NOW How Much Would You Pay?
Got the following values clarification exercise in e-mail a few days ago and had two responses:
Suppose you have a very rich person. S/he loves to collect Rembrandts. Or perhaps Stradivariuses. Whatever. S/he buys all the Rembrandts, Strads, whatevers on the market.
Then s/he destroys them.
Should this be allowed?
Response A is a bit of a geste:
Suppose you have a duly-constituted government that fits your prescription for democracy, and declares, after due deliberation, its policy that it all Stradivariuseseseses or Rembrandts or whatever should be turned over to it. Its own citizens must do so under penalty of law, and it becomes a priority of its foreign policy to acquire, by force or trade, all other Stradivarii or Rembrandts or whatever. Then it destroys them.
Should this be allowed?
There’s a point in there about bias, whom we feel deserves to be put on the spot, which assumptions we consider questionable. You might conclude that which question gets asked tells you more about the preoccupations of the questioner than anything else. But shoe Mr. Godwin from the room for a minute and replace Rembrandts or Strads with “Jews” and our second example becomes less hypothetical than history, while our first stays safely in the lab which conducts gedankenexperiments.
There is another distinction, I think. It does not matter how you answer the second question. You don’t get to answer it. You get to answer, for most values of democracy, whether you think your state should destroy these things, but not whether your state may destroy these things. The state, in its aspect of that portion of society that wields monopoly force, does as it (they) will. Everything about the state is revisable including what it may not, theoretically, do. This is as true of ours as any.
After two hems, a final haw. I know of no law in our own country that prohibits a rich person from setting out on this mission of destruction today, yet we have Stradivarii and Rembrandts still.
Nevertheless, a fair question, shaky premises and all, deserves a straight answer. Having bobbed and weaved before the initial question I felt it only honorable to be unequivocal in my actual response: Absolutely.
I assume my readers will spare me tired canards about libertarians “only valuing money” and such. Only by realizing that what people value is not, chiefly, money, can we think about the question. Even the rich person in the nightmare scenario at issue does not chiefly value money. If he did, he wouldn’t waste it buying a bunch of geegaws to smash.
Destruction is the end of all human things. Marble crumbles, gilt flakes from monuments, vowels slip and powerful rhymes become historical, then occult, then forgotten entirely. What lasts survives as long as it does because it inspires one or many people to preserve it. They do this because it pleases them, in the broadest sense of the word “please.”
We also know that there is no seller without a buyer. One person existing who wished to destroy all Stradivariuses or Rembrandts and having the wealth to devote to the task would be a monstrous prodigy of negative zeal. A world where all current owners of Stradivariuses or Rembrandts would sell their treasures to this man to be destroyed would be a world that had ceased to deserve them.
I do not think we will see either that man or that world. I find that a great comfort.
See. Also Obsidian Wings, Catallarchy
UPDATE: Beltway Traffic Jam link.
Comment by bryan —
March 11, 2005 @ 12:26 pm
hello please, I am Dr. William Von Monstro and am come to buy all your disgusteeng Rembrandts und Stradivarri for to love and cherish them.
Money no objection.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 11, 2005 @ 5:06 pm
I appreciate the offer, Doctor. But I can’t bear to part with my own.
Comment by billy-jay —
March 11, 2005 @ 5:47 pm
Excellent post, Jim.
Comment by Jeremy Osner —
March 11, 2005 @ 7:40 pm
Interesting but I don’t see the point of equating Rembrandts (i.e. valuable objects) with Jews (i.e. a group of people) — there isn’t really an analogy there I don’t think.
Comment by Doug Muir —
March 11, 2005 @ 8:53 pm
Hm. The Stradivarius question is silly, but it’s not that far from some real-world situations.
Evil Rich Guy owns a lot of first-growth forest land. This happens to be the home of a rare bird species. ERG cares nothing for this; he needs money now. (Perhaps to pay for his obsessive habit of collecting Stradivarii? Who knows.) ERG cuts down all the trees and the birds go extinct.
This is not in the least hypothetical, of course. In fact, I’ve just described exactly how the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker went extinct here in the US during the 1940s. The Ivory-Bills’ last patch of habitat (first-growth bottomland forest in Louisiana) was owned by a wealthy but feckless Southern family. One day the family decided it would rather have cash; they sold the land to a timber company, which promptly logged it. This being pre-environmental protection laws (though not pre-environmentalism), there was nothing to be done, though contemporary bird-lovers and scientists screamed and screamed and screamed. (And are screaming still.)
So: should ERG/TimberCo be free to cut down the birds’ forest? “Absolutely”? Or should there be a law to restrict or stop them?
Doug M.
Comment by Hesiod —
March 11, 2005 @ 9:34 pm
The problem with Jim’s lament at the end is that it presupposes that the evile Strad/Rembrandt destroyer is going around making his or her intentions known ahead of time.
It seems that the gist of ths question was what if such a person collected all of them first, and THEN destroyed them?
To put this in terms that Jim might find more concerning, what if some rich person decided they wanted to collect all the Golden age first issues of DC comics [and Detective 27]…went around the country buying them up at premium prices, acted like he loved them and wanted to display them all in a public musaeum somewhere, and then when he obtained all the Action, Detective and other comics, he made a big bonfire and tossed them all in. Thus destroying the originals forever.
No one, prior to the act, would object to him buying their copy on the grounds that it would be destroyed or hidden away somewhere. They’d get alot of money, and the thing would be displayed in a public collection. A win/win!
Except, he lied. And it’s not like he lied about the value of the books to buy them cheap. He paid a premium.
And what if, instead of destroying ALL the copies, he kept one of each to enhance the value of his remainig collection? Making them one of a kind?
Is he an entrepenuer? Or a scumbag?
IN any event, it’s a poor question to ask whether it should be allowed. It is allowed. And there is nothing you can do ahead of time to stop it, short of banning a free market in such items.
And even then, the black market trade in such goods would create the same problem.
Al you can do is punish the wrongdoer after the fact as a deterrent to others. If, indeed, what he did was wrong.
The point, ultimately I think, is that some things should not be for sale at any price.
Countries like Iraq would agree with that, as they watch their cultural patrimony being looted from their territory.
Comment by Francis —
March 11, 2005 @ 10:18 pm
eminent domain or regulation?
if we want to prevent the destruction of the strads, we could send the sheriff to seize them, then buy him out. Is is a “public purpose” to save irreplaceable artifacts? sure. more to the point, even with the Kelo case still pending, i’d bet dollars to donuts that no court would interfere with the legislative decision.
now, regulation is the tougher issue. Is it within the police power of the stateto pass a law making it a crime to destroy (wantonly / willfuly / intentionally) a category of heritage assets? probably. after all, most states have historic preservation laws; many jurisdictions in California have oaks preservation laws.
to me, the interesting question about libertarianism in a democracy is the political question. What ARE the limits on police (no, not the cops. in this context “police” comes from greek “polis” meaning city) power? and WHO decides? how comfortable are libertarians in vesting substantially more power in courts to set aside laws which restrict liberty and property interests?
Francis
ps: Jim, I’ve enjoyed your blog for years. thanks for allowing comments.
Comment by Francis —
March 11, 2005 @ 10:20 pm
oops. i was trying to add blank lines between paragraphs. sorry.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 11, 2005 @ 10:30 pm
Fixed! Sorry for the formatting issues. We have high hopes for this weekend, resolutionwise.
Comment by Daryl McCullough —
March 12, 2005 @ 12:04 am
Hi, Jim. Glad to see you’ve got comments now. Pretty colors, too.
Well, this gets to a question I’ve had about libertarianism: Do libertarians support their political positions *because* of their consequences, or in *spite* of them. Yes, I know that most libertarians believe that the consequences of adopting libertarian positions would likely be positive, but that’s an empirical issue; it isn’t an analytic truth. So if it turns out that libertarian principles produced bad outcomes (I don’t have to define “bad outcome” do I? Let’s just say, people starving in the streets, people burning comic books, cats and dogs living together in sin, the whole Ghost Busters scenario.) does that mean that libertarianism is falsified, or is the outcome of libertarianism good by definition?
I’m open to libertarianism as a means to an end (the end being happy people living interesting, subjectively fulfilling lives) but have no interest in it as an end in itself.
Comment by Hesiod —
March 12, 2005 @ 12:12 am
“I’m open to libertarianism as a means to an end (the end being happy people living interesting, subjectively fulfilling lives.”
Don’t you mean “objectively” fulfilling lives? ;^)
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March 12, 2005 @ 10:00 am
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Comment by Jim Henley —
March 12, 2005 @ 10:11 am
A few things.
1. Doug, thanks for the history on the ivory-billed woodpecker. Other than screaming, what did the conservationists of the 40s offer either the family or the timber company to save the woodpecker’s habitat? I’d like to know before taking the point further.
2. Francis, thanks for the kind words. Francis, this particular libertarian has a pretty broad concept of what constitutes a “taking” under the fifth amendment. Eminent domain abuse is a visceral issue for me. I think the question will end up tying in to Jeremy’s woodpecker.
3. Darryl: It’s tricky, though, isn’t it? If we have a set of principles that sometimes lead to bad outcomes, so we adjust our principles in those cases, do we in fact have principles, or just brute-force preferences to which we retrofit justifications? Won’t principles worthy of the name force us to swallow at least the occasional unfavorable outcome? (Frex, it would really bother me if someone destroyed any Rembrandts, let alone all of them.)
4. Hesiod: it’s an interesting wrinkle if the guy keeps his intentions secret, yes. It’s in the nature of collectors that word would get around that this one guy wanted to “buy everything.” That would make other collectors very interested. It would also drive up the prices of whichever items he didn’t own. I would also point out that this is the kind of thing covenants are good for. (This too probably relates to how I think about Jeremy’s pecke – er, you know.
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Comment by Doug Muir —
March 13, 2005 @ 1:58 am
Jim: not a lot. In the 1940s, environmentalism existed — it had been around since John Muir, early 1900s — but it wasn’t well organized and didn’t have a lot of money. Furthermore, this was going on during the Second World War: the key piece of habitat was sold in ‘43, logged in ‘44. So (1) prices were sky-high, and (2) conservationists, like everyone else, were a bit distracted.
They did contact the family, saying “please don’t sell”; this was ignored. Then they contacted the timber company, saying “no no no please no” and “at least leave a few big trees for nesting sites”; this too was ignored.
– While the war pushed wood prices up, it’s worth noting that first-growth virgin forest was already worth quite a lot. FGVF doesn’t exactly follow normal laws of supply and demand, because it takes ~200 years to produce. So the price, historically, has gone steadily up as those big logs get rarer and rarer. This is why, BTW, there’s only about 0.0001% of the original first-growth forest left east of the Mississippi… if you put it all together, you could walk around it in a morning. If you were allowed to cut it, it would be worth several million dollars an acre. That’s because (for instance) knot-free 50-foot straight oak beams are rather hard to find these days, and thus command a pretty high price.
Anyway. The conservationists could in theory have tried buying the land, but, as noted, the movement hadn’t reached that level of organization and funding yet. (The Nature Conservancy, the main private-sector organization for doing this sort of thing, wouldn’t be founded until 1951 — in part because of the experience with the Ivory-Bill — and wouldn’t really take off until the 1960s. Damn hippies.) We’re talking some birdwatchers, a few scientists, and a handful of federal employees, none of them with any money to speak of. Buying the necessary land — a few square miles of that prime bottomland forest — would have cost, in modern dollars, perhaps $10 million. Chump change for a government, very doable for the modern Sierra Club or Nature Conservancy, but not plausible for conservationists in 1943.
(Note also that conservationism in 1943 was still heavily influenced by the Teddy Roosevelt “save this gorgeous mountain from having ski lodges built on it” paradigm. Which is good as far as it goes, but didn’t tend to look at /species/. So finding a private sector sugar daddy would have been hard.)
As for appealing to government: this was 1940s Louisiana. Boy, this is /swamp/. We’re a poor state. Huey Long, God love his soul, would have us build beaches and parks, but you’re talkin bout a /bird/? Shee-oot.
Federal government? There was a war on. A couple of the birders actually tried, but too late; once the loggers went in, the whole thing disappeared in a matter of weeks.
This didn’t kill all the birds, BTW. It just eliminated all their nesting sites. Woodpeckers nest in holes in dead trees, right? Well, the ivory bill was the world’s largest woodpecker. We’re talking a bird that could get bigger than a crow, with a beak as long as your hand. They would drill out a nesting chamber two or three feet across. So they could only nest in really *big* dead trees… Ivory bill sightings, of various degrees of plausibility, continued into the 1960s. But once that last bit of habitat had been logged, the species was doomed.
Long answer, but since you asked.
So… should there have been a law? Should there be a law ever, in the abstract? Or if the family wants to sell the nesting sites, and the lumber company wants to log them, should those rights be ‘absolute’?
Doug M.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 14, 2005 @ 6:50 am
Doug, thanks! That’s very informative. I especially appreciate your ability to explain why the ivory-bill was cool. If I have any energy after Deadwood I’ll pull my chin on the matter. If not, anon.
Comment by Doug Muir —
March 14, 2005 @ 3:23 pm
Hi Jim,
Early white settlers gave the Ivory-Bill the nickname of “the Lord God Bird”. Apparently, upon seeing it for the first time — this huge bird, stark black and white with an enormous red plume, golden eyes, and the beak like a power drill — everyone’s first reaction was, “Lord /God/! What the hell is that thing?”
The Ivory-Bill had few predators, because one peck from that beak would see off anything smaller than an eagle. It was loud, fierce and fearless, and with good reason. In the 1890s, one wildlife artist discovered this the hard way, when he netted an Ivory-Bill, took it back to his hotel room, and then tried to put it in a cage so he could paint it at his leisure. The bird smashed the cage to pieces, gave him several deep puncture wounds, and blasted its way out the window in a shower of glass.
(Unfortunately, this fearlessness made it rather easy to hunt. An Ivory-Bill’s instinctive response to an approaching human was not to fly away, but to _stare the human down_. There are only a few other bird species that show this behavior, and they’re all large raptors like eagles and big owls. Hunting didn’t finish off the Ivory-Bill, but did help push it to the edge.)
All woodpeckers are living drills, but the Ivory-Bill was in a class by itself. It was basically a small chainsaw with wings. Even before it was seriously endangered, birders would travel for days to see it in action. You have to imagine this big bird just blasting into a rotten tree, BRRRRAAAAACCCK, chips and sawdust flying everywhere; then pausing to slurp up a grub or two with its six inch long, barbed and spiked tongue; and then BRRRAAAACCCK returning to the attack again, while the hole in the tree got visibly bigger.
Yeah, it was pretty cool.
There’s a recent YA book out called The Race To Save The Lord God Bird. I haven’t read it, but it’s getting rave reviews; if your kids are in that age group, they might find it interesting.
Otherwise, looking forward with interest to your thoughts on this.
cheers,
Doug M.
Comment by Leonard —
March 16, 2005 @ 2:43 am
Doug seems to me the story of the Ivory Bill has some serious problems as a lesson in political philosophy.
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One thing I’d like to point out up front: war is bad. The state grows, pretty much everything else shrinks, which includes endangered species. Nobody had any money? Well, in the libertarian view that was the fault of (a) a depression caused by the Fed and prolonged by FDR, and (b) the fact that a war was on and taxation was sky-high.
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When you disarm all the knights, you can’t expect chivalry to quite such a degree. The libertarian view of the world *allows* the knaves while creating conditions for knights. In the socialist view of the world, all are knaves except the state-sanctioned knights of the regime. God help us if they are knaves too.
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But back to the case of the Ivory Bill…
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As you said, there was no environmental lobby to speak of at the time. But why would there have been? People have to care about something for there to be a lobby. But people did not care, at least, few did and not that much. So I believe you are back-projecting our values onto a different time. Do *I* want to save the Ivory Bill? Yes; but it’s too late. But would I have wanted to save the Ivory Bill then? I cannot say. Probably not. If I had lived then I would different.
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Human action of any kind to “save” something depends on human values. So you might hypothesize that there “should” have been some environmental laws akin to the Endangered Species Act, that would have effectively dispossessed the family owning that land. And I might hypothesize that in a more libertarian place, some white knight “should” have had the cash to step forward to buy the land to save it. Either way, we’re both in hypothetical land. As such, I see no reason to prefer one property regime over the other. Both failed.
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Thus, back to “absolutely”. I’m absolutely in favor of private property in spite of largely (but not completely) hypothetical warts. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be better than the alternative (public property), and to my mind, it is.
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Comment by Carlos —
March 16, 2005 @ 9:37 am
As Doug’s co-blogger, I’m going to insert three words here: “And a pony!”