A Liberty Classic Book Review of Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, by Ludwig von Mises. Liberty Fund.1 Classical liberalism “had a good war.” In 1944, two seminal books in this tradition of thought were published. The first of these was F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, the other Omnipotent Government by Ludwig von Mises. They were complemented the following year by Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies. Hayek’s book soon became a classic, and it is still considered a force to be reckoned with. Mises’s book has been less fortunate. Yet it is an important contribution, for at least two reasons. On the one hand, Mises offers his explanation of what made German politics degenerate to the point of trusting her fate into Hitler’s hands. On the other hand, Mises offers a complex understanding of the consequences of what he calls “etatism” in the international sphere. Mises uses “etatism” instead of statism because that word, “derived from the French état… clearly expresses the fact that etatism did not originate in the Anglo Saxon countries, and has only lately got hold of the Anglo-Saxon mind.” His critique of interventionism here does not only focus on its unintended consequences, insofar as people’s welfare is concerned. Instead, he identifies some of its broader political consequences. “For [Mises], embracing liberalism would be the only effective guarantee of world peace: any other solution than embracing free trade and open borders is bound to develop conflict between states.” The world parted from liberalism in two key ways. In a liberal world, “frontiers are drawn on the maps but they do not hinder the migrations of men and shipping of commodities. Natives do not enjoy rights that are denied to aliens.” One may think of perhaps the most extraordinary passage in Pericles’s funeral oration: Athens, he claimed, is open “to the world, and never by alien acts to exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality.” That sense of openness as an essential mark of a liberal polity is central to liberalism in Mises’s view (though of course he had a more inclusive understanding of political right). For him, embracing liberalism would be the only effective guarantee of world peace: any other solution than embracing free trade and open borders is bound to develop conflict between states. In his biography of Mises, Guido Hülsmann points out that, as soon as he arrived in the United States and got in touch with other European emigres, he started thinking about what might happen in Europe after the war. In this context, he thought deeply about the problems of the international order. His reflections are a lucid example of the application of the economic way of thinking—and a meditation on the power of economic ideas, which goes beyond the mere sphere of their application. If Omnipotent Government seems bitter, it does so because Mises thought “etatism” made conflict widespread and potentially unavoidable. “A democratic commonwealth of free nations is incompatible with any discrimination against large groups,” but modern politics thrive on such discrimination—which are apparent in trade and migration barriers. Etatism”must lead to conflict, war, and totalitarian oppression of large populations:” for Mises, it breeds conflict and thrives on conflict. “In our age of international division of labor, totalitarianism within several scores of sovereign national governments is self-contradictory. Economic considerations are pushing every totalitarian government toward world domination.” Etatism breeds monism and intolerance. “The right and true state, under etatism, is the state in which I or my friends, speaking my language and sharing my opinions, are supreme. All other states are spurious. One cannot deny that they too exist in this imperfect world. But they are enemies of my state, of the only righteous state, even if this state does not yet exist outside of my dreams and wishes.” “A world parliament elected by the universal and equal suffrage of all adults would obviously never acquiesce in migration and trade barriers,” since the interests of the world poor are those that are hurt the most. Alas, as Mises knows well, such a Utopian dream can hardly be of any use in the world of politics. The distinctively non-Utopian world which saw the emergence of Nazism is the core of Mises’s study. Omnipotent Government is the ultimate version of a manuscript on which Mises started to work in 1938, as he wanted to explain “The Way of the German People toward National Socialism” (this was the working title). It is closely linked with his 1919 book Nation, State, and Economy, where Mises had explained the rise of German imperialism. While he was often dismissed as a laissez-faire ideologue, Mises’s explanation is historical and nuanced. He tracks the decline of the fortune of German liberalism and the rise of nationalism, trying to refuse easy and mistaken explanations. While he was deeply pessimistic about the spirit of the age (“It seems that the age of reason and common sense is gone forever,” he wrote to Hayek in 1941), his work attempts to be a logical, cold analysis of what happened. He maintains it was “very easy indeed to assemble many facts of German history and many quotations from German authors that can be used to demonstrate an inherent German propensity toward aggression”—but that was wrong. “There have been in Germany, as in all other nations, eulogists of aggression, war, and conquest. But there have been other Germans too. The greatest are not to be found in the ranks of those glorifying tyranny and German world hegemony. Are Heinrich von Kleist, Richard Wagner, and Detlev von Liliencron more representative of the national character than Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, and Beethoven?” These words were not written lightly and one should not assume that were dictated by an imperfect knowledge of what happened in Nazi Germany. It is true that the Soviets entered at Auschwitz in 1945 and only then did the world truly realise the extent of the Nazis’ atrocities. But Mises had a better grasp than many of Nazism. After the Anschluss, his apartment in Vienna was searched and looted by the Gestapo, and the inheritance bequeathed to him and his brother Richard by their father was confiscated. For years, as Hülsmann carefully reports, Mises was doing all he could to help colleagues who were stripped of their jobs and academic positions to find new ones abroad. Then he had to leave Austria himself, first for Switzerland and then the United States. Yet Omnipotent Government is permeated by a profound admiration for German culture and can be seen as an attempt to save it from a prejudice that sees Germany as fated to become a hotbed of cruel nationalism. On the contrary, Germany could have been liberal, as evidenced by the tentative flowering of liberal developments in the middle of the 19th century, but the political debate took a different turn, thereby preparing the scene for the rise of the Nazi regime. For Mises, the turning point in German history was the constitutional conflict which opened in Prussia when liberal parliamentarians refused to accept the government’s plan for military reform in the late 1850s. The army was understandably a sensitive issue for German liberals, as it was used to suppress the uprisings in 1848-49. The court wanted to strengthen the army to reduce the likelihood of any other revolutionary attempts. The liberals “wanted to wrest the army from the King and to transform it into an instrument for the protection of German liberty. The issue of the conflict was whether the King or Parliament should control the army.” “The struggle against this army bill,” Mises wrote, “was the last political act of German liberalism.” Not that the liberals actually wanted to prepare the ground for any popular upheaval. “The liberals were resolved to spare the German people, whenever possible, the horrors of revolution and civil war. They were confident that in a not-too-distant future they themselves would get full control of Prussia. They had only to wait.” Mises describes the German liberals of the 19th century as fervent believers in public opinion and the education of the masses. They knew “they could not establish popular government within a nation where many millions were still caught in the bonds of superstition, boorishness, and illiteracy.” Thus education, and a strong appreciation for the virtues of a free society, ought to spread precisely among “those strata of the population from which the King drew his reliable soldiers.” In his narrative of German liberalism, Mises emphasizes the extent by which “the aim of German liberalism was the replacement of the scandalous administration of the thirty-odd German states by a unitary liberal government.”He recognizes a liberal element in the struggle for German unification and refuses to see a linear continuity between Prussianism, German nationalism and National Socialism. Chancellor Bismarck was hardly a hero of Mises: “Bismarck and his military and aristocratic friends hated the liberals so thoroughly that they would have been ready to help the socialists get control of the country if they themselves had proved too weak to preserve their own rule.” Yet they were not proto-Nazis. If they paved the way for Hitler, they did so in a different sense. The triumph of German militarism, together with the emergence and success of socialist doctrine, changed “the nation’s mentality.” The liberal party, and hitherto liberal positions generally speaking, vanished: at some point “there were no longer any liberal authors in Germany. Thus the nationalist writers and professors easily conquered.” Etatism became popular in all quarters. It was not only the bourgeoisie that bought into Prussian militarism: virtually the whole of German society did, with prominent academics (including the so-called “socialists of the chair” Adolph Wagner and Gustave Schmoller) leading the choir. Mises’s work is idea-centric: he attaches great importance to the fashions of the intellectual world. Politics is a matter of interests, but the dominant ideas in society make those interests intelligible to the very people who hold them. Ideas anticipate and draw the space of the politically possible. The prevailing ideas, in Germany, brought people to consider their nation as a “closed” economic system and to believe that its success depended upon other governments’ failures. “Etatism” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: “the most advanced countries of Europe have poor domestic resources. They are comparatively overpopulated.” As a trend “towards autarky, migration barriers, and expropriation of foreign investments” consolidates, they are bound to experience a severe fall in standards of living. If “the old liberals were right in asserting that no citizen of a liberal and democratic nation profits from a victorious war,” when you introduce “migration and trade barriers” everything changes. The economy becomes a realm of conflict, not of co-operation. “Every wage earner and every peasant is hurt by the policy of a foreign government, barring his access to countries in which natural conditions of production are more favorable than in his native country. Every toiler is hurt by a foreign country’s import duties penalizing the sale of the products of his work.” Had Germany adopted free trade and liberalism, these ideas would have gained center stage in continental Europe. But not only it did not happen: the fact that the entire world of politics was openly anti-liberal determined that possible opportunities to move in a liberal direction were never grasped. A turning point was the end of WWI. “The main argument brought forward in favor of the Hohenzollern militarism was its alleged efficiency.” For Mises the First World War “destroyed the old prestige of the royal family, of the Junkers, the officers, and the civil servants.” By late 1918 “the great majority of the nation was sincerely prepared to back a democratic government.” But the Marxist elements of the Social Democratic Party withdrew their support for democracy, hoping to hasten towards the Revolution. Yet that created the impression that “as the conservatives had always asserted, the advocates of democracy wished to establish the rule of the mob.” Thus “the idea of democracy itself became hopelessly suspect.” For Mises, “the nationalists were quick to comprehend this change in mentality.” Very quickly German politics degenerated into a sort of war between “extreme” groups, Marxist and nationalist: “there was no third group ready to support capitalism and its political corollary, democracy.” Those who thought they were opposing nationalism were “fanatical supporters of statism and hyper-protectionism. Bt they were too narrow minded to see that these policies presented Germany with the tremendous problem of autarky.” Such an ideological climate, together with the Marxists flirting, made for “a spirit of brutality” that gave “political parties a military character.” “If Hitler had not succeeded in winning the race for dictatorship, somebody else would have won it.” The time was ripe for something like Nazism to emerge. It was not the support of the wealthy that caused Hitler’s success. It is true that he “got subsidies from big business…. Hitler took their money as a king takes the tribute of his subjects…. The Entrepreneurs preferred to be reduced by Nazism to the status of shop managers than to be liquidated by communism in the Russian way. As conditions were in Germany, there was no third course open to them.” The Nazis conquered Germany because they never encountered any adequate intellectual resistance. Mises insists that this happened because “the fundamental tenets of the Nazi ideology do not differ form the generally accepted social and economic ideologies.” Such tenets are (a) an understanding of capitalism as a system of exploitation; (b) the idea a duty existed for the government to substitute control of business for free enterprise; (c) price controls are legitimate; (d) easy money policy has “nothing to do with the periodical recurrence of economic depression,” (e) capitalism does not serve the masses and has not increased their living standards., (f) the only advantage in international trade lies in exporting. For Mises, what consolidated Nazism was the fact that statism was the hegemonic ideology in the Western world too. Instead of being inclined towards international cooperation and trade, other countries faced Germans in the way the Nazi expected—and that allowed them to grow consensus. “With regard to these dogmas there is no difference between present-day British liberals and the British labor party on the other hand and the Nazi on the other.” Mises of course does not mean that these groups share the same means of the Nazi, who were “sadistic gangsters”: but that in the 1920s and in the 1930s the dominant intellectual discourse was such as to leave no doubt that European countries saw each other as antagonists in the economic race, and not as potential allies that could gain by cooperating and trading with each other. It is worth noting that, when the book came out, Hans Kohn, the distinguished historian of nationalism, reviewed it in The American Historical Review. While Kohn considered Mises the last holder of the “belief, current a century ago, that in a world of perfect and unhampered capitalism, of free trade and democracy, there would be no incentives for war and conquest,” a faith that he considered “utopian,” he valued Mises’s liberal warnings in an age of collectivism. Furthermore, he thought Mises presented his analysis of German nationalism “with cogent arguments, with many illuminating references and in a brilliant style.” For more on these topics, see “Liberalism versus the State,” by Alberto Mingardi. Library of Economics and Liberty, May 4, 2020. See also Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time by Ludwig von Mises, Online Library of Liberty; and the EconTalk podcast episode Peter Boettke on Mises. Mises’s liberalism in this book is, as always, adamant. “It is a delusion to believe that planning and free enterprise can be reconciled. No compromise is possible between the two methods. Where the various enterprises are free to decide what to produce and how, there is capitalism. Where, on the other hand, the government authorities do the directing, there is socialist planning.” But it will be wrong to take this for an uncritical endorsement of “real world capitalism.” He sees the emergence of a businessman’s syndicalism (crony capitalism, we would call it) as “something like a replica of the medieval guild system. It would not bring socialism, but all-round monopoly with all its detrimental consequences. It would impair supply and put serious obstacles in the way of technical improvements. It would not preserve free enterprise but give a privileged position to those who now own and operate plants, protecting them against the competition of efficient newcomers.” Omnipotent Government may be seen by some as an overly economistic attempt to make sense of totalitarianism. Indeed, there was more to Nazis than their system of price controls. But it is precisely for this reason that it is such a fascinating read. Brutality, hatred and the pride some political groups take in aggression are traced back to a flawed understanding of the world, propelled by their rejection of liberalism. Omnipotent Government is a testimonial to the power of the economic way of thinking and to Ludwig von Mises’s analytical power. Footnotes [1] Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Edited with a Foreword by Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011). Online text available at the Online Library of Liberty at Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. *Alberto Mingardi is Director General of the Italian free-market think tank, Istituto Bruno Leoni. He is also assistant professor of the history of political thought at IULM University in Milan and a Presidential Scholar in Political Theory at Chapman University. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

So if our instincts undervalue truth, that’s not surprising—our instincts evolved in a different world, one better suited to the soldier. Increasingly, our world is becoming one that rewards the ability to see clearly, especially in the long run; a world in which your happiness isn’t nearly as dependent on your ability to accommodate yourself to whatever life, skills, and social groups you happened to be born into. More and more, it’s a scout’s world now. —Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t.1 (p. 40) When your views are challenged by a discordant observation or a person with a different opinion, should you treat this as an opportunity to reconsider or as a threat to fight off? Julia Galef argues for the former. Galef favors what she terms the scout mindset, which means adjusting your outlook to take new information into account. She contrasts this with what she calls the soldier mindset, which means ignoring or dismissing new information in order to keep your current outlook intact. According to Galef, the intellectual scout uses reasoning to try to map reality. The scout welcomes contrary information as helping to correct this map. The soldier uses reasoning to defend one’s map of reality. The solider fights contrary information as if to stave off defeat. Scout mindset has a number of advantages. One makes better predictions and decisions by seeking the truth. One is actually more persuasive to others, because people value honest assessment rather than overconfidence. This raises the question of why the soldier mindset evolved in the first place. Galef lists several psychological factors that make it appealing. First, challenges to our worldview make us uncomfortable. Dismissing such challenges relieves the discomfort, at least for a while. We are inclined to tune our beliefs in order to protect our self-esteem. For example, if we have trouble learning a foreign language, it is easier to insist that knowing foreign languages is unimportant than to undertake the effort needed to attain that skill. When we make a decision, considering alternatives may create anguish. Closing our minds to those alternatives may allow us to feel better about our choice, at least for a while. Being firm in our beliefs can help us to get others to comply with our wishes. But note that this creates the risk that when others defer to our soldier mindset, they do so reluctantly, lacking our same conviction. Galef cites a study in which … law students who are randomly assigned to one side of a moot court case become confident, after reading the case materials, that their side is morally and legally in the right. But that confidence doesn’t help them persuade the judge… [they] are significantly less likely to win the case—perhaps because they fail to consider and prepare for rebuttals to their arguments. (p. 27) Galef points out that one’s beliefs can serve as a sort of fashion statement. Psychologists call it impression management, and evolutionary psychologists call it signaling: When considering a claim, we implicitly ask ourselves, “What kind of person would believe a claim like this, and is that how I want other people to see me?” (p. 23) A related motive for holding some beliefs is to fit in better with one’s social group. This can be a particularly powerful motive when a group is strict about excommunicating heretics. “The more that we are convinced of our own objectivity, the less likely that we are operating in scout mindset.” One of Galef’s interesting themes is that we self-deceive about our mindset. The more that we are convinced of our own objectivity, the less likely that we are operating in scout mindset. In fact, one key to remaining in scout mindset is the willingness and ability to recognize one’s own inclination to fall back on soldier mindset. As she puts it, But the biggest sign of scout mindset may be this: Can you point to occasions in which you were in soldier mindset? (p. 57) In particular, having high intelligence and a good education is no assurance that one has scout mindset. On the contrary, it makes one better able to operate using soldier mindset and to hang on to incorrect views. Galef believes that one acquires scout mindset by cultivating certain habits. These include making a point of telling other people when they have helped you to change your mind, genuinely welcoming feedback, and subjecting your own beliefs to rigorous examination. Galef advocates using thought experiments as a way of escaping from soldier mindset. For example, in deciding whether to continue or quit a project, she proposes an “outsider test,” in which you imagine what another person would do if they were suddenly dropped into your situation. This thought experiment could relieve you of the baggage of your previous actions that got you into the predicament. The outsider test may also make it easier to avoid throwing good money after bad or wasting time continuing to pursue a graduate degree that no longer seems as worthwhile as when you started. Another interesting thought experiment is to ask whether your opinion would change if an influential person were to change their mind. For example, suppose that during a meeting the boss advocates a particular project. Before you decide whether or not you agree, imagine what your thinking would be if the boss were to oppose the project. For acquainting yourself with diverse viewpoints, it pays to choose carefully who you pick to represent that viewpoint. If you only pay attention to the worst people on the other side, then this will serve to close your mind rather than open it. To give yourself the best chance of learning from disagreement, you should be listening to people who make it easier to be open to their arguments, not harder. People you like or respect, even if you don’t agree with them. People with whom you have some common ground—intellectual premises, or a core value that you share—even though you disagree with them on other issues. People whom you consider reasonable, who acknowledge nuance and areas of uncertainty, and who argue in good faith. (p.171) Galef suggests that one good habit is to cultivate friends who model the scout mindset. One of the biggest things you can do to change your thinking is to change the people you surround yourself with. We humans are social creatures, and our identities are shaped by our social circles, almost without our noticing. (p. 219) For more on these topics, see the EconTalk episode Julia Galef on the Scout Mindset and “Tribal Psychology and Political Behavior,” by Arnold Kling, Library of Economics and Liberty, August 6, 2018. See also the EconTalk episode L.A. Paul on Vampires, Life Choices, and Transformation. When we raise the level of analysis from the individual to the group, this leads me to think of another reason that the soldier mindset survives. At an individual level, self-skepticism may be a useful characteristic. But at a group level, rewarding loyalty and stifling dissent may have survival value, at least up to a point. A society where “anything goes” could lose out to a society that demands sacrifice and a strong community-oriented ethic from its members. From an individual perspective, treating challenges to one’s beliefs as an opportunity rather than a threat might be a good strategy. But from a group perspective, it may pay off to be less truth-seeking and more conformity-demanding. I suspect that this tension between what is best for the individual and what promotes group survival may be at the heart of why soldier’s mindset is difficult to leave behind. Footnotes [1] Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. Portfolio/Penguin, 2021. *Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012. Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

Here are my reactions to Part 1 of the book club for Mike Huemer’s new book: Kevin DC: Thoughts/comments directed primarily towards Bryan: Compared to other academic disciplines, philosophers really do spend a lot of time rehashing 2000-year-old debates. I suspect this is at least in part due to the fact that of all the disciplines in the academy, philosophy is the one with the longest history. Chemists don’t rehash 2,000 year old debates because 2,000 years ago, chemistry wasn’t a thing. Historians, by contrast, do tend to spend more time rehashing, say, the history of the Roman Empire and other subjects that are thousands of years old, simply because history, like philosophy, stretches back that far as a discipline. I don’t think the analogy works.  Philosophers keep rehashing fundamental questions; historians, in contrast, rehash details.  The consequentialism/deontology debate seems roughly comparable to “Did the Roman Empire exist?”  Furthermore, by your logic, chemists are going to start rehashing fundamental questions in a few centuries.  Seems highly unlikely. Alexander Davis: I’m not sure that this is exactly a disagreement, but it seems relevant. On 6), about subjective claims: I think that we should avoid the words “objective” and “subjective” as much as possible. Why? Well, look at how they are often used in language: –As rhetorical sticks with which to beat your interlocutor over the head. Compare “X is true!” with “X is objectively true!”. Adding objectively did not alter what was being claimed… –As premature ends to what could have been a productive conversation. As examples, at multiple times in my life, I found myself trying to engage someone in a philosophical conversation about ethics, or free will, etc., only to run into the “X is just subjective” wall. This is especially annoying, because that’s assumed to be an uncontroversial fact, when it isn’t even among the people who study it the most (philosophers)… It’s not that the subjective/objective distinction is entirely bogus; it’s just misused, and assumed to be more clear-cut than it really is… All reasonable.  Using objective as a synonym for “rational” or “logical” makes sense to me.  So does objective as a synonym for “directly experienceable by multiple observers.”  In that sense, my pain is subjective (only I can directly observe my own pain), but my left hand is objective (multiple people can directly observe it).  But most facts declared to be “subjective” fit neither category. John Alcorn: Fashionable discourse about racism often commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. ‘If an institution is racist, it has negative disparate impact on Blacks. Institution A has negative disparate impact on Blacks. Therefore, A is racist.’ The fallacy of affirming the consequent mistakenly interprets a sufficient cause as a necessary cause. In the example I gave above, disparate impact of institution A on Blacks might have main causes other than racism.  The fallacy of the consequent regrettably short-circuits empirical inquiry and careful causal analysis. Agree.  Huemer seems more wrong than I realized on this point. Jackson Johnson: I am shocked you did not discuss Huemer’s ideas on the media starting on page 75! They seem to be in stark contrast with your own, and I was expecting you to mention them for sure. You trust the media when they make direct observations, but distrust them with regards to “causation, meaning, and importance.” I agree with this position. However, Huemer seems to distrust the media for even direct observations. Why? The example he uses is a case where the media got a direct observation wrong. They used the defendant’s lawyer as a source rather than the court, which appears to be a failure of direct observation rather than those three things… Technically, this wasn’t a “direct observation” because the media was repeating someone else’s alleged observations without properly checking them.  But this is still negligent reporting.  How common does Huemer think such negligence is, compared to its actual frequency?  I’ll let him answer for himself. Thomas Lee Hutcheson: #4 Suppose someone holds a position: Policy X will have good effect Z and just does not mention bad effect Y or just dismisses it as negligible. A “strawman” counterargument would be that Policy X has a non-negligible effect Y and therefore X should not be adopted. The steelman argument would be that according to some weighing scheme that the proponent of X might accept, the sum of the good effects Z and bad effects Y is less than zero and therefore X should not be adopted. A super steelman argument would be that Policy X’ will have the good effects of X but without the bad effects Z and so X’ should be adopted instead of X. I think one should always use the steelman or super steelman argument and eschew the strawman argument entirely. I don’t see how the final sentence follows.  Suppose 99% of proponents of X hold the most naive view.  Should we ignore them despite their prevalence? Dwarkesh Patel: On balance, I suspect that having a stern truth-seeking mentality is pragmatically useful compared to being a typical conformist, but the evidence is fairly weak. (I do however agree with Huemer that we have a prima facie moral duty to seek the truth even when the consequences are bad). This is highly nonobvious to me and I would love to hear you explain why. It makes sense to me why decision makers have a moral duty to seek the truth about the topics relevant to their decision (the President or a CEO should be thoughtful and well informed). But why do ordinary people like me have a moral duty to seek truth about things which we have no hope of affecting? Why is it even supererogatory to seek truth in these cases? I’m definitely not proposing a duty to spend lots of time or money learning useless things.  What I’m proposing, at minimum, is that you should try to believe what is most likely to be true given the information you possess. Does this really seem so strange?  If someone accused you of, “Believing whatever makes you feel best,” wouldn’t this seem like a harsh criticism of your character?  If someone claimed that, “X puts the truth first,” wouldn’t this seem like high praise? Related: Would you find a prima facie duty to tell the truth (i.e., not to lie) implausible?  If not, why isn’t a prima facie duty to believe the truth likewise plausible? Parrhesia: I believe that people speak of humor in a subjective sense and an objective sense, as they do with coolness, beauty, cuteness and other adjectives. “That was funny to me” is a coherent statement but so is “It’s funny but not to me.” Someone could also engage in a conversation about why “Most people think it’s not funny, but it is.” These statements seem semantically correct and not incoherent. If every English speaker died and no one could understand Dave Chappelle’s comedy specials, I would think that they remain funny. I tend to agree, though I don’t know how I’d start convincing someone who disagreed. Henri Hein: Anecdotally, it’s pretty commonly recognized that persistence is one of the most important attributes for an entrepreneur or inventor. I don’t want to spend too much time hashing this out in completeness, but here is another story, from roughly 20,000 years ago. It involves 2 tribes, the Pushovers and the Pigheads. They each had their Creative Genius. One time, the Genius from the Pushover tribe comes into the cave with a burning log and says “Look, we can control fire! We can use it to cook our food, have light to work inside our cave, and stay warm during winter!” The others objected. They didn’t want the smoke and it seemed to dangerous. So the Pushover Genius said, “oh well, you are right, it was probably a dumb idea.” That winter the Pushover tribe got wiped out by the Neanderthals. The Pighead Genius also came into the cave one time with a burning log and the same speech. She was presented with the same response. She then proceeded to demonstrate how to use the fire in a pit, but the others kicked her and her log out. Then she approached her friends one by one to convince them to let her try the fire in the cave. She made camp-fires and slept by them, and cooked her food. Over time, the resistance softened, and the other Pigheads came around to at least wanting to try this fire thing. They all survived the winter, beat the Neanderthals, and they became fruitful and multiplied. Obviously, being a Pighead is a survival trait. Not if your new ideas is bad… as most new ideas are!  What’s obvious, I’d say, is that there’s an optimal degree of openness for survival.  Extreme Pushovers and Extreme Pigheads both put themselves in danger relative to following a Golden Mean. (0 COMMENTS)

A Wall Street Journal report of today (Stephanie Yang, “China’s Tech Clampdown Is Spreading,” June 6, 2021) suggests that the Chinese government is clamping down on tech companies just like the US and EU governments are doing, and often using the same rhetoric. Any economic theory of politics—in fact, any political theory—must be able to explain that. The WSJ writes: Not a week seems to go by without Chinese regulators calling out tech companies for alleged offenses ranging from inconsistent pricing to imperiling user privacy to difficult working conditions. In May, China’s cyber regulator accused 105 apps, including short-video and job-recruitment apps, of illegally collecting and using personal data. It ordered the companies to fix their problems within three weeks or risk legal action. The directives came days after another 117 apps were told to fix user-data problems. Regulators have also met with ride-hailing services for potential mistreatment of drivers, while internet firms have been ordered to reform their data and lending practices. Authorities have also criticized delivery platforms over what they view as deceptive pricing tactics. Note the “legal action” expression. It may be partly an interpretation of the journalist or an attempt to make American readers understand, but both explanations hide that what is called “legal” does not mean the same in China as it does (or did) in the American and Western legal traditions. As Nobel economics prizewinner F.A. Hayek emphasized in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, the rule of law refers (or referred) not to anything decreed by established political authorities but to something governed by an abstract and general rule not aimed at any individual or specific group of individuals. It is well worth reading or rereading Hayek’s book, which shows how Western countries had already started ignoring the classical-liberal concept of the rule of law, starting with Germany in the 19th century. It is as if we in the West have been preparing to meet China halfway between liberty and tyranny! Any general theory of the state, not only of a Chinese-type of totalitarian state but also of the continuous (or nearly continuous) growth of the democratic state in the US and in the West more generally, must explain why the state cannot avoid the totalitarian temptation. From different viewpoints, this is what Hayek and public-choice theory (including James Buchanan and the more radical version of Anthony de Jasay) tried to do. Although these theories are often very different, they are all anchored in classical liberalism and in modern economics. The practical goal of the state across its different forms is to gain monopoly power and only external constraints can prevent it from extending the scope of its rule. The Wall Street Journal story illustrates: “The government would like to send a very clear message to all of these tech conglomerates that it’s the government who is in charge,” said Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based industry research firm Marbridge Consulting. “Any notion otherwise ultimately won’t be tolerated.” The tech companies are viewed, in China as in the democratic countries, as challenging the state’s monopoly on legitimacy and control. As the state’s authority grows and attains a certain reach, Hayek noted, private individuals also learn to think—their incentives lead them to think—like the rulers want them to think. In line with what has been happening in the West (see my Econlog post on the politicized corporation), the Chinese case provides another illustration: Tech companies have responded to the reprimands with pledges to be good corporate citizens. It is of course the state and the majority or minority supporting it who decide what a “good corporate citizen” is. (0 COMMENTS)

Many economists, after noting that government regulations have harmful unintended consequences, advocate replacing government regulation with government-provided information. These economists see the bad consequences of having government officials make decisions for people and not allowing people to make their own decisions. At the same time, they argue, the government officials might have good information and if they simply provide that information to the public, that will improve the situation. In the cases other economists and I discuss, a replacement of regulation with government provision of information would be an improvement. With such a shift from regulation to information provision, people could take the government’s information into account but still make their own decisions. Would it be preferable to a situation with no regulation? For it to be preferable, the government would have to provide good information and not mislead people. But does the government generally provide good information? Figuring out the answer would take years of research, but recent evidence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and some basic reasoning about government officials’ incentives, should make us hesitant to trust government information. This is from David R. Henderson, “Less Regulation, More Information: Better Results?” my latest article at Defining Ideas, published on June 3. Another excerpt, in which I point out the tough spot Dr. Rochelle Walensky is in: The second area in which good information would have been helpful is in guiding the decisions, not only of state and local governments but also of individuals, about whether to mask while outdoors. It never made much sense to me to wear a mask while walking outdoors unless I was in a densely packed crowd with no movement, the kind of crowd you might see in a “mosh pit” at a rock conference. (Disclosure: I have never been in a mosh pit and plan never to be in one.) It turns out that my intuition was right. According to Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, who also holds a master’s degree in public health, “viral particles disperse quickly in the outside air.” Gandhi cites a number of studies that find that well under 1 percent of investigated infections were linked to outdoor transmission. In one study from China, only one case out of 7,324 (0.0137 percent) was contracted outdoors. Yet on April 27, the CDC’s Walensky stated, “Less than 10 percent of documented transmission in many studies has occurred outdoors.” Well, yes. Although one or two studies did find a little less than 10 percent, most found well below 1 percent. So Walensky’s information was true but misleading. In Walensky’s defense, she was arguing that masking outdoors was generally unnecessary. My guess is that she was trying to do her best as a medical professional but was feeling strong opposition both from within the White House and from members of the public who support President Biden and strongly support masking. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Today Peru is going to the ballot, for the second round of its Presidential elections. For Agorà, a new YouTube channel of Liberi Oltre, a very active network of Italian scholars and activists, I had a conversation on Peru with Enrique Ghersi, a well-known libertarian scholar and lawyer. The first bit of the video is in Italian, but our chat is in English. I have learned a lot from Enrique – alas, news from Lima are most depressing. (0 COMMENTS)

My meteorologist friend and sometime EconLog commenter Tom Lee had an excellent letter in today’s Monterey Herald. Here it is: Humans get better at weather protection “Study blames climate change for 37% of global heat deaths” reads the Herald headline, echoing a headline syndicated across the world. Sounds sinister, but surprisingly the study that generated the headline was not based on actual data on people who died because of heat. It was based on a computer model. If it were valid, one would expect it to agree with other data about heat-related deaths. Not so. EPA-published records for heat-related deaths over the United states show no trend since about 1975. In fact, the most annual deaths occurred in 1980. If a warming climate were killing more and more people, wouldn’t we be seeing the most deaths now? The EPA heat wave index reaches back to 1895; the worst heat waves in the U.S. occurred in the 1930s with the Great Dust Bowl. The article also claims an increasing toll due to global warming from storms, flooding and drought. But a plot of data from the EMDAT Global Disaster Database shows that climate- related deaths have plummeted in recent years. The reason: we humans have gotten much better at protecting ourselves from the weather. Increasing global wealth means that even the poorest are less vulnerable to the elements. — Thomas F. Lee, Monterey   Interestingly, I posted on it on Facebook, but the post was apparently taken down without any message to me. So I did it again and it was taken down again. The third time is probably not a charm. The Facebook Stasi are apparently on their game. And what nerve Tom had in referring to data reported by that hotbed of libertarianism, the Environmental Protection Agency. The picture above is of members of the Stasi. Note: Before you get all hot and bothered, recognize that of course I know I’m exaggerating by referring to the employees of a for-profit firm as Stasi. I’m using the term they way the people on Seinfeld referred to the soup Nazi. In both cases, their private property gives them the absolute right to be petty, close-minded people who don’t want others to see alternative views, no matter how science-based. (0 COMMENTS)