" were both common phrases. I just assumed it was a holdover from the pre-search engine days when it was common to have various websites link to others as the primary means of finding which websites existed and were useful.
The only alternative was to type in the actual website address exactly, with no exceptions. You typed www. and had to have the /specific-website or got an error.
Similar to how David Friedman has linked other Substack blogs and they link to others (and back to David), these website often made chains and could be circular, and adding the term "rings" as in "web rings" was common.
I think I had only seen/heard the word "webbed" in the phrase "webbed feet" before I started reading this blog. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/webbed was the only dictionary I could find that lists this sense of the word. To me it feels like a word from a different age, like "velocipede" or "spectacles".
I got on the Internet very early, largely via Usenet.
My apologies, I didn't realize I had any incentive to actually read you.
In my experience, there are people who are sincerely well-intentioned but wrong supporting some political philosophy, but there are also people who support some political philosophy because they have some ulterior motive (which is what I call evil). The latter may well include libertarians and proprietarian anarchists, by the way; these tend to be scammers and frauds, when sincere and "political entrepreneurs" when they are insincere (for instance, I have doubts about Javier Milei of Argentina).
While "evil" people (as per above) always consider those who disagrees with them as either stupid or evil, unfortunately -- as you write -- some well-intentioned people also, regrettably, do it. Even some with whom I agree on most things, except this. Furthermore, I find this attitude of getting angry at one's opponents to be counterproductive in the task of persuasion and spreading the word.
There are, I believe, sound evolutionary reasons why humans tend not to consider the arguments of those whom they consider to be enemies: the enemy might be smarter than us and might successfully deceive us. Therefore, if we want to persuade someone to change their mind, it is important not to trigger their friend-or-foe identification system and paint ourselves as "the enemy", which is often made more difficult by memeplexes that teach that everybody that disagrees with them are enemies as a matter of memetic immune reaction. Getting angry at one's opponents beliefs, implying that they are either evil or stupid to believe what they do is very unhelpful and likely to trip their "enemy" mode even if they would otherwise listen.
I don't feel comfortable lumping together the likes of Wolff (as you describe him), with Rothbard.
While I don't always agree with Rothbard, I think he and his camp score higher on intellectual humility.
(By the way, I think that's one of the reasons the extreme left has more political success, they prioritize intellectual unity within their ranks).
Also, Rothbard tries to develop a deontological ethical system, where consequences play a secondary role, while the emotional left is within the consequential framework (with a lot of confused thinking e.g. Rawls).
This makes the difference between the two camps vivid.
On the one side, the emotional left with its "ends justify the means" running over and over into the wall of disastrous ends followed by "not real communism" cries.
On the other side, the emotional Rothbardians with "ends NEVER justify the means" inadvertently promoting good consequences without even trying too much.
Wolff objected to the connection to Rothbard too. There are a lot of differences. But both of them see the disagreement as fundamentally based on which side you are on, not on a disagreement about which side, or what policies, produce what results.
At the very least, this approach (disagreement based on side) makes more sense for a deontologist. After all, Rothbard is not a consequentialist, for him liberty is a religion (at least that's my reading).
I don't follow his religion, but it's quite benign even when it's wrong.
On the other side, the emotional left is either dangerously religious (communism), or terribly hypocritical (when it is consequentialist, but ignores reality when it's inconvenient).
Another enjoyable and civil foray - muchas gracias. Seems from my low perch that one of the great examples of this kind of problem is exemplified by Rousseau, the seminal inspiration for so much left-leaning discourse. We who survived the Cold War all know about the miserable track record of command economies and the horrors that accompanied them. I grew up dipped in the critiques on offer in my dad’s copies of National Review, and WFB had no qualms about tracing the toxicity of it all back to Rousseau’s doorstep. There is something to that but as arguments go it also suffered from de-contextualization in much the same way leftist advocacy of its own ideals did. (Yes, when Monsieur Rousseau wrote an awful lot of people actually lived in chains, though that evil practice had been much diminished by the late 20th century.) Would it be fair to hold that our vaunted powers of reason, despite our hubris, never succeed in catching-up to our capacity for self-delusion, homicide, etc.? And that the tenacity of this dynamic is reason enough to be wary of whatever comprehensive solutions they think of next? Asking for a friend.
I think there’s an argument for moral realism in here. You seem to be arguing that the real disagreements are not over which outcomes we want, but which institutions produce those outcomes. I think this is true because I think morality is real. Unfortunately, moral realism has become seen, by much of western culture, as morally wrong! This is a recipe for the tribalism you are describing. The moment a person tries to conceptualize morality, they are “committing the sin of moral realism. I think western elites consider moral realism to be wrong because if you DID have the real moral truth, wouldn’t that be an argument for things like empire and crushing freedom of religion and freedom of speech? Since those things are obviously wrong, the implicit logic says, “moral realism must be wrong.”
I am, as it happens, a moral realist, for reasons described at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/An%20Argument%20I%20Lost.htm. But I don't think that is connected with my disagreement with Wolff and Rothbard.
This is the same reasoning I eventually found; I didn’t know it was called intuitionism. I think it probably _is_ connected with that disagreement with Wolff and Rothbard, but in a roundabout way. The story of Wolff first looking diligently for answer to the question of the true ethics, and then giving up and becoming a communist, is a beautiful parallel to the history of western philosophy over the last ~500 years or so: if searching for the truth doesn’t give us nice and tidy formulae to absolve oursleves from having to consult our moral intuition and reason under uncertainty, there are two possible responses: We can continue to rely on this intuition, and still try to make use of principles and reasoning while giving up on the desire for moral certainty - or we can give up on the reasoning process, in order to hold onto the feeling of moral certainty. You have to pick one or the other: the use of reason or the feeling of being certain that you are on the right side. Wolff and Rothbard want to FEEL right, more so then they want to do good. They are unwilling to accept moral uncertainty, and so revert to a more primitive, animalistic kind of morality.
You might want to read Huemer's book _Intuitionism_ for a account of the position by a professional philosopher who agrees with it.
I wish life were generally as simple as in the time of the old song (Which Side are You On?) about the miners, when you had to be a union man and not a lousy scab. That old song is more meaningful to most people than the metaphysics of morals, not only because Kant is so hard to read but also because people simply know without Kant what's fair and what's not. People also know that they are part of a bargain in which they are willing to trade a certain amount of fairness for other goods, even if it is mere stability, for instance. The fair point Wolff and Rothbard could be making, instead of writing a silly diatribe about the requirement for hating the state, is that human nature does not deal well with purely cosequentislist considerations when profound injustice or evil is being perceived and felt. Human dignity has been upheld through many acts of futility and you will often fail to convince people that surrender to the bully is the most dignified option based on your calculations.
“Purely consequentialist considerations” are a delusion, unless you have the total state of the universe and infinite computing power. Since nobody has that, what we call “consequentialism” is more like, “compute consequences based upon some toy model which is only an approximation of reality.” This raises the question: which aspects of reality has your approximation thrown out?
Which is the same core problem with command economies generally. There are always second, third, fourth-order unintended consequences that were unknown and therefore could not have been measured.
If you want to know if (to pick some controversial topics on purpose) gay marriage or teenage gender transitions are (bad/good/whatever) and you're using consequentialist methods, you would need to know the outcome over the next XX(X?) years, which is obviously not something we would know ahead of time. So instead we all become deontologists at some point and people instead say "Love is Love" and give up on the consequences. Or if they're being disingenuous they use the lack of consequences *prior* to a change to pretend that means there wouldn't be consequences after.
Communists seem really big on that. Assuming the economy stays just the way it is now, but with the proceeds distributed through a command economy to increase equality. There seems to be no a priori reason to think that a major change would have no unintended results, and lots of practical real world examples where it did.
Yes! Communism, being centralized decision making, doesn’t work for strictly computational reasons. It’s like trying to have a single job scheduler for the entire world, rather than relying on local CPUs to make local scheduling decisions. Even if you remove the human element entirely, global consensus only works if it’s extremely energetically intensive and low bandwidth. See also: bitcoin’s onchain throughout. If you want a system that’s live enough to be responsive to human needs, it has to consist of a network of dynamic decision making agents, only very loosely tethered to some global state consensus mechansim.