freedom’s just another word….
Actually, according to Arnold Kling, freedom is the absence of monopoly:
Consider the following definition of freedom: the absence of monopoly.
The absence of monopoly means that you can exercise exit, even if you cannot exercise voice. The presence of monopoly means that, at most, you can exercise voice.
Neither my local supermarket nor any of its suppliers has a way for me to exercise voice. They don’t hold elections. They don’t have town-hall meetings where they explain their plans for what will be in the store. By democratic standards, I am powerless in the supermarket.
And yet, I feel much freer in the supermarket than I do with respect to my county, state, or federal government. For each item in the supermarket, I can choose whether to put it into my cart and pay for it or leave it on the shelf. I can walk out of the supermarket at any time and go to a competing grocery.
The exercise of voice, including the right to vote, is not the ultimate expression of freedom. Rather, it is the last refuge of those who suffer under a monopoly. If we take it as given that the political jurisdiction where I reside is a monopoly, then perhaps I will have more influence over that monopoly if I have a right to vote and a right to organize opposition than if I do not. However, as my forthcoming Unchecked and Unbalanced argues, the reality is that the amount of influence I have is shrinking while the scope of the monopolist is growing.
The idea of charter cities (or seasteading) will be a success to the extent that it creates a viable exit option vis-a-vis government. Suppose that the Chinese government loses its monopoly power, because it becomes easy for people residing in China to choose to live under alternative governments. In that hypothetical case, I would argue that those residents are free, even if those who choose the Chinese government are not allowed to vote in contested elections or to freely criticize their government. If you lived in North Korea, which would you rather have–the right to vote or the right to leave?
In fact, if we had real competitive government, then we would be no more interested in elections and speaking out to government officials than we are in holding elections and town-hall meetings at the supermarket. I repeat: real freedom is the absence of monopoly.
Fascinating.
Update.
I think this is exactly what I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to say for a while now. Kling puts it far more succinctly than I could have which is why I pretty much block-quoted the entire thing, give or take.
It is a fascinating take on freedom, though, isn’t it?
“I think this is exactly what I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to say for a while now. ”
Me too.Report
Call me skeptical, but it sounds like he’s saying that freedom’s just another word for being privileged enough to move to another country.Report
A couple of thoughts about this. We all do have a voice at our supermarkets. We can complain to the manager or head office. They do actually listen, although some companies don’t care. Why do so many companies to market research stuff, because they want to know our feedback. So I think that was, at best, a poor example.
Comparing supermarkets to countries has to be….ummm…. the mother of all bad analogies. The costs of going to a different supermarket are almost nothing in almost every urban or suburban spot in America. The cost of leaving a country is huge: the loss of culture, language, family, locality. Leaving your country is for most a one time event. Freedom is just another word for you have one chance to pick where to live and then you are stuck with it.Report
The right to secede is a big one.
This is why I support strong Federalism when a gun is held to my head. If I hate the state I live in, I can always move to a different one. If I don’t like my country, I can move to Canada or Mexico or Taiwan. When the government says “nope, you don’t get to leave!”, then that’s indicative of a real problem. West vs. East Germany used to be a really useful example of this particular problem.
The problem is that, these days, there’s no “where to go” if you want smaller, less intrusive government. There’s no “west” left.Report
Right, Jaybird. Except “The West” as some miracle libertarian paradise is an utter fabrication. The only thing that made it possible – massive government intervention.
From driving off the Native Americans who really owned the land, to surveying and mapping the land, to subsidizing the railroad and spending billions on irrigation projects, the American West is perhaps the most government-influenced landscape in the world.Report
Afghanistan or Somalia don’t interest you? They are pretty much renowned for no functioning central government.
There are people who live out in the wilderness in Alaska so they can get away from evil gov. Of course you actually have to survive out there. Then when they get tired and/ or old they move into towns so they can be near services. And then complain to their last breaths about the gov.Report
Yeah, yeah. Love it or leave it.
If you like free health care so much, why don’t you move to England, etc.Report
What???? you aren’t interested in those no central gov paradises?
When did I say love it or leave it? Stay it’s your country to.
I am not aware of this “free healthcare” thing you talk about. Health care in the UK is paid for be taxes I believe.Report
Where would these theoretical Chinese who rejected their state live? What if they were attacked by non-Chinese? Does anyone believe the Chinese gov’t would not protect them. Is there any meaningful sense in which they are not nearly explicitly proposing a free-rider arrangement for themsleves with reard to the primary function of a state? If there is a meaningful place they could live when we would realistically believe they had given up any expectation of protection from aggression, and didn’t fall into the umbrella of another state or quasi-state power, then this vision does have some potential as an arrangement that could provide absolute maximum terrestrially-achievable negative freedom (something I have absolutely necer coveted and find ample reasons to fear profoundly). But I wish them good luck with their new country.Report
Why is it that these hyper-libertarian conceptions of freedom always require people to be pretty much fantastically wealthy to pursue freedom? Exactly how do we meaningfully explain to the inner-city poor that *real* freedom means you have the right to go join a charter city in the middle of the ocean? I imagine any version of Atlantis sounds equally fanciful to them.
Also, the logical conclusion of this argument is that freedom, properly understood, is the right to (if you so choose) completely self-govern (i.e., exit from all governments). For the supermarket, this sort of works – you do/should have the right to make all your own food, if that’s what you want. But complete self-governance just takes us back to the state of nature. Whether you like Locke or Hobbes (I think Hobbes is far more realistic), most of the West basically agreed three or four centuries ago that that’s not workable.
Incidentally, this is why libertarians, no matter what they say, are manifestly *not* classical liberals: they tend to reject what is really the core insight of classical liberalism.Report
You know, in saying that true freedom is the product of the economic privilege to exercise choice, there is the basis for a very strong argument that says that classic liberalism and the Enlightenment demand redistribution on the grounds of protecting freedom.Report
That’s a very good point, and I agree entirely. The question, to my mind, is not whether or not wealth should be redistributed, but how wealth should be redistributed.Report
I think so as well. As Matt Yglesias has indicated in the past (although I don’t recall him ever explicitly making the argument), there are a lot of ways in which “modern” liberalism actually is (contra what libertarians may thing) a natural extension of classical liberalism. If I were to construct the argument, which I haven’t really done yet, it would involve some discussion of the ways in which non-governmental power (which Locke, Jefferson, and others really didn’t confront philosophically) undermines some of the core ideas about freedom that liberals were working with. And that this non-governmental power often requires some kind of social remedy.Report
Actually I would urge people to look not just at the concept of “competitive governments” but look at how important exit is in any scenario, even our day-to-day micro-economic lives. Kling is just taking this concept of monopoly and running with it….Report
Choice generally is good, though there is a literature on the declining marginal utility of increased choice, and our irrational responses to equivalent choices that are presented in varying ways.
Would you say that in the employer-based health insurance model, we experience the health insurance market as a monopoly (that’s probably a duh question but I’ll put it out there anyway)?Report
Oh certainly. We’re very much in a monopoly situation with our current health care system. Freedom to exit is very limited.Report
I think this is getting things a bit backwards. The ability to choose exists precisely because there’s a monopoly in place. (i.e. the state (as an institution) monopoly on the use of coercive hard power) Because the state is the only institution capable of doing this (and therefore denying other institutions that power) it effectively prevents coercive hard power from being used against individuals who then have the ability to move about the grocery store as they please. In other words, the only thing that prevents the massive disparity in hard power between the super market and the consumer (the former obviously having a great deal more manpower and capital) from manifesting in a coercive use of hard power, is the monopolization of hard power by states. New feudalism or the “End of the State” end-games where non-state entities (seasteads I think would count in this area) begin to possess similar amounts of coercive hard power are insofar as they’ll exist, a significant step BACKWARD. Smaller entities upon which there are fewer constraints from a larger monopoly of power simply means they’re more capable of using that hard power against individual actors.
What’s to stop charter cities from creating draconian emigration policies once people get there? Confiscatory financial policies? North Korea is an interesting example to bring up in this choice framework, because it shows just how capable a relatively small entity is of using coercive power to hold its individual actors in place even with competing large actors in its immediate neighborhood.Report