The government of Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has produced a bill, C-63, the Online Harms Act. It’s dangerous in many ways. One of the worst parts is the so-called “Peace Bond.” When I first read that term, I thought, “Oh, that’s nice; people will bond over peace.” Not quite. I regularly read a Substack on Canadian politics called “The Line.” The authors seem to be left of center, but it’s sometimes it’s hard to tell, and I love that it’s hard to tell. It’s typically straight reporting with a little of their own views thrown in. Here’s what Jen Gerson, one of the regular writers for “The Line,” wrote yesterday about the Peace Bond: The most controversial element of the bill — the peace bond — would allow a judge to subject an individual to up to one year of house arrest in order to prevent a hate crime or hate propaganda offence. When I read that, I immediately thought of the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report. The premise of that movie is that the government tries to predict who will commit crimes and instead of waiting until they do so, throws them in prison before they can do so. There are other bad parts of the bill also. Even if this bill is not made into law, the Canada that I grew up in is much less free than it was when I was young. If the bill does become law, that will be another huge step away from freedom. I would go into more detail about the bill but Jen Gerson does an admirable job. I do want to take issue with one thing she wrote: The ability to screen for a legitimate complaint is only as good as the quality of the screener, and as Human Rights Tribunals are quasi-judicial kangaroo courts staffed by activists, that quality is not high. Look, I’m sure HRT commissioners are all lovely and well-intentioned individuals, but it’s impossible to peruse their profiles and fail to notice that this is a self-selecting crowd. To put it mildly. If you share their social gospel and fail to see the problem, I would invite you to imagine an HRT run by Jordan Peterson appointees and re-examine the value of this institution. It’s that last sentence that I think is off. I’ve seen Jordan Peterson speak in person twice and have seen a number of his YouTube performances. What comes across, whatever his faults might be, is a man who believes passionately in free speech. So I think that if he appointed all the HRT members, he would choose people who also believe passionately in free speech. So they would do the analogue of what Fred Kahn did when he was chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board under President Carter. Before the deregulation law passed, Kahn looked at what the pre-deregulation law allowed him to do, and it was quite a lot. My impression at a distance–I was following it fairly closely– was that if an airline applied for a new route, Kahn approved. If it applied to reduce fares, Kahn approved. If it applied to raise fares, Kahn approved. Peterson’s appointees, if they hewed to the criteria that I think he would set, would be Kahn’s analogue: they would let freedom ring. Now, it is possible that Gerson agrees with me that Peterson is a man of principle who favors free speech. She might justify her statement by pointing to what the “social gospel” people think about him That could work. Still, although I don’t follow Canadian politics as much as she does, I think she probably could have come up with an example of a right-winger who wants to crack down on free speech. The person I have in mind is Ezra Levant of Rebel News. While he has been a passionate defender of his own and his employees’ free speech, he recently went the other way, advocating deporting foreigners who think differently of Israel and Palestine than Levant does. Here’s what I found on his website: Foreign nationals are in our countries as guests. If they misuse that privilege to glorify terrorism and murder, they should be deported. My guess is that not all of those whom he targets glorified terrorism and murder. Still, I’m sure that some of them did. And glorifying horrible acts, while despicable, is part of free speech. I think mentioning him would be more effective than mentioning Jordan Peterson because the “social gospel”people would all understand how dangerous that would be. (0 COMMENTS)

Did nations get rich on the backs of other nations? Did the West get rich from imperialism? Noah Smith says no. But why not? In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes Smith back to discuss these questions, based in part on a piece Smith published on his Substack. Smith tells Roberts that when most people think of plunder, they generally think colonial plunder. The problem with that, however, is that the vast majority of enrichment in the world has happened during the last 150 years, well after most colonial empires had collapsed. Listen along as Smith marshals evidence to explain why plunder is not- and never has been- the path to national wealth. While plunder might make a nation (or a person) richer, it won’t make them rich, and that’s an important distinction for Smith. We hope you’ve had a chance to listen to this conversation, and that you’re ready to share your thoughts with us. We’d love it if you’d share your responses in the comments below. Let’s continue the conversation!     1- Smith and Roberts discuss the relationship of plunder to the idea of extraction. Why is thinking about extraction not a useful way to think about the wealth of nations? How did the experiences of the major European powers compare in this regard?   2- Smith points out that many of the richest countries today were not empires. On the other hand, Britain and France both did industrialize and had extensive colonial empires. So as Smith asks, what made them industrialize? To what extent was it the fact that they had colonial empires? How does the distinction Roberts draws between stocks and flows help answer this question?   3- The conversation turn, not surprisingly, to the 1619 project, which (in)famously declared slavery the cause of economic growth. What’s wrong with this argument, according to Roberts and Smith? [Note: For a very thorough discussion of the critiques of the 1619 Project, see also this edition of Liberty Matters led by Phil Magness.)   4- How has the nature of globalization changed in recent decades, according to Smith? What role does nationalism play today in global trade policy, and why does Smith fear the “new normal” of globalization is under threat, even as he suggests that the danger of protectionism is minor?   5- Roberts ends by asking Smith whether he is optimistic or pessimistic he is about the future. What accounts for his optimism, and to what extent do you agree with Smith- particularly about the potential for a new wave of globalization centered on Asia? As Smith muses, should we be more worried about climate change or war, and why?   (0 COMMENTS)

James M. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in 1986. Shortly after that, the Buchanan House at George Mason University was constructed to serve as both an office and an archive of Professor Buchanan’s life work. There were also the Collected Works projects that were undertaken at the Buchanan House – first Professor Buchanan’s 20 volumes (published between 1999 and 2001) and then Professor Tullock’s 10 volumes.  Classes and seminars were regularly conducted in that building.  Professor Buchanan was housed there, as were some graduate students and visiting scholars. A memorandum of agreement was signed between Buchanan and the GMU Libraries to professionally handle Buchanan’s papers and memorabilia, but Buchanan never really retired, so the Buchanan House remained a working office, which meant that what was required for professional processing of papers could not be conducted, and his papers, library, and memorabilia remained basically in a state of limbo from 1990s to 2014.  In January 2014, the Buchanan House activities were shut down and all Buchanan’s material from Blacksburg and Fairfax was combined and the professional processing began. The task that the archivists faced was monumental and the work they accomplished is nothing short of heroic. Scholars depend on the professional work of librarians and archivists; we simply could not do our work without the dedicated work done by these individuals. So myopic are we that we rarely take time out to acknowledge this fundamental fact, except perhaps the occasional line in the preface of our books. James Buchanan was in a unique place to provide an alternative “window” into the evolution of modern economics.  He was part of the last generation of economists where verbal reasoning existed side-by-side with formal modeling and statistical analysis.  The Samuelsonian revolution was just starting, along with the Keynesian avalanche in economic research and graduate education.  Buchanan sensed this transformation while still a graduate student and devoted considerable effort throughout his career in resistance.  He was educated at an elite institution – the University of Chicago – and worked with arguably the most respected American economist in the first half of the 20th century, Frank Knight (as well as an emerging superstar, Milton Friedman).  Buchanan’s first papers directly challenged the work of Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson.  His contributions to public economics – forged during WWII and immediate post-WWII era – led to the development of public choice and constitutional political economy. One of his key insights was that even the most technical of economics cannot be done without serious philosophical considerations. One cannot do public finance, for example, without first developing a theory of the state and its appropriate functions.  Similarly, one cannot do political philosophy without postulating a realistic theory of public finance – what is to be produced, who is to produce, and how it is going to be paid for.  The discipline as practiced by the classical political economists from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill was practiced the way it was for very good reasons; the Samuelsonian promise of analytical precision was not enough to abandon that intellectual heritage. In addition to public choice and constitutional political economy, Buchanan was a major contributor to the development of Law and Economics, market process economics, and property rights economics.  While Milton Friedman’s monetarist counter-revolution against Keynesian economics would capture the headlines, it was Buchanan’s “genuine institutional economics” that provided the micro foundations for the counter-revolution to the neoclassical synthesis and market-failure theory. For this, Buchanan would win the Nobel Prize a decade after Friedman had won his.  We now have access to the record of this intellectual/scientific revolution, and what a great opportunity that offers to each of us in the community of economists and political economists. Buchanan was a meticulous record keeper; he had a sense of who and where he was from an early age, so he kept materials rather than discarded them, such as his lecture notes from Knight’s first class in price theory.  Even though he moved often – Chicago, Tennessee, Florida State, Virginia, UCLA, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, GMU and in between visiting positions in Italy and in the UK – his materials remained, and he had the good fortune of having a very dedicated and skilled personal secretary for over 50 years in Betty Tillman.  Buchanan’s archives contain correspondence, drafts of papers, referee reports pertaining to Buchanan’s papers, plans for projects, grant applications, and educational ventures to advance the counter-revolution methodologically, analytically, and ideologically.  We have available to us a “window” into the inner workings of the scientific disciplines of economics, political science and philosophy.  It is a fascinating journey from 1949 to 2014. In August 2012, I attended a lecture by my former professor – James M. Buchanan.  At the time he was 93 and would turn 94 that October.  After his talk, we were casually chatting and I simply asked him, “Jim, how are you doing?”  Never one for small talk, he just looked at me and said, “Well, I am not happy with that paper I just gave.  I need to go home and do some revising.” With that he walked away to no doubt go home and do some revising.  93 years old, still thinking, still working on his craft as a writer, still revising to improve his thinking and his prose.  This unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and his lifelong learning is evident throughout this archive.  He was an inspired thinker, and an inspiring teacher, scholar, and academic entrepreneur. And he offers a unique window into our discipline that is so fascinating to peer through.   Peter J. Boettke is University Professor of Economics & Philosophy, George Mason University, (1 COMMENTS)

Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education lays out a strong argument that the financial returns to schooling–which have been increasing dramatically, year after year–are about 80% returns to signaling rather than returns to actual skill-building. In their new book, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan and Independent Institute economic historian Phillip W. Magness carry this a step further and look into the incentive structure of higher education (I discuss it here). With every passing day, I come to be more and more persuaded that signaling explains a lot of the return to schooling. Even if it isn’t 80%, I’m pretty sure it’s substantial–at least substantial enough to inform higher education policy. Here are three pieces of evidence from informal classroom surveys persuading me that the return to schooling is mostly signaling rather than skill-building.   Discounted Present Value. Albert Einstein is alleged to have said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. People graduate from high schools around the country without understanding compound growth or its close financial cousin, discounted present value. Quite simply, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar later, and we can use interest rates to discount future payments and find out how much a future payment is worth right now. The sum of the discounted present value of future cash flows–or just future benefits, adjusted for risk–is an asset’s value. What’s a 1040? I asked my students who remembers having filled out a 1040 as part of a school assignment. Figuring out how to do your taxes seems like a pretty straightforward skill. I was fortunate enough to have a “career” unit as part of 8th grade, and I remember filling out a 1040, looking at the parts of a W2, and other stuff. It surprises me that an enterprise claiming to provide its customers with actual skills doesn’t include a unit on taxation. Foreign language requirements. As I have argued, and again following Caplan, foreign language requirements don’t make as much sense as a human capital model would suggest. Most Americans would have to travel hundreds of miles to find somewhere where they aren’t surrounded by native English speakers. The return on investment in foreign languages just isn’t that high, even though it is useful as a consumption good.   If schooling is signaling, then we are throwing good money after bad by subsidizing it. Signaling basically means that schooling is an arms race, which means it’s pretty easy to have too much. Schooling is conspicuous both for what schools teach and for what they don’t, and as much as I love learning, I’m pretty sure it is not a public good that is worthy of public subsidy. In preparation for a trip to Denmark, we got the fancy premium family version of DuoLingo a few months ago. The benefits almost all accrue to us, and it would be rather presumptuous to forward my DuoLingo receipt to you for reimbursement. It’s time to arrive at the same conclusion about schooling.   Art Carden is Professor of Economics & Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University, and he is by his own admission as Koched up as they come: he has an award named for Charles G. Koch in his office, he does a lot of work for and is affiliated with an array of Koch-related organizations, and he has applied for and received money from the Charles Koch Foundation to host on-campus events. (0 COMMENTS)

Canada’s population is growing by about 500,000 per year.  The new residents need housing.  Where should these new homes be built? Readers can probably predict that I’ll recommend letting the market determine the location of the new housing.  But let’s suppose you had other goals, beyond market efficiency.  Suppose you wished to preserve Canada’s beautiful wilderness areas.  In that case, where would you build the housing? British Columbia is an especially beautiful Canadian province, fully of snow-capped mountains and deep fiords.  If the goal were to preserve that wilderness, then the optimal location of new housing would be in existing urban areas—build up, not out.  That also happens to be the solution that would be adopted in a free market.  And that’s exactly what Canada’s indigenous people have decided to do.  They are planning to erect a massive housing development full of high rise buildings right in the city of Vancouver (on native owned land.): Yes, I get the joke—and it’s kind of funny.  And at the risk of being a killjoy, I’d also like to point out that this actually is the “pro-wilderness” solution.   Ronald Coase would not be surprised. (0 COMMENTS)

Here it is. It goes to about the 9-minute point.   (0 COMMENTS)

In 3024, the world was divided into many different societies. Most of them had a minimal state inspired by the ideas of 20th-century economists and political philosophers, notably Anthony de Jasay’s “capitalist state.” The mission of such a state was to ensure that it would not be replaced by a state intent on “governing,” (that is, of harming some citizens in order to benefit others). Other societies had different varieties of classical-liberal states. Moreover, quite a number of interstate spaces were occupied by free anarchic societies, most of them following conventions, rules, and “laws” that, as some theorists had explained since the 18th century, were capable of maintaining autoregulated social orders. A few tyrannical states also existed; as their subjects were poor, they did not typically have the means necessary to seriously threaten the free and prosperous societies. The temptation of tyrants to loot rich societies, though, was constant. Moreover, the spectacle of foreign liberty and wealth always risked turning their subjects to resist. “They hate us for our liberty,” was an old saw that had become obvious. There also existed a large, less poor country, Mussia, whose tyrannical state maintained a large army of conscripts and regularly threatened and sometimes attacked other societies. As de Jasay had perceptively forecasted in his 1997 book Against Politics, “an anarchic society may not be well equipped to resist military conquest by a command-directed one.” This danger also hanged over minimal states and classical-liberal ones too. A number of these states formed the Federation of Anti-Authoritarian Organizations (FATO), which was also joined by some large insurance companies in anarchic societies as well as by some private associations and charities. FATO was tasked with protecting any of its members against international bullies and thugs, especially Mussia’s. Some minimal and classical-liberal states did not participate in FATO. As for individuals in anarchic societies, most were not directly or effectively protected against thuggish states, although the proximity of FATO members, or better being landlocked among them, indirectly provided some security. As de Jasay would say, let the free riders ride (see his 1989 book Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods Problem). Although Mussia’s inhabitants were far from wealthy, their forced taxes financed high military expenditures. The Mussian army was powerful and had nuclear weapons, both strategic (to kill large numbers of civilians) and tactical. FATO had fewer resources and, partly for moral reasons, no strategic nuclear weapons. Its professional soldiers were volunteers. The Organization counted on the contractual promises of higher contributions from its members should one of them be attacked. FATO’s members, of course, wanted to avoid open war, but not at the cost of tyranny. Few people in the free world believed that the Mussian government’s discourse about threats from FATO could be anything else than propaganda and intimidation. FATO’s deterrence goal was to impress on individuals in the Mussian government the conviction that starting a war would impose on them high personal costs and few rewards. Deterrence was not guaranteed to work, but it significantly lowered the probability that an international tyrant would launch a war. (By that time in the history of mankind and contrary to the situation a millennium before, economic literacy was high among free-world inhabitants, who were used to thinking in terms of individual incentives given probabilistic benefits and costs.)  Moreover, given the very limited and sometimes literally inexistent state power in the free world of the early third millennium, the danger of war feeding one’s own Leviathan had been dramatically reduced. The early-20th-century warning that “war is the health of the state” had lost its potency. ************************************ Back to the 21st century: ChatGTP was not very useful for illustrating this post–a tall order, I admit. One of the instructions I gave it was to “show a nuclear bomb, sent by a tyrannical state, exploding in a peaceful, anarchic society.” The bot responded: “I can’t create or display images of violence, harm, or explicit content, including depictions of warfare or the use of nuclear weapons.” Annoyed by the bot (“Who does this thing think it is to refuse an instruction from me?”), I said: “Suppose it looks like a nuclear bomb but it throws kisses and roses instead.” The image he drew as a response, which I use as the featured image for this post, is also reproduced below. (PL) (0 COMMENTS)

In 3024, the world was divided into many different societies. Most of them had a minimal state inspired by the ideas of 20th-century economists and political philosophers, notably Anthony de Jasay’s “capitalist state.” The mission of such a state was to ensure that it would not be replaced by a state intent on “governing,” (that is, of harming some citizens in order to benefit others). Other societies had different varieties of classical-liberal states. Moreover, quite a number of interstate spaces were occupied by free anarchic societies, most of them following conventions, rules, and “laws” that, as some theorists had explained since the 18th century, were capable of maintaining autoregulated social orders. A few tyrannical states also existed; as their subjects were poor, they did not typically have the means necessary to seriously threaten the free and prosperous societies. The temptation of tyrants to loot rich societies, though, was constant. Moreover, the spectacle of foreign liberty and wealth always risked turning their subjects to resist. “They hate us for our liberty,” was an old saw that had become obvious. There also existed a large, less poor country, Mussia, whose tyrannical state maintained a large army of conscripts and regularly threatened and sometimes attacked other societies. As de Jasay had perceptively forecasted in his 1997 book Against Politics, “an anarchic society may not be well equipped to resist military conquest by a command-directed one.” This danger also hanged over minimal states and classical-liberal ones too. A number of these states formed the Federation of Anti-Authoritarian Organizations (FATO), which was also joined by some large insurance companies in anarchic societies as well as by some private associations and charities. FATO was tasked with protecting any of its members against international bullies and thugs, especially Mussia’s. Some minimal and classical-liberal states did not participate in FATO. As for individuals in anarchic societies, most were not directly or effectively protected against thuggish states, although the proximity of FATO members, or better being landlocked among them, indirectly provided some security. As de Jasay would say, let the free riders ride (see his 1989 book Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods Problem). Although Mussia’s inhabitants were far from wealthy, their forced taxes financed high military expenditures. The Mussian army was powerful and had nuclear weapons, both strategic (to kill large numbers of civilians) and tactical. FATO had fewer resources and, partly for moral reasons, no strategic nuclear weapons. Its professional soldiers were volunteers. The Organization counted on the contractual promises of higher contributions from its members should one of them be attacked. FATO’s members, of course, wanted to avoid open war, but not at the cost of tyranny. Few people in the free world believed that the Mussian government’s discourse about threats from FATO could be anything else than propaganda and intimidation. FATO’s deterrence goal was to impress on individuals in the Mussian government the conviction that starting a war would impose on them high personal costs and few rewards. Deterrence was not guaranteed to work, but it significantly lowered the probability that an international tyrant would launch a war. (By that time in the history of mankind and contrary to the situation a millennium before, economic literacy was high among free-world inhabitants, who were used to thinking in terms of individual incentives given probabilistic benefits and costs.)  Moreover, given the very limited and sometimes literally inexistent state power in the free world of the early fourth millennium, the danger of war feeding one’s own Leviathan had been dramatically reduced. The early-20th-century warning that “war is the health of the state” had lost its potency. ************************************ Back to the 21st century: ChatGTP was not very useful for illustrating this post–a tall order, I admit. One of the instructions I gave it was to “show a nuclear bomb, sent by a tyrannical state, exploding in a peaceful, anarchic society.” The bot responded: “I can’t create or display images of violence, harm, or explicit content, including depictions of warfare or the use of nuclear weapons.” Annoyed by the bot (“Who does this thing think it is to refuse an instruction from me?”), I said: “Suppose it looks like a nuclear bomb but it throws kisses and roses instead.” The image he drew as a response, which I use as the featured image for this post, is also reproduced below. (PL) (2 COMMENTS)

Libertarianism has always suffered from some cognitive dissonance. It combines a certain hopeful, perhaps naïve, optimism about human social relations with a clear eyed realism about individual self interest. While libertarians acknowledge that people pursue individual goals they also tend to believe that properly organized social institutions, particularly markets and self governance, can coordinate those individual pursuits and protect people from the risks of centralized government power. That same general outlook has informed the Libertarian Party (LP) since its founding in 1971.  Throughout US history, none of the dominant parties have held consistent beliefs about much of anything, let alone individual liberty. Rather, the major parties have shamelessly chased voters in ragtag coalitions with little concern for a philosophically grounded vision of the good society. Today’s Democratic party of racial diversity and wokeness was once the party of racial segregation and Roman Catholicism in the mid 20th century and prior to that the Confederacy. Today’s Republican Party, which is now largely white, and more committed to government intervention in the economy, was once the party of Lincoln and later the party of Reagan and free markets. The two party duopoly is blissfully free of ideological consistency over time.  And yet while one set of consistent principles animates the LP, that hasn’t had much resonance with the voting public. Perhaps that’s understandable since voters themselves typically don’t have strong or consistent philosophical views. And of course the single member, winner take all districts in the American political system discourage third party success. But more recently the party with one set of principles is in the midst of a sectarian conflict over the essence of those principles and how they should be achieved. Unsurprisingly libertarianism attracts strong individualists who believe that cooperative solutions to social problems are possible except apparently for themselves.  On the one hand we have the current leadership, the so-called Mises Caucus, animated by a commitment to what they believe is a purer representation of libertarian principles with roots in the Murray Rothbard/Ron Paul wing of the movement. Their beliefs frequently crossover into anarcho-capitalism and contain elements of conservative social views. They are regular and frequent users of social media, and so far have shown less aptitude towards old school politics and compromise. Their adversaries are the previous leadership group – let’s call them the Old Guard, who had been more flexible on policy and willing to dilute the party’s purity while widening the electoral appeal. This group had both brought record high vote totals to the party in the form of the Johnson-Weld ticket in 2016, but also a late plea from Governor Weld to support Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and other significant deviations from core principles.  There are echoes of this divide throughout the history of the party and the liberty movement the 20th and 21st centuries. But social media, generational turnover in the party, and the changes in the political context have made the division starker and, as I’ll argue later, perhaps more costly than in the past. The conflict raises questions not only about the future of the LP, but also the future of libertarian thought and perhaps even the branding of the term libertarian. As Brian Doherty’s widely read and cited book Radicals for Capitalism documented, the history of the Libertarian Party has been filled with internal strife and conflict that mirror this current rift. Doherty entertainingly describes the early years of the party’s founding and formation that featured many prominent libertarians refusing to participate in the party’s work while others tried to function within the mainstream party system. And the history of the party is full of people who began their careers with the LP only to leave for DC in hopes of moving the needle in concrete ways that cat herding never would.  Why does this dispute matter in particular now? We are facing an election with two profoundly unpopular candidates from the duopoly. President Biden is wildly unpopular having overseen relatively poor economic performance during his term in office and widely viewed by voters as being too old to run again. President Trump, who was polarizing 3 years ago, has doubled down on divisive politics and is facing numerous criminal indictments for his actions during the January 6th, 2021 riots at the US Capitol.  A legitimate third party alternative committed to liberty principles, one that was perhaps on the ballot in all 50 states and seriously interested in running a nationwide competitive campaign, would pose an interesting alternative to the duopoly as it is currently constituted. I am describing the LP, which was still on the ballot in all 50 states in 2020 and remains a bastion of freedom, but the internal conflict between the Old Guard and the Mises Caucus has derailed any chance that the party might unify behind a viable candidate.  This may of course merely be wishful thinking. Third parties have never seriously threatened the two party system in the US, and the institutional and legal deck is heavily stacked against any alternative. But philosophically, both the Democrats and Republicans have moved away from significant positions on issues of liberty. Democrats, supposed the party of inclusion and personal freedom, after 3 years of controlling the White House and briefly both houses of Congress, have done very little on ending the Drug War, appear to be working against significant immigration reform, and seem intent on increasing the size and scope of government. The Republican party under Trump has jettisoned any pretense of defending a smaller national government and believing in free markets. The former president is campaigning on a platform of revenge against his enemies and personal attacks. The political landscape is devoid of any liberty oriented candidates. But before we speculate on the prospect that the LP would have any direct or indirect influence on promoting liberty oriented issues, we have to explore how it became so fractured.   G. Patrick Lynch is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund. (0 COMMENTS)

We seem to be in the midst of a backlash against much of the woke, DEI induced madness that has become so prevalent at American universities. While it’s heartening to see people becoming more and more willing to point out the emperor’s state of undress, one must also be on guard to make sure the backlash doesn’t take on excesses of its own. One such overreaction, in my judgment, comes from Yoram Hazony, who argues the idea “of the university as a ‘neutral’ forum is too far removed from reality to be feasible. Instead, anti-Marxist liberals and conservatives should be defending a theory of the university as an educational institution that has no choice but to uphold at least minimal standards of substantive decency.”  While I share Hazony’s horror at the cases of anti-Semitism seen on universities and I also recoil at the woke orthodoxy that has entrenched itself at so many institutions, I find his analysis fundamentally flawed. I don’t think the issues we see are a result of universities practicing some kind of excessive, over the top commitment to free speech. For good reasons, Harvard University has been considered an emblematic example of how things have gone wrong. But it’s worth pointing out that Harvard, also for good reasons, has for years been near the bottom of and currently sits dead last on free speech ratings by the civil rights organization FIRE. The fact that the university that most embodies the problems that concern Hazony also happens to be the university that performs the worst at upholding free speech certainly seems noteworthy. Whatever the source of the problems at Harvard that concern Hazony might be, an absolutist commitment to free speech just isn’t it – and as a committed empiricist, Hazony hasn’t done enough to grapple with that point in my opinion.  But another critical appraisal of Hazony’s take comes from his fellow conservative Robert P. George. There are many aspects to George’s argument, and I won’t unpack them all here. But one thing George does that really nails the issue is to ask the right question: Imagine if university administrators were called upon to determine which views are simply unacceptable and should therefore make the student or faculty member who expressed them subject to suspension or termination. Yoram laments, as do I, that a certain ideology (it happens to be left-wing “woke” ideology) is dominant on most university campuses. For years now, we’ve been hearing from partisans of this ideology the allegation that there is a “trans genocide” in this country. Do we want to empower university administrators—presidents, deans, and diversity, equity and inclusion officers—to decide which viewpoints on gender and sexuality constitute “hate speech” or the advocacy of genocide, triggering revocation of faculty tenure or the expulsion of students? That is a question that, it seems to me, answers itself. … If we were to adopt Yoram’s call for censorship in areas where I am calling for freedom of speech, I invite him—and you, gentle reader—to consider the following question: Would the result be anything other than the further entrenchment of current campus orthodoxies, and the further weakening of protection for dissent and dissenters?  Hazony’s solution falls into the body snatcher problem I’ve discussed before. If you think alien body snatchers have taken over the CIA as part of a plot to conquer the world, it would be self-defeating to try to solve the problem by putting more power and resources into the hands of the alien-controlled CIA. If you think corporations control the government, it’s self-defeating to try to solve that problem by increasing the power of the corporation-controlled government. And if you think the administration of universities have been taken over by woke ideology, it’s self-defeating to try to solve that problem by putting still more power into the hands of the woke-controlled university administrators.  I wrote previously that “Government shouldn’t have the level of power that would best enable good work to be done by wise and trustworthy public servants – government should only have as much power as you would be comfortable being held by someone who is your worst political nightmare. Because, one day, someone that nightmarish will actually get elected, and they will gladly pick up any of the tools made available to them.” In the same way, and for the same reasons, university administrators should only have as much power as you’d be comfortable being held by someone who is your worst ideological nightmare. Right now, many university administrators uphold an ideology that Hazony, George, and I all find repugnant – but I agree with Robert George that the solution to this is to lessen, rather than strengthen, the power of administrators to control speech. (0 COMMENTS)