Why libertarianism is foolish, and if you believe in it, so are you

[Kuya]

Let's start with who Robert Nozick is to libertarianism:

Spoiler: show

Libertarians will blanch at lumping their revered Vons—Mises and Hayek—in
with the nutters and the shills. But between them, Von Hayek and Von Mises
never seem to have held a single academic appointment that didn't involve a
corporate sponsor. Even the renowned law and economics movement at the
University of Chicago was, in its inception, heavily subsidized by business
interests. ("Radical movements in capitalist societies," as Milton Friedman
patiently explained, "have typically been supported by a few wealthy
individuals.") Within academia, the philosophy of free markets in
extremis was rarely embraced freely—i.e., by someone not on the dole of a
wealthy benefactor. It cannot be stressed enough: In the decades after the war,
a kind of levee separated polite discourse from free-market economics. The
attitude is well-captured by John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in a review of
Hayek's Prices and Production: "An extraordinary example of how,
starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam."*


And then came Robert Nozick.


To my knowledge, in writing Anarchy, State, and Utopia,
his breathtaking defense of libertarianism, Nozick never accepted a dime other
than from his employer, the philosophy department at Harvard University.
(Unless it was from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at
Palo Alto, the "minimally structured academic institution bordering on
individualist anarchy" as Nozick put it, where he wrote the book's early
chapters.) In fact, Nozick was the disinterested intellectual that
laissez-faire had been searching for since Congress passed the Emergency
Banking Act of 1933. Nozick started out a classic of the type: a Brooklyn kid,
one generation off the shtetl, toting a dog-eared Plato. But along the way to a
full Harvard professorship, attained at the age of 30, he'd lost the socialist
ardors of his upbringing. "For a while I thought: 'Well, the arguments are
right, capitalism is the best system, but only bad people would think so,' " he
once told a journalist. "Then, at some point, my mind and my heart were in
unison."

Spoiler: show

The Times Literary Supplement ranks Anarchy, published in
1974, as one of the "100 Most Influential Books Since the War," and that, I
think, is underselling it. To this day, left intellectuals remember where they
were when they first heard Nozick's arguments against not just socialism but
wealth redistribution of any kind. "It is no exaggeration to say," the
Telegraph wrote, after Nozick died in 2002, "that Nozick, more than
anyone else, embodied the new libertarian zeitgeist which, after generations of
statist welfarism from Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy, Johnson and Carter,
ushered in the era of Reagan and Bush, pere et fils." Prior to
Anarchy, "liberty" was a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions
and progressive taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts
and the B.F. Goodriches. After Anarchy, "liberty" was a concept as
worthy of academic dignity as the categorical imperative.

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even
an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim
(that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be
maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for
allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a
matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax
the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par
with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n
hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't
at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener
allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

His argument against welfare state liberalism:

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To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an
unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this
end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of
each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant,
calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the
separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the
underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means;
they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without
their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

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With the solemn invocation of individual lives, the liberal humanist ought to
push away from the table, take a deep breath, and ask whether any of this
remarkable assault is true. Can it really be that eliminating the income
tax shows maximum moral respect for others? I thought a fraction of a rich
man's fortune is to the rich man only money but to a starving man is freedom.
Am I a moral idiot? It is impossible without writing a book (and many have) to do Anarchy
justice. Nonetheless, one argument from its pages is considered its most
central, most famous, most bewitching. This is the so-called "Wilt Chamberlain"
argument, and pausing to pick it apart, we can begin to see why Nozick's
defense of libertarianism, as Nozick himself came to believe, collapsed.

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When I think with my own brain and look with my own eyes, it's obvious to me
that some combination of civil rights, democratic institutions, educational
capital, social trust, consumer choice, and economic opportunity make me free.
This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick is arguing that economic rights are
the only rights, and that insofar as there are political rights, they are
nothing more than a framework in support of private property and freedom of
contract. When I study American history, I can see why America, thanks to a
dense bundle of historical accidents, is a kind of Lockean paradise, uniquely
suited to holding up liberty as its paramount value. This is not what Nozick is
arguing. Nozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to put forward
any other value is to submit individuals to coercion.

Nozick's Chamberlain argument:

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"Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great
gate attraction. (Also suppose contracts run only for a year, with players
being free agents.) He signs the following sort of contract with a team: In
each home game twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission
goes to him. (We ignore the question of whether he is "gouging" the owners,
letting them look out for themselves.) … Let us suppose that in one season one
million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain ends up with
$250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone
else has. Is he entitled to his income? Is this new distribution D2
unjust?"

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Nozick assumes our dream society is in some respect egalitarian; that to
prevent Wilt from grossly out-earning his fellow citizens, the system we've
imagined in D1 will curtail Chamberlain's right to the whole fruit of his own
labor. To the liberal humanist, Nozick is saying: You don't take your finest
hero, Kant, seriously, because if you did, you would never sacrifice Wilt's
autonomy to the social planner's designs. To the socialist, he is saying: You
don't take your own finest hero, Marx, seriously, because if you did, you would
never expropriate his surplus value (via taxation) as blithely as the
capitalist. And to his own fellow Harvard professors, he is saying: You don't
take your own finest hero—yourself—seriously, because if you did, why would you
ever curtail the prerogative of a superstar?

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To this, Nozick replies: All that intellectual pomp, arrayed to convince me
that my talents are not mine? But my talents aren't like fire and
disease. They aren't fatalities I insure against. Quite the opposite: My
talents constitute the substance of who I am, and I am right to bank on them.
Having cornered us with Kant, with Marx, and, most of all, with our own vanity,
Nozick concludes, "No end-state principle of justice can be continuously
realized without continuous interference with people's lives," confident that
"interference" is sufficiently morally offensive to carry the day.

How the author attacks Nozick's argument:

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Here the liberal humanist needs to relax, take a second breath, and realize
that, while clever, the Wilt Chamberlain argument is maybe a little too
clever—i.e., what seems on first blush to be a simple case of freedom from
interference is in fact a kind of connivance. Anarchy not only
purports to be a defense of capitalism, but a proud defense of capitalism. And
yet if Anarchy would defend capitalism unashamedly, why does its most
famous argument include almost none of the defining features of
capitalism—i.e., no risk capital, no capital markets, no financier? Why does it
feature a basketball player and not, say, a captain of industry, a CEO, a
visionary entrepreneur? The example as Nozick sets it out includes a gifted
athlete (Wilt Chamberlain), paying customers (those with a dollar to see Wilt
play)—and yet, other than a passing reference to the team's "owners," no
capitalist!

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Put another way, Nozick is cornering us into answering a ridiculously loaded
question: If every person were a capitalist, and every capitalist a human
capitalist, and every human capitalist was compensated in exact proportion to
the pleasure he or she provided others, would a world without progressive
taxation be just? To arrive at this question, Nozick vanishes most of the known
features of capitalism (capital, owners, means of production, labor, collective
bargaining) while maximizing one feature of capitalism—its ability to funnel
money to the uniquely talented. In the example, "liberty" is all but cognate
with a system that efficiently compensates the superstar.

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The connivance is thus hidden in plain sight. "Wilt Chamberlain" is an
African-American whose talents are unique, scarce, perspicuous (points,
rebounds, assists), and in high demand. We feel powerfully the man should
be paid, and not to do so—to expect a black athlete to perform for
(largely) white audiences without adequate compensation—raises the specter of
the plantation. But being a star athlete isn't the only way to make money. In
addition to earning a wage, one can garnish a wage, collect a fee, levy a toll,
cash in a dividend, take a kickback, collect a monopoly rent, hit the
superfecta, inherit Tara, insider trade, or stumble on Texas tea. For each way
of conceiving wealth, there is at least one way of moralizing its distribution.
The Wilt Chamberlain example is designed to corner us—quite cynically, in my
view—into moralizing all of them as if they were recompense for a
unique talent that gives pleasure; and to tax each of them, and regulate each
of them, according to the same principle of radical noninterference suggested
by a black ballplayer finally getting his due.

Spoiler: show

To my critique of the Chamberlain example, a libertarian might respond: Given
frictionless markets, rational self-maximizers, and perfect information, the
market price for Wilt's services could not stay separable from the market price
to see Wilt play. (Visionary entrepreneurs would create start-up leagues,
competing leagues would bid up prices for the best players.) In a free-market
paradise, capital will flow to talent, until rewards commensurate perfectly
with utility. Maybe; and maybe in a socialist paradise, no one will catch the
common cold. The essence of any utopianism is: Conjure an ideal that makes an
impossible demand on reality, then announce that, until the demand is met in
full, your ideal can't be fairly evaluated. Attribute any incidental successes
to the halfway meeting of the demand, any failure to the halfway still to go.

Even Nozick abandons these ideas:

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How could a thinker as brilliant as Nozick stay a party to this? The answer
is: He didn't. "The libertarian position I once propounded," Nozick wrote in an
essay published in the late '80s, "now seems to me seriously inadequate." In
Anarchy democracy was nowhere to be found; Nozick now believed that
democratic institutions "express and symbolize … our equal human dignity, our
autonomy and powers of self-direction." In Anarchy, the best
government was the least government, a value-neutral enforcer of contracts;
now, Nozick concluded, "There are some things we choose to do together through
government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that
we do them together in this official fashion ..."

Why did Nozick change his mind?:

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Even in 1975, it took a pretty narrow view of history to think all capital is
human capital, and that philosophy professors, even the especially bright ones,
would thrive in the free market. But there was a historical reason for Nozick's
belief: the magnificent sieve. Harvard's enrollment prior to World War II was
3,300; after the war, it was 5,300, 4,000 of whom were veterans. The GI Bill
was on its way to investing more in education grants, business loans, and home
loans than all previous New Deal programs combined. By 1954, with the Cold War
in full swing, the U.S. government was spending 20 times what it had spent on
research before the war. "Some universities," C. Wright Mills could write in
the mid-'50s, "are financial branches of the military establishment." In the
postwar decades, the American university grew in enrollment, budget and
prestige, thanks to a substantial transfer of wealth from the private economy,
under the rubric of "military Keynesianism." As a tentacle of the
military-industrial octopus, academia finally lost its last remnant of colonial
gentility.



At the same time the university boomed, marginal tax rates for high earners
stood as high as 90 percent. This collapsed the so-called L-curve, the graphic
depiction of wealth distribution in the United States. The L-curve lay at its
flattest in 1970, just as Nozick was sitting down to write Anarchy. In
1970, there were nearly 500,000 employed academics, and their relative income
stood at an all-time high. To the extent anyone could believe mental talent,
human capital, and capital were indistinguishable, it was thanks to the
greatest market distortion in the history of industrial capitalism; and because
for 40 years, thanks to this distortion, talent had not been forced to compete
with the old "captains of industry," with the financiers and the CEOs.

Spoiler: show

Buccaneering entrepreneurs, boom-and-bust markets, risk capital—these
conveniently disappeared from Nozick's argument because they'd all but
disappeared from capitalism. In a world in which J.P. Morgan and Cornelius
Vanderbilt have been rendered obsolete, reduced to historical curios, to a
funny old-style man, imprisoned in gilt frames, the professionals—the
scientists, engineers, professors, lawyers and doctors—correspondingly rise in
both power and esteem. And in a world in which the professions are gatekept by
universities, which in turn select students based on their measured
intelligence, the idea that talent is mental talent, and mental talent is, not
only capital, but the only capital, becomes easier and easier for a humanities
professor to put across. Hence the terminal irony of Anarchy: Its
author's audible smugness in favor of libertarianism was underwritten by a most
un-libertarian arrangement—i.e., the postwar social compact of high marginal
taxation and massive transfers of private wealth in the name of the very
"public good" Nozick decried as nonexistent.

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And the screw takes one last turn: By allowing for the enormous rise in
(relative) income and prestige of the upper white collar professions,
Keynesianism created the very blind spot by which professionals turned against
Keynesianism. Charging high fees as defended by their cartels, cartels defended
in turn by universities, universities in turn made powerful by the military
state, many upper-white-collar professionals convinced themselves their
pre-eminence was not an accident of history or the product of negotiated
protections from the marketplace but the result of their own unique mental
talents fetching high prices in a free market for labor. Just this cocktail of
vanity and delusion helped Nozick edge out Rawls in the marketplace of ideas,
making Anarchy a surprise best-seller, it helped make Ronald Reagan
president five years later. So it was the public good that killed off the
public good.


Since 1970, the guild power of lawyers, doctors, engineers, and, yes,
philosophy professors has nothing but attenuated. To take only the most pitiful
example, medical doctors have evolved over this period from fee-for-service
professionals totally in control of their own workplace to salaried body
mechanics subject to the relentless cost-cutting mandate of a corporate
employer. They've gone from being Marcus Welby—a living monument to public
service through private practice—to being, as one comprehensive study put it,
harried "middle management." Who can argue with a straight face that a doctor
in 2011 has more liberty than his counterpart in 1970? What any good
liberal Democrat with an ounce of vestigial self-respect would have said to
Nozick in 1970—"Sure, Bob, but we both know what your liberty means. It means
power will once again mean money, and money will be at liberty to flow to the
top"—in fact happened. The irony is that as capital once again concentrates as
nothing more than capital (i.e., as the immense skim of the financiers), the
Nozickian illusion (that capital is human capital and human capital is the only
capital) gets harder and harder to sustain.

Spoiler: show

Sustained it is, though. Just as Nozick would have us tax every dollar as if
it were earned by a seven-foot demigod, apologists for laissez-faire would have
us treat all outsize compensation as if it were earned by a tech revolutionary
or the value-investing equivalent of Mozart (as opposed to, say, this guy, this guy, this guy, or this guy). It turns out the Wilt
Chamberlain example is all but unkillable; only it might better be called the
Steve Jobs example, or the Warren Buffett* example. The idea that supernormal
compensation is fit reward for supernormal talent is the ideological superglue
of neoliberalism, holding firm since the 1980s. It's no wonder that in the
aftermath of the housing bust, with the glue showing signs of decay—with Madoff
and "Government Sachs" displacing Jobs and Buffett in the headlines—"liberty"
made its comeback. When the facts go against you, resort to "values." When
values go against you, resort to the mother of all values. When the mother of
all values swoons, reach deep into the public purse with one hand, and with the
other beat the public senseless with your dog-eared copy of Atlas
Shrugged.

TL;DR: Nozick argues that liberty is the most important value, and that taxation is an imposition on that liberty by taking away money that a person earns via their own skills. It amounts to sacrificing some people, to help others, therefore it is inmoral because all individuals are inviolable. He uses an argument of a black athlete earning a high wage due to his talents.

The problem is, not only do you have to assume that liberty is the only and most important value, but Nozick requires that you treat all capital as human capital. He tries to defend capitalism, but uses none of its defining modern features, such as bankers and financiers. He creates an ideal of capitalism and tries to guilt trip us into accepting his argument, much like most libertarians and anarcho-capitalists too. And no matter how much free market capitalism we try, they will always say that we didn't try enough of it. Every success is due to the free market, and every failure is due to something else.

Nozick did not see how the actions of other people (government spending) created a system in which he could thrive. A system where a philosophy professor could be placed on par with a superstar black athlete, and earn an astronomical wage. But as this system came down (what do people think of a philosophy degree now a days?), so did Nozick's illusions.

I realize that a lot of us tend to fall for libertarians when we see them defend liberal social causes, but never forget that economic liberty is the most important (and to some, the only liberty) liberty to them, and when given the option, they will always side with free market capitalism over social causes. That's why they would much rather play with republicans than democrats (even though democrats are somewhat neoliberal). They will fight government when it harms people, but they will not fight modern capitalism when it does the same. We should ally with libertarians and anarcho capitalists when conveniant, but we should keep them at a distance.

http://www.slate.com/id/2297019

[tyven]

what the fuck, kuya

[solanis]

jesus christ kuya

[Egon]

It makes me giggle when BG members think that BG is the liberal center of the galaxy. You all should start having conventions.

BGCon - Coming to a unemployment line near you!

Sent from my MB611 using Tapatalk

[Hyan]

Nozick argues that liberty is the most important value, and that taxation is an imposition on that liberty by taking away money that a person earns via their own skills.

I can definitely see the flaws in that mindset.

So much so that I don't think more needs to be said.

Also, oh my god Kuya.

[Day]

jesus christ kuya

As much as it pains me... cosigned.

[Nevex]

Typical Kuya thread, tl;dr, nothing to see here etc.

[Drex]

What's really awful is that the article's author managed to misfire so often on a relatively easy target (Libertarianism)

[Abandon]

haha, what the fuck, Kuya?

[Kuya]

Don't trust those libertarian niggas over there, leaving their libertarian essence in the air

[Correction]

I blame guartz for this.

[Ksandra]

I blame kuya for this.

[Kuya]

Typical Kuya thread, tl;dr, nothing to see here etc.

Too deep for you?

[pahnphoenix]

tl;dr but i hate libertarianism. it's idiotic. pretty easy to explain why in a couple sentences...

[Kuya]

It really isn't. The problem with refuting this stuff is that it isn't inmediately self-evident why it's false. forcing you to put some thought into this, and annoying you. libertarianism is not necessarily stupid, but rather, contrived.

I think the problem is, when a libertarian argues with you, the assumptions or principles aren't inmediately laid bare. For example, they will rarely tell you right at the start that they want you to assume liberty is the most important or only principle. You usually have to dig it out of them, which is a chore.

[pahnphoenix]

they normally haven't given much thought as to the meaning of liberty anyway. they often think it means "privileged individual's freedom to make money".

their whole worldview is really incoherent. if that isn't immediately obvious to them, it's because they're stupid / uneducated. pretty snobby sounding thing to say i guess, but there it is. they want several mutually undermining things, and ultimately advocate for actions/policies that would (obviously) only benefit currently consolidated power.

[Kwijiboe]

they normally haven't given much thought as to the meaning of liberty anyway. they often think it means "privileged individual's freedom to make money".

their whole worldview is really incoherent. if that isn't immediately obvious to them, it's because they're stupid / uneducated. pretty snobby sounding thing to say i guess, but there it is. they want several mutually undermining things, and ultimately advocate for actions/policies that would (obviously) only benefit currently consolidated power.

Ah, Damnit. Now this thread will never go away.

[pahnphoenix]

:D

[Zoolander]

No no no, a TRULY FREE Market would ensure individual freedoms and prosperity for all. We just haven't had any really free markets, god damn government meddling.

[Dimmauk]

No no no, a TRULY FREE Market would ensure individual freedoms and prosperity for all. We just haven't had any really free markets, god damn government meddling.

Stacked deck bro. And getting worse.