Compassionate Conversatism
There were many years in which I could have written Doug Mataconis’s Friday post, “You Can Be Compassionate Without Supporting Big Government,” and for all I know, I did. I supported the true empathy of unforced charity, worried about government programs “crowding out” civil society, and believed that the “coerced” nature of redistributive policies made it impossible to be “moral” at all, since morality requires affirmative choice. I also bought most of the arguments about how government poor-support policies were counterproductive – doing more harm than good. Like Ron Paul, I wouldn’t have wanted the dude to die, but I’d want it to be “the little platoons” that saved him.
This leaves me with no standing to get snooty about other people supporting the above. So I’ll just list a few reasons I changed my mind.
1. The numbers don’t add up. Given the actual costs of catastrophic illness, to take just one calamity that can afflict people, a given church or community association can only support so much of any one person’s affliction, let alone many members.
2. What the actual historical record seems to show between the early 19th to the mid-20th Century, is the actual provisioners of private charity pushing for more public, tax-funded responses to the problems the provisioners worked on. The little platoons themselves apparently felt they were not up to the task.
On “conservative” Hayekian/Burkean principles, the observed pattern of private charitable providers becoming public-policy reformers should count as evidence from the slow evolution of tradition.
3. One of the claimed advantages of relying on decentralized, private charity is the leveraging of a kind of Hayekian local knowledge: you are better able to help your family member, your friend, your neighbor than the impersonal government, because you know those people better than any bureaucrat can know them, and can aid them more effectively than any “one size fits all” program designed in some distant capitol.
But having had more years to live with troubled family members and get to know severely disabled friends makes me suspect there’s some value in depersonalization. In the real world, the financial and emotional strains of poverty, disability, addiction, chronic illness and post-calamity trauma overload social relationships. Friendships break. Families splinter. The realities of class stratification and income distribution mean that the Afflicted’s social network is simply unlikely to carry much spare capacity anyway.
4. There is no political dynamic that gets us from a rickety welfare state to a viable left-libertarian “voluntaryist” minarchism. A left-libertarian, post-state society where neighbor cares for neighbor and we crowd-source help for the needy by leveraging internet technology still appeals to me on a deep emotional level. But no American political movement with the energy and power to eliminate the existing social-welfare system will be animated by the impulses needed to make Voluntaryland work as desired.
The American record is clear: the only anti-welfare-state coalitions that “get things done” are culturally right-wing coalitions. Their animating principle is hostility toward the Other: the nationally, racially, sexually different. This means “limited government” comes bundled in a coalition with nativism, jingoism and sexual inquisition. It relies on a theory of “strong desert” where people are poor because of failures of “personal responsibility.” Eliminating “big government” – meaning, the social programs part of “big government” – in America and keeping it from coming back via the democratic process means this coalition dominates not just all the levers of power but the idea space of the culture. You don’t get robust voluntary support for the indigent and afflicted from that society. Once you establish that “the irresponsible” don’t “deserve” support from the government, it’s unclear why they deserve my personal support either.
5. As for the supposed counterproductive nature of some or all social-welfare programs, I came to doubt that this was an iron law of social welfare. It might just be that our existing programs were too chintzy to do any good.
Comment by Kevin B. O'Reilly —
September 18, 2011 @ 1:05 pm
The ironic thing is that the middle-class entitlements that clearly are unnecessary and unaffordable are the ones with the broadest bipartisan political support, despite Rick Perry’s “Ponzi scheme” noise-making. So, as you say, the welfare programs that are the most justifiable are the easiest political target. Meanwhile, the completely indefensible programs (agriculture subsidies, corporate welfare, etc.) have strong special-interest protections. Alas.
Comment by Domage —
September 18, 2011 @ 2:16 pm
Welcome to the more-real world. The little town I live in is overwhelmed with individual tragedies, and the local charities are unable to keep up.
The worst are the economic tragedies that did not have to happen. Like a friend of mine who is a skilled and experienced carpenter. After his wife died, the medical bills pretty much wiped him out. He was just digging his way out when his truck died. Despite help from friends, he could not afford a new (used) truck. And so he lost his job. Followed by his house. And today is backed into an economic corner where his minimum-wage job (the only one he can walk to in the absence of public transport) covers his rent and some of his food. For want of a car, he’s now a net drain on society to the tune of thousands of dollars a year.
And this did not have to happen if we had some sort of stronger safety net that would have staved off his loss of transportation.
Comment by Rob Bodine —
September 18, 2011 @ 2:56 pm
My problem with [whatever you want to call it; I get yelled at regardless of what I call it] is, as always, procedural rather than substantive. It’s clearly illegal under the US Constitution, but that clarity has been distorted by decades of disrespect of Constitutional limits since the New Deal and FDR’s SCOTUS cronies taking over. Now every justice finds ways to justify holdings that satisfy their political philosophies. If you want it legalized, amend the Constitution. Then we can have a meaningful, legal substantive discussion. Until then, all substantive arguments fall on deaf ears (mine, anyways). A second issue is that [whatever you want to call it; I get yelled at regardless of what I call it] is perfectly legal at the state level, and like most issues, it’s more efficiently addressed as locally as possible. I don’t understand the need to make a federal case out of it (literally). Even though the bankruptcy process is federally managed, a person filing bankruptcy in Montana has much less of an impact on me financially than it does on a fellow Montanan. It largely isn’t my problem, and thus it seems inappropriate to go to the trouble of amending the Constitution, though it’s much worse to ignore the Constitution.
BTW, you’re argument will fall on many more deaf ears when you label all “culturally right-wing coalitions” (i.e., the organizations and presumably their leadership) as hostile to anyone who is “nationally, racially, sexually different.” While this is largely true, this type of extremism is true on both sides. Zealots are the only ones that get things done in society. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the masses, and it certainly isn’t an absolute even when discussing organizations.
Comment by Charles Davis —
September 18, 2011 @ 3:13 pm
I think you’re right to point out that there does not currently exist a sufficient mutual support network to simply leave the problems of high health care costs and related issues to voluntary charity. This is a problem left-libertarians and anarchists need to better address: how to build up the sort of support network we would need in the absence of the state so we can get from here to there.
As others have pointed out, though, there are people following through the cracks every day right now, losing their jobs because they can’t afford a car or going bankrupt because they can’t afford a surgery – and they’re not getting the help they need, from private charity or the state. Indeed, the latter chooses to invest substantial resources that could be used to help people instead on bombing and imprisoning them. Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats seem to agree that the “entitlements” the government provides, not the war-making and the prison-building aspects of the state, are what need to be slashed from the federal budget. Is it really any less idealistic and far-fetched then to hope the state will provide a more adequate social safety net anytime soon? Perhaps we should focus more on the nitty-gritty (and neglected) task of building up those mutual aid networks, since building up welfare programs appears to be a non-starter.
You don’t get robust voluntary support for the indigent and afflicted from that society. Once you establish that “the irresponsible” don’t “deserve” support from the government, it’s unclear why they deserve my personal support either.
I agree. And I think that’s why most anarchists stress the need for a social revolution, not a political one – meaning, you need to first create a society that can support and maintain itself through consensus rather than coercion before taking an ax to the state; if you don’t, you’re going to be stuck with the same sort of people who believe violence is just and mass poverty a fact of life, which is a recipe for the rise of another state, not a vibrant anarchist paradise. It’s not an easy task, of course. It certainly won’t happen overnight. But when even ostensibly liberal administrations are giving trillions of dollars to the wealthy in the form of bailouts at the same time they’re championing welfare reform for the poor, achieving a more just and humane state-provided social safety net – or even one that is just minimally adequate for a society facing near double-digit unemployment and a staggering 15% official poverty rate – doesn’t strike me as any easier.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
September 18, 2011 @ 3:26 pm
Jim, have you read David Beito’s _From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State_? It complicates, though I wouldn’t say debunks, the historical claim you make in point 2. Per Beito, the operators of private charitable and mutual-aid organizations had a pretty wide range of attitudes toward tax funding– some for, as you say, some against. Then, too, they were embedded in a Progressive Era intellectual culture with its own biases toward systematization and universal guarantees of things, so the ones who wanted more government may not have been entirely reliable narrators on whether they were “up to the task.” Beito is also worth reading in general as a sympathetic but fair-minded guide to the strengths and weaknesses of voluntary organizations of that era.
That said, your reasons are reasonable, and I so think many libertarians are lazily overconfident about the effectiveness of private charity. My remaining objection is the simple pluralist-principled one. I’m happy to chip in to help those in really bad situations; I don’t really object to paying the share of my taxes that goes to that help (in stark contrast with the much larger share that goes to much less benevolent purposes); but my values are not universal truths, and I can’t in good conscience support the use of mass force to make others who may disagree with me contribute to my causes.
Domage makes a good point, btw, about “for want of” situations tipping too many people into poverty. For those interested in ameliorating that, I can highly recommend Modest Needs (modestneeds.org), which attempts to scale up and systematize the provision of assistance to people with exactly the sort of problems Domage described– getting them the stuff they need, at the time they need it, to keep their heads above water. They’re good folks and they’ve learned a lot about how to do this sort of good.
This is what I think more of the 21st C voluntary sector should look like: finding creative ways to offer, for those whose informal networks are absent or overstrained, the sort of help that we better-off folks can rely on from our informal networks. Maybe that’ll end up building the new society in the shell of the old, maybe it won’t, but it can’t hurt.
Comment by Asteele —
September 18, 2011 @ 3:33 pm
Hey cute, a concern troll. I’ll just note that no one with any political power cares about the constitution, so I’m not sure why I should either.
Anyways, did Doug really name-check Charles Murray! in his initial post, Jesus. This whole welfare programs make people poorer stuff is retarded, the great society cut the poverty rate in half almost immediately, giving poor people money works.
Comment by Barry —
September 18, 2011 @ 3:57 pm
Adding on to Asteele, I’ll agree to respect the Constitution when the Right feels bound by it. In both the letter and the spirit – for example, an eternal war state might get around certain clauses in the Constitution, but that’s not of interest to me. And by letter – is there any Constitutional justification for the USA? Not that I don’t want it, but I don’t think that the Constitution authorizes it.
Comment by b-psycho —
September 18, 2011 @ 4:21 pm
That’s why those in favor of Voluntaryland should — indeed, must — focus on getting rid of the warfare & corporate-welfare first.
What little social welfare we do get is at best a chintzy attempt at compensation for all the other systemic robbery and favoritism that defines the state. I don’t hold it against anyone who actually needs help if they do take it that way, I’m more concerned with how so many people end up in those situations in the first place, doubting it’d be as much as we currently see if not for the aforementioned robbery.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 18, 2011 @ 6:32 pm
Excellent post, Jim.
My stance on social welfare in the ideal society is quite distinct from my stance on social welfare in our present context.
Consistent with this point:
My understanding is that even in Western Europe, which is regarded by any American with superficial knowledge as a bastion of support for the welfare state, the support for the welfare state becomes most strained in the context of immigration controversies. Hence, this is not just an American thing, it is a human thing. When people support a safety net, they don’t usually shift support away because they found something better. Rather, they shift away from supporting it because they found somebody to resent.
Pingback by Welcome to the Real World | Man Are We Screwed —
September 18, 2011 @ 8:13 pm
[...] who make the right choices would not die alone. And those others? Really what do they deserve? [Jim Henley/Unqualified Offerings] The American record is clear: the only anti-welfare-state coalitions that “get things done” [...]
Comment by Kolohe —
September 18, 2011 @ 8:42 pm
If you observe public housing complexes at close range, the ’supposed’ part of number 5 becomes very apparent, mostly because they don’t address – or actively make worse – the problematic or nonexistent social networks as discussed point 3.
Comment by Patrick L —
September 18, 2011 @ 10:26 pm
Domage gave a perfect example of why public charity is likely to fail. Domage’s friend needed specific help with a bankruptcy lawyer. A specific problem, that requires specific expertise.
His friend’s safety network tried to give him money to buy a car, when they should have said they’d help him with paperwork and finding a good financial assistant and lawyer. His friends wanted to help, to do the right thing, but didn’t know how, and made the situation worse.
It’s not enough to want to do the right thing, you need to help in the right way. The charity of government is not designed to help in the right way. It’s designed to help in the way that makes it symbolize how great we are at helping people. As the OP said, it’s to chintzy, and designed to be that way.
If you want to help the poor, you need to develop a scientific and humiliating attitude towards charity. Federalized charity, while capable of throwing lots of money at problems – some of which can be improved by adding more money (what can’t?) – is inappropriate for developing a process of abandoning charity that fails, for admitting that our ideas are bad and new ideas must come about. Private charity at least has some mechanism for evolution – charities that are ineffectual can (but don’t always) fail as donors seek out charities with better results. Public charity has no design mechanism to self-improve, and can only improve along the axis of symbolic waste: the “look how much we care, and anyone that questions us doesn’t care”.
For all the crap we give Libertarians they are are at least honest in their belief that the nation is not a tribe. They don’t care about some people, and they admit it. I’d rather have honest indifference, than dishonest indifference disguised as compassion.
Comment by Avram —
September 18, 2011 @ 10:30 pm
Solution: Get those Predator drones out of the Middle East and use them to hand out welfare, food stamps, and health insurance checks after bundling all those programs into Defense. The right will support it, because it’s an increase in military spending; the left will support it, because it’s a social safety-net; and it’s constitutional under the it doesn’t count if flying robots do it clause recently invoked by the Obama administration to defend our involvement in Libya.
Comment by E.D. Kain —
September 19, 2011 @ 1:54 am
Jim -
This is excellent. Much of it I’m entirely on board with. One thing I’d point out in the left-libertarian camp’s favor: the rising healthcare costs have at least in part to do with the bad government anti-market policies we have in place.
On the other hand, prices likely would have gone up at least in catastrophic or terminal cases to the point that charities would have been crowded out anyways.
Besides, isn’t the old wisdom this: if we want less of something, tax it; if we want more of something, subsidize it….and if that’s the case, doesn’t welfare actually subsidize charity for the poor (at least when it’s not crafted in a particularly pernicious way)?
Comment by E.D. Kain —
September 19, 2011 @ 2:02 am
Oh – one more thing. I think Burke is rightly considered a conservative, and his little platoons as well. But Hayek was a liberal, if a very libertarian liberal nonetheless. Which I bring up because the local knowledge and decentralist critique of Hayek’s applies equally to liberal non-Burkean thinking as it does to conservative analysis of politics.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
September 19, 2011 @ 3:13 am
“My problem with [whatever you want to call it; I get yelled at regardless of what I call it] is, as always, procedural rather than substantive. It’s clearly illegal under the US Constitution…”
General welfare clause? (Which Hamilton took to permit exactly things like you say are *clearly* illegal.)
Comment by Gene Callahan —
September 19, 2011 @ 3:16 am
“If you want to help the poor, you need to develop a scientific and humiliating attitude towards charity.”
Charity needs to be humiliated?!
Comment by Barry —
September 19, 2011 @ 8:32 am
Listen to the right, and that’s the conclusion. Afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.
Comment by Barry —
September 19, 2011 @ 8:33 am
Patrick: “The charity of government is not designed to help in the right way. It’s designed to help in the way that makes it symbolize how great we are at helping people. As the OP said, it’s to chintzy, and designed to be that way.”
Um, do you have proof? Not just that some programs are sub-optimal, or problematic (especially considering the political constraints).
Comment by Barry —
September 19, 2011 @ 9:09 am
Editing my earlier funny goof: ‘And by letter – is there any Constitutional justification for the USA? Not that I don’t want it, but I don’t think that the Constitution authorizes it.’
‘USA’ should be ‘USAF’.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 19, 2011 @ 10:18 am
Actually, this isn’t a goof. The US Constitution is illegal under the Articles of Confederation, which required unanimous approval from the states to amend or replace it. However, the Constitutional Convention illegally claimed that 9/13 was sufficient.
Anyway, this libertarian thinks the one great virtue of the welfare state is the defeat in detail of the little platoons, since their aid is pretty much always been wielded as a mechanism of social control — conform or you get nothing in your hour of need. Each bit of social insurance made universally available makes this threat weaker and less convincing. I would not mind paying taxes to fund a basic income for precisely this reason.
(Of course, in reality, I pay taxes for the government to blow up Arabs and spy on me.)
Comment by Thoreau —
September 19, 2011 @ 11:24 am
Excellent point, Neel. And welcome back to this fine blog!
Comment by sglover —
September 19, 2011 @ 1:41 pm
Patrick L — that’s a helluva lotta words to say, in effect, only **those** people have problems like that; I’ve got mine.
Yeah, yawn, just like pretty much every other cube-dwelling Libertarian ubermenschen I’ve ever met. As trite as you are obtuse.
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September 19, 2011 @ 2:25 pm
[...] Henley has an excellent explanation of his move away from libertarianism. He lists five reasons, though I don’t think the list is exhaustive. In brief, the reasons are [...]
Comment by Eli Rabett —
September 19, 2011 @ 2:52 pm
What does Eli think of compassionate conservatism? in the words of Ghandi, that would be a good thing
Comment by matthew h —
September 19, 2011 @ 3:26 pm
Ok, just because Jim has apostasized, I mean shifted to state welfarish a bit, does this place have to start sounding like the friggin’ Huffington Post? What’s next: “‘baggers”, “basement-dwelling libertarians”. “Paultards?” Relentless exorcisms of “Guh-REEED”.
(Full-fledged abusive attacks on Randians or Rand are nonetheless tolerable.)
Comment by Glaivester —
September 19, 2011 @ 5:15 pm
Anyway, this libertarian thinks the one great virtue of the welfare state is the defeat in detail of the little platoons, since their aid is pretty much always been wielded as a mechanism of social control — conform or you get nothing in your hour of need. Each bit of social insurance made universally available makes this threat weaker and less convincing. I would not mind paying taxes to fund a basic income for precisely this reason.
And the welfare state is not wielded as a mechanism of social control? In England, a family has been told that they cannot be foster parents unless they agree to teach any children under their care that homosexuality is okay, even if that contradicts their religious beliefs.
The welfare state can easily be used (and is being used) to force people to conform to the secular humanist morality of those in control.
Comment by Glaivester —
September 19, 2011 @ 5:20 pm
As for the supposed counterproductive nature of some or all social-welfare programs, I came to doubt that this was an iron law of social welfare. It might just be that our existing programs were too chintzy to do any good.
Except that Europe, with its much greater social welfare programs, is getting some of the same problems (”chav culture” in England, for example).
Comment by Glaivester —
September 19, 2011 @ 5:38 pm
I also would wonder if you are going to reconsider the libertarian position on welfare if you should not also reconsider the libertarian position on immigration.
Is a large welfare state really compatible with letting in large numbers of people from much poorer countries with far less lucrative skills?
Thoreau: When people support a safety net, they don’t usually shift support away because they found something better. Rather, they shift away from supporting it because they found somebody to resent.
That’s one way to look at it. Another is that people want first top help their compatriots, their countrymen. When instead the focus on welfare is to bring in people from other countries with no connection to you, you no longer see the initial objective.
It’s like giving your brother a place to stay when he is unemployed, only to find that he decided to bring home three or four strangers that he met in the unemployment line.
Furthermore, much of the talk about ethnic homogeneity and welfare seems, I think, to be too judgmental towards the taxpayer. We always talk about how taxpayers are less willing to pay for welfare to support people who “don’t look like them.” There is less of a discussion as to whether welfare recipients are more likely to be willing to take advantage of the system or be less appreciative for the assistance when the people paying for their welfare do not look like them.
(In terms of “appreciative” I mean that they appreciate that they are living in a society which is providing them with a living and that they wish to preserve the society and do their part to perpetuate it, rather than having their primary focus being on what’s in it for them and in how to punish the society unless it gives them what they want).
Comment by William Burns —
September 19, 2011 @ 5:40 pm
Glaivster,
Where are these people being “forced to conform to the secular humanist morality of those in control”? No one’s stopping them from being homophobes, they’re just saying that they’re not going to put children (some of whom will inevitable be LGBT) in that environment.
Comment by Glaivester —
September 19, 2011 @ 7:44 pm
William, these people are being forced through their tax dollars to support a system which requires that any children in that system be raised with a particular system of morality. Moreover, anyone who needs to relinquish their children is being forced to agree to have those children be raised in that system of morality.
My point is that I don’t see a difference between this and between a private organization saying that it will only help you place your child if you agree to have him placed in a home where people belong to a particular faith.
The point I am making is that the government is not immune to using the welfare state to exert social control; it’s just that because the targets of the control are different than those of the private organizations, and are unpopular to a lot of the social liberals, they do not see it as such.
Comment by someotherdude —
September 19, 2011 @ 9:29 pm
“My point is that I don’t see a difference between this and between a private organization saying that it will only help you place your child if you agree to have him placed in a home where people belong to a particular faith.
That’s not totally true. There are many liberal Protestants who believe in civil rights for Gay folks, and would restrict adoption to Fundamentalist Protestants Families.
Sometimes, most of the time, folks within the same faith have radically different views, concerning how society should treat persons.
Comment by Glaivester —
September 19, 2011 @ 10:26 pm
someotherdude -
That’s not totally true… folks within the same faith have radically different views, concerning how society should treat persons.
You missed my point. I am not arguing that one’s opinion on homosexuality is exactly equivalent to a religious faith. I am saying that requiring people to have a positive opinion of homosexuality in order to be a foster parent is just as much a form of social control as requiring them to belong to a particular religious faith is. (i.e. by “I don’t see a difference” I mean “I don’t see a difference in terms of being a form of social control“).
My point was that Neel seems to think that leaving charity to private organizations is bad because they can use the money to control people. He seems to ignore the possibility that government does the same thing – or else he likes the positions that the government takes and therefore doesn’t mind the social control.
Comment by Patrick L —
September 19, 2011 @ 11:06 pm
Barry I’m just expanding on some ideas that government charity is mostly symbolic, rather than designed to help, is something Robin Hanson keeps pushing.
A recent example would be this post:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/the-great-charity-storm.html
For posts tagged charity:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/charity
And for his nation-state as tribe rant
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/are-nations-tribes.html
Comment by Kevin Carson —
September 20, 2011 @ 1:08 am
Jim, I totally agree re Point 4. I’ve just about given up on political dynamics.
There is, however, an economic and technological dynamic IMO.
If the left-libertarian decentralized alt economy comes about, it won’t be through a political dynamic. It will come about because
1. The technological prerequesites are in place, like micromanufacturing technology (in particular the feasibility of fabbing medical technology at the local level in small-scale facilities), widespread use of digital currencies in an encrypted darknet economy, and primary social units like neighborhood associations, cohousing projects, urban communes, extended family compounds, etc. exist for pooling income and risk.
2. The motive for adoption is there. That means the fiscal exhaustion of the state and its social safety net, and the hollowing out of state and corporate institutions by which people used to get health benefits. It means a much larger share of the population being chronically unemployed or underemployed, and turning of necessity to self-provisioning in the above-mentioned primary social units, and actively building income-pooling arrangements with neighbors.
It will come about when means coincide with motive.
Comment by Avram —
September 20, 2011 @ 2:34 am
Glaivester, imagine that British couple winds up taking in a gay child. What they’re insisting upon is the right to harass that child, leading to likely long-term psychological trauma, and possible suicide.
I don’t think “Do you promise not to harass these children into killing themselves?” is too much to ask of foster parents.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 20, 2011 @ 6:58 am
@Patrick L: “Robin Hanson thinks it” is less of a defense and more of a confession.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
September 20, 2011 @ 7:13 am
Neel: “this libertarian thinks the one great virtue of the welfare state is the defeat in detail of the little platoons”
The libertarian urge to civilizational destruction steps right out of the closet!
Comment by Gene Callahan —
September 20, 2011 @ 7:16 am
Neel: “The US Constitution is illegal under the Articles of Confederation, which required unanimous approval from the states to amend or replace it.”
You have failed to consider how much more illegal the Articles of Confederation were under the regime that preceded them!
Comment by Kolohe —
September 20, 2011 @ 7:34 am
Mr. Carson, wrt to your point 2 in comment 35, that’s exactly the crux of the ‘charity problem’
The people in most need of the services that would be provided by the small local organically created social networks are the ones where such networks are least available – and would be even less available in a post-state society. Even if stipulated (which I do) that the greatest potential for sustainable charity (i.e. that which could potentially provide a path to self sufficiency) is from those same small local organically created social networks.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2011 @ 9:09 am
Robin Hanson phrases speculation as assertion. He is also fascinated with signalling, and tends to see it to the exclusion of all other possibilities.
The problem with his line of argument is the following. If you remember your Schelling, you know that people send signals to convince the other party to alter their behavior. Now, a signal may be faked, and the question is: when is a signal credible? The answer to this question is that your signal is credible if, and only if, the costs of sending the signal exceed the benefits that you will get from your opponent changing his or her behavior. Otherwise, you could be a rational agent sending a signal to trick your opponent into changing their behavior. That is, a signal is only credible if it proves that you are irrationally committed to a course of action. (Hence Schelling’s aphorism defining reputation as something good to have but never worth paying for.)
This means that to the extent Hanson believes signalling models, he has abandoned rational-expectations models of human action (good for him). This also means that he needs to offer argument why other non-rational-expectations explanations (eg, Bourdieu’s idea of habitus and field, le Grand’s knightly motives, etc) do not apply — which he basically never does, and in fact he tends to make explicit appeals to the authority of economics to avoid doing so.
Comment by Barry —
September 20, 2011 @ 11:38 am
Robin Hanson – professor of ‘economics’ at Koch U?
We’ve wasted far too much time and energy listening to people like that.
Comment by Tom Jackson —
September 20, 2011 @ 5:06 pm
Barry,
As opposed to the time and energy that’s well spent listening to ad hominem attacks?
Comment by someotherdude —
September 20, 2011 @ 6:13 pm
Glaivester–
But if government agencies do nothing, they essentially take a side anyway. Doing nothing, or a hands off approach, tends to be another form of “social control.”
Comment by Kevin Carson —
September 20, 2011 @ 6:26 pm
Kolohe @42. Good point. I don’t know how to answer, except that 1) removing the “crutches” (in Jim’s parlance) should be the least of priorities for libertarians, and 2) I expect the state to become fiscally exhausted to the point it’s unable to sustain the welfare state one way or the other. Not a real pretty picture, I guess.
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September 20, 2011 @ 7:25 pm
[...] Henley of Unqualified Offerings writes about the problem of compassionate conservatism, which is that volunteer giving and community care simply cannot keep up with demand. What the [...]
Comment by pseudonymous in nc —
September 20, 2011 @ 11:18 pm
Charity’s capricious. If you have the first bake sale or fundraising BBQ of a particular social group, you might make a (small) dent into the medical bills. But the second? Or third? And should your bake sale be at the start of the month or the end?
In addition, the power dynamic of private, personal charity can be problematic: however much one might aim to give impersonally, there’s always the lingering sense of some kind of moral debt or obligation.
Except that Europe, with its much greater social welfare programs, is getting some of the same problems (”chav culture” in England, for example).
To no surprise, Glaivester knows nothing of what he speaks: the spiritual grandmother of every chav is Margaret Thatcher. Nor does immigration account for the difference between the very different approaches to the welfare state now offered in London and Edinburgh.
Comment by Barry —
September 21, 2011 @ 7:54 am
Comment by Tom Jackson —
“Barry,
As opposed to the time and energy that’s well spent listening to ad hominem attacks?”
Well, we’ve spent decades listening to Austrians, Objectivists, and Chicago/-like people spouting ideas that just didn’t work.
I side with Daniel Davies on this.
Comment by dhex —
September 21, 2011 @ 8:44 am
not a fan of either, but “austrians and objectivists” make up, what, .0001% of the population?
them and the maoists, always up in my shit. can’t get to the subway without tripping over some maoists.
damn maoists.
Comment by mpowell —
September 21, 2011 @ 2:14 pm
Glaiv, while you have a limited point, it is not nearly as effective as you think. Whoever is giving the money sets the rules. Those rules can either be judgmental, capricious and discriminatory, or they can be well thought out and reflect the best instincts of the society. As it turns out, your example is a terrible one as the right to harass the LGBT kids you might be foster parents to sounds like a terrible idea to just about anyone with a lick of sense (as Avram has pointed out). The whole point of centralized control over the money giving process is that it can be as democratic as you manage to make your government. This is not always a great system, but it is better on average than all the others. Someone is always going to be telling you what to do at least some of the time. Some people just freak out when it’s the government. They should get over it.
Comment by mpowell —
September 21, 2011 @ 2:19 pm
Also, I’m pretty impressed that anyone in this day and age expects us to take seriously the argument that the government can get out of charity business and private practice will do anywhere near as good of a job taking care of the problem.
Have you guys researched aid programs recently? What gives you any impression that they are a well run system? Their efforts tend to be highly uneven, typically addressing the most sympathetic causes (but not necessarily most needy or most efficient). And their cost overhead is ridiculous because they need to spend a ton of money on the process of raising money. The administrative costs of the government are crazy low in comparison. And here in the real world, poverty rates dropped pretty clearly once the government started getting involved.
It’s hard to take anyone seriously when they start talking about substituting private charity for government aid. You know that either they don’t really know anything about what they’re talking about or they don’t really care about improving human happiness.
Comment by Barry —
September 21, 2011 @ 3:13 pm
Comment by Kevin Carson —
September 20, 2011 @ 6:26 pm
“Kolohe @42. Good point. I don’t know how to answer, except that 1) removing the “crutches” (in Jim’s parlance) should be the least of priorities for libertarians, ”
Jim’s post on crutches and shackles is one of the top 10 items I’ve read on libertarianism (the real stuff). I’d unhesitatingly use it as a litmus test on these matters.
“and 2) I expect the state to become fiscally exhausted to the point it’s unable to sustain the welfare state one way or the other. Not a real pretty picture, I guess.”
An important thing to note is that this ‘fiscal exhaustion’ is pulled out of the right’s lower solid excretory orifice only when the money would go to things that don’t directly help the right. It bears endless repeating that (a) the right spent 2001-09 spending like crazy, and (c) every right-wing politician has had no trouble spending freely on his/her cronies and backers.
Comment by Barry —
September 21, 2011 @ 3:16 pm
Comment by dhex —
“not a fan of either, but “austrians and objectivists” make up, what, .0001% of the population?”
New to the internet, and to the econonmic punditoriate, eh?
Comment by Thoreau —
September 21, 2011 @ 8:51 pm
I grant your point about the intertubez, but:
(1) most of the country does not spend as much time on the tubez as your average blogger or commenter
(2) the economic punditariat may have a goodly number of folks with some variant of “free market” as their moniker, but at the risk of going all True Scotsman, most of them probably despise Austrians and Objectivists. They’re from other “free market” breeds, breeds that are much more comfortable with crony capitalism.
(I grant that Objectivists don’t really object to anything that helps wealthy businessmen, but they like to keep their hands clean and explain that it would be better if this were accomplished in some manner that is more ideologically pure than the currently-configured relationship between the government and corporations.)
Now, if you said “free market in a loose sense and totally apologist for big business” to describe wide swaths of the punditariat you’d get no objection from me. But you picked on the fringiest of the fringey types, rather than the more conventional cool kids actively working to further concentrate the wealth.
Comment by Barry —
September 22, 2011 @ 8:30 am
“But you picked on the fringiest of the fringey types, rather than the more conventional cool kids actively working to further concentrate the wealth.”
OK
Comment by Ranselaer —
September 22, 2011 @ 12:21 pm
“It might just be that our existing programs were too chintzy to do any good.”
This isn’t what I’ve observed. Years ago a cousin of mine declared herself and her 2 kids “homeless” because they were living in her parents’ garage. You would not believe all the free stuff that came her way. Welfare checks, food stamps, free medical coverage via Medicare, even free books, backpacks and school lunches for her kids. It was unbelievable the amount of tax-payer dollars that went to support her, all because she was too lazy to work and knew how to game the system.
Comment by Ranselaer —
September 22, 2011 @ 4:29 pm
Sorry I meant to say Medicaid, not Medicare. But you get my point . . .
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 22, 2011 @ 5:16 pm
How much did all that bounty add up to per month, Ranselaer?
Comment by Ranselaer —
September 22, 2011 @ 6:04 pm
Enough for her + 2 kids to live on. Life’s pretty damn cheap when you get free money, food and medical coverage. Came at the price of her dignity, but she had cashed that in long ago.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 22, 2011 @ 6:10 pm
Are you saying you have no idea? I’d love it if you could put aside your personal bitterness toward your cousin long enough to work through the numbers here.
Comment by Ranselaer —
September 22, 2011 @ 7:02 pm
Well Jim, my dear old Missouri cousin wasn’t exactly in close contact with my side of the family at the time she was gaming the system. I certainly wasn’t able to cross examine her as to the details of her personal finances. I know what her parents told me, which is that she lived for quite some time on the dole, not because she wasn’t able bodied or incapable of working, rather because she was lazy and wanted free stuff. And the system obliged. Feel free to call me bitter or any other names you can think of, but I honestly don’t think that giving her more generous benefits would have helped her situation one bit. Hence my reply to the comment in the article about existing programs being “too chintzy” to do any good.
Comment by Enlightened Layperson —
September 22, 2011 @ 11:51 pm
I supported the true empathy of unforced charity, worried about government programs “crowding out” civil society, and believed that the “coerced” nature of redistributive policies made it impossible to be “moral” at all, since morality requires affirmative choice.
Allow me to point something out. Your focus here is on the rights of the giver, as is almost every libetarian comment I have read opposing tax-supported welfare. Your reasons for changing your mind all have to do with the needs of the recipient. It seems to me that is the real difference between the sides on the debate. Many anti-welfare libertarians don’t even seem to recognize that the needs of the recipient can be a legitimate public policy issue. (Mataconi, I will acknowledge, appears to be an exception).
Comment by Barry —
September 23, 2011 @ 6:31 am
Ranselaer,
1) By the time that you and your kids are living in your parents’ garage, ‘homeless’ is a good description.
2) There are numerous stories of the hoops one has to jump through for medicaid, or any other such programs (other than Social Security and Medicare), so I’ll assume that you are full of it.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 23, 2011 @ 8:36 am
Ranselaer: It’s odd that you consider merely naming the emotion that fairly leaps out of your words to be calling you “names.” Why is that?
This is separate from any disagreements I have with what you’ve written, and I do have them.
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