Free market economics and libertarianism are often linked, rightly wrongly, with egoism, selfishness, and greed. In Leviathan (1651), perhaps the first great modern political text, Thomas Hobbes writes that “No man gives but with the intention of good to himself, because gift is voluntary; and all voluntary acts are the object to every man in his own pleasure.” That is, even giving is self-directed, a way of serving our own interests or pleasing ourselves. Ayn Rand famously extolled the virtue of selfishness, writing “Selfishness does not mean only to do things for oneself. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.” To put oneself first, she argues, represents moral excellence. And economist Walter Williams has professed his adoration for avarice, publishing an essay entitled simply, “I Love Greed.” Williams argues that it is the greed of Texas ranchers and Idaho potato farmers that keeps New Yorkers supplied with beef and potatoes. Made to depend on love and kindness, they would go hungry. Far from abjuring greed as a vice, such writers suggest, we should seek to perfect its role as the principal motivator of our activity. To really understand greed, however, we need to dig deeper. One of its profoundest portraits in world literature is to be found in Leo Tolstoy’s novella, Master and Man (1895). Tolstoy himself had seen greed from both sides. Born into an aristocratic and wealthy Russian family, he lost both parents in his first decade of life. As a young man, he left university and ran up heavy gambling debts before serving in the Crimean War. After a tour of Europe, he returned to his estate and founded schools to educate the children of peasants. Marrying, he and his wife Sophia had thirteen children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. Sonya, as she was known, also served as his secretary and editor, copying out in longhand seven drafts of his massive War and Peace. In the early 1890s, Tolstoy sought to renounce his wealth and the copyrights to his literary works, which Sonya regarded as the wrong thing to do, in part because they had such a large family to support. By the time Tolstoy composed Master and Man, he had grown weary of arguing over money, and tensions within the family were high. The protagonist of Master and Man is Vasili Andreevich Brekunov, a supremely greedy human being. A provincial merchant, the story opens as he is making hasty preparations to purchase a grove, a transaction from which he expects to profit handsomely. The kind of man who trims the ends of church tapers in order to resell them, he prepares by collecting 700 rubles of his own money, as well as 2,300 in church money he has in his possession. As he and his peasant Nikita, whose past bouts of drunkenness make him easy to exploit, prepare to set off, his eyes fall on his “unloved wife” and his young son, “whom he always thought of as his heir.” As soon as they leave the village, they venture into a blizzard in which nothing can be seen. As they drive, Vasili takes little interest in the peasant, except when Nikita’s need for a horse comes up. Vasili offers to sell him a horse for 15 rubles that is only worth 7, knowing all the while that he would charge him 25, preventing Nikita from drawing any income for half a year. Vasili, it is clear, is nothing so much as a profit maximizer. Out in the blizzard, Vasili and Nikita repeatedly lose their way, discovering that most of the time they are only moving in circles. At last, Vasili agrees to hunker down for the night, hoping that dawn will bring an improvement in the weather. Vasili wraps himself up in the sledge, leaving Nikita to dig a hole for himself in the snow. As he lays there, Vasili has no wish to sleep and instead thinks of the “one thing that constituted the sole aim, meaning, pleasure, and pride of his life—of how much money he had made and might still make, of how much other people he knew had made and possessed, and of how those others had made and were making it, and how he, like them, might still make much more.” From the deal for the grove alone, he expects to make ten thousand rubles. He calculates how he will sell the oaks for sledge runners and the rest for firewood, gleefully considering the possibility that he might make as much as twelve thousand. He will grease the surveyors palm with perhaps a hundred and fifty rubles to inflate the size of the glade, getting the whole thing for eight thousand. Whatever it takes to maximize profit. Vasili lays there thinking of what a great man he is becoming, relishing how others will envy his success. ‘In my father’s time what was our house like? Just a rich peasant’s house: just an oat mill and an inn—that was the whole property. But what have I done in these fifteen years? A shop, two taverns, a flour-mill, a grain store, two farms leased out, and a house with an iron-roofed barn,’ he thought proudly. ‘Not as it was in father’s time! Who is talked of in the whole district now? Brekhunov! And why? Because I stick to business. I take trouble, not like others who lie abed or waste their time on foolishness while I don’t sleep of nights. Blizzard or no blizzard, I start out. So business gets done. They think money-making is a joke. No, take pains and rack your brains! You get overtaken out of doors at night, like this, or keep awake night after night till the thoughts whirling in your head make the pillow turn,’ he meditated with pride. ‘They think people get on through luck. After all, the Mironovs are now millionaires. And why?’ The thought that he might himself become a millionaire like Moronov, who began with nothing, so excited Vasili Andreevich that he felt the need of talking to somebody. But there was no one to talk to…. Vasili is a man in thrall of greed. He spends all his time thinking how he can get more money. What matters to him most is not his wife, his son, or even his own safety, but the art of the deal, his excellence at taking advantage of others and extracting more from them than he will be asked to give. Whether it is tens of thousands or rubles for a grove or just tens of rubles for a horse, Vasili is determined always to get the better of everyone. He sees people not as persons but as profit maximization opportunities. Each time he secures himself the better end of a bargain, he feels enlarged and looks down on others from an even higher vantage. He sees himself in terms of his property, which causes him to see even his son as nothing more than his heir, an extension of his own net worth. Vasili is the center of his own universe, a supreme egoist. Later, when he begins to think he might die out in the blizzard, he turns his deal-making talents to Saint Nicholas himself, promising that if he escapes this predicament, he will offer a thanksgiving service and some tapers. But no such deal is forthcoming. Adam Smith, in contrast, was no fan of greed, selfishness, and egoism. He did, of course acknowledge that something in the way of enlightened self-interest plays a vital role in human affairs, famously writing, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Some mistakenly conclude from this that Smith was both a psychological and moral egoist, implying both that regard for self is the only possible motivator of human conduct and that it should always hold sway in our decision making. Yet Smith is a far richer, more nuanced, and nobler thinker than such a simplistic conclusion would suggest. In fact, Smith regards greed, selfishness, and egoism with disdain and holds that we should do so, as well. To gain an appreciation for Smith’s doubts, we must turn from the 1776 Wealth of Nations to his 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he regarded as his greatest work and continued to revisit and revise throughout his life. But before turning explicitly to Smith’s views on selfishness, we should acknowledge some general features of moral reasoning, which Smith himself helped to elucidate. First, our intellectual and cultural interests incline us to see something things clearly and to ignore or at least pay less attention to others. In this sense, the very act of attending to something can be a kind of moral act. What do we attend to most regularly and closely—the performance of the financial markets and new opportunities to advance our career and wealth, or the unfolding life stories of our family and friends and the opportunities such relationships provide to contribute to the welfare of others? Likewise, these same intellectual and cultural interests incline us to see things in certain ways, tending to interpret them in some ways and not in others. For example, upon learning that someone has given a large gift in treasure, talent, or time to someone in need, a psychological egoist such as Hobbes would ask what he or she hoped to gain from it, while Smith might instead regard it as a noble instance of the virtue of generosity. Our understanding in such matters is partly shaped by quantitative metrics, such as how much money changed hands, or how many hours of time were devoted to volunteer activities. Economists have not been alone in their passion to understand human affairs in terms of metrics, and in fact this tendency has pervaded the social sciences broadly. But our perceptions and understanding are shaped in different and equally or even more important ways by symbols, analogies, and convictions. Hobbes, for example, sees the origins of human society in a “state of nature,” devoid of social passion, in which each looks out only for himself, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” For him, law is all about restraint, the need to prevent the “war of each against all” from resulting in mutual annihilation. Smith, by contrast, grounds his moral theory in a very different account, one in which “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” For Smith, social passions are essential features of human nature. “Were we to ask whether a particular choice is right or good, we would need to ask, right for whom or good for what?” As opposed to those espousing ethics of egoism, selfishness, and greed, Smith’s view of morality is a fundamentally relational one. The former locate the referent of all moral questions in the self. I simply need to ask the question, is the proposed course of action good for me, or perhaps more to the point, best for me? Whatever most promotes my own selfishness desires and interests represents the best choice. For Smith, however, moral life is a good bit more complex. Were we to ask whether a particular choice is right or good, we would need to ask, right for whom or good for what? In some cases, the referent might by a single person, A or B. But in other circumstances, it might be groups of people, such as families, businesses, communities, and even whole nations. Such rights and goods are defined and hence must be evaluated largely in relation to others. Each of us, to the extent that we truly understand the full context of the moral life, makes decisions with respect to larger wholes of which we are parts. For Hobbes, the state is a fragile thing, always about to be pulled apart by the divergent passions of its members and sustainable only by coercion. Without the threat of punishment, people would give full rein to their selfish passions, and communities would quickly disintegrate. To keep them together, every individual must keep a lid on a part of himself, in effect granting expression to only part of his or her nature. Smith, by contrast, operates on the assumption that human beings are naturally cooperative and even collaborative creatures. It is in our nature to work together, as in the division of labor, which he highlights at the opening of The Wealth of Nations as “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor.” For Hobbes, men must be coercively bound together to avoid their natural tendency to oppose and perhaps even kill each other, while for Smith collaboration represents the key to the full realization of our powers. For Hobbes, without law, police, judges, jails, and other technologies of punishment, social life would not be possible, while for Smith, social life is the starting point from which other goods flow. For Smith, there neither was nor ever could be a solitary state of nature. Consider a human being in distress. For Hobbes, there is nothing remarkable about this, since life itself is an exercise in suspicion, jealousy, envy, and greed. To fail to live in fear is to move forward in life imprudently. By contrast, Smith regards distress as an unnatural state and locates equanimity in the company of others. When we share a source of anxiety with a friend, “we are immediately put in mind of the light in which he will view of situation, and we begin to view it ourselves in the same light; for the effect of sympathy is instantaneous.” To compose ourselves, we need “society and conversation,” and if we are ever cut off from them, as we would be in the state of nature, we are apt to find ourselves, like “men of retirement and speculation, brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of honor” than others. The company of others reminds us that we are not alone, that we are bound to others in relationship, and that we are parts of larger wholes whose needs and missions we are called upon to serve. Only when we see ourselves in such contexts can we really gain our proper moral bearings. For Hobbes, generosity is unnatural, except insofar as it offers the opportunity to advance self-interest, which is to say that apparent generosity is just a ruse. Scratch a so-called altruist and watch an egoist bleed. As Smith sees it, however, generosity is not only possible but very real and highly necessary. Such a contrast plays out in Tolstoy’s novella. At first, Vasili is ready to sacrifice everything for the deal, happily leaving the sledge, the horse, and Nikita behind in order to save himself. But when his escape into the blizzard merely returns him to them, he undergoes a transformation. It is only when he is lost that he truly discovers his position and path in life. Suddenly, without even knowing exactly why, he begins tending to the freezing Nikita, covering him with his warm coats and even lying down on top of him to keep him warm. For the first time, he begins thinking to himself in the first person plural, saying “There, and you say you are dying. Lie still and get warm, that’s our way….” This new Vasili can only reflect on his former self with bafflement: His money, his shop, his house, the buying and selling, and Mironov’s millions—it was hard for him to understand why that man, called Vasili Brekhunov, had troubled himself with all those things with which he had been troubled. ‘Well, it was because he did not know what the real thing was,’ he thought. For more on these topics, see Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes. 1909 edition, with an essay by W. G. Pogson Smith. Online Library of Liberty. Division of Labor, by Michael Munger. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. “‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ Reading Guide,”. AdamSmithWorks “Tolstoy, Smith, and the Perils of Loneliness,” by Richard Gunderman. AdamSmithWorks, October 20, 2021 Kevin McKenna on Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union, and In the First Circle. EconTalk podcast episode. To Hobbes, such a transformation would seem impossible, an awkward and highly artificial deus ex machina. No one can cease being an egoist, nor should anyone want to. To Smith, however, the idea that someone might sacrifice himself for someone else, because he sees him as a human being the same as himself, is a distinct possibility. From Smith’s psychological vantage point, Vasili’s dislocation could produce a relocation—he could cease seeing himself as a solitary individual and instead realize that he is part of something larger, in which he is linked with Nikita. Viewed in this context, Vasili discovers in himself the capacity to think and act in relationship, and even to lay down his life to save someone he only recently despised. Greed, in short, can give way to love. Vasili dies in the effort to save Nikita, but it is also through his act of sacrifice that, for the first time, he really comes to life. His egoist life had left him utterly alone, trapped in a prison of his own making. Realizing in desperation that he could not continue to amass and hoard his wealth beyond this life, a new relational possibility emerged, a meaning in life that could transcend even his own death. Smith, I think, would approve. *Richard Gunderman is Chancellor’s Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics, Medical Education, Philosophy, Liberal Arts, Philanthropy, and Medical Humanities and Health Studies at Indiana University. He is also John A Campbell Professor of Radiology and in 2019-21 serves as Bicentennial Professor. He received his AB Summa Cum Laude from Wabash College; MD and PhD (Committee on Social Thought) with honors from the University of Chicago; and MPH from Indiana University. (0 COMMENTS)

A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.1 First published sixty years ago this year, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock‘s The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy is widely recognized as a seminal work in the development of the public choice school in economics and political science. The book builds some of the foundations of James Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty published 13 years later.2 The main question raised in The Calculus of Consent, as the subtitle of their book suggests, is whether there is an individualist logic in constitutional democracy, whether rational individuals could unanimously consent to the rules that define this political system. The authors look at politics with the lens of methodological individualism: human individuals are “the only ultimate choice-makers in determining group as well as private action.” Political theories must also be built on reasonable assumptions about individual behavior. Individuals usually follow their own interests, in political as in economic matters. Sometimes they respond to “the instincts of benevolence and sacrifice,” as Dennis Robertson wrote, but a realistic account of social matters must economize on the resort to “that scarce resource Love.” Buchanan and Tullock further assume that “separate individuals are separate individuals and, as such, are likely to have different aims and purposes.” They observe that individuals try to maximize their respective “utility” (the position of each in his own scale of preferences) through mutually beneficial exchanges. In this perspective, the state (the domain of politics) and the market are just two alternative ways of carrying out mutually beneficial exchanges, a central idea in The Calculus of Consent. Ethics and the Organization of Human Activity An activity will be organized collectively instead of being left in the market sector when it is expected to be more beneficial that way. “Beneficial” means bringing net benefits to each individual according to his own evaluation. One reason to move an activity (say, police protection) to the collectivized or public sector would be to reduce the external costs of purely private interactions. Buchanan and Tullock adopt a wider definition of “external effects” (external costs and external benefits) than what we now call “externalities.” Their external effects include all the effects that an individual action can have on others, including purely subjective effects and effects that are mediated by markets. External costs include not only pollution but, for example, fire risks and presumably the drop in the value of somebody’s assets because of competitors’ actions. The authors note that the cost of eliminating or reducing some external effects of private actions with government intervention may be higher than the costs of the original problem, in which case individuals will want to leave the activity in the private sector. The problem is that a majority or a plurality of individuals may vote themselves benefits and force the rest of society to pay, or exempt themselves from taxes that the rest have to pay. The majority can exploit the minority. These are different external costs that flow from government action itself. “An equal moral value is attached to the utility of all individuals. The individualism of The Calculus of Consent is not only methodological, but also ethical.” The exploitation of a minority raises a normative (ethical) problem if, as Buchanan and Tullock do, we adopt the ethical axiom that individuals are all equal and should benefit from equal freedom. In other words, the authors’ political economy is concerned with the organization of a “society of free men.” (It should be needless to say that “free men” means “free individuals,” not “free males” nor, say, “free green men.”) An equal moral value is attached to the utility of all individuals. The individualism of The Calculus of Consent is not only methodological, but also ethical. A Unanimous Constitution Any self-interested and rational individual who does not know whether he will be in the minority or in the majority will want to constrain the latter. Buchanan and Tullock formalize this observation by imagining a social contract that establishes basic rules of social cooperation, which will include limitations on the power of any majority. As the ultimate beneficial political exchange, the social contract must be unanimous. That such a contract has never been signed is not a valid objection, because it is only a conceptual way to say that all members of a society need to agree on the fundamental rules that will guide and constrain their interactions. The authors reasonably claim that a unanimous agreement is more likely on general rules than on the specific social choices that will come later. There is less potential conflict in choosing the rules of the game than in the outcome of a specific match. In the stylized social contract, the individual is uncertain of his future position, as if he were under what John Rawls called a “veil of ignorance.”3 Buchanan will later say that Rawls’s analytical setting was “closely related to” that of The Calculus of Consent.4 Buchanan and Brennan explain that, in a situation of uncertainty, “the individual will not find it advantageous to vote for rules that may promote sectional, class, or group interests.” By focusing on each individual‘s rational decision to adhere to a social contract that serves his interests, Buchanan and Tullock avoid the problem known as the interpersonal comparisons of utility. Such comparisons are scientifically impossible because each individual’s utility is subjective, in his own head. Each and every individual knows that any government decision that will be made in ordinary politics—in “in-period politics” posterior to the social contract—risks generating the governmental external costs for him previously mentioned. The lower the proportion of voters required to approve a decision, the higher are these expected external costs. On the contrary, if a qualified majority (a supermajority) of, say, 66% is needed instead of 50%+1, the individual will have a better chance to be on the right side of the majority-minority divide. Thus, as the required majority increases, the expected external costs of government action decrease. As the qualified majority approaches unanimity, the higher the capacity and temptation become for any individual to hold out his consent in the hope of being bribed with lower taxes or special benefits, so the cost of making a bargain with the remaining opponents increases more and more. On the other hand, the decision-making costs—the cost of persuading everybody in the required majority—will grow as the size of the required majority increases. Any rational individual will want a constitutional rule that minimizes the sum of decision-making and governmental external costs (the external costs of government decisions for minorities). The individual will want a proportion of voters closer to unanimity in future political decisions that are likely to affect his previously determined property and human rights, but a smaller majority or plurality for activities “most characteristically undertaken by governments,” such as education and police protection. Buchanan and Tullock do believe that government intervention—political exchange—is beneficial in many activities. A democratic government is “us” but we have to mistrust its power. Rational individuals establishing constitutional rules will want to impose other limits to majority power. One of these limits would be a bicameral assembly. Buchanan and Tullock demonstrate that this device greatly limits the capacity to form exploiting coalitions: it can be equivalent to a unanimity requirement in a single house. Moreover, government decentralization whereby individuals can vote with their feet introduces competition and “marketlike alternatives into the political process,” allowing individuals with different preferences to have them catered to by different jurisdictions. This suggests that “where possible, collective activity should be organized in small rather than large political units.” We may wonder if this idea doesn’t underestimate the potential for tribal-like majorities who can better exploit their own minorities, like, say, the Whites with respect to the Blacks in the old South. For Buchanan and Tullock, it is clear that the ideal remains unanimity. Lower voting proportions are just “practical expedients” necessary to take into account the cost of decision-making in day-to-day politics. Only unanimity has a special status and normative significance. The problem of democratic societies is that “majority rule has been elevated to the status which the unanimity rule should occupy.” Ultimately, in the social contract itself, unanimity gives a veto to each and every individual. Unanimity is ultimately the only conceivable test of a right political choice. At the social-contract level, it buttresses the economic concept of Pareto improvement, which means that at least some individuals benefit and none are harmed. Another implication of the unanimity rule is that any individual has the “right of revolution,” which must be the right to secede individually from the contract and not the right to force others to do the same. If an individual opts-out of the social contract, however, he is likely to lose its protection. The Calculus of Consent is often coherently radical. Logrolling and Special Interests Majority voting does not take into account the intensity of preferences: “Even those voters who are completely indifferent on a given issue will find their preferences given as much weight as those of the most concerned individuals.” Although it is forbidden in every democracy, trading votes would at least partly solve the problem. If anyone could sell their vote to somebody who values it more, the latter could express the intensity of their preferences (and the former would gain too). Informal vote-trading is possible through the intermediation of political parties and political entrepreneurs. For example (my own example), if I attach a high value to the Second Amendment but don’t care much about subsidies for abortion, I can vote for a candidate or political party that defends my intense opinion even if it strongly opposes the issue about which I care less. It is just as if I had traded my vote with somebody who cares a lot about stopping abortion subsidies but does not have a strong opinion on the Second Amendment: he gives me his vote on the Second Amendment in in return for mine on abortion subsidies. This indirect trading of votes is called “logrolling.” It is most effectively practiced among elected representatives in smaller legislative assemblies, one voting for a measure favorable to another representative’s constituents in exchange for the latter support of “pork” for the former’s own constituents. One problem of logrolling is that it tends to produce an overextension of the public sector. It is inseparable from democracy, but the extended exploitation of vote-trading by special interests works against the democratic regime. Pressure groups who defend the special interests of their members, such as trade unions (or, for that matter, the special interests of corporations for protection against competition), can impose high external costs on other citizens. The more there is to extract from the government, the more incentives for special interests to enter the political fray. When the segmentation of society into special interests enters a spiral of more and more “differential or discriminatory legislation,” constitutional change becomes necessary to save constitutional democracy. Contrary to what Buchanan and Tullock hoped, however, there is still no sign of a large demand for such a reform. Functions of Government What then should be the role of the state? Buchanan and Tullock’s answers may disappoint libertarians and many classical liberals: they see a potentially wide role of government in reducing the “external costs” of private action, which can be whatever an individual does not like others doing, and in producing whatever good or service the state can produce at a lower cost. But the problem is tempered by constitutional constraints based on rules that are theoretically unanimous. The state does not enforce a vacuous or ad hoc “public interest.” The “public interest” does not exist except “in terms of the operation of the rules for decision-making, and these rules can be evaluated only over a long and continuing series of separate issues.” This formulation suggests an interface with Friedrich Hayek’s perhaps more practical theory of the rule of law. The rational individual, Buchanan and Tullock argue, will want the constitution to allow some form of “income insurance” because he does not know where he will end up in the distribution of income. He is assumed to have diminishing utility of income, that is, one dollar lost is worth more in utility than one dollar gained for him. Such income insurance must be constrained, the authors admit, lest a majority transfers to itself income from minority’s members, or special interests transfer income from the poor to the rich. As evidence, they point out that this is what framers of political constitutions do in practice: they allow for redistribution but not pure, unconstrained redistribution. Buchanan and Tullock make one important point, citing the great Swedish economist Knut Wicksell (whose writings had much influence on Buchanan): improving distribution would be better done through the definition of property rights than through the fiscal system. Although no example is given, one might think that Georgist land taxes for the benefit of the landless would fit the bill. Another interesting implication of the constitutional theory developed in The Calculus of Consent is that a more homogeneous community will face lower external costs of governmental decisions, presumably because similar individuals want to impose what everybody wants to do anyway. It follows that the individuals of this community will more readily accept less restrictive rules on majority power. On the contrary, in a more heterogeneous community, individuals will want more restrictive rules against the majority. “Many activities that may be quite rationally collectivized in Sweden, a country with a relatively homogeneous population, should be privately organized in India, Switzerland, or the United States.” But this may underestimate the possibility of parochial oppression, as I suggested above. The Good Society Buchanan and Tullock’s “Good Society” remains one in which the power of the government is constitutionally limited. The Enlightenment gave rise to a system where “constitutional democracy in its modern sense was born a twin of the market economy.” In his Appendix on political philosophy, Buchanan emphasizes David Hume’s claim that the purpose of constitutional checks and controls is to make it “in the interest of even bad men to act for the public good.” Recall that, in The Calculus of Consent, the public good would be defined as what all individuals would agree on if they didn’t know what their respective positions in society would be. Given the drift to differential or discriminatory legislation, Buchanan and Tullock argue for constitutional change. In their opinion, this would mean a shift toward more inclusive voting rules (more requirements of qualified majority) and more restrictive limits on the range of collective activity. They were optimistic that such constitutional change was coming, although they admit that this is “an explicit value judgment” on their part and that the change could go the other way. We may ask how unanimous constitutional change could possibly happen in today’s polarized America or what good change could possibly come out of the process. The revolutionary character of Buchanan and Tullock’s constitutional doctrine shows clearly in a remark by Tullock in his own Appendix on the book’s theoretical forerunners: “The State should have enough power to ‘keep the peace’ but not enough to provide temptation to ambitious men. The State should never be given enough power to prevent genuinely popular uprisings against it.” Beware of Leviathan! The Calculus of Consent contains many unanswered questions, which is not surprising for a pioneering book, or any book for that matter. What is the contour of the “group” or “community” of individuals who adhere to a social contract? Doesn’t the growth of the state and the resulting polarization contradict the idea of politics as compromise? If the book provides, as the author claims, “some conceptual rationalization for the type of political complex represented by American constitutional democracy,” hasn’t something very wrong happened in America? Does the state represent politics as exchange or is it more essentially a Leviathan? For more on these topics, see “A Conversation with James M. Buchanan”, a 2-part video interview at Econlib recorded in 2001; and “Lessons and Challenges in The Limits of Liberty,“ by Pierre Lemieux, Library of Economics and Liberty, November 5, 2018. See also the EconTalk podcast episode Michael Munger on Constitutions; and Public Choice, by William F. Shughart II in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Buchanan himself seems to have later become less optimistic.5 He explained how the strict contractarianism of The Calculus of Consent had “a natural tendency to neglect the problems that arise in controlling the self-perpetuating and self-enhancing arms of the collectivity itself,”6 that is, in controlling the state. He seems to have become more fearful of the state conceived as “us.”7 These are crucial issues on which the future of individual liberty, if not of civilization, may depend. And there is no doubt that The Calculus of Consent was a milestone on the road to understanding the social and political world. Footnotes [1] James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962) (Liberty Fund, 1999). [2] James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (1975) (Liberty Fund, 2000). [3] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Belknap Press, 1971). [4] Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty, p. 10. [5] Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty, pp. 10-12. See also “Afraid to Be Free: Dependency as Desideratum,” Public Choice 124 (2005), pp. 19-31. [6] Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty, p. 12. [7] See also Pierre Lemieux, “Lessons and Challenges in The Limits of Liberty,” Liberty Classics at Econlib.org, November 5, 2018. *Pierre Lemieux is an economist affiliated with the Department of Management Sciences of the Université du Québec en Outaouais. He blogs on EconLog. He lives in Maine. E-mail: PL@pierrelemieux.com. For more articles by Pierre Lemieux, see the Archive. (0 COMMENTS)

In this book I have supplemented “liberal science” with the term “reality-based community,” by which I mean the social network which adheres to liberal science’s rules and norms…. The community’s interactions are structured and elaborate and amount to much more than just the sum of its individuals’ doings, and the essential enablers, connectors, and transmitters are institutions. Institutions propagate and enforce norms and rules, evaluate and certify credentials, set agendas and direct resources, enforce accountability, and train future generations… today, the institutions and norms of liberal science, not individuals, are the real targets of attack by nihilists and bullies. —Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge1 (p. 26) In his latest book, Jonathan Rauch attributes human success in accumulating knowledge to our willingness to abide by what he calls the Constitution of Knowledge. By that, he means a set of institutions and norms that allow ideas to be freely contested in a process that is fair, open, peaceful, and able to arrive at sensible outcomes. He draws an analogy with the American Constitution, which allows political issues to be contested similarly. “Where Rauch focuses on the attacks on the twentieth-century information order from without, I would emphasize the rot from within.” Four aspects of Rauch’s thinking struck this reviewer. First, I was impressed and persuaded by his emphasis on knowledge emerging from a social process. Second, I concur with his view that this process is undermined by what he calls “trolling” on the one hand and “cancel culture” on the other. Third, I agree that social media has disrupted the information order of the last century, and that this works to our detriment. And fourth, Rauch writes as if a return to the twentieth-century information order can be achieved by taming the disruptive forces. I think that this ignores the decay and corruption that have afflicted the key institutions of journalism and academia. Where Rauch focuses on the attacks on the twentieth-century information order from without, I would emphasize the rot from within. Epistemology as a Social Process In 2021, a number of prominent authors published books on the topic of truth and error in human thought. In philosophy, the issue of determining what is true is known as the problem of epistemology. Recent and forthcoming books that deal with this issue include: • Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know • Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us • Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t • Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Oliver Sibony. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment • Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters These authors, as well as most philosophers, emphasize what an individual should do in order to arrive at true beliefs and avoid error. For example, Julia Galef suggests that we are prone to error when we become too emotionally invested in our beliefs.2 Rauch puts the emphasis on the social process of acquiring knowledge. He favorably cites the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: He saw more clearly than anyone before him, and also more clearly than almost everyone today, that the concept of objective knowledge is inherently social… “Unless truth be recognized as public—as that of which any person would come to be convinced if he carried his inquiry, his sincere search for immovable belief, far enough—then there will be nothing to prevent each one of us from adopting an utterly futile belief of his own which all the rest will disbelieve,” he wrote. (p. 74) Rauch takes seriously the fact that human beings differ in our beliefs. This can turn out very badly. He cites the religious wars of the 16th century as a trauma that informed both the political theory that ultimately produced the American Constitution and the intellectual network that, in parallel, produced the Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch sees John Locke as a central figure in both. In the field of politics, Rauch credits John Locke with formulating three fundamental principles: natural rights, which apply to every person; rule by consent; and religious toleration. In epistemology, Locke championed empiricism: What Locke was doing, here, was expelling from intellectual respectability—from the epistemic rule book—claims which, because they are not checkable, are not adjudicable…. Locke saw how untestable certitudes sparked irreconcilable social disputes. (p. 68) Once we accept the Constitution of Knowledge and its norms for toleration and empiricism, differences of beliefs can serve a constructive purpose. When our ideas are contested and evaluated in an agreed-upon manner, using the scientific method as much as possible, the more accurate ideas tend to win out in the end. Thus, as a society we accumulate knowledge effectively, even though as individuals our nature is to be biased and emotionally attached to our beliefs. Under the Constitution of Knowledge, the question of truth is never finally settled. Instead, there is an ongoing evolutionary process. New ideas, like new mutations or new businesses, mostly fail. But a few succeed dramatically well, and society moves ahead by exploiting the successful ideas and discarding the failures. For this evolutionary process to work well, we need to agree to abide by certain rules and norms. For example, because scientific data are important to the process, we need a strong norm against falsifying or misrepresenting data. But in the 21st century, Americans are suffering from rule-breakers in our midst. Trolls and Cancelers In contemporary jargon, a troll is someone who makes provocative statements in order to attract attention. Trolls do not contribute to the reality-based community. On the contrary, they make a mockery of truth seeking. They promulgate falsehoods and conspiracy theories. When refuted, they merely repeat a lie or go on to tell another. Rauch points out that these are the very same disinformation techniques employed by Communist regimes against democracies. The heart of a troll is nihilist. Studying the spread of hostile political rumors, several researchers… found that many trolls were motivated by a “need for chaos” and “a desire to tear down the system as such.” … From the beginning, troll culture leaned to the right…. People like Alex Jones, who were nonentities in the reality-based world, discovered they could build commercial empires as conspiracy theorists. (p. 180) Rauch recalls that In 2013 someone using the handle @backupwraith tweeted: “I firmly believe that @realDonaldTrump is the most superior troll on the whole of twitter.” Trump quoted the tweet with the comment: “A great compliment!” (p. 16) Note that this was years before Mr. Trump campaigned for the Presidency. Rauch argues that Mr. Trump knowingly used information-warfare tactics in order to undermine confidence in mainstream media, thereby creating a space in which he could lie and get away with it. While the Right was lining up behind the troller-in-chief, the Left was producing its own pathology: cancel culture. This form of information warfare uses threats and coercion. Rauch reminds us that in 1989, Iran’s autocrat, Ayatollah Khomeini reacted to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses by issuing a fatwa calling for the murder of Rushdie and anyone who assisted with the book’s publication. Although Rushdie survived by going into hiding, others were killed as Muslims carried out the fatwa. Many people who were not harmed physically were nonetheless intimidated. In the past few years, young progressives have issued their own fatwas, against people whose views they find offensive. Although they have not inspired the murder of their victims, they have caused them to be fired, shunned, and humiliated. This is cancel culture. Beyond the price that individuals have paid under cancel culture, Rauch argues that the intimidation of the rest of us threatens to ruin the Constitution of Knowledge. It replaces open debate with what Rauch refers to as “spirals of silence”: In principle, a view which may initially not represent a consensus at all, which indeed is in the distinct minority, can make itself first seem dominant and then actually become dominant as holdouts fall silent, succumb to doubt, or convert to what they think is the prevalent view. Spoofed consensus can become real consensus, or at least close enough to be indistinguishable. Moreover, as we know from totalitarian states, once the spiral forms, even obvious facts can fail for a long time to interrupt it. (p. 219) Social or Anti-social? In theory, the Internet might have produced a golden age for the Constitution of Knowledge. It could speed up the evolution of ideas. “Unfortunately,” Rauch writes, … we forgot that staying in touch with reality depends on rules and institutions. We forgot that overcoming our cognitive and tribal biases depends on privileging those rules and institutions, not flattening them into featureless, formless “platforms.” In other words, we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology. Information can be simply emitted, but knowledge, the product of rich social interaction, must be achieved. Converting information into knowledge requires getting some important incentives and design choices right. Unfortunately, digital media got them wrong. … The metrics and optimization tools were sensitive to popularity but indifferent to truth. (pp. 143-144) Social media as currently structured serves to reward those who foster outrage and beat tribal drums, rather than reward those who are open minded and empiricist. The Constitution of Knowledge depersonalizes persuasion by attacking the hypothesis, not the person. In the reality-based community you can challenge someone’s credentials or track record, but your challenge needs to be measured, evidence-based, and impersonal—and your reputation will suffer if your challenge is abusive. By contrast, in the outrage industry, smearing and trolling are easy and effective ways to capture attention… The reality-based community is a professional network which rewards knowledge and expertise. By contrast, on social media, where attention is the coin of the realm, celebrity and virality are self-justifying… the medium turned out to favor professionals in the arts of manipulative outrage. (pp. 153-154) In short, social media facilitates and rewards trolling and canceling. It acts as an enabler for the enemies of the Constitution of Knowledge. What About the Enemy Within? Rauch’s recommendations presume that twentieth-century institutions, especially journalism and academia, are basically healthy. The threat comes from outside those institutions. In the case of journalism, the barbarians are the technology companies and the trolls that they enable. In academia, it is the students who grew up in a culture that views disagreement and debate as a threat rather than as an opportunity. He believes that journalism can be fixed by changing the culture of new media giants to be more conducive to truth seeking. For example, he is optimistic that Facebook’s content moderation board can set standards that will bring Facebook content more in line with the Constitution of Knowledge. In the case of academia, Rauch sees one problem as an absence of ideological diversity. Although the Constitution of Knowledge can be served by a faculty that is mostly on the left, it cannot function where conservatives are absent altogether, as is the case in many disciplines nowadays. The other problem in academia is that too many students and faculty remain silent while the cancelers get their way. Rauch believes that they need to be more proactive in their defense of free speech. If Rauch has a blind spot, it is that he overlooks the deterioration that has taken place within twentieth-century institutions. He is unable or unwilling to recognize institutional decay. As one trivial example, Rauch quotes Lisa Page in one place and Peter Strzok elsewhere to buttress minor points. Rauch refers to each only as “a former FBI agent.” In fact, they were infamously lovers who boasted to one another in text messages about their intentions to bring down the Trump Presidency. When this was revealed, their superiors felt it necessary to take punitive action. Rauch mentions none of this, not even in a footnote. For me, this is equivalent to quoting Michael Milken on financial institutions without mentioning that he served time in prison for insider trading. As a professional journalist, if you view the accusations against Page and Strzok (or Milken) as overblown, then you owe it to the reader to say so, rather than going on as if their records were unblemished. A more significant example is when Rauch writes: Many people, to be sure, will pay a premium for reality-based content (aka “news”). As I drafted this chapter, the New York Times announced that its subscription base had topped 5 million. (p. 156)

A Book Review of Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall.1 It’s been over 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Ever since those horrible attacks, the United States government has been waging a “war on terror” both at home and abroad. The war on terror has fundamentally reshaped our lives. The TSA’s invasive searches have become a prerequisite for air travel. Millions of Americans have had their phone records and other metadata intercepted by the National Security Agency. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University2, the U.S. government has spent over $8 trillion on the war on terror. They also find disturbing human costs, including over 900,000 deaths in the war on terror. The war on terror has been going on for most of my life. Many college students today have been living with the war on terror for their entire lives. These students might wonder whether economics has anything relevant to say about the world they live in, especially if they’re just taught a set of abstract models. But economics is not just a set of abstract models on a blackboard. Economics is a way of thinking. As Peter Boettke says, the economic way of thinking is a set of eyeglasses that help us clearly see the world around us. In Manufacturing Militarism, Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall use economics to explain the war on terror. More specifically, Coyne and Hall use economics to explain the role of government propaganda in the war on terror. They quote philosopher Jason Stanley’s definition of propaganda as having “three key characteristics”: “First, propaganda is purposefully biased or false. Its purpose is to deter people from having access to truthful information. Second, propaganda is used to promote a political cause. Third, propaganda is bad from the perspective of those targeted by the propagandist’s message because it limits their ability to make an informed judgment.” While they acknowledge that propaganda can exist in many spheres of life, they focus on government propaganda and the U.S. national security state. They illuminate this important phenomenon using a mix of economic theory and illustrative history. Economic theorists use models to analyze the social world. One such model describes the ideal protective state. In this model, citizens have access to information about public officials’ performance. Acting on this information, they can hold officials accountable. This creates incentives for officials to act in the interest of citizens. Under this model, there is no need for propaganda. If officials are already acting as citizens wish, then officials do not need propaganda to secure the citizens’ support. There is also no room for propaganda within this model. Citizens are assumed to have sufficient information that they will not be fooled. But as Hall and Coyne persuasively show, real-world governments deviate sharply from this idealized model. Actual states are characterized by principal-agent problems. A principal-agent problem happens when one person (the principal) owns an asset but actual control is in the hands of someone who is supposed to act on their behalf, their “agent.” For example, corporations “are owned by shareholders who must rely on those hired to manage the firm to serve their interests.” The agent will often know things that the principal does not. This asymmetric information means that there is room for the agent to act opportunistically, which undermines the interest of the principal. Principal-agent problems don’t just apply to corporations. Democratic states are full of them! The citizens of a democratic state can be understood as principals, and public officials as the citizens’ agents. You might think that public officials have strong incentives to act in the interests of citizens. After all, citizens have the power to vote politicians out of office. But Coyne and Hall point out a variety of factors that undermine democratic feedback. One such factor is rational ignorance. Since a single vote is unlikely to change the outcome of an election, voters have very little incentive to acquire detailed information about government officials’ actions. Even if they do acquire such information, the time delays between elections mean that they often cannot penalize elected officials until it is too late to reverse their actions. This creates slack in the system that special interests, both private corporations and public employees, can exploit. And of course, the secrecy associated with national security policy makes these issues even more severe. This means that the ideal state model does not hold, and there is substantial room for powerful government officials to use propaganda to manipulate the public. The economic analysis that Coyne and Hall offer is classic public choice theory. Public choice theorists use the tools of economics to offer a clear-eyed analysis of government. Rather than assuming benevolence, they study the incentives facing voters, vote-seeking politicians, bureaucrats, and contractors. But Coyne and Hall offer more than theory. They use real world examples to show that the theory is empirically relevant. Towards the beginning of the book, Coyne and Hall discuss the long history of U.S. government war propaganda. They trace war propaganda all the way back to the American Revolution and offer especially insightful analysis of propaganda during the two World Wars and the Cold War. Ultimately, this is just setting the stage for their main focus: the ongoing war on terror that continues to shape our lives. The war on terror is multifaceted. One of the most consequential aspects was the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many Americans now know that the invasion was sold based on false claims, such as assertions that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks and that he was developing weapons of mass destruction. But how did the Bush administration convince so many Americans of these falsehoods? “Anyone who wants to better understand the propaganda used to sell the invasion of Iraq should read this book.” Anyone who wants to better understand the propaganda used to sell the invasion of Iraq should read this book. Coyne and Hall carefully explain what officials knew and what they said, showing “the disconnect between what was known by U.S. government officials and what was presented to the public.” They also show how administration officials used the media to launder false claims. Sources within the administration would leak information to the press, such as claims that intercepted aluminum tubes were strong evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Then when the New York Times reported on this, officials like Condoleeza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney referenced the story “as an indication of independent credibility outside the administration.” The propaganda continued after the invasion, with officials actively working to shape public opinion about the war. They continued to use the media laundering strategy. They embedded journalists with American troops, which altered the incentives and information available to those journalists. Individuals with direct ties to defense contractors, lobbyists, and the Pentagon appeared on television news but were presented as independent experts. Media reporting on the war on terror was substantially distorted by U.S. government propaganda. Could Americans avoid such propaganda by tuning out the news? Sadly not. As Coyne and Hall show, Americans are inundated with government propaganda when they watch sporting events, go to the airport, and watch summer blockbusters. The Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars sponsoring “patriotic displays” at sporting events, especially NFL football games. And “paid patriotism” is not the only form of post-9/11 sports propaganda. When Pat Tillman left the NFL to join the army, government officials began to use his military service as a propaganda opportunity. After he was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, high-ranking officials in the U.S. government concealed information about his death. Coyne and Hall carefully document what officials knew, the gap between what was known and what was said publicly, and how this deception served a pro-war narrative. Every time Americans fly commercially, they are required to travel through checkpoints maintained by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Coyne and Hall compellingly argue that the TSA does not make Americans safer. Moreover, the TSA engages in propaganda through a mix of “security theater” and “threat inflation.” Their actions thereby promote the broader framework of the war on terror, even if they do not support a specific conflict. But this security theater comes at a serious cost for civil liberties, and can be particularly harmful to some air travelers, such as those with “prosthetic breasts, colostomy bags, and other medical devices.” People are subjected to humiliating treatment, and it’s more for show than for any measurable security benefits. We also encounter propaganda when we go to the movies. Many films are produced using resources offered by the Department of Defense, such as military hardware. But to access these resources, filmmakers grant the Department of Defense veto power over their scripts. This alters the messages and ideas conveyed in movies and television shows. Government resources are used as a carrot to encourage filmmakers to send more favorable messages about American militarism. Manufacturing Militarism offers a compelling mix of theory and history. Coyne and Hall show us how useful economics can be for understanding the war on terror and the propaganda that sustains it. I hope their book inspires future research on these issues. I think their framework could be applied fruitfully to understand the role of propaganda and threat inflation in immigration policy, for example. Or the role that propaganda plays in America’s drone wars and airstrikes abroad. For more on these topics, see the EconTalk podcast episode Christopher Coyne on Exporting Democracy after War; and “The Economics of al-Qaeda,” by Anne Rathbone Bradley, Library of Economics and Liberty, December 2, 2019. See also the EconTalk podcast episode Don Boudreaux on Public Choice. In addition to inspiring future research, I hope that Manufacturing Militarism inspires readers to think critically about government power, and creatively about how to resist militarism. As Ludwig von Mises said, “Peace builds, war destroys.” In a world where warfare and militarism continue to inflict significant destruction around the world, it’s up to us to restore peace and the productive social cooperation that it fosters. Footnotes [1] Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror. Stanford University Press, 2021. [2] Available online at Costs of War. Watson Institute, Brown University. *Nathan P. Goodman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Economics at New York University. His research interests include defense and peace economics, self-governance, public choice, institutional analysis, and Austrian economics. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

“Science is prediction.”  Not quite true, but still deeply insightful.  Especially when you remember that “Science is prediction” doesn’t mean a prediction that you whisper to yourself.  “Science is prediction” means a public prediction.  You have to shout it from the rooftops, in advance. When Einstein publicly predicted a specific anomaly in the deflection of light during a solar eclipse – and turned out to be exactly right – it was awesome.  Einstein loudly said exactly what was going to happen before it happened.  He was right.  And the world took notice. Now ponder this: As a matter of pure logic, the evidence would have been just as strong if Einstein waited for the eclipse measurements to come in, and then showed they were consistent with his theory.  But of course the world’s reaction would have been far more tepid in this scenario. Why?  In common-sense terms, the answer is, “It’s easy to ‘explain’ facts you already know.  Practically any smart person can do it.  As a result, we reasonably discount post hoc explanations.” If you know a little modern psychology, though, you’ll be sorely tempted to say, “Public prediction greatly reduces the severity of confirmation bias.”  Human beings naturally tend to misinterpret the facts in favor of their own views.  But such misinterpretation is much more difficult if (a) you say exactly what’s going to happen before you see the facts, and (b) do so publicly to ensure that many of your listeners will refuse to gloss over your failed predictions. And if you know more modern psychology, you’ll probably pile on.  “Public prediction greatly reduces the severity of not only confirmation bias, but also Biases X, Y, and Z.”  For example, public prediction also greatly reduces the severity of Social Desirability Bias.  Human beings naturally tend to say and believe things that sound good.  But sugar-coating reality is much more difficult if (a) you say exactly what’s going to happen before you see the facts, and (b) do so publicly to ensure that many of your listeners will refuse to gloss over your failed predictions.” The upshot: The adage that “Science is prediction” rests not on logic, but on psycho-logic.  Logically speaking, explaining after the fact is just as epistemically revealing as predicting before the fact.  Psychologically speaking, however, explaining after the fact is far inferior to predicting before the fact.  Why?  Because explaining after the fact is mired in intellectual corruption.  Predicting before the fact is, by comparison, squeaky clean.  Predicting before the fact is the best way to signal that you’re overcoming bias. Otherwise you’re mired in what Tetlock calls “vague verbiage” and “self-scoring.”  You say things vague enough to be compatible with a wide range of outcomes.  And then you further water-down this forgiving metric by delegating the scoring to yourself.  An epistemic kangaroo court. Notice, by the way, that betting combines the advantages of prediction with a recognition of its flaws.  Like predictions, bets are specific.  And even if a bet is “private,” at least one person who doubts you – your opponent – knows about it. At the same time, the bet avoids the unfortunately binary nature of prediction.  Suppose Einstein’s light deflection prediction had failed.  That’s doesn’t prove he was wrong.  Perhaps something went wrong with the equipment.  Or one of the human beings measuring the light could have made a mistake.  Or a rival scientist could have deliberately sabotaged the experiment.  A bet – rather than a flat prediction – incorporates all of these contingencies.  And reminds us to focus not on any particular bet, but on the bettors’ track record.  That’s the best guide to whose judgment we should trust. Given my still-perfect betting record, I’ll admit this is a suspicious conclusion.  And if that’s what you’re thinking, good for you.  You’re using psycho-logic to ferret out the truth, as every thoughtful person must. (0 COMMENTS)

When we see Michaelangelo’s David or the design of the Apple Store, we assume a genius with a predetermined vision was the key to the outcome. Yet as Lorne Buchman, author of Make to Know, tells EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, great art is more about embracing the process of exploration and the results that emerge in the process […] The post Lorne Buchman on Creativity, Leadership, and Art appeared first on Econlib.

To counter “disillusionment with the government,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D. Conn) expressed a widespread but invalid or seriously misleading idea: it is the idea that governments should “deliver” or, in other words, be efficient (“Americans Diverge on Perils and Lessons of the Jan. 6 Capital Attack,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2021): Listen, I do think people are actively considering giving up on democracy in this country. And that does explain part of the reason why people marched on us, why people tried to overthrow the government. We’ve got to show people that government can deliver for them. The idea that government should “deliver” is seriously misleading because it depends on what exactly it delivers. The WSJ reports that Mr. Murphy was “arguing for passage of Mr. Biden’s stalled economic agenda.” For anybody who disagrees with this trillion-dollar agenda—and about half of American voters do—the government should not “deliver.” It is an invalid idea if one assumes that it is incorrect to tax all the people in a country or even just a selected group of scapegoats (like “the rich”) in order to finance the benefits that others want. In other words, it is not because some group has some grievance that the government should deliver relief, for this usually means that some other group will be conscripted into providing it. To support my claim, I could invoke the radical theory of Anthony de Jasay, but I will instead refer to the much milder ideas of Friedrich Hayek, which are representative of what classical liberals have believed for at least two centuries and a half. In Rules and Order (1973), the first volume of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek wrote: Since [the representative assembly] possesses authority to arrange everything, it cannot refuse responsibility for anything. There will be no particular grievance which it will not be regarded as capable of removing; and since in every particular instance taken by itself it will generally be capable of remedying such a grievance, it will be assumed that it can remove all grievances at the same time. However, it is a fact that most of the grievances of particular individuals or groups can be removed only by measures which create new grievances elsewhere. Incidentally, a new consolidated version of the three volumes is forthcoming at the University of Chicago Press, under the competent editorship of Jeremy Shearmur. I will soon review the “Rules and Order” part for Econlib. Of course, there can be real grievances. In a classical-liberal or libertarian perspective, however, these would be grievances against discrimination by government, not requests for government discrimination, that is, for granting privileges to some at the detriment of somebody else. Saying that to “deliver” anything somebody wants should not be the role of government amounts to saying that the government should not be “efficient” in implementing measures that undermine or threaten the general context of individual liberty that equally allow all individuals to each pursue his own goals. This is why our forebears put stringent limits on government “efficiency,” from countervailing powers inside the government to specific procedural rules that politicians and bureaucrats must follow, such as the Senate 60% majority, not to forget constitutions, bill of rights, or other such fundamental laws that are by design constraining and difficult to change. (I put “efficient” and “efficiency” in quotes because the meaning of the concept refers to what satisfies individual preferences without making anybody worse off. This encapsulation of Pareto efficiency would require a discussion by itself, and Hayek would differ. Let’s keep this conversation for another time.) The obstacles put up against government “efficiency” include privacy rules that are, or were, enacted against government agencies building, using, or sharing databases on citizens. It is dangerous that government actions be too well-coordinated, as Hayek again understood (quoting from Rules and Order): It is important that the size of this ‘public sector’ be limited and the government do not so co-ordinate its various services that their effects on particular people become predictable. [Emphasis in original] In this perspective, a government should not discriminate in favor or against identifiable individuals determined in advance—although a measure may differentially affect unknown individuals in future instances. For example, changing intellectual property law will affect people who decide to create such property in the future or who would then benefit from it, but should not benefit or harm any particular person on whom we can now put a name. In brief, the government should not “deliver” just to deliver some goodies to some privileged group in society. There is nothing good in government delivering tyranny or measures that push people farther on what Hayek called the “road to serfdom.” The only thing that government should deliver are the (few) measures that (arguably) facilitate the common interest of individuals in the satisfaction of their several preferences. (0 COMMENTS)

A friend who read Charley Hooper’s and my recent Wall Street Journal article, “Coercion Made the Pandemic Worse,” December 27, 2021, which I blogged about here, sent it to his son. His son, who’s a fan of Frederic Bastiat, told his dad that our point in the first paragraph reminded him of this paragraph from Bastiat’s famous book The Law: Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain. I had forgotten this quote. I used a similar one from a different Bastiat reading a few years ago: But, by an inference as false as it is unjust, do you know what the economists are now accused of? When we oppose subsidies, we are charged with opposing the very thing that it was proposed to subsidize and of being the enemies of all kinds of activity, because we want these activities to be voluntary and to seek their proper reward in themselves. Thus, if we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in religious matters, we are atheists. If we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in education, then we hate enlightenment. If we say that the state should not give, by taxation, an artificial value to land or to some branch of industry, then we are the enemies of property and of labor. If we think that the state should not subsidize artists, we are barbarians who judge the arts useless. This is from Bastiat,  “What is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” I used it here. (0 COMMENTS)

When I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (in 1968), the year 2001 seemed impossibly far out into the future. Now it’s more than 2 decades in the past—back in the bygone neoliberal era. This recollection got me thinking about the new field of “progress studies”.It seems to me that human progress is very uneven:Technology: Very rapid progressScience: Rapid ProgressPublic morals: Slow progressSports: Slow progressHuman personalities: No progressArt: No progressEx ante, this is not what one might have expected. The human body doesn’t change much from one generation to the next, but athletes are clearly better today than a few decades ago, and much better than a century ago. On the other hand, art might have been expected to progress, as artists built on the achievements of their predecessors. And yet, as Tyler Cowen recently pointed out, the golden age of music was during the time of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Tyler is much better informed on music than I am, and as you might expect his post contains a number of interesting explanations for historical trends in “classical” music.  Nonetheless, I see a big flaw in Tyler’s post.  Tyler focuses on explanations specific to music, whereas it seems to me that the evolution of highbrow music is quite similar to the evolution of the other forms of art.  I know more about the visual arts, so I’ll focus there. Just as the best music was created in earlier centuries, the same is true of the best paintings.  And that’s despite a huge increase in the global population, and a far greater increase in the number of humans with the economic resources to engage in painting as an art form.  Why aren’t there hundreds of great painters today? One response is that there are lots of great painters; it’s just that we don’t see it.  After all, artistic taste is subjective.  But that merely pushes the question back one step.  Why are composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach widely regarded as the greatest of all time?  Why is it that in a 1985 survey of art experts by the Illustrated London News, only 2 of the 20 greatest paintings of all time were from the 20th century, one from the 18th century, and none at all from the 19th century?  Yes, it can take a while to appreciate new art, but surely by now we can fully appreciate the art of the 18th century. It also seems to me that art has changed in similar ways in a wide variety of fields.  In some sense, modern art seems simpler and more idea-driven than the classics of the past, whereas older art involves a high level of craftsmanship.  Doesn’t Andy Warhol compare to Titian in much the same way that Philip Glass compares to Beethoven? My preferred theory is that the field of art involves discovery, and those who arrive first have the greatest opportunity to make major discoveries.  If Thomas Edison were born today, he’d have trouble inventing so many new home appliances.  Instead, he might have gone into software or biotech.  A talented young artist born in the 20th century might have decided that painting and photography were exhausted, and gone into filmmaking.  (Kubrick is one such example; he started as a photographer.) Filmmaking is a newer art form, and its golden age in the West and Japan was roughly 1920-1980 (and perhaps 1985-2005 in the rest of Asia.)  Even poetry seems to be in decline.  In 1820, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Blake were all writing poetry.  Are there 5 comparable living British poets?   So what does all of this mean?  Are things getting better?  I’m sort of agnostic on that question.  I’d put about a 40% probability on the hypothesis that utility is rising due to improvements in technology and public morality, and about a 60% probability on the hypothesis that utility is not rising over time because people have the same sort of personality flaws they had 100 years ago or 1000 years ago.  I’m frequently surprised by the extent to which people can be depressed despite living conditions that are objectively far superior to those in the past.  And I’m also surprised by the extent that (from a psychological perspective), life as portrayed in old novels seems very much like life as experienced today.  In my own life, a huge increase in economic wellbeing doesn’t seem to have made me happier than when I was younger.  And young people today don’t seem to be happier than I recall young people being in the 1960s. Nonetheless, because there is a non-trivial probability that progress is making us happier (say 40%), we should continue to strive for improvements in technology and public morals.  I recall the pre-novocaine era, and I don’t wish to go back even if hedonic set point considerations prevent the drug from making me happier.  I also don’t wish to go back to the pre-civil rights era. On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind going back to a time when Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde and Aftermath were all released in a span of 4 months. PS.  Sorry, I don’t have a link for the old art survey from 1985, but it was dominated by the usual suspects (Velasquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Titian, etc.).  The two modern paintings were by Picasso, and there was a Watteau from the 18th century.  Not surprisingly, Las Meninas topped the survey (by a wide margin), with View of Delft coming in second: (0 COMMENTS)

In the view of Terry McAuliffe, former Virginia Gubernatorial candidate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” According to Mary-Michelle Upson Hirschoff, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law, it is not even clear that parents have an unambiguous right to have their children excused from instruction they regard as objectionable. She states: “The curriculum of a public school in a democratic system of government is necessarily a subject of political debate. These controversies dramatize the inherent tension between the interests of the state and the interests of the parents in shaping the child’s development.” And what is the position of Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers? She declared war on “culture warriors” who are “bullying teachers.” She elaborated: “But culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.” She opposed those who want to “limit learning and stoke fears about our public schools.” Whatever happened to the axiom, “the customer is always right?” This is a basic foundational premise which operates all throughout the private economy. The customer wants to purchase new dungarees with holes in them that look ten years old? All the buyers need to do is snap their fingers and their wish is the command of the business sector. Do they want electronic vehicles? Entrepreneurs hasten to provide them. The same with computers instead of typewriters; cell phones in place of land line telephones and cameras; “roughage” instead of food that makes life worth living. They like large groceries instead of mom and pop stores, or, electronic shopping? Again their wishes are sovereign. “The customer is king” might well be the motto of the capitalist system. Why is this not working in education? Why are there millions of parents outraged with what their children are being taught? The problem is so serious that Attorney General Merrick Garland has felt the need to involve the Federal Bureau of Investigation to quell these protests. What is going on here? What is going on is that when it comes to public education, the children and their guardians, the parents, are simply not “customers.” Rather, they are wards of the state. Yes, their taxes finance public schooling, but they simply have no say in what goes on there, any more than they have control over other gigantic government bureaucracies. Wait, I spoke too quickly. They do have the ballot box. But this power can be implemented only every two or four years, and mainly impacts politicians, and only very, very indirectly, tenured bureaucrats in the teachers’ unions. Instead of begging, pleading, complaining about the corrupt miseducation intellectually crippling their children, they should transfer their children to private schools. Why do they not do that? It is simple. Then, they would have to pay twice over, once through taxes for the “education” of other children in public schools, and a second time, directly, for their own kids’ private education. How did this system get started? Public schooling began in most of the country in the late 19th century. It was initiated, mainly, by Protestants who wished to rid the country of the supposed evils of Popery and Catholicism. They did not have the power to ban private schools of the latter. They did the next best thing from their perspective: forced parents who patronized them to pay twice over. They were unscrupulous, but good economists; they knew that demand curves slope in a downward direction. Force the Catholics to pay double, and a lot of the impetus of Catholic education would be lost. So, parents unhappy with woke public education being crammed down the throats of their children have a natural constituency: Catholics. And in addition Jews and members of other religion groups who also provide private education. Forced school busing was beat back by massive numbers of outraged parents, and this latest attempt to impose political correctness can also meet the same fate, if the non “customers” can but become organized instead of limiting themselves to sporadic protests. Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans and is co-author of An Austro-Libertarian Critique of Public Choice (with Thomas DiLorenzo). (0 COMMENTS)