Ignoring the Thrust

by E.C. Gach

It looks like there’s three different categories of critique which aim at rebutting this “garbage” by Stephen Metcalf over at Slate (I’m open to additional categories I may have missed).

1.) Metcalf attacks positions that are not actually held by those who identify as “libertarian,” and when he attacks the right ones, he does so unpersuasively.
2.) Metcalf is a bad writer who includes several factual inaccuracies/distortions in his piece.
3.) Nozick doesn’t agree with Metcalf but Ann Coulter does.

Category 3 is the easiest.  Basically, Matt Welch compares Metcalf to Ann Coutler via their mutual critique of libertarians, despite the fact that, well, their critiques of libertarians have nothing in common with one another except that both exist as critiques.  Of course, ever being affiliated, either fairly or unfairly, with Ann Coulter?  Not good.  Metcalf 0, detractors 1.

Category 2 is a bit deeper.

Metcalf says,

“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.”

Will Wilkinson counters,

“This attempt to marginalise two great thinkers is as lazy as it is dishonest. A little light googling is enough to establish the basic facts, but it seems Mr Metcalf could not be bothered.”

I’ll take Wilkinson at his word, but since neither Hayek or Mises are mentioned much in the article, this point only hurts Metcalf’s credibility, not his main arguments.  Still, Metcalf 0, detractors 2.
Next, Brad Delong corrects Metcalf’s account of Keynes with regard to Hayek,

“But Keynes did not write this on the margin of any book. He did not write it by hand. He said it in print–“Keynes at his witty bitchy best”, as Bruce Caldwell puts it. Keynes published it in 1931 in the journal Economica–13:34 (November), pp. 387-97, “The Pure Theory of Money: A Reply to Dr. Hayek”, and it was of Hayek’s Prices and Production. It was about Hayek’s business-cycle theory (where, Milton Friedman used to say, Hayek “was not a great economist”) and not about his moral philosophy (where, I would argue, he was a great albeit flawed economist).”

Metcalf takes another a hit.  Delong pulls out this nugget to show what Keynes thought of Hayek, “In my opinion it is a grand book…. Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement…”

Again, though Metcalf’s piece unfairly dismisses Hayek in the first place, the truth of his claims with regard to the Austrian really don’t bare on the thrust his argument, so I’ll move past this part and chalk it up as another win for the detractors, with Metcalf now 0 for 3.

Lastly for category 2, David Boaz corrects Metcalf on Nozick’s political stances later in life,

“It gets repeated a lot: ‘Even Nozick renounced libertarianism.’ If it were true, it’s not clear what it would mean. Libertarianism is true, or not, whether or not Paul Krugman or Russell Kirk believes it, and whether or not Robert Nozick believes it. The idea stands or falls on its own. But as it happens, Nozick did “stay a party” to the libertarian idea.”

Metcalf has gotten this bit wrong too.  Another mistake that is embarrassing, though it has little to do with the arguments at hand.  Metcalf 0, detractors 4.

Then there’s category 1, which contains the most interesting and complex set of rebuttals.

Jason Kuznicki’s critique,

“Metcalf’s piece falls into a large and (sadly) growing category for me, one labeled “People Condemning Libertarians for Strange Things That Never Occurred to Anyone, Let Alone to Us.”

Kuznicki than goes on to demonstrate how,

“For a libertarian, it’s only Wilt Chamberlain’s particular type of wealth that is morally blameless, not all the rest. Which kind is his? The kind acquired through voluntary transactions, without coercion or fraud. The kind that comes from Nozick called capitalist acts between consenting adults.”

Here things become difficult.  Kuznicki has seemingly reformulated Metcalf’s take on the libertarian position in a way that makes it immune to Metcalf’s critique.  Unfortunately, I fail to see how he has done anything other than hide the controversy in apparently banal language.   Here we have, “voluntary transaction” without “coercion or fraud,” or, as Kuznicki reminds us, “capitalist acts between consenting adults.” This might seem plain and matter of fact to libertarians, but for those outside that viewpoint, the phrases are exactly what is at issue.

Pausing for a moment, this is the passage from Metcalf that Kuznicki seeks to rebut,

“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.”

Kuznicki wants to say that Metcalf is compounding the potentially morally blameworthy modes of wealth accumulation (e.g. stealing), with the morally blameless ways (e.g. those that arise through agreed to transactions like paying to see someone play basketball).

Here is Kuznicki again.

“For a libertarian, it’s only Wilt Chamberlain’s particular type of wealth that is morally blameless, not all the rest. Which kind is his? The kind acquired through voluntary transactions, without coercion or fraud. The kind that comes from Nozick called capitalist acts between consenting adults.”

Metcalf address this in two ways.  The first is that we don’t live in a world where these kinds of presumably “pure” interactions can take place.  That is, we don’t have perfect information, we don’t have frictionless markets, etc.  If we did have those things, perhaps we might be able to glimpse the pure and blameless kinds of wealth accumulation Kuznicki suggests.  Second, where Kuznicki would make it look easy, figuring out whether “consent” exists, or “coercion” occurred is far from easy.  And it is exactly in these phenomena that all the arrangements of capitalism arise.  Metcalf seems to be saying that in the Chamberlain example, Nozick has introduced a sterile scenario in which our moral sentiments rightly feel the athlete should get his due, but in the process seeks to legitimate all the other forms of wealth accumulation that occur in capitalist society.

Metcalf in his own words,:

”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.”

In addition, the point here, as someone else noted, isn’t that Chamberlain’s wealth is illegitimate, but that apparently easy to draw links between his labor, playing basketball extremely well, and his wealth, the income received from spectators willing to pay to watch, are atypical.  Most wealth creation does not follow directly from some individual virtue, or at the very least, not in such visible ways.

Finally, there’s Aaron Ross Powell, who claims that Metclaf misinterprets Nozick by incorrectly assigning to Nozick the view that liberty is the highest and most fundamental value.  Rather, Powell aims at a more nuanced interpretation,

“I value liberty, yes, but I also value my health, my daughter’s happiness, and films staring William Powell and Myrna Loy. In fact, libertarians, progressives, and even Robert Nozick value quite a lot of things. The libertarian argument is simply that a state that attempts to directly maximize any value besides liberty—by, say, coercively taxing in order to pay for more Thin Man films—violates individual rights.  What’s more, if the state does remain limited to protecting only liberty, we’ll get more health, happiness, and great movies.”

“According to Nozick and most other libertarians, it is for the protection of liberty that we organize a state—and a state that violates its citizens’ liberty (beyond, arguably, certain “night watchman” duties) commits a moral wrong. Metcalf gets that much right. But this is not because liberty is the only value. Rather, it is because liberty is the only value the state should concern itself with. All the other values—of which there are a great many, not all shared equally by all individuals—are the exclusive concern of civil society.”

“Liberty is not the only value. It is the only value within the scope of politics. Liberty is also the value that allows all the other actually-held values to flourish.”

Powell seems to be saying that, no, liberty insn’t the only moral value, existing prior to all other values.  Only that liberty is the value that allows all other actually held values to flourish, and that by maximizing liberty, we maximize everything people actually value (e.g. health, happiness, movies).

This is Metcalf,

”Nozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to put forward any other value is to submit individuals to coercion.”

Back to Powell,

”The difference between Nozick’s vision and Metcalf’s is that Nozick embraces that wonderful chaos, provided it happens within a framework of respected rights. Metcalf would strike down choice and replace it with state-endorsed value. He would force all of us or none of us to watch Wilt play, placing the decision to be a spectator or an abstainer not with free individuals but with Stephen Metcalf.”

I really don’t want to sound like an ass for any longer than need be, so if someone could point out the elusive difference Powell is hitting on I would appreciate it greatly.

And I mean that sincerely.  I’m not looking to defend Metcalf’s piece in total.  It looks to contain numerous errors and oversights that are contradicted by the facts.  But the essay brings up many points that proponents of libertarianism have, to my mind, never satisfactorily settled.

Even Conor Friedersdorf, whose writing I love, reacted by singing the praises of libertarians for fighting the good fight against the war on drugs, our imperial overreach, and the general degradation of constitutional liberties in this country.  Yes, libertarians are good people to and could be part of a meaningful coalition with liberals to fight these fights on many fronts.

Still, whatever one thinks of Stephen Metcalf, with whom I am unfamiliar and know nothing about, or his Swiss cheese of an article, there is substance there that cries out for legitimate engagement.

I would give my summary of Metcalf’s main argument, however Wes Alwan at the Partially Examined Life has already given a pretty good one,

“…here’s the central argument: Nozick can only assign liberty the overriding value he does, argues Metcalf, by assuming that absent government interference, recompense naturally lines up with talent and hard work, and so to interfere would always be unjust. Which is to say that the markets naturally find a way to give everyone what they deserve. In an ideal world that might be the case: but ideal conditions cannot be established (just as they can’t for a socialist utopia). When we are closer to ideal conditions for liberty, it is ironically because redistributive justice has established them. According to Metcalf, the fact that during the post-WWII boom those conditions (for matching up recompense with talent) were as close as ever to ideal was underwritten by “high marginal taxation and massive transfers of private wealth in the name of the very ‘public good’ Nozick decried as nonexistent.” In other words, markets don’t function according to the libertarian ideal unless some very un-libertarian foundations have been established to help them function that way.”

Now I’m not holding that the above is completely true or that the counter arguments are lack merit, only that the foundation of traditional libertarianism relies heavily on antiquated notions like the “rational individual,” and makes the large claim that extending liberty is not only a moral imperative: it is a means toward achieving greater prosperity and more just outcomes.

So I encourage everyone to dismantle Metcalf on the basis of his critique of libertarianism and not on the basis of his poor fact checking or snarky delivery.