Hayek was not a physicist
By Thoreau
This evening I went to an interesting lecture at the Carnegie Institute in DC, concerning the nature of scientific consensus, as applied to controversies of the past as well as global warming today. It was an interesting talk, and a thought came to mind:
Libertarians have a great deal of intelligent things to say about the ability of market economies to adapt to changing environments. Libertarians have a great deal of intelligent things to say about the ways that government policy distorts markets and encourages fossil fuel consumption (as I brought up in a recent post). Libertarians have a great deal of intelligent things to say about the danger of using blunt regulatory tools to solve problems. Libertarians have a great deal of intelligent things to say about the importance of letting innovation and markets tackle problems rather than central planners. And, if one absolutely must pursue a coercive remedy to a problem, libertarians have much to say about what sort of remedy would at least be minimally distortionary.
But libertarians possess no unique qualifications when it comes to determining whether a substance that efficiently absorbs solar radiation will increase the temperature of the atmosphere. You can consult Rand and Hayek and Nozick and whoever else and learn all about libertarian political philosophy and economic issues and the morality of a market economy. But you won’t learn anything about heat transport, scattering of infrared radiation from aerosols, absorption cross sections, or gas flow.
Given this, what should libertarian writers, think tanks, policy analysts, and so forth have offered to the debate when global warming became a topic of widespread discussion? Should they have opined on energy policy and urged politicians to respect the power of markets to respond to changing conditions? Or should they have continued to question the science?
Mind you, if the science is genuinely weak then it is fine to ask hard questions, and urge that decisions be postponed until more facts come in. And if one does indeed possess technical qualifications expertise then by all means share whatever information you are qualified to share you know.
But we libertarians fancy ourselves to be experts on market economics, and one powerful principle in market economies is that you get the best results when people do whatever they do best. As a group, libertarians are not distinguished by their expertise on radiative transport and whatnot, but rather by their insights on markets and economies and human behavior. Reading Hit and Run, including the enduring skepticism on the science (in some cases perhaps quite extreme skepticism) by the comments gallery as well as the staff writers (although the more extreme positions come from the commenters), I’m struck that even now many libertarians adhere to positions for which it is very difficult to find scientific support. They insist that the science is junk when they would be better off contributing to the debate over solutions.
Also, there are plenty of good reasons to adopt a more sensible energy policy anyway. Just to name one, I’d observe that efforts to provide security in oil-producing regions has led us into all sorts of ill-advised adventures. Numerous other critiques can be and have been offered. So it’s not like there was no other reason for libertarians to argue for better energy policy until recently.
If all of the libertarian expertise that’s been poured into arguing against scientific experts had instead been poured into arguing for saner energy policy, we wouldn’t be in a situation where all the credibility on this issue resides on the left.
To my fellow libertarians, I offer this plea: The next time that scientists suggest that human activities, even industrial activities, may be producing externalities, please don’t jump into the scientific debate unless you have the credentials expertise to do so. Instead, offer the sorts of arguments at which libertarians excel: “Well, if there is indeed a problem here, removing government policy X would certainly be a good thing to do. Indeed, I can think of plenty of other good reasons to remove government policy X…”
Think of it as leveraging your comparative advantage.
Comment by Azael —
March 1, 2007 @ 10:17 pm
The Denialists’ Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts
Just sayin’
Comment by Thoreau —
March 1, 2007 @ 10:54 pm
Azael-
That’s a hilarious article, but there’s a trump card that wasn’t included in the deck:
If somebody catches on and observes the use of denialist tactics, that person is then accused of using ad hominem tactics. “You can’t address my arguments so you’re accusing me of shilling. If you really had an argument to make then you’d make it.”
Comment by Kevin B. O'Reilly —
March 1, 2007 @ 11:17 pm
I don’t even know enough about climate science to know whether Pat Michaels‘ PhD in “ecological climatology” means anything or not. Let’s say his training is legitimate. Do those letters then qualify him to be wrong?
There are a lot of reasons, some reflective of healthy skepticism and some merely ideologically driven, for how the global warming/climate change debate has developed.
But your take on this is kind of glib. Libertarians may like to fancy themselves as experts in market economists, but most of us certainly don’t have PhDs in economics. And many libertarians, furthermore, are partial to Austrian economics which is pretty widely discredited within the mainstream of the economics field. Heck, Milton Friedman was viewed as a kook within economics for about half his career.
So, should libertarians have writen off economics and consigned the field to the Keynesians? Yeah, libertarians should have stuck to political philosophy, I suppose. Hmm … how many philosophy departments have tenured professors who are avowed libertarian rights theorists?
Why not just leave policy, period, to … elected officials? After all, they’re the ones the people have delegated to think about this stuff for them right? What do we — mere unelected, unqualified, nonofficeholders really have to add to the conversation?
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 1, 2007 @ 11:40 pm
Geez, you’re telling me that libertarians gleefully collaborated in trashing science that doesn’t fit their ideological preconceptions? What a surprise.
The problem with your suggested solution is that libertarians still really have no answers to these problems. Marketization is just the next strategy of denialism. When the tradeable carbon dioxide permits start to rise in price, and the libertarian cliche MEN WITH GUNS start to emerge from the government to force industry to buy them nevertheless, libertarians will be the first ones saying that we can’t possibly continue this governmental transfer program, which will have no natural constituency at all. Result: time wasted. The marketization alternative, a carbon dioxide tax suifficient to actually change major industries, is never going to fly.
Comment by von Laue —
March 2, 2007 @ 2:20 am
What Puchalsky forgot to say is that he, himself, has no point, and is just typing words in an effort to add finger funk to his keyboard. What a surprise.
Comment by TC —
March 2, 2007 @ 3:46 am
Dr. Gore for sure is an expert on climate change aint he? After all he created the Goreacle!
You may all rise now.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
March 2, 2007 @ 3:54 am
Mr. Puchalsky, you’re supposed to be more discrete: we know what you really are after is bigger government, not improved climate, but you’re supposed to pay lip service to “market solutions, should they applly, would be preferrable, blah, blah…”
Comment by robotslave —
March 2, 2007 @ 4:43 am
Er, from what I can tell, Puchalsky is just saying that the sort of market solutions that libertarians favor for de-pollution of a shared atmosphere are dependent on rules or frameworks that must ultimately be enforced by governments. He didn’t say it very nicely, true, but is that really a controversial assertion?
Comment by Tom Scudder —
March 2, 2007 @ 5:24 am
Rich is certainly right that any kind of large-scale action is likely to look very non-libertarian: a global tradeable carbon-permit system will probably look a lot like the current global intellectual property system, with people in both poor and rich countries trying to leverage the system to their own benefit: in rich countries, using lawyers & lobbyists to set the rules in their favor; in poor countries, using noncompliance (”piracy”) to simply avoid them.
Comment by quasibill —
March 2, 2007 @ 8:13 am
Just to carry over a pet peeve from a previous post – credentials knowledge, or truth. I could care less what a person’s credentials are in a debate (in a market transaction, that may be a different story, due to the time value of researching) – what’s important are the facts and reasoning used. If a high school drop-out has the facts and logic on his side, I’m not going to automatically ignore him because a PhD says so.
Ask Thoreau – when he’s reading a journal article, does he just automatically accept it as good science just because the author has a PhD from Harvard? Or does he read it critically, looking to see if the reasoning and facts are good?
With that rant over, I think the phenomenon you describe is attributable to the enduring legacy of Rand and her belief that business was a persecuted class. I’m probably alone in the libertarian movement in viewing Rand as a net negative to the cause, given all the really destructive associations she made.
All one has to do to understand why markets, with a strong respect for property rights, will do better than state fiat, is ask the question who polluted the environment more – the Soviet Union, or GE? Then ask, the U.S. Army (even subtracting what it did in times of declared war), or GE? There’s a reason why GE wins those comparisons, and it has to do with state privilege (not that GE doesn’t enjoy alot of that on its own, and so isn’t a perfect example of the concept, but in today’s economy, most, if not all, large corporations are the beneficiaries of significant state privileges…)
Comment by quasibill —
March 2, 2007 @ 8:27 am
Ugh,
Just noticed that the post was from Thoreau, so asking yourself is kinda rude way of putting it, but I hope you get my point.
Also, I keep forgetting that html uses greater then and less than symbols, so the sentence should read “credentials do not equal knowledge or truth.”
Comment by Thoreau —
March 2, 2007 @ 8:43 am
I think I used the wrong word when I referred to “credentials.” I should have said “expertise.” Expertise can be gained from formal training, work experience, self-study, whatever.
My point is that the technical issues are often distinct from the policy issues. It may very well be that activity X causes harm to humans. That’s a technical question that requires a technical analysis. If you have the knowledge and skills (gained by whatever means) to either conduct the analysis or at least ask useful questions then by all means do so.
But among the great insights that libertarians have to offer are:
1) The government is frequently not the best entity for solving a problem.
2) The government often makes problems worse, and so the best thing to do may be to remove a policy rather than create a new one.
I think these insights are important, and they’re ideas that need to be put out there for a wide variety of issues. Yet many libertarian organizations and writers squandered credibility by attacking the science rather than talking about the things that they know best, i.e. leveraging their comparative advantage.
From a purely tactical perspective: If you can persuade people that more government is not the best way to deal with a particular problem, then attacking the science suddenly becomes far less urgent.
Regarding libertarians and economics: I freely admit that I have not paid much attention to macroeconomics and the differences between Keynesian and Austrian perspectives. I actually did minor in economics in college, but other than one required macro class (which I disliked for a number of reasons) I stuck to microeconomics and statistics. I found that microeconomics is full of insights relevant to libertarianism, particularly the distortions caused by subsidies or price controls, the importance of property rights, and regulatory capture. (FWIW, back then I was on the left and I still found those insights significant.) Indeed, my class on environmental economics was basically a long lesson on property rights and present value theory.
Libertarians may be considered outside the mainstream on macroeconomics, but on microeconomics I think we’re pretty much right there in the mainsream.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 2, 2007 @ 8:45 am
Here’s the key point:
The difference between an insightful libertarian and a denialist shill is that the insightful libertarian wants non-government solutions to problems, while the denialist shill insists that there are no problem.
Guess which one has more credibility?
Comment by ajay —
March 2, 2007 @ 9:36 am
ask the question who polluted the environment more – the Soviet Union, or GE?
The Soviet Union had a GDP of $2 trillion. GE has net profits of around $12 billion. Not really a fair comparison.
Comment by Alex —
March 2, 2007 @ 10:06 am
…although only one of them made wind turbines, to be fair.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 2, 2007 @ 10:13 am
I see that this thread has really brought out those old-time libertarian believers. Choosing one at random: Callahan, I see no reason why I should pay lip service to market solutions. The only role that libertarians have had in the “market solutions” debacle in environmentalism is a two-step: 1) suggest a market solution, 2) demand that this solution be stopped as soon as it actually starts working and the government needs to enforce it. One of the things that libertarians would know if they were actually concerned with government failure is that programs require constituencies. You can’t build a program that’s supposedly going to change our entire industrial infrastructure on a tactic whose only supporters will predictably abandon it.
There is no reason why anyone should listen to libertarians on this issue, any more than we should listen to those neocons who have turned against the Iraq war and who now want to tell us what we should do next. They have argued in abundantly bad faith.
Comment by Eric Martin —
March 2, 2007 @ 10:22 am
Dr. Gore for sure is an expert on climate change aint he
No. But he has the horse sense to listen to the experts. That’s gotta count for something.
Comment by No Longer a Urinated State of America —
March 2, 2007 @ 10:49 am
“Heck, Milton Friedman was viewed as a kook within economics for about half his career.”
That’s why he won the Clark medal in 1951 and the Nobel in 1977, eh?
Jeez. Talk about counterfactual arguments.
“Libertarians have a great deal of intelligent things to say about the ability of market economies to adapt to changing environments.”
And many libertarians are working off of rather superficial Econ 101 mental models of the economy and microeconomy. That’s why the Hit-and-Run folks are having a hard tie grokking the science. Acknowledging the externality means shifting from a minarchist view. And that means shifting to using libertarianism as a heuristic, instead of a quasi-utopian vision.
Comment by Azael —
March 2, 2007 @ 11:15 am
I agree that this is the key point of the post. For me, the key issue is a quantitative one:
What is the distribution between these two. If we have 1 insightful libertarian for every 100 shills, then there’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed. Otherwise, it’s like saying that only the real communists should be listened to.
I mean, otherwise, pretty much every ideology from militant Islam to Apartheid could be making the same form of statement that you are…
Comment by Thoreau —
March 2, 2007 @ 11:49 am
And many libertarians are working off of rather superficial Econ 101 mental models of the economy and microeconomy. That’s why the Hit-and-Run folks are having a hard tie grokking the science. Acknowledging the externality means shifting from a minarchist view. And that means shifting to using libertarianism as a heuristic, instead of a quasi-utopian vision.
Yep. You’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s the difference between a religion and a set of useful (but not perfect) ideas.
What is the distribution between these two. If we have 1 insightful libertarian for every 100 shills, then there’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
I don’t think they’re shills, because (with a few exceptions) they aren’t being paid to deny the existence of problems. So I was incorrect to use the word “shill.” I think that for many, however, this is a matter of religion.
But, yeah, I wonder more and more about the extent of the problem. I call myself libertarian because I see a lot of good ideas that can lead us in a better direction. I don’t, however, see a set of “perfect” ideas that must be absolutely adhered to in order to bring about the Ideal World.
Comment by steveintheknow —
March 2, 2007 @ 1:28 pm
Good post.
It sucks when skepticism of the solution gets conflated with denial of the problem. I wish I could say more, but for now I am one of those who should do more listening.
Comment by sglover —
March 2, 2007 @ 1:55 pm
All one has to do to understand why markets, with a strong respect for property rights, will do better than state fiat, is ask the question who polluted the environment more – the Soviet Union, or GE?
GE likely wouldn’t even be concerned about its environmental record at all if it didn’t have to worry about that pesky little facet of government called LAW. You’re making a real apples and oranges comparison here. The USSR turned vast (often inhabited) areas into toxic dumping grounds because there was no political opposition standing in the way. In a democratic society, political constituencies have often catalyzed reforms and protections — through law — that most literate adults would agree are essential to The Good Life. As often as not, they’ve had to fight against the market worshippers of their day.
If you’re a self-proclaimed libertarian, you really DO NOT want to venture within a light-year of the topic of environmentalism, because your precious markets have fuck-all in the way of a solution. Like sanitation and other epidemiological precautions, maintaining a sustainable environment is fundamentally a public concern, which can ONLY be addressed through collective efforts — be they regulations, taxes designed to encourage certain behaviors, or whatever.
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
March 2, 2007 @ 1:57 pm
To my fellow libertarians, I offer this plea: The next time that scientists suggest that human activities, even industrial activities, may be producing externalities, … offer the sorts of arguments at which libertarians excel: “Well, if there is indeed a problem here, removing government policy X would certainly be a good thing to do.
But what if the problem genuinely requires positive action by government? Are you calling for intellectual honesty ehre, or just more sophisticated subject-changing? Or do you really believe there is no environmental probelm that unregualted markets won’t address?
Comment by Thoreau —
March 2, 2007 @ 2:01 pm
lemuel-
I’m saying 2 things. First, to whatever extent some libertarian proposals can at least help with the solution (even if as just one part of a bigger package) then we should put those ideas on the table. (e.g. If problem X can be at least partially reduced by getting rid of subsidy Y, that point should be made.) Second, I’m saying that whatever libertarians do, they shouldn’t go around acting like a bunch of creationists, i.e. rejecting any scientific findings with implications that they might not like.
To whatever extent libertarian ideas are useful, they should be put forward in a useful manner, rather than be discredited by association with people who are acting like flood geologists.
Comment by quasibill —
March 2, 2007 @ 2:18 pm
“GE likely wouldn’t even be concerned about its environmental record at all if it didn’t have to worry about that pesky little facet of government called LAW”
Do you have any inkling of understanding or what you speak, or do you climb on to the nearest soapbox and preach your religion, facts be damned?
LAW does not equal STATE. You can have LAW without STATE. In fact, STATE is the biggest negation of law ever imagined, as the state claims to be allowed to do things no individual would ever be allowed to do under LAW.
“The USSR turned vast (often inhabited) areas into toxic dumping grounds because there was no political opposition standing in the way”
The USSR AND the US Army have done that because they are STATES, that claim that the law does not apply to them. And people like you nod your heads and say “yessir!”
Comment by sglover —
March 2, 2007 @ 2:32 pm
Do you have any inkling of understanding or what you speak, or do you climb on to the nearest soapbox and preach your religion, facts be damned?
A beautiful set-up for the self-parody that follows. Hearty applause for a truly entertaining performance, sir! Huzzah!
Now, you wanna get off your own soapbox, and explain to me how law does not equal state, but army does? Oh, and I’m really dying to hear about a system of laws that exists outside of any political structures like, say, states. Do enlighten me, please.
I don’t think you’ve earned your condescension license quite yet.
Comment by jlw —
March 2, 2007 @ 2:55 pm
I can’t speak for everyone left of center, but I think it’s a widely shared belief over here that markets are nifty human creations for matching supply with demand and determining a fair price for things people want to buy.
Furthermore, market mechanisms can be adapted as a regulatory tool by governments to allocate very scarce commonly held resources (such as radio spectrum) or control things that the people who created/elect the government want to control or even eliminate. (For example, the market in certain power plant emissions.) But it’s important to remember that this kind of market isn’t the same as the first. Absent intervention by a government on behalf of the population it represents, there would be no market, as the emissions have no intrinsic value to their producers–they’d sent sulphur dioxide up their smokestacks for 100 years and would continue to do so even to this day if the government hadn’t created a negative value for it. And, most importantly, threatened to punish polluters who didn’t take part or who cheated.
None of this is particularly controversial, or shouldn’t be, but it seems that many on the other side of center forget that markets are just as artificial–that is, humanly created–as goverments, and that markets are good only to the extent that they are useful.
If people decide that they want to limit the amount of carbon dioxide being dumped in the atmosphere and if there is a market mechanism that can accomplish this, then the market mechanism ought to be employed to the extent of its usefulness–and without precluding the use of other mechanisms, such as taxes or whatnot. But such markets won’t be The Market. Instead, they’ll be a means for the majority of the population to impose its will on those who would degrade commonly held property.
So, does that make it a libertarian triumph, or a statist one?
Comment by jlw —
March 2, 2007 @ 3:04 pm
More substatively, I think too many people on right of center hold their view just to be in opposition of those dirty, fucking hippies.
If Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman had agitated for clear-cutting forests and selling love at a fair market price, most self-styled libertarians would be tree-hugging communists.
Comment by Stevo Darkly —
March 2, 2007 @ 3:06 pm
sglover –
Law preceded the state. Law exists outside the domain of states.
I’m just passing through, but you can Google the following phrases (separately) and learn some fascinating things:
- “law preceded the state”
- “the Law Merchant”
- “polycentric law”
- “non-statist law”
Comment by quasibill —
March 2, 2007 @ 3:22 pm
sglover -
pot, meet kettle, regarding condescension.
Stevo has already started your education, but it may help your ignorance further to research middle ages iceland and ireland, as well as research the history of “common law” in England.
Further, I’ve already pointed out to you the conflict – what is a state other than a group of people who claim that the laws that apply to everyone else do not apply to them (for example, robbery)? If GE came to you and said – give me your money or go to jail – you’d say “robbery!” When a state does the exact same thing, you say “not robbery!”
Your response, as bereft as it was of any meaningful reply to my argument, is as good a concession as I’ve ever seen. Regardless, you might be interested to know that I am not a “denier”, I am one who recognizes that most of the worst polluters today are big polluters because they are centralized business models (for example, commercial pig farms) that, by their very nature, concentrate pollution in distinct areas and in distinct ways that de-centralized, truly free market institutions would not, if the state had merely let them evolve.
jlw –
The problem you identify is not one of “market” per se, but of poorly identified or delineated property rights. It’s a mistake many libertarians fall into when discussing things (myself included), but there is a distinct difference between property rights and the “market”. Property rights schemes precede the market. A market can help to mitigate flaws in the underlying property rights scheme, but sometimes, the flaw is just too big, and the scheme itself must be modified. This is why a true libertarian is not only in favor of markets in goods, but also in legal codes (hence federalism).
Comment by mds —
March 2, 2007 @ 3:53 pm
Might I also suggest, sglover, once you’re done looking into patriarchal, clan-based medieval Iceland as a paradigm for modern statelessness, that you also Google “free rider problem” and “externalities.” But hey, stateless Iceland lasted three centuries before ever-growing inequality led to its collapse, which is longer than any medieval state could claim.
Comment by sglover —
March 2, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
You’re an idiot. Sorry, I know this kind of argument flies at the libertarian conventions, but in normal parlance, there’s a distinction between “a band of robbers” and “the state”. Let’s quit with the Ayn Rand-level analogies, ‘kay?
Ah yes. If only the free market were truly free, we’d be awash in environmentally benign neighborhood chemical refineries. Economies of scale, the physical reality that various industrial processes are simply unpleasant — this is all irrelevant. Hell, why stop where you did? Why not tell me that in the libertarian utopia, steel mills will smell like lilacs?
Look, enough already. Your kind of magical thinking is why I say that libertarians are the 21st Century version of the believing Communists of a century ago.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 2, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
sglover-
FWIW, quasibill’s school of libertarians is bitterly criticized by the corporate apologist school of libertarians.
That may or may not be particularly significant to you, but it’s a fact worth noting.
Comment by sglover —
March 2, 2007 @ 4:35 pm
OK, perhaps I should have been more clear. If you’re going to make a distinction between the state and the law, I’d really like to see an historical example. Unless you had something specific in mind, I didn’t see anything relevant when I googled “law preceded the state”. Of the suggestions you gave, the “Law Merchant” seemed the closest fit, although three other examples turned up in my quick skim of “The Jurisprudence of Polycentric Law”. (However, one of those was the very same Law Merchant. The others were a legal system practiced by New Guinea tribes, and a commercial legal system found in the Islamic Maghrib hundreds of years ago.) By the way, the Wikipedia entry for Law Merchant reads an awful lot like an advocacy piece.
Gotta say that I’m underwhelmed by these examples. If I take what seems to be the most convincing example (to a North American), the Merchant Law, what I see is something not very different from the kinds of self-regulating practices that exist in practically every industry and profession today. It’s very hard for me to believe that even the best of these is capable of standing in for actual law, as pretty much everyone understands it, i.e., a codified set of rights and prohibitions, intended to serve as the ultimate authority for settling disputes.
Comment by sglover —
March 2, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
Er, I forgot to mention that I noticed links to various forms of theologically-based legal codes — but I’m hoping we’re not taking those as anything to strive for, are we?
Comment by sglover —
March 2, 2007 @ 4:49 pm
Ah, sly. But any libertarian worth his bones knows that the way to deal with your “externalities” bugaboo is 1) deny they exist with words like “bugaboo”, and 2) insist that the market will produce a solution — automagically!
But wait a tic — I thought medevil Iceland’s biggest claim to fame was that it was the very earliest parliamentarian (-like) government, ever! It was probably statists who ended its Golden Age.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 2, 2007 @ 4:56 pm
sglover-
As much fun as it is to bash anarcho-capitalists as naive ideologues, they are not the only flavor of libertarianism. I’d say that the more moderate strains are the norm on this forum.
Comment by michael holloway —
March 2, 2007 @ 5:48 pm
For all you suffering from anti-ism-otus;
Rocky Mountain Institute:
http://www.rmi.org/
Comment by Leonard —
March 2, 2007 @ 5:49 pm
And then you reject what you find.
Look, I don’t expect you to want to live under any particular law code. That’s as true for the Merchant Code, as sharia, as medieval Iceland, as it is for many state-based codes. What I expect is modest enough: that you recognize that at least some law can exist outside of the state. It’s not common to find full-blown anarchic legal systems, for obvious enough reasons, but it has happened. But certainly little examples are endless.
For example, Americans have cultural norms on how to queue. Queues are respected. There’s no law for that, or I should say, the state has not codified the law for it. Other cultures have different notions about this.
Another little example you may have lived: reserving a parking space that you created after a snowstorm. I posted about that on my blog a few years back.
Or take traffic rules. Ever been to Italy?
Or, perhaps something new to you: the system of social norms in in Shasta County, CA.
Once you perceive that any law can exist outside the state, you’ve made a big leap intellectually. The existence of any spontaneous order has suggests a number of challenging questions.
Comment by Mona —
March 2, 2007 @ 6:05 pm
The Editors linked to this post and have an interesting discussion going; this is one of my comments from over there:
Comment by sglover —
March 2, 2007 @ 6:31 pm
It seems to me that you’re talking about traditions, which are in a certain sense the opposite of law, because almost by definition they are hardly ever codified. They don’t need to be, because as you point out, they’re simply a shared understanding. (Of course, the two are deeply related — a legal code that’s at odds with local traditions isn’t going to last long.)
So yeah, having been to the former USSR, I can vouch for the fact that orderly queueing isn’t second nature to everyone on earth. Going further, I can imagine a society in which, say, traffic signs and speed laws aren’t necessary, because for whatever reason sensible driving habits are revered, stylish, what have you. (I think something like this was actually tried, successfully, someplace in Europe not long ago.) Hell, the general deference that Americans have for “lawful authority” is itself a tradition — one that my aforementioned travels really made me appreciate.
But so what? The deeper significance of all this still eludes me. All any of these examples indicate is that 1) people don’t need written laws to govern all their behavior, and 2) in certain specialized contexts, people can figure out their own dispute resolution schemes. These insights are not unique to libertarianism, or “non-statist law”, or any of it. They’re not even particularly new…..
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
March 2, 2007 @ 6:34 pm
Thoreau, I think that what you’ve run into here is partly a psychological issue, and it’s one that’s common to anyone who learns something worth knowing that the mainstream isn’t currently accepting – it’s not a libertarian thing, that is, it’s a minority-view thing. When you find an important and denied insight, and you accept its validity, there you are in a contrarian position. And as you look around, you find some other denied truths. There will inevitably be some, since even a consensus formed by pure beings of utter wisdom would need time to assess new claims, work out priorities, and so on. There will always be things worth knowing that the conventional wisdom denies.
The problem comes when the outsider shifts from “this is worth knowing whether or not others agree” to “others’ rejection validates the truth of this, and it is important insofar as it is denied”. When it happens in fashion and pop culture, we recognize it as a form of terminal hipness, letting the masses define what’s acceptable, even though it’s by inversion rather than acceptance. (Anyone who rejects the popular because it’s popular is as enslaved as someone who rejects the unpopular because it’s unpopular. Neither retains the power of independent judgment.) When it happens in ideology, well, “contrarian” is the best general label I know of.
I don’t think that there’s anything innate in libertarianism as a bunch of schools of semi-related thoughts that makes it prone to endorsing cranks and rejecting valid consensus, it’s just the psychology of one’s position as an outsider.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 2, 2007 @ 9:42 pm
Mona, did scientists ever predict an ice age in the 70’s? No. See this page. There is, however, a myth that one was widely predicted, based on a few pop science articles (which get written about anything and everything). You’ve been taken in by the equivalent of the “people spitting on soldiers returning from Vietnam” myth. Likewise, your quote about Schneider was doctored.
You wrote about someone else having the courage to admit they were wrong for supporting the war. But you yourself are still holding on to your excuses for your denial, just like any liberal hawk who says that they were fooled, but it was all the left’s fault that they got tkaen in by the right’s propaganda. Maybe you should think about how good your own judgement really is.
Comment by No Longer a Urinated State of America —
March 3, 2007 @ 1:53 pm
“Stevo has already started your education, but it may help your ignorance further to research middle ages iceland and ireland, as well as research the history of “common law†in England.”
I’ve read about 2,000 pages of Icelandic sagas, and this assertion boggles the mind. I’d take Iceland as a counter-factual to minarchism. Deforested the volcanic soil and watched haplessly as the their topsoil blew out to sea, leaving them poor as dirt and with no trees to build trading ships. And most sagas are lawsuit-no effective resolution-murder-another lawsuit to get wergeld-no effective resolution-more murder, etc. [with a few stanzas of poetry and lots of geneology thrown in]. The lack of an effective state meant there was no ability to enforce the decision of a court, and so you were dependent on having sufficient numbers of burly thugs in your group of friends to go round and get your settlement. [And if you didn't have a strong social position with lots of muscle, then you had no chance of getting the decision of a court enforced.] Not surprisingly, this practice often resulted in more violence, and reduced Iceland to what was barely a step up from large-scale gang warfare, until they asked the Norwegians to take them over.
Irish Brehon law had twelve castes within it – you can’t seriously be looking up to this as a model. And pre-Norman Ireland had lots, and lots, and lots of armed disputes between Chieftains. The Normans were *invited* into Ireland by a King of Leinster to aid him in his disputes.
Mona wrote:
“Steve Schneider (sp?), one of the chief scientific purveyors of this [ice age] theory”
Mona, there’s a problem with your assertion here: Schneider did speculate on the risk of an ice age [based on effect of acid gas aerosols], but he was also the one who realised his mistake and debunked his own work within 18 months.
See: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/mg19225822.300-histories-the-ice-age-that-never-was.html
Comment by MQ —
March 3, 2007 @ 2:41 pm
On “market solutions”: when dealing with externalities, taxes ARE the preferred market solution.
In a frictionless world, tradable permits are almost identical in their economic effects to carbon taxes. In the real world, they are taxes plus a heaping extra helping of bureaucracy. They are favored over taxes by business mostly because businesses believe they will be able to manipulate the more complex permit system more easily than they can taxes. I don’t understand why other groups seem to favor them, but maybe it is because of the “coolness factor”.
Comment by MQ —
March 3, 2007 @ 2:51 pm
“What I expect is modest enough: that you recognize that at least some law can exist outside of the state.”
I would go further than this. Law is dependent on voluntary compliance outside of state enforcement. So law itself is based on normative and informal communal consensus. If even half of the people in the U.S. decided not to pay their taxes, there’s no way the IRS could enforce the law. Same really for any other law; compliance is mostly voluntary. Only a minority of the population refuse to comply with drug laws, but that is enough to make them just about unenforceable.
But the threat of state sanctions plays a vital role in stabilizing fragile social norms, which could otherwise collapse because of just a few ostentatious cheaters. Also, the state-provided infrastructure makes compliance easy and habitual.
Comment by Mona —
March 3, 2007 @ 3:10 pm
Rich, nothing doctored about it. Schneider agrees he said this, arguing only that the bracketed portion he did not say:
Clearly he thinks being an environmental activist puts him in tension with his obligations as a scientist to purely traffic in truth as he can determine it. He advocates that the tension need not always be resolved in favor of truth, but “hopes” that the needs of both the activist and scientist role can overlap.
Further, I lived through the 70s and I was genuinely worried about global cooling/ice age, because the media was replete with wanrnings from scientists on that subject. I lived it Rich, and recall the concern I had quite well, only to discover it was a bunch of bullshit.
That and Ehrich’s bogus jeremiads & etc turned me into quite the skeptic of environmentalist scare-mongering.
Comment by Robert P. —
March 3, 2007 @ 4:10 pm
Mona, I lived through it too – we are about the same age, I believe – and I remember it quite differently. I remember about three years’ worth of panicky news articles by folks like John Gribbin. I do not remember anything remotely like the scientific consensus that began to be established around Global Warming from about 1990 – the year of the first IPCC report – onwards. However, no one has to rely on either your memory or mine – William Connelly has examined the actual writings, both scientific and popular, from the period. You should read his page.
BTW, Steven Schneider wasn’t a major figure in the scientific community back then – he was a postdoc.
Comment by No Longer a Urinated State of America —
March 3, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
‘Rich, nothing doctored about it. Schneider agrees he said this, arguing only that the bracketed portion he did not say:’
Mona, it is doctored. You’ve relied on Simon’s insertion of a preamble into Schneider’s interview in 1989.
Schneider’s expressing frustration with the need of the media for a simple narrative, rather than the messy uncertainties that exist on the cutting edge of science.
And you left out his expression that scientists should be both honest and effective.
One should also note that 1989 was a long time ago in terms of climate science. We’re a lot further in the certainty of AGW, and the mechanisms of climate, than two decades ago.
Here’s the un-doctored interview from Discover magazine in October 1989:
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind†we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
Comment by Mona —
March 3, 2007 @ 5:28 pm
Robert P., all I know is that more than one source from an alarmist media, and for quite some time, was pushing and quoting scientists to the effect that pollution was about to engender a global cooling/ice age. I believed it. I further worried that we were going to have famines killing millions or billions, massive mineral depletions and population explosion devastation; I was concerend about all of that until around 1980 when I began subscribing to Reason magazine and encountered common sense and serious debunking.
It became clear to me that no small number of scientists — and Schneider is a prominent environmental scientist — were either exaggerating evidence, or lying in service of a political agenda. That kind if thing is an intellectual mortal sin to me, and I ceased trusting environmental scientists, especially in their most gloomy predictions.
As I said, I came to the point where I’d believe a dire warning when fellows like Ron Bailey agreed there was reason to. Bailey concluded a few years ago or so that global warming had the science to support it, and when he did, that was good enough for me. I’m not proficient enough in the underlying science myself to make an independent judgment, but I am well-read enough to know that environmentalists had cried “wolf!” before, and many times regarding many issues.
Comment by Andy P —
March 3, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
In case anyone wanted an update on strawmen and other tired arguments we’ve got…
- There can be no law without the state, proof is in the fact that its never happened (3x)
- Libertarianism can’t solve collective problems, proof again in the fact that its never happened (3x)
- Libertarianism = Corporatism, we heart business and therefore out philosophy is evil (2x)
- Libertarians will fight any idea supported by government = Libertarians not wanting government mandates (1x)
Comment by sglover —
March 3, 2007 @ 8:41 pm
I think that if you’re going to complain about strawman arguments, you should avoid making them yourself. Either that, or read the actual text of the arguments that you think you’re slaying.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 3, 2007 @ 10:43 pm
MQ-
Yep, I’d say that carbon taxes would be far simpler in practice than tradable carbon permits.
Mona-
Don’t believe any science reporting that you read in Time, Newsweek, or any daily newspaper. The Economist has good science articles, and Scientific American is excellent. Nature and Science both have excellent websites with articles for laymen (no subscription required, updated daily). Professional societies (organizations conducting a broad spectrum of activities related to a particular branch of science, NOT organizations that exist solely for advocacy) have good publications that feature articles readable by laymen (e.g. Physics Today, Optics and Photonics News). There are other good science news sources as well, but those are the ones that I read most often.
Ron Bailey? Well, Ron has some interesting things to say and he reports on things that I might not otherwise learn about. But my problem with Ron Bailey can be summed up in a short spoof: “We libertarians ask the hard questions. We want to see more data. We want answers to the hard questions. We don’t settle for…what’s that? Crazy-ass speculation about transhumanism? Dude, that stuff is going to change the world! Yeah, yeah, it’s in its preliminary stages, but trust me. This stuff is hot!”
Highly selective skepticism bugs the hell out of me.
Comment by The Editors —
March 3, 2007 @ 10:56 pm
Be fair: Bailey simply remembers not to be sceptical of anything that comes to him on CEI stationary. CEI may be selective; Ron just reads his lines.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 3, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
To be fair, Kerry Howley does excellent reporting on health care, and Jacob Sullum is excellent at skewering junk science.
So, overall, Reason still has a lot of good science reporting.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 4, 2007 @ 1:32 am
“Further, I lived through the 70s and I was genuinely worried about global cooling/ice age, because the media was replete with wanrnings from scientists on that subject. I lived it Rich, and recall the concern I had quite well, only to discover it was a bunch of bullshit.”
I think that your memory is falsified, Mona. Not that you’re lying, but that you remember what propaganda has told you that you remember. I don’t think that you actually picked out ice ages as something to worry about specifically out of the horde of other pop science possible disasters of the time, nor do I think that you read the Schneider quote and it stayed with you. No, both of those items are standard items of corporate / denialist / libertarian propaganda, which is why people have written Web sites clarifying them.
Let me guess — you also remember that when governments banned DDT, it ended up killing a large number of people due to malaria, right?
Comment by Mona —
March 4, 2007 @ 11:11 am
Rich: Shove the “false consciousness” shit up..well, you know. I never claimed to remember Schneider’s words from the time; I do, however, recall genuinely being worried about all the things in the 70s I have itemized here, including a pending ice age.
It is only subsequently that I learned about the Schneider quote, or that DDT bans resulted in malaria deaths. My skepticism of nvironmental-scaremongering resulted from learning that the things I had feared in the 70s were a crock of shit, and the Schneider quote merely is after-acquired evidence as to that being so.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 4, 2007 @ 1:10 pm
Well, DDT bans didn’t result in malaria deaths, so it looks like you’ve picked up the full propaganda package.
And I’m sure that maybe you were worried about an ice age for about 10 minutes sometime, in addition to a whole lot of other things. That’s just enough for the later propaganda to convince you that you were indeed really worried about all that ice age talk.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 4, 2007 @ 1:59 pm
And if you don’t believe me about the DDT ban, try the cites in Lambert’s DDT ban myth bingo.
Basically, Mona, you’re acting exactly like the ex-liberal-hawk who has turned against the war, but who still spouts all the myths at anyone listening to justify why they were for the war in the first place.