"I cannot think of a situation when you would ever need to impose artificial barrier to entry as a deliberate policy."
Um. I just gave you one. Casual transport in a densely populated urban region.
I'm not strictly committed to medallions, but in the absence of them some other artificial barrier needs to be constructed once an area gets large enough and densely populated enough to matter.
Because they're more interested in vindicating their ideological principles than in creating a functional system of casual transport for a densely population urban region that needs such a system.
Funny. Had a similar thread on Yglesias's site, and he mostly agreed with you (and Reason.tv) about taxi medallions and you're all just .... wrong.
The "market" is casual transport simply doesn't work without strict government regulation, including, if necessary, and it almost always IS necessary when a city gets big enough to matter, artificial barriers to entry.
What will happen to those "poor" taxi drivers balleyhooed by Reason.tv is that they'll get even poorer if Reason has its way.
This isn't really a philosophical or even a political point. It's empirical. It's not debateable in terms of more or less "liberty" or more or less "justice." It simply isn't. We know from the history of hackney carriages going back to the first licensing in London in 1635 what makes a casual transport system function well and what doesn't.
This is not to say that D.C.'s system functions well. Or New York's. Or Boston's (where I spent my yoot as a taxi driver). Only that Reason magazine is LITERALLY, and I literally mean that literally, the last persons on earth I'd ask to think about how to improve it.
Just a thought, maybe silly, as I re-engage this subject, but is it so certain that Olson's, Hume's, Scott's and Hayek's account of state formation is "factual" and/or factual enough to allow for a generalization? Maybe Hume was inferring from a particular set of geographic and cultural circumstances that lent itself to the process of sedentary brigandage.
Thinking of two references. My old Professor Beryl Crowe offered an account of very early development in what is now the Holy Land that was quite compatible with Nozick's process. He argued that the turmoil documented in the OT was actually a later anachronistic romanticizing for what the archeology shows was pretty much 3 or 4 milllenia of peaceful, incremental development.
Similarly, the accounts of Titus Livy, indirectly through Machiavelli, show an early Italy that would fit quite well with Nozick's account of the origins of the minimal state.
Finally, it might not even be logically the case that even if stationary brigandage was an enabling or empowering process, that that's the genetic institution. After all, the brigands wouldn't have bothered if there was nothing to steal or conquer. The cultures they dominated must have had something worth conquerring, and instituions capable of surplus production. And whatever instituions the "victims" had may well be regarded as the original institutions of the state. The "perpetrators" were, after all, frequently known to adopt the religion, customs and other social institutions of their "victims."
Maybe the state already existed before the brigands came along. They just added the spears. A big addition, I admit, but still, only an addition.
"The reason for this is very simple — ownership of wealth implies the ability to use it, to transfer it, and to exchange it. A pattern distribution of wealth that doesn’t permit these acts is not really a distribution of wealth, because its purported owners wouldn’t own it. Not to the extent that they can’t control its destination, at least."
I don't see any practical distinction between my reading of what Nozick said and your reading of what Nozick said. To put it another way, I'll accept your paraphrase above as accurate, although I like mine better because I have very high self-esteem.
Where I presume we'd disagree is that I would continue that Wilt doesn't really have ownership of the wealth he acquired by random chance. IOW, I'm perfectly fine with a system that doesn't permit those acts of use, transfer and exchange--at least to the extent that the wealth is the product of random chance.
See? Now you're getting away from the analytic argument Nozick made and wandering into the synthetic argument wanted Metcalf made.
Those points you made, those empirically-determinable points about the interplay of random chance and willful effort (and, I might add, the "rules of basketball," but let's not go there yet), are EXACTLY what Metcalf said was why Nozick's Wilt argument failed. I hope he's reading this thread.
But to return to the more analytic question, it's not that all of it is luck, but that any of it is luck because Nozick's claim was that the taking of any of it was unjust.
To repeat. Since Nozick rejected the idea that anyone except Wilt had a right to ANY of those quarters, to whatever extent luck was responsible, he's imbuing random chance with moral worth to that extent.
And that, I say, is the fatal contradiction in the Wilt argument because it requires people to accept random chance as moral order.
Wilt? I'd really rather not get too far outside the actual parameters of Nozick's argument, since he was trying to construct an analytic argument, not a synthetic one, but No, Wilt didn't work very hard at all, except at partying.
Bill Russell, on the other hand, was famously prohibited from practice by Red Auerbach because he worked too hard. He was the anti-Alan Iverson.
In any event, no matter how hard Wilt worked, no spectator would voluntarily render him a quarter were it not for the random chance of his being seven-feet tall.
"Its just dressing a stupid non-argument up in fancy intellectual clothes. "
I swear, the first thought I had when I got to end of the piece was, "God damn it, I wish I could've edited that." From my own experience, I think what Metcalf did was forget to apply one of the Good Doctor's cardinal rules: When you think you have written something especially brilliant, strike it out.
(Methinks me not the only one around here to have violated it.)
"1. Odd, then, that Metcalf specifically and solely classified my argument as a “b” argument."
Except he didn't. He specifically categorized your "a" case as "strictly merited, but trivial." Then he proceeded to the "b" question because it's the "b" question that matters.
"2. ... I’ve never claimed that libertarians or Republicans support the concept of distributive justice."
I think you may have mis-read me, although I was possibly unclear. Or maybe I have a typo or unintentional double negative. Or maybe you do.
My claim is that libertarians or Republicans support the concept of NON-distributive justice, or, possibly, distributive INjustice [more below]. Metcalf's claim about that claim is that it can be traced, in it's contemporary iteration in the civil discourse, to Nozick's "Anarchy, State & Utopia," and in particular to the very famous Wilt argument.
"This, however, tells us nothing about why or how libertarian thinkers have been influential in this regard"
Huh? Read any of the right-wing/libertarian/Republican/conservative hogwash belched about the estate tax over the last twenty years if you want an example of how or why Nozick's principle of non-distributive justice has been influential. I'm pretty much done providing examples.
"As for the Dick Armey quote….are we talking morals or economics? I thought we were talking morals."
Tee hee. And you accuse me of moving goalposts. Nope, we've hardly talked about morals at all, and I've done my best to avoid it, at least explicitly (I'll admit you do seem to have picked up on my implicit moral stand).
In fact, last I remember I denied that "justice" or "injustice," that is, morals, had anything at all to do with all those quarters Wilt collected since he collected them as a result of a random combination in his DNA.
But I'll talk about morals now, if you like.
Nozick's claim is that since Wilt's collection of voluntarily offered quarters is "not unjust," any coercive claim by a third party on those quarters is by definition unjust by virtue of the coersion.
Here's the weakness in Nozick's moral position. True, the collection of quarters is "not unjust." It's also not "not unjust." And it's not "just." The collection of quarters isn't a function of moral operation at all. It's a result of random chance. And to imbue the operation of random chance with moral worth negates the very concept of moral action utterly and altogether.
Ayn Rand, to her credit, got out of that bind by dispensing with the idea of morality as operating in economic life, insisting that the market was "amoral." That made for a consistent ideology (Yay!) but it also led to a psychopathic social order (Boo!) because, it turns out, for whatever reason (God, sociobiology, sex, collective unconscious, pick your favorite) people need morals and those morals need to be ordered, not random.
So. To the brass tacks. If Wilt's collection of quarters is "not unjust," not "not unjust," and not "just," but rather the result of random chance, then that means he acquired his wealth by random chance. He got lucky. (A lot, in more ways than one). But if wealth can be acquired by luck, it can also be denied by luck. That's what "random outcome" is all about.
So. Some people are wealthy by luck, others are not by luck. Is that moral? No. It's luck. So the question then becomes, Should society attenuate the operation of random outcomes in the interests of advancing human welfare?
I say Yes. And I'm not going to argue it. I'm proposing it as a Major Premise.
I think it's shitty that some people have to live shitty lives because of shitty luck and I think we should take some of the nice stuff from the people who live nice lives because they had nice luck and give to the people who have shitty lives so their lives won't be so shitty anymore.
1. "If you don’t care about demonstrating that the answer to the “a” question is yes, then you never even reach the “b” question at all."
Don't be silly. The "a" question boils down to the distinction between "just" and "not unjust," which you argued are not synonymous, a "far cry," you said. Metcalf agreed that was a "strictly merited" proposition and I said I would accept it if arguing "formalisiticly." Dispensing with the "a" question, which Metcalf and I both did by YIELDING it, is necessary to get to the "b" question.
2. "In showing 'b' facts matter."
PRECISELY. In A. J. Ayer's formulation, "a" is an analytic question, "b" is a synthetic question. And the "b" question shows that the crucial distinction is not, as you and Julian and others claim, the distinction between "just" and "not unjust," but the distinction between either "just" or "not unjust" and "random outcomes." Because now we can empirically observe whether a public policy that distinguishes between "just" and "not unjust" and allows random outcomes to rule wealth distribution leads to an increase in human welfare.
Metcalf isn't even necessarily arguing that it does not (although I assume that's his position), he just wants that discussion to occur.
"You need to show someone in the accused group actually saying “a” or believing “a” and then show that person’s influence."
Stop it. Just stop. If you want to pretend that one of the two major parties in the USA, and one that has wielded all the levers of power at times in the last thirty years, has not advanced the principle of non-redistributive-justice, through argument, electoral advantage and policy proscription, go ahead and keep pretending it. There are not arguably "only two" libertarians in Congress and it doesn't matter anyway because when a majority in Congress proceeds on the basis of "libertarian" principle, then it's the principle that's implicated, not the person who might be most pure..
But since you insist, here's what Dick Armey said on the Floor of the House with respect to health care on July 13, 1994:
"•But more important than the dollar figures is the very real pain that will be felt by sick people who will be denied medical care . Price controls invariably produce scarcity, and scarcity produces rationing. When you make it illegal to sell a product at its natural market price, producers respond by reducing the quantity and quality of the product until supply and demand meet at the new, lower, Government-imposed price. This is a law of economics, which no parchment law can repeal."
"His attempt to salvage his answer in the affirmative to “a” here is preposterous."
Actually, with one exception, I'm going to mostly agree with you on that, or at least, any disagreement I might have is too minimal to bother with. As I hinted earlier, my totally speculative suspicions as to Nozick's subjective motives for choosing Wilt are different than Metcalf's totally speculative suspicions. I don't think Nozick's choice was either willful or sinister (except to a few Celtics fans).
It WAS, however, a muddle.
And it's the muddle that matters to b). I could have written Metcalf's exact same essay showing that Nozick, presumably a Warriors/76ers fan from his time at Princeton, had wittily gotten a zinger in on Celtics fan Rawls without changing the substantive critique of the moral emptiness of the political economy implied by the Wilt Chamberlin argument.
"He then utterly misrepresents my own argument, saying that I was attempting to address 'b' ..."
Er. Ah. Well. Um. Hmmmm. How to be tactful about this without drawing E.D. in to slap me down (again). Let me put it this way. Those of us with long, in some cases, decades-long, experience of objecting to or attempting to refute radical individualist/libertarian/Objectivist/lassiez faire/classical liberal arguments have learned the hard way that allowing you to retreat from "b" arguments to the relative safety of "a" arguments simply allows you to avoid the consequences of "b" arguments.
At which point, "b" actors (i.e., people like Thatcher, Reagan, Phil Gramm, Dick Armey, Bill Frist and Jack Kemp) advance "b" public policy on the basis of "a" and then all you "a" people get to run for the hills when the public policy turns out to be a total failure. No no NO!! You cry and protest, we didn't mean "b," we meant "a," and besides, "b" isn't really a reflection of "a" anyways because those "b" people betrayed our elegant little abstractions we came up with while smoking dope in our dorm rooms!! Don't blame us!!
Yeah. We DO blame you.
I don't want to speak for Metcalf (though I suspect I do) when I say, we don't give a shit about "a" arguments. That's why Metcalf readily conceded your argument was "strictly merited." If you folks wanna waste your time in dorm-room bullshit sessions about quarters being rendered to seven-foot tall priapists, knock yourself out. I could concede every element of your "a" arguments without altering a single element of my "b" arguments.
"...finding a way to blame a small movement for all of the bad and none of the good of the last 40 years"
I find that line of argument intriguing, and saw it elsewhere, including on the LoOG threads and I don't really have a rejoinder to it that you will accept. Where you see a "small movement" that included things like "voting for Ed Clark for President in 1980," I see things like "over thirty years of neoliberal corrosion of the Social Democratic consensus that prevailed from the end of World War II."
In other words, you think of yourself as "small" and I think of you as "big," which is rather an odd reversal for usual political disputation. Whether your "small movement" wants to take credit for Reagan and Bush 43's supply-side horseshit, I think it's to blame. Whether you believe Greenspan's refusal to safely deflate the housing bubble was a result of his commitment to your "small movement," I believe it was.
Whether you want your "small movement" to have had it's arguments expropriated to advance policies that served corporatism, that is indeed what your "small movement" wrought.
Perhaps you should come to realize that maybe your "small movement's" ideas don't work in the real world, however elegant they may may seem in dorm-room bullshit sessions?
"the actual substance of the Wilt Chamberlain argument"
The Wilt argument has no substance.
Mark:
I just noticed that this line in Metcalf's surrebuttal is specifically directed to you:
"To understand why this criticism is strictly merited but ultimately trivial,"
He grants you your point. But he also, I think carries my point in that he suggests he's trying to engage in "enlightened discussion about the market and whether it conduces to just or merely random outcomes."
Whether he used the term "random outcomes" in the original piece I do not remember, but I sure as hell know I did in defending it on the LoOG threads.
Well, I don't know what "reason to believe" you had that Metcalf was answering "What Nozick Meant" rather than "What does 'What Nozick Meant' mean for public policy," but the reason I have now for believing the latter is that he just said so.
On a related topic that I didn't mention earlier because I wasn't familiar enough with the actual textual issues, even when I read Brad DeLong's "fact check" I thought "trivial" and "pedantic" looked too mild a description of DeLong's complaint. I suspected Metcalf had transcribed an anecdote from a usually authoritative secondary source (a Keynes biography or something like that) or some other similar, minor error. Since the quote was in fact provably accurate in exact wording, attribution and substantive context, what was the point of DeLong's temper tantrum'? Scholars make errors like that all the time. When they're discovered you acknowledge the error, fix it, and move on.
"(and, FWIW, I do think that this is what Metcalf was attempting to do)"
I could not disagree more. Here's what Metcalf said near the conclusion:
"Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality?"
Those are public policy questions, not analytic questions of abstract philosophical import. Even Metcalf's nominally "abstract" definition of freedom turned out to be highly empirical and grounded in public policy and practical politics, "... some combination of civil rights, democratic institutions, educational capital, social trust, consumer choice, and economic opportunity."
"Saying that inequality is not inherently unjust is a far, far cry from saying that it is inherently just, or even that it is more often than not just."
Just spotted that quote on the Dish. I believe said something similar on one of the earlier Nozick LoOG threads, i.e., that if I were arguing formalistically I would agree with the former proposition and disagree with the latter.
But, of course, in the synthetic world of actual civil discourse and genuine policy disputes, those propositions are treated as synonymous. That is why right-wingers, Republicans and the more vulgar sort of libertarian are constantly accusing left-wingers, Democrats and assorted variations of Social Democrats of "class warafare" any time any sort of distributive economic justice policy reaches salience.
In the analytic world of Nozick, detached libertarian bloggers and assorted other pointy-heads, Yes, of course that's a "far cry." But in the real civil discourse and the real policy world we live in, it's a very near cry.
The fundamental problem is code-switching. People "mis-read" Nozick and Wilt when they talk about practical politics because Nozick was operating at the level of abstract principles (which is pretty much what Metcalf did). On the other hand, Nozick's "defenders" are simply making the reciprocal mistake.
If the question is "What Nozick Meant" then that 's fine. And if the Question is "What does 'What Nozick Meant' mean for public policy," then that's fine, too.
But those are two radically, and I mean RADICALLY different questions.
Let me try this another way. Imagine the actual practice of politics in the USA system, i.e., the advancing and eventual implementation of a policy agenda, was something like a fluid array of ideological, partisan and focused-interest coalition building.
You have a few core blocs derivied from national-partisan and/or sectional interests, none of which by itself is capable of navigating all the veto points to advance a policy, and then a variety of subsidiary blocs representing specific business-sector interests, certain ideological beliefs, or limited cross-sectional but localized interests.
Things like Democrats, Republicans, the South and The West are core blocs; subsidiary blocs are things like Airplane manufacturing, air travel businesses, obedient Catholics, libertarians, dock workers, mass transit users, financial firm managers and teachers' unions (list obviously not exhaustive).
Subsidiary blocs DO matter, in fact, they ALWAYS matter because they are always essential to constructing a winning coalition capable of advancing policy.
Now. When the libertarians join a coalition of mostly Republicans, a few Blue Dog Democrats and corporatists, the policy is very likely to get advanced. So libertarians matter. You can, if fact, be the tipping point. Corporatist preferences get implemented as public policy. Libertarian principles get vindicated in public policy. You win. You matter.
But on most other areas of public policy, the kinds of things to which you pay lip service to delude yourself into believing you act on "principle," your influence as a subsidiary bloc is either incapable of constructing a winning coalition, or is superfluous to it. You usually lose, and therefore don't matter, and on the rare occasion where you win those policy conflicts, the winning coalition would've won without you anyway, so you still don't matter.
When you assist the corporatists, you're toxic parasites. When you don't, you're inert substances. Give me an example where you advance a policy to resist corporatism, and I'll concede you could be a symbiotic influence.
"Isn’t that better explained that, sometimes, the corporatists that run everything sometimes get legislation passed that libertarians agree with rather than a rare exception of libertarians passing something?"
Could be. It doesn't really matter, though. Either way, libertarians enable and encourage corporatism when they agree with corporatists, and are laughably useless sideshows (again, with the exception of worst-faith hypocrisy as with Net Neutrality) when they claim to resist corporatism.
From my perspective as a Social Democrat, libertarians are either toxic parasites or inert substances. If there were a situation where we could be symbiotic, I'd be all for it. But it turns out, there isn't.
"Libertarians hold significant sway in *any* aspect of public policy? Since when?"
Yes. They do. For example, they got the Commodities Futures Trading Act passed through Congress and signed by the President in 2000.
The fact that the President who signed it was a Democrat has nothing to do with the libertarian philosophical underpinning of the Act.
When corporatist interests line up with libertarian principles (except for a few times, like net neutrality, when libertarians invent some bogus rationale to sell their souls), libertarian principles hold sway.
When corporate interests are indifferent, libertarian principles are a laughable sideshow.
When corporate interests are hostile to libertarian principles (The Prison Industrial Complex, say) any rare and minor resistance to corporatism is driven by the progressive-populist left anyway. That is why the Climate Change movement is a project of the left, despite a very clear argument based on libertarian principle that is not only feasible, it could be controlling.
Well, he did make enemies in the organized and semi-organized libertarian community by calling them "vulgar libertarians," didn't he?
I don't think my use of the term "adolescent" and my insistence that libertarianism doesn't work as model for social organization is very different at all from Carson's critique.
"After all, of course Reason hate SWAT raids and the drug laws and the PATRIOT Act"
Yeah. I was SO IMPRESSED by the swarms of principled libertarians who swooped into Wisconsin last November to save the Senate seat of the single U.S. Senator who voted against the PATRIOT Act.
All the resources principled libertarian Daivd Koch brought to bear to save Russ Feingold.
"I think you’re mistaking corporatism for libertarianism,"
I most assuredly am NOT. What I'm telling you is that IN PRACTICE, libertarianism is simply one of the tools of corporatism. Climate change. Wall Street Regulation. Corporate, Capital Gains, estate and top marginal tax rates. Health Care Reform. Every single aspect of policy where libertarians hold significant sway in the public arena, they act as agents of corporatism.
Every aspect where they don't hold sway--either because their position is too idiotic to be held by more than a tiny minority or because they're simply a drop in the bucket of a movement driven by others--they don't matter.
So, when libertarians matter, they suck, and they don't suck when they don't matter.
"I think libertarianism is a good starting off point for a lot of political philosophy. "
I don't, but I'll concede both that it could be and/or that that's a strictly normative judgment unamenable to rational falsification. In fact, I'll go a llittle further, and I mean this sincerely and without satiric intent: It's a good starting point for teenage boys. And your teen years are a good time to start thinking about politics.
I tried to be a little more equivocal and lower the tone a little, so let me clarify. I don't think I made generalizations about "all libertarians" (at least, not in the comment heading this thread). I limited my point to institutional libertarianism and it's influence on policy.
"See how nicely he was swimming along there until that last line?"
Actually, that last line is perfect. Do you know why? Because in the current polity of the USA, not only is justifying predation the primary activity of "libertarianism," at the electoral/legislative/policy implementation level AND at the academic/think tank/policy development level, it's the only activity.
I will concede that at the grass roots level there may be some random anonymous libertarian blogger or LoOG commenter who isn't primarily devoted to justifying predation, but, truth to tell, they don't matter. They aren't bankrolling net neutrality opposition, blocking climate change legislation, or driving support for libertarian social policy like marijuana decriminalization, online poker or gay rights.
"Libertarianism" IN PRACTICE is nothing but an apology for the dominance of concentrated capital and the shredding of the social contract, and no amount of pretty little blogposts about medical marijuna is going to change that. What is in PHILOSOPHY is irrelevant.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Libertarianism and Privilege”
Jay:
Dunno. What's interesting about Montgomery?
"
James:
"I cannot think of a situation when you would ever need to impose artificial barrier to entry as a deliberate policy."
Um. I just gave you one. Casual transport in a densely populated urban region.
I'm not strictly committed to medallions, but in the absence of them some other artificial barrier needs to be constructed once an area gets large enough and densely populated enough to matter.
"
North:
Because they're more interested in vindicating their ideological principles than in creating a functional system of casual transport for a densely population urban region that needs such a system.
"
James:
Funny. Had a similar thread on Yglesias's site, and he mostly agreed with you (and Reason.tv) about taxi medallions and you're all just .... wrong.
The "market" is casual transport simply doesn't work without strict government regulation, including, if necessary, and it almost always IS necessary when a city gets big enough to matter, artificial barriers to entry.
What will happen to those "poor" taxi drivers balleyhooed by Reason.tv is that they'll get even poorer if Reason has its way.
This isn't really a philosophical or even a political point. It's empirical. It's not debateable in terms of more or less "liberty" or more or less "justice." It simply isn't. We know from the history of hackney carriages going back to the first licensing in London in 1635 what makes a casual transport system function well and what doesn't.
This is not to say that D.C.'s system functions well. Or New York's. Or Boston's (where I spent my yoot as a taxi driver). Only that Reason magazine is LITERALLY, and I literally mean that literally, the last persons on earth I'd ask to think about how to improve it.
On “Nozick and Process-Defective Fundamental Explanations”
Jason:
Just a thought, maybe silly, as I re-engage this subject, but is it so certain that Olson's, Hume's, Scott's and Hayek's account of state formation is "factual" and/or factual enough to allow for a generalization? Maybe Hume was inferring from a particular set of geographic and cultural circumstances that lent itself to the process of sedentary brigandage.
Thinking of two references. My old Professor Beryl Crowe offered an account of very early development in what is now the Holy Land that was quite compatible with Nozick's process. He argued that the turmoil documented in the OT was actually a later anachronistic romanticizing for what the archeology shows was pretty much 3 or 4 milllenia of peaceful, incremental development.
Similarly, the accounts of Titus Livy, indirectly through Machiavelli, show an early Italy that would fit quite well with Nozick's account of the origins of the minimal state.
Finally, it might not even be logically the case that even if stationary brigandage was an enabling or empowering process, that that's the genetic institution. After all, the brigands wouldn't have bothered if there was nothing to steal or conquer. The cultures they dominated must have had something worth conquerring, and instituions capable of surplus production. And whatever instituions the "victims" had may well be regarded as the original institutions of the state. The "perpetrators" were, after all, frequently known to adopt the religion, customs and other social institutions of their "victims."
Maybe the state already existed before the brigands came along. They just added the spears. A big addition, I admit, but still, only an addition.
On “Rawlsekianism Reloaded: Normative justification”
Murali:
Oh whoa. Thanks for the shout out.
I've been over on Newsvine embroiled in Gay Marriage, civilian control of the military and debt-limit threads and let LoOG go for a couple of days.
Lemme page-down and -up a little and I'll reply later, okay?
On “Song for Stephen Metcalf”
Jason:
"The reason for this is very simple — ownership of wealth implies the ability to use it, to transfer it, and to exchange it. A pattern distribution of wealth that doesn’t permit these acts is not really a distribution of wealth, because its purported owners wouldn’t own it. Not to the extent that they can’t control its destination, at least."
I don't see any practical distinction between my reading of what Nozick said and your reading of what Nozick said. To put it another way, I'll accept your paraphrase above as accurate, although I like mine better because I have very high self-esteem.
Where I presume we'd disagree is that I would continue that Wilt doesn't really have ownership of the wealth he acquired by random chance. IOW, I'm perfectly fine with a system that doesn't permit those acts of use, transfer and exchange--at least to the extent that the wealth is the product of random chance.
"
Murali:
See? Now you're getting away from the analytic argument Nozick made and wandering into the synthetic argument wanted Metcalf made.
Those points you made, those empirically-determinable points about the interplay of random chance and willful effort (and, I might add, the "rules of basketball," but let's not go there yet), are EXACTLY what Metcalf said was why Nozick's Wilt argument failed. I hope he's reading this thread.
But to return to the more analytic question, it's not that all of it is luck, but that any of it is luck because Nozick's claim was that the taking of any of it was unjust.
To repeat. Since Nozick rejected the idea that anyone except Wilt had a right to ANY of those quarters, to whatever extent luck was responsible, he's imbuing random chance with moral worth to that extent.
And that, I say, is the fatal contradiction in the Wilt argument because it requires people to accept random chance as moral order.
"
Murali:
Wilt? I'd really rather not get too far outside the actual parameters of Nozick's argument, since he was trying to construct an analytic argument, not a synthetic one, but No, Wilt didn't work very hard at all, except at partying.
Bill Russell, on the other hand, was famously prohibited from practice by Red Auerbach because he worked too hard. He was the anti-Alan Iverson.
In any event, no matter how hard Wilt worked, no spectator would voluntarily render him a quarter were it not for the random chance of his being seven-feet tall.
"
Simon:
Thanks.
"Its just dressing a stupid non-argument up in fancy intellectual clothes. "
I swear, the first thought I had when I got to end of the piece was, "God damn it, I wish I could've edited that." From my own experience, I think what Metcalf did was forget to apply one of the Good Doctor's cardinal rules: When you think you have written something especially brilliant, strike it out.
(Methinks me not the only one around here to have violated it.)
:^{)>
"
Mark:
"1. Odd, then, that Metcalf specifically and solely classified my argument as a “b” argument."
Except he didn't. He specifically categorized your "a" case as "strictly merited, but trivial." Then he proceeded to the "b" question because it's the "b" question that matters.
"2. ... I’ve never claimed that libertarians or Republicans support the concept of distributive justice."
I think you may have mis-read me, although I was possibly unclear. Or maybe I have a typo or unintentional double negative. Or maybe you do.
My claim is that libertarians or Republicans support the concept of NON-distributive justice, or, possibly, distributive INjustice [more below]. Metcalf's claim about that claim is that it can be traced, in it's contemporary iteration in the civil discourse, to Nozick's "Anarchy, State & Utopia," and in particular to the very famous Wilt argument.
"This, however, tells us nothing about why or how libertarian thinkers have been influential in this regard"
Huh? Read any of the right-wing/libertarian/Republican/conservative hogwash belched about the estate tax over the last twenty years if you want an example of how or why Nozick's principle of non-distributive justice has been influential. I'm pretty much done providing examples.
"As for the Dick Armey quote….are we talking morals or economics? I thought we were talking morals."
Tee hee. And you accuse me of moving goalposts. Nope, we've hardly talked about morals at all, and I've done my best to avoid it, at least explicitly (I'll admit you do seem to have picked up on my implicit moral stand).
In fact, last I remember I denied that "justice" or "injustice," that is, morals, had anything at all to do with all those quarters Wilt collected since he collected them as a result of a random combination in his DNA.
But I'll talk about morals now, if you like.
Nozick's claim is that since Wilt's collection of voluntarily offered quarters is "not unjust," any coercive claim by a third party on those quarters is by definition unjust by virtue of the coersion.
Here's the weakness in Nozick's moral position. True, the collection of quarters is "not unjust." It's also not "not unjust." And it's not "just." The collection of quarters isn't a function of moral operation at all. It's a result of random chance. And to imbue the operation of random chance with moral worth negates the very concept of moral action utterly and altogether.
Ayn Rand, to her credit, got out of that bind by dispensing with the idea of morality as operating in economic life, insisting that the market was "amoral." That made for a consistent ideology (Yay!) but it also led to a psychopathic social order (Boo!) because, it turns out, for whatever reason (God, sociobiology, sex, collective unconscious, pick your favorite) people need morals and those morals need to be ordered, not random.
So. To the brass tacks. If Wilt's collection of quarters is "not unjust," not "not unjust," and not "just," but rather the result of random chance, then that means he acquired his wealth by random chance. He got lucky. (A lot, in more ways than one). But if wealth can be acquired by luck, it can also be denied by luck. That's what "random outcome" is all about.
So. Some people are wealthy by luck, others are not by luck. Is that moral? No. It's luck. So the question then becomes, Should society attenuate the operation of random outcomes in the interests of advancing human welfare?
I say Yes. And I'm not going to argue it. I'm proposing it as a Major Premise.
I think it's shitty that some people have to live shitty lives because of shitty luck and I think we should take some of the nice stuff from the people who live nice lives because they had nice luck and give to the people who have shitty lives so their lives won't be so shitty anymore.
"
Mark:
1. "If you don’t care about demonstrating that the answer to the “a” question is yes, then you never even reach the “b” question at all."
Don't be silly. The "a" question boils down to the distinction between "just" and "not unjust," which you argued are not synonymous, a "far cry," you said. Metcalf agreed that was a "strictly merited" proposition and I said I would accept it if arguing "formalisiticly." Dispensing with the "a" question, which Metcalf and I both did by YIELDING it, is necessary to get to the "b" question.
2. "In showing 'b' facts matter."
PRECISELY. In A. J. Ayer's formulation, "a" is an analytic question, "b" is a synthetic question. And the "b" question shows that the crucial distinction is not, as you and Julian and others claim, the distinction between "just" and "not unjust," but the distinction between either "just" or "not unjust" and "random outcomes." Because now we can empirically observe whether a public policy that distinguishes between "just" and "not unjust" and allows random outcomes to rule wealth distribution leads to an increase in human welfare.
Metcalf isn't even necessarily arguing that it does not (although I assume that's his position), he just wants that discussion to occur.
"You need to show someone in the accused group actually saying “a” or believing “a” and then show that person’s influence."
Stop it. Just stop. If you want to pretend that one of the two major parties in the USA, and one that has wielded all the levers of power at times in the last thirty years, has not advanced the principle of non-redistributive-justice, through argument, electoral advantage and policy proscription, go ahead and keep pretending it. There are not arguably "only two" libertarians in Congress and it doesn't matter anyway because when a majority in Congress proceeds on the basis of "libertarian" principle, then it's the principle that's implicated, not the person who might be most pure..
But since you insist, here's what Dick Armey said on the Floor of the House with respect to health care on July 13, 1994:
"•But more important than the dollar figures is the very real pain that will be felt by sick people who will be denied medical care . Price controls invariably produce scarcity, and scarcity produces rationing. When you make it illegal to sell a product at its natural market price, producers respond by reducing the quantity and quality of the product until supply and demand meet at the new, lower, Government-imposed price. This is a law of economics, which no parchment law can repeal."
"
Mark:
"His attempt to salvage his answer in the affirmative to “a” here is preposterous."
Actually, with one exception, I'm going to mostly agree with you on that, or at least, any disagreement I might have is too minimal to bother with. As I hinted earlier, my totally speculative suspicions as to Nozick's subjective motives for choosing Wilt are different than Metcalf's totally speculative suspicions. I don't think Nozick's choice was either willful or sinister (except to a few Celtics fans).
It WAS, however, a muddle.
And it's the muddle that matters to b). I could have written Metcalf's exact same essay showing that Nozick, presumably a Warriors/76ers fan from his time at Princeton, had wittily gotten a zinger in on Celtics fan Rawls without changing the substantive critique of the moral emptiness of the political economy implied by the Wilt Chamberlin argument.
"He then utterly misrepresents my own argument, saying that I was attempting to address 'b' ..."
Er. Ah. Well. Um. Hmmmm. How to be tactful about this without drawing E.D. in to slap me down (again). Let me put it this way. Those of us with long, in some cases, decades-long, experience of objecting to or attempting to refute radical individualist/libertarian/Objectivist/lassiez faire/classical liberal arguments have learned the hard way that allowing you to retreat from "b" arguments to the relative safety of "a" arguments simply allows you to avoid the consequences of "b" arguments.
At which point, "b" actors (i.e., people like Thatcher, Reagan, Phil Gramm, Dick Armey, Bill Frist and Jack Kemp) advance "b" public policy on the basis of "a" and then all you "a" people get to run for the hills when the public policy turns out to be a total failure. No no NO!! You cry and protest, we didn't mean "b," we meant "a," and besides, "b" isn't really a reflection of "a" anyways because those "b" people betrayed our elegant little abstractions we came up with while smoking dope in our dorm rooms!! Don't blame us!!
Yeah. We DO blame you.
I don't want to speak for Metcalf (though I suspect I do) when I say, we don't give a shit about "a" arguments. That's why Metcalf readily conceded your argument was "strictly merited." If you folks wanna waste your time in dorm-room bullshit sessions about quarters being rendered to seven-foot tall priapists, knock yourself out. I could concede every element of your "a" arguments without altering a single element of my "b" arguments.
"...finding a way to blame a small movement for all of the bad and none of the good of the last 40 years"
I find that line of argument intriguing, and saw it elsewhere, including on the LoOG threads and I don't really have a rejoinder to it that you will accept. Where you see a "small movement" that included things like "voting for Ed Clark for President in 1980," I see things like "over thirty years of neoliberal corrosion of the Social Democratic consensus that prevailed from the end of World War II."
In other words, you think of yourself as "small" and I think of you as "big," which is rather an odd reversal for usual political disputation. Whether your "small movement" wants to take credit for Reagan and Bush 43's supply-side horseshit, I think it's to blame. Whether you believe Greenspan's refusal to safely deflate the housing bubble was a result of his commitment to your "small movement," I believe it was.
Whether you want your "small movement" to have had it's arguments expropriated to advance policies that served corporatism, that is indeed what your "small movement" wrought.
Perhaps you should come to realize that maybe your "small movement's" ideas don't work in the real world, however elegant they may may seem in dorm-room bullshit sessions?
"
Simon:
"the actual substance of the Wilt Chamberlain argument"
The Wilt argument has no substance.
Mark:
I just noticed that this line in Metcalf's surrebuttal is specifically directed to you:
"To understand why this criticism is strictly merited but ultimately trivial,"
He grants you your point. But he also, I think carries my point in that he suggests he's trying to engage in "enlightened discussion about the market and whether it conduces to just or merely random outcomes."
Whether he used the term "random outcomes" in the original piece I do not remember, but I sure as hell know I did in defending it on the LoOG threads.
"
MarK;
Well, I don't know what "reason to believe" you had that Metcalf was answering "What Nozick Meant" rather than "What does 'What Nozick Meant' mean for public policy," but the reason I have now for believing the latter is that he just said so.
On a related topic that I didn't mention earlier because I wasn't familiar enough with the actual textual issues, even when I read Brad DeLong's "fact check" I thought "trivial" and "pedantic" looked too mild a description of DeLong's complaint. I suspected Metcalf had transcribed an anecdote from a usually authoritative secondary source (a Keynes biography or something like that) or some other similar, minor error. Since the quote was in fact provably accurate in exact wording, attribution and substantive context, what was the point of DeLong's temper tantrum'? Scholars make errors like that all the time. When they're discovered you acknowledge the error, fix it, and move on.
On “The Broad and the Narrow, or How to Beat a Dead Horse”
Mark:
"(and, FWIW, I do think that this is what Metcalf was attempting to do)"
I could not disagree more. Here's what Metcalf said near the conclusion:
"Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality?"
Those are public policy questions, not analytic questions of abstract philosophical import. Even Metcalf's nominally "abstract" definition of freedom turned out to be highly empirical and grounded in public policy and practical politics, "... some combination of civil rights, democratic institutions, educational capital, social trust, consumer choice, and economic opportunity."
"
Mark:
"Saying that inequality is not inherently unjust is a far, far cry from saying that it is inherently just, or even that it is more often than not just."
Just spotted that quote on the Dish. I believe said something similar on one of the earlier Nozick LoOG threads, i.e., that if I were arguing formalistically I would agree with the former proposition and disagree with the latter.
But, of course, in the synthetic world of actual civil discourse and genuine policy disputes, those propositions are treated as synonymous. That is why right-wingers, Republicans and the more vulgar sort of libertarian are constantly accusing left-wingers, Democrats and assorted variations of Social Democrats of "class warafare" any time any sort of distributive economic justice policy reaches salience.
In the analytic world of Nozick, detached libertarian bloggers and assorted other pointy-heads, Yes, of course that's a "far cry." But in the real civil discourse and the real policy world we live in, it's a very near cry.
The fundamental problem is code-switching. People "mis-read" Nozick and Wilt when they talk about practical politics because Nozick was operating at the level of abstract principles (which is pretty much what Metcalf did). On the other hand, Nozick's "defenders" are simply making the reciprocal mistake.
If the question is "What Nozick Meant" then that 's fine. And if the Question is "What does 'What Nozick Meant' mean for public policy," then that's fine, too.
But those are two radically, and I mean RADICALLY different questions.
On “No such thing as bad publicity”
Jay:
"Well, *NOTHING* really matters."
Not so.
Let me try this another way. Imagine the actual practice of politics in the USA system, i.e., the advancing and eventual implementation of a policy agenda, was something like a fluid array of ideological, partisan and focused-interest coalition building.
You have a few core blocs derivied from national-partisan and/or sectional interests, none of which by itself is capable of navigating all the veto points to advance a policy, and then a variety of subsidiary blocs representing specific business-sector interests, certain ideological beliefs, or limited cross-sectional but localized interests.
Things like Democrats, Republicans, the South and The West are core blocs; subsidiary blocs are things like Airplane manufacturing, air travel businesses, obedient Catholics, libertarians, dock workers, mass transit users, financial firm managers and teachers' unions (list obviously not exhaustive).
Subsidiary blocs DO matter, in fact, they ALWAYS matter because they are always essential to constructing a winning coalition capable of advancing policy.
Now. When the libertarians join a coalition of mostly Republicans, a few Blue Dog Democrats and corporatists, the policy is very likely to get advanced. So libertarians matter. You can, if fact, be the tipping point. Corporatist preferences get implemented as public policy. Libertarian principles get vindicated in public policy. You win. You matter.
But on most other areas of public policy, the kinds of things to which you pay lip service to delude yourself into believing you act on "principle," your influence as a subsidiary bloc is either incapable of constructing a winning coalition, or is superfluous to it. You usually lose, and therefore don't matter, and on the rare occasion where you win those policy conflicts, the winning coalition would've won without you anyway, so you still don't matter.
When you assist the corporatists, you're toxic parasites. When you don't, you're inert substances. Give me an example where you advance a policy to resist corporatism, and I'll concede you could be a symbiotic influence.
I just can't think of an example.
"
Jay:
"Isn’t that better explained that, sometimes, the corporatists that run everything sometimes get legislation passed that libertarians agree with rather than a rare exception of libertarians passing something?"
Could be. It doesn't really matter, though. Either way, libertarians enable and encourage corporatism when they agree with corporatists, and are laughably useless sideshows (again, with the exception of worst-faith hypocrisy as with Net Neutrality) when they claim to resist corporatism.
From my perspective as a Social Democrat, libertarians are either toxic parasites or inert substances. If there were a situation where we could be symbiotic, I'd be all for it. But it turns out, there isn't.
"
Pat:
"Libertarians hold significant sway in *any* aspect of public policy? Since when?"
Yes. They do. For example, they got the Commodities Futures Trading Act passed through Congress and signed by the President in 2000.
The fact that the President who signed it was a Democrat has nothing to do with the libertarian philosophical underpinning of the Act.
When corporatist interests line up with libertarian principles (except for a few times, like net neutrality, when libertarians invent some bogus rationale to sell their souls), libertarian principles hold sway.
When corporate interests are indifferent, libertarian principles are a laughable sideshow.
When corporate interests are hostile to libertarian principles (The Prison Industrial Complex, say) any rare and minor resistance to corporatism is driven by the progressive-populist left anyway. That is why the Climate Change movement is a project of the left, despite a very clear argument based on libertarian principle that is not only feasible, it could be controlling.
On “Still More Caricatures of Libertarianism”
Erik:
Well, he did make enemies in the organized and semi-organized libertarian community by calling them "vulgar libertarians," didn't he?
I don't think my use of the term "adolescent" and my insistence that libertarianism doesn't work as model for social organization is very different at all from Carson's critique.
Except, like I said, he might be more tactful.
On “No such thing as bad publicity”
Jesse:
"After all, of course Reason hate SWAT raids and the drug laws and the PATRIOT Act"
Yeah. I was SO IMPRESSED by the swarms of principled libertarians who swooped into Wisconsin last November to save the Senate seat of the single U.S. Senator who voted against the PATRIOT Act.
All the resources principled libertarian Daivd Koch brought to bear to save Russ Feingold.
Made me proud be a Murican.
"
Erik:
"I think you’re mistaking corporatism for libertarianism,"
I most assuredly am NOT. What I'm telling you is that IN PRACTICE, libertarianism is simply one of the tools of corporatism. Climate change. Wall Street Regulation. Corporate, Capital Gains, estate and top marginal tax rates. Health Care Reform. Every single aspect of policy where libertarians hold significant sway in the public arena, they act as agents of corporatism.
Every aspect where they don't hold sway--either because their position is too idiotic to be held by more than a tiny minority or because they're simply a drop in the bucket of a movement driven by others--they don't matter.
So, when libertarians matter, they suck, and they don't suck when they don't matter.
"
Erik:
"I think libertarianism is a good starting off point for a lot of political philosophy. "
I don't, but I'll concede both that it could be and/or that that's a strictly normative judgment unamenable to rational falsification. In fact, I'll go a llittle further, and I mean this sincerely and without satiric intent: It's a good starting point for teenage boys. And your teen years are a good time to start thinking about politics.
I tried to be a little more equivocal and lower the tone a little, so let me clarify. I don't think I made generalizations about "all libertarians" (at least, not in the comment heading this thread). I limited my point to institutional libertarianism and it's influence on policy.
"
Erik:
"See how nicely he was swimming along there until that last line?"
Actually, that last line is perfect. Do you know why? Because in the current polity of the USA, not only is justifying predation the primary activity of "libertarianism," at the electoral/legislative/policy implementation level AND at the academic/think tank/policy development level, it's the only activity.
I will concede that at the grass roots level there may be some random anonymous libertarian blogger or LoOG commenter who isn't primarily devoted to justifying predation, but, truth to tell, they don't matter. They aren't bankrolling net neutrality opposition, blocking climate change legislation, or driving support for libertarian social policy like marijuana decriminalization, online poker or gay rights.
"Libertarianism" IN PRACTICE is nothing but an apology for the dominance of concentrated capital and the shredding of the social contract, and no amount of pretty little blogposts about medical marijuna is going to change that. What is in PHILOSOPHY is irrelevant.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.